Russia-Ukraine war origins
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Russia-Ukraine war origins, per John Kiriakou, trace to 2014 rather than the 2022 invasion. The United States repeatedly promised Russia that NATO would not expand to its borders and that Ukraine would not join, then did the opposite. He notes Russia itself twice asked to join NATO and was refused under Presidents Clinton and Obama. He tells the fuller version: at the end of the Clinton administration Putin, newly in power, floated Russia joining NATO outright; Clinton demurred but agreed at least not to admit countries on Russia's border. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland joined anyway. Years later, at a summit with Obama, Putin raised it again and warned that Ukraine joining NATO "would be a serious problem"; Obama said it wouldn't happen. After the 2014 removal of a democratically elected pro-Russian Ukrainian leader, which Kiriakou says came at Washington's urging, and his replacement with a pro-Western one, Russia seized Crimea "for their own protection," and talk of Ukraine joining both NATO and the EU resumed under Biden. Kiriakou frames this pattern as consistent with how U.S. power works abroad generally, informal control and influence rather than a traditional territorial empire like the British, and argues that sustaining a defense budget bigger than the next eight countries combined requires having an enemy to justify it.

Kiriakou says that from the war's earliest days, observers on all sides agreed the conflict was untenable for Ukraine and the West, and that any peace would require Ukraine to cede the Donbass and Crimea while being barred from NATO but allowed to join the EU, roughly the shape the war has taken by 2025. Western sanctions initially surprised Russia but ultimately failed to bite, he says, because its economy is closely tied to China, India, and Iran. Kiriakou says Russia is now winning and has no reason to accept talks brokered by Donald Trump; Ukraine will end as a "rump state," possibly landlocked, and never in NATO, because a weak Russia serves Western interests. Rather than NATO, he predicts Ukraine will get fast-track EU membership after ceding territory, comparing its likely trajectory to Cyprus, not in NATO, but in the EU, with a strong economy despite a banking crisis 15 years ago.

Kiriakou is skeptical of NATO's continued relevance generally, relaying his attorney's question of why Montenegro, which no plausible power would invade, is even in an alliance originally designed to counter a Soviet Union that no longer exists.

Kiriakou has been consistent from the war's first day: he opened his Sputnik radio show on the day of the invasion by unreservedly condemning it and calling for Russian forces to leave Ukraine immediately, without any pushback from the Russian-government-owned network, a position he says he held alongside equally strong opposition to unlimited U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine, arguing the money would be better spent on American bridges, roads, schools, and hospitals. He blames both the invasion and the broken NATO promises the U.S. made under Clinton and Obama, saying Washington told Moscow repeatedly it would not support Ukrainian NATO membership while lying about it the whole time. He argues the Biden administration's deep commitment to the war was partly a re-election strategy and partly Biden's pursuit of a wartime-president legacy after withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq, every president, he says, wants to enter the history books that way. He faults the New York Times and Washington Post in particular for exaggerating small Ukrainian gains into major victories, citing a 2023 counter-offensive the Ukrainian military itself predicted would drive 60 miles into Russian territory and split the Russian army, but which in fact advanced five miles and never came near Crimea, and for running a story describing a "Wagner coup" against Putin that Kiriakou says never happened, calling it instead an aborted march partway to Moscow that the Russian government negotiated its way out of. He also cites the Twitter Files as evidence the CIA has long worked through the platform, noting Hillary Clinton once asked Twitter to hold off on a system upgrade the night Iran's 2009 Green Revolution began. Despite more than 20 years outside the agency, Kiriakou says the CIA remains institutionally hostile to Russia, while he was still there he argued the U.S. could still cooperate with Moscow on counterterrorism, counternarcotics, and counterproliferation despite poor relations, a position colleagues found shocking.

Negotiations, weapons, and the battlefield

Kiriakou has long predicted the war ends in a negotiated peace, given Russia's greater manpower reserves, and has named Turkey as the only country positioned to broker it, the sole NATO member to have maintained close relations with Russia throughout the war. Early in the war he estimated it would drag on for one to two years, noting Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley had just predicted it could last ten years while his Sputnik colleague Garland Nixon predicted it would wrap up in a couple of weeks. He predicted Russia would end up retaining Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea as nominally independent, Russian-aligned republics, provided Ukraine kept sea access at Odessa, a version of the settlement he later refined into a face-saving formula for both sides: Ukraine formally ceding the Donbas and Crimea, which it had already lost 11 years earlier, in exchange for a fast track to EU membership. He has said the two men most fundamentally disagree on where the line falls, Trump wants Putin to stop at Donbas and Crimea, and Putin, emboldened by an essentially unlimited supply of North Korean troops who fight to the death rather than surrender, has instead suggested he might take all of Ukraine. Trump, Kiriakou says, is "apoplectic" that Putin won't simply follow his instructions to end the war. He recalls a moment roughly a year into the war when a top U.S. general said Russia was on its heels after a major battlefield defeat and that it was the moment to negotiate, but the Biden administration refused, at one point even flirting with a policy of regime change in Moscow.

On the weapons side, Kiriakou described Ukrainian forces training on American systems, including surface-to-air missiles and artillery, at Fort Hood, but said learning to fly F-16s would take nine to twelve months regardless. To bridge that gap the U.S. sought Soviet-era MiG fighters from Morocco, Cyprus, India, and Israel in exchange for F-16s: Morocco agreed, Cyprus declined, and Israel offered up its unwanted MiGs for free, saying it had only bought them to have them. He also described a parallel, non-CIA covert track: Ukrainian sleeper cells that had been planted inside Russia for over a decade, burying weapons caches ahead of activation, then digging them up to conduct sabotage operations once the war began, run through a NATO proxy intelligence service rather than the CIA, since Russia is a "denied area" the CIA itself cannot operate in.

Kiriakou has warned the war carries costs well beyond the battlefield. Ukraine produces roughly 10 to 12 percent of the world's wheat, he notes, and cutting that off risks food shortages and worse inflation, especially in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. He has also pointed to the war's entanglement with Nazi-era memory in Greece: a member of the Azov Battalion addressed the Greek parliament by video shortly after Zelensky did, prompting most of the chamber to walk out, which Kiriakou linked to the fact that Greece lost more people per capita to the Nazis in World War II than any other country. He made the point personal, recalling that his father's favorite cousin, who died a few weeks before one interview, had been shot in the stomach as a young man on their ancestral Greek island by a Nazi soldier who claimed the well he was drawing water from as "a German well," and carried the scar for the rest of his life. Kiriakou has said he believes the two sides will eventually have to negotiate directly, whether that means Ukraine ceding land, forgoing NATO membership, or both.

The Nuland recording (Reason2Resist)

John Kiriakou points to the leaked recording of Victoria Nuland telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt who the next prime minister of Ukraine would be, before he became exactly that, as evidence of U.S. involvement in the 2014 events he places at the war's origin. He uses it to argue that aligning with the Russian government on a fact does not make one a propagandist.

See also

- China as economic threat
- Permanent wartime economy
- Volodymyr Zelensky
