The Biden Family’s History of Influence-Peddling, Explained…

Progressives have memory-holed much of this history. The Obama State Department and its European counterparts had an embarrassingly notorious hands-on role in the Maidan revolution and the new Ukrainian government that emerged in its aftermath. Predictably, this meddling in another nation’s domestic politics, to the point of toppling the elected government, was exploited by Vladimir Putin to rationalize Russia’s responsive aggression in eastern Ukraine — the annexation of Crimea and the border war that exploded into today’s full-out war when Moscow launched its February 2022 invasion.

Though more Euroskeptic than his political rivals in Kyiv, Yanukovych had leaned toward entering Ukraine into a political association and trade agreement with the European Union. As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, this prompted a furious reaction from the Kremlin, which was always in a natural position to leverage its neighbor’s dependence on Russian goodwill for energy supplies, safe commerce, and domestic tranquility. Putin thus threatened that if Yanukovych made his bed with the West, he would block Ukraine’s imports, slash its exports, cut off its energy lines, bleed its economy, and drive it into collapse. Yanukovych succumbed, ditching the European deal in favor of an alternative Russian pact. This accommodation, to fend off the bear on the border, triggered the internal strife that led inexorably to Yanukovych’s abdication and flight to safety in Moscow.