Shut Down Anglo-American ‘Break Up Russia’ Operation Now!

by Gretchen Small and Carl Osgood

[Print version of this article]

April 21—As the world wavers between “World War III with nuclear fires,” as Belarus President Alexander Lukashenka has so accurately warned, and the start of a serious peace process as openly urged by many within the Global South, and more quietly but with growing insistence, by forces within the West, hardcore neoconservative Anglo-American ideologues have launched a drive for the disintegration of the Russian Federation to be officially adopted as the only acceptable outcome of the NATO-provoked and NATO-led Ukraine war on Russia. “Strategic defeat,” the “ruin” of Russia is not enough; it is their stated intention that Russia be erased from the world map, allowing perhaps, grudgingly, a small “Muscovy” to exist.

The breakup of Russia has been British imperial policy for centuries, whose roots and multiple facets EIR has tracked and exposed.[fn_1] The current operation is shaped explicitly upon the precedent of World War I–era British geopolitics, using Poland, Ukraine and the Baltic states, especially, as an external battering ram against Russia (Czarist, Soviet, or today’s Russian Federation equally), while simultaneously fomenting and arming ethnic and regional revolts inside the country. The operation is founded upon the sweeping, false premise: that the Russian Federation, like the Soviet Union before it, was never and cannot be anything but an expansionist empire, oppressing its own population and threatening its neighbors. Ruled out is the reality that a large, multi-ethnic country can exist and progress. Ruled out is the principle of mutually beneficial cooperation between neighboring countries.

To pursue this British goal under today’s conditions—when trust and, for all practical purposes, formal relations between the world’s largest nuclear superpowers, the United States and Russia, have been destroyed—is the most dangerous policy conceivable.

Russia’s nuclear doctrine has long stated that the Federation would not use nuclear weapons except in case of an “existential threat.” The doctrine was reiterated in the 40-page document outlining “The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation,” issued by Presidential decree on March 31, 2023, which states again that “in response to unfriendly actions of the West, Russia intends to defend its right to existence and freedom of development using all means available” (emphasis added).

As you read the following profile of the British-authored, United States-centered drive to make eliminating Russia as a nation the immediate strategic official goal of the entire, expanding NATO alliance, keep in mind the shuddering implications of Lukashenka’s March 31 warning: “It is impossible to defeat a nuclear power. If the Russian leadership understands that the situation threatens Russia’s disintegration, it will use the most terrible weapon. This cannot be allowed to happen.”

The current, frenetic drive to breakup Russia must be shut down now!

Gearing Up

The conceit that breaking up Russia would be good for the world has already come to dominate U.S. academic Slavic Studies centers in the United States. Traditional course programs immersing students in study of Russian language, culture, history, politics, etc., have been replaced in many centers by courses prioritizing ideologies from within Russia’s smaller neighbors, often with an anti-Russian bent. This shift is referred to as “decolonizing” Slavic studies. Russia itself is redefined as merely an amalgam of nationalities and territories, united only by force imposed by an alleged “Russian empire.”

Washington think-tanks and government agencies have gone further, and faster. One of the big U.S. government promotions of breaking up Russia was a June 23, 2022 live-streamed seminar on “Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” organized by the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). This was an outrage: the CSCE, created by U.S. law in 1976 as a government agency to coordinate U.S. policy related to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), sponsored a “briefing” on the “moral and strategic imperative” to bring about the piece-by-piece dismemberment of Russia!

The lead speaker was Casey Michel, then of the Hudson Institute, whose May 27, 2022 article in the Atlantic magazine (“Decolonize Russia: To Avoid More Senseless Bloodshed, the Kremlin Must Lose What Empire It Still Retains”) was the premise of the conference. Michel argued that now, with the Ukraine war, the U.S. has the opportunity to complete what then-Secretary of Defense (and later Vice President) Dick Cheney had demanded in 1991:

[T]he dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire but of Russia itself, so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.

The other U.S. policymaker addressing the event was from the Defense Department’s National Defense University, Dr. Erica Marat, Associate Professor and Chair of the Regional and Analytical Studies Department of its College of International Security Affairs.

The Hudson Institute and the Jamestown Foundation quickly took the lead in promoting this policy. Over the past year, between these two notorious, war-mongering U.S. think-tanks, they have published a book, issued policy memoranda, written myriad articles, organized a seminar by an official U.S. government agency, and held their own joint seminar, all making the case for the United States and NATO to urgently begin, as the title of the seminar stated, “Preparing for the Dissolution of the Russian Federation.”

Talking up a policy is the least of it. The two institutions are deployed to provide public cover for U.S.-UK military and intelligence operations attempting to build up a new generation of separatist-terrorist forces both inside and outside the Russian Federation to be the shock troops of this would-be “decolonization” project.

The public instrument of this hybrid warfare today is an operation called the “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum” (FNPRF), founded in Warsaw, Poland in May 2022 by representatives of Russian regional and ethnic “independence” movements, made up mostly of exiles, fanatically committed to wiping Russia off the map. The FNPRF’s “Northern Eurasia 2023” map depicts a would-be “post-Russia” utopia with 41 new “countries” carved out of the Russian Federation—and, nota bene, out of the territory of China, too. The FNPRF thus identifies itself as a successor of the “Captive Nations” fronts run by British MI6 and the CIA during the Cold War (many of them led by people who had worked in Nazi Germany’s anti-Soviet operations) and of post-war British projects such as the Unrepresented Peoples Organization.

Four FNPRF conferences were held in 2022, working towards strengthening and unifying their forces. Anglo-American operatives and Russia-haters from Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland and other locations—as usual, representing only a small, ideology-driven segment of those countries’ populations—were present from the get-go. Since the start of 2023, the pace of their “march through the institutions” of NATO member countries has escalated. At the invitation of two Polish MEP’s, the fifth conference was held in the European Parliament. Now, their American sponsors have organized the sixth, to be held in the United States at the end of April. It is to be a four-day affair, held in three cities, with the aim of organizing U.S. backing for their separatist cause.

No surprise who will be leading the show. The Hudson Institute is hosting the FNPRF two-day conference in Washington, D.C., April 25-26, with the Jamestown Foundation providing the lead-off speaker. One-day conferences are to follow at Philadelphia’s City Hall and New York City’s Ukrainian Institute of America.

Their task, they proclaim, is to organize America to help “the captive nations and regions to free themselves from a century of imperial occupation and exploitation by Muscovy”—the name, dating from the 13th century, by which these Russia-haters refer to Russia. Their stated objective is bone-chilling: “our efforts to streamline the uncontrolled process of disintegration of a nuclear state.”

‘Children of Satan’ Are Playing with Nuclear War

Both think-tanks sponsoring this operation are bastions of the grouping made infamous as the “Children of Satan” by Lyndon LaRouche and EIR for their advocacy of terror, torture and war after 9-11. Both have a long history of serving as fronts for U.S. military/intelligence operations of this type.

The Jamestown Foundation was created in 1984 as a private sector cover for the CIA; its initial assignment was to handle defectors from the East Bloc (Soviet and allied countries). The Foundation brags today that after its founding, it “rapidly became the leading source of information about the inner workings of the captive nations of the former Communist Bloc.”

In the late 1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Advisor who was well-known for his lifelong campaign to break up Russia, set up shop at the Jamestown Foundation, serving on its advisory board for several years and then on its board of directors until 2008. This was the time frame in which Brzezinski wrote his book, The Grand Chessboard, and related articles, promoting a maniacal scheme to revive geopolitics and break Russia into three entities.

When he co-founded the “American Committee for Peace in Chechnya” (ACPC) in 1999, the Jamestown Foundation became one of its two centers of operations in the United States. By “peace,” the ACPC meant Russia must accept the independence demands of the brutal Chechen jihadists, armed by the Anglo-Americans with the intent of ousting Russia from the oil-rich North Caucasus region. The board of Brzezinski’s ACPC was full of people from the infamous unipolar Project for a New American Century (PNAC): William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, Richard Perle, and many more.

The Hudson Institute has a similar profile, boasting among its “experts” today such infamous war-hawks as Richard Perle’s protégé, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and leading architect of the devastating, illegal Iraq war Doug Feith, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby, along with several other former G.W. Bush officials who came out of the Special Operations Command and “Global War on Terror” planning. Not to mention such rabid anti-China fanatics as Miles Yu and former CIA Director Mike “we lie, cheat and steal” Pompeo.

It has also been a bastion of lunatics who have entertained the possibility of fighting and winning a nuclear war since its founding in 1961 by Herman Kahn, the former RAND analyst and Department of Defense consultant who made Thinking About the Unthinkable—the title of his 1962 book—a trademark. Kahn never abandoned his contention that “some kinds of limited nuclear war are clearly possible,” and that “it is incorrect to say that victory in nuclear war is impossible,” as he wrote in his last book, Thinking the Unthinkable in the 1980s.

As recently as November 16, 2022, Hudson published a document entitled, “New Nuclear Threats Require Homeland Civil Preparedness,” ridiculing talk of nuclear “Armageddon.” They delude themselves—or simply lie—that a limited nuclear war is the only potential threat, and therefore the United States need not concentrate on preventing nuclear war, but only on planning to survive one.

This policy is so provocative and dangerous, that a wide range of Establishment policy-shapers fear its implementation. Even the notoriously Anglophile Henry Kissinger, no stranger to anti-Russia machinations, issued two articles in quick succession which argued, as he wrote in The Spectator on Dec. 17, 2022:

The preferred outcome for some is a Russia rendered impotent by the war. I disagree…. the dissolution of Russia or destroying its ability for strategic policy could turn its territory encompassing 11 time zones into a contested vacuum.… All these dangers would be compounded by the presence of thousands of nuclear weapons which make Russia one of the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Meet the Key ‘Handlers’ of Today’s Jihadis

On Feb. 14, 2023, the Hudson Institute and Jamestown Foundation held a joint three-hour seminar, titled “Preparing for the Dissolution of the Russian Federation.”

Anchoring the seminar were presentations by Luke Coffey of the Hudson Institute and James Bugajski of the Jamestown Foundation. Coffey elaborated on his December 2022 Policy Memo, “Preparing for the Final Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Dissolution of the Russian Federation”; Bugajski presented key sections of his 470-page book with the charming title, Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture, published by the Jamestown Foundation in July 2022.

Coffey and Bugajski are the chief “hands-on” operatives assigned to the FNPRF project. They speak at their conferences, meet (virtually and in-person) with leaders from that operation, and are now avidly promoting the end-of-April U.S. conferences of these terrorists on their respective twitter accounts. Coffey delivered the welcoming remarks to open the FNPRF conference in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the Hudson Institute (where it is being held), and addressed a later panel; Bugajski delivered its keynote speech the first day, titling it, “Seize this Historic Moment.”

Both are fanatical proponents of the dead unipolar order, equally as obsessed with crushing China and recalcitrant Global South nations, as they are with breaking up Russia.

Both are also as much British as they are American operatives.

Bugajski, the son of Polish parents, was born and educated in Great Britain, and started his career with BBC-TV. After a stint at Radio Free Europe in Germany, he relocated to the United States, first setting up shop at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), then at the even more-rabidly anti-Russian Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), and finally at the Jamestown Foundation. The U.S. government has certainly used his services; he has been a “consultant” for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Department of Defense, the International Republican Institute, and the Free Trade Union Institute (AFL-CIO), among others. At one point, he ran South Central Europe Area Studies at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.

Coffey, like Bugajski, studied at the London School of Economics. He served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army, but judging by his Hudson Institute biography, he is most proud of his service to the British military and Conservative Party:

Mr. Coffey served at the UK Ministry of Defense as senior special adviser to then-British Secretary Liam Fox. He was the first non-UK citizen appointed to this position by the Prime Minister to provide advice to senior British ministers. Among his duties was helping shape British defense policy in relation to trans-Atlantic security, NATO, the Middle-East, and Afghanistan. Mr. Coffey previously worked in the House of Commons as an adviser on defense and security issues for the Conservative Party. He helped develop and implement policy initiatives on security and defense matters, in particular drafting the defense section of the party’s 2010 election manifesto.

Inflicting Chaos, Turmoil and War on Eurasia

The February 2023 joint Hudson-Jamestown seminar was a real show.

It started with a video exchange with Coffey’s “friend,” Ukrainian parliamentarian Alexii Goncharenko (also Oleksiy Honcharenko), who had led a successful effort to get the Supreme Rada (Ukraine’s Parliament) to unanimously pass a resolution extending diplomatic recognition to the “Chechen Republic of Ichkeria” last October—in Goncharenko’s view, the first of many planned resolutions recognizing non-existent “independent” governments. Addressing the seminar in person was Inal Sherip, the “Foreign Minister” of that Chechen “government in exile” in London, which he proudly identified as “the successor” of the terrorist leaders who waged two brutal separatist wars in the 1990s and the following decade, in which “tactics” included the mass murder of civilians by bombing subways and apartment buildings, taking more than a thousand hostages at a primary and secondary school, etc.

Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, introduced the first panel by identifying himself and Bugajski as having had “the great honor of being affiliated with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski,” whose legacy and writings continued to be valid. Indeed. Howard had been Brzezinski’s right-hand man for years as Executive Director of his ACPC, the sponsors of the 1990s generation of anti-Russia jihadis which waged war against the people of the Caucasus for more than a decade.

It was Brzezinski-ite Howard who located their subject of discussion as a continuation of previous British-led efforts to break up Russia. Howard invoked the anti-Russian efforts of Polish Chief of State Józef Pilsudski and his Polish Legion during the period between the two world wars, and spoke happily of a possible revival of “Prometheanism,” a reference to the so-called Promethean League of ethnic minorities from regions within the U.S.S.R.

Those intertwined projects overlapped British geopolitical schemes (ongoing still today) to create a confederation of nations against Russia between the Baltic, Black, Aegean and Adriatic seas—dubbed the “Intermarium.”[fn_2]

Both Bugajski and Coffey dismissed democracy as a goal! This crowd foresees decades of conflict across the giant Eurasian territory of Russia, requiring NATO rule over the former Russia’s neighbors in Europe.

These people may be evil, but creative they are not. Bugajski’s chapter on scenarios for Russia’s rupture is just that, a compiled list of scenarios that reads like the output of a poorly programmed computer, a series of “if this, then that” algorithms. Often a scenario begins with the blanket assertion that “this will happen,” based on earlier-asserted reasons. Then, when “this happens,” these people may do this and those people may do that.

Included in his logical series are such lying assumptions as the claims that the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine was really a popular uprising, and that the 1999 Moscow bombings of apartment buildings were really carried out by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), not Chechen terrorists.

Bugajski summarized his recommendations for Washington policymakers most succinctly in an article in the Washington Examiner some weeks after the seminar

A Russia in deep turmoil cannot simply rejoin the international system and have economic sanctions lifted…. The only practical solution without foreign occupation is to devise plans for managing the volatile dissolution of the failing federation…. The presence of multi-national NATO forces should increase among member states.…

He urged that a policy planning team be formed in Washington to plan for Russia’s “impending rupture,” to work in parallel with a similar “conflict planning” center to be assembled at NATO headquarters in Brussels, “to deal specifically with scenarios of regional instability generated by Russia’s state failure.”

Coffey, too, insisted in his December 2022 “Preparing for Dissolution” memo, that “Western policymakers start planning for the new geopolitical reality on the Eurasian landmass.” Forget democracy as a goal. Western policymakers had better get cracking on planning for how to deal with the future of regional and national “revolution, insurgency and civil war” envisioned for Russia. “Policymakers should assume” that when Russia shatters, it “will be more like Chechnya in 1994 (brutal conflict) than Estonia in 1991 (peaceful and straightforward)…. Private armed groups will proliferate.… The breakup of the Russian Federation will likely lead to internal fighting between different centers of power,” he forecast.

Coffey, like other speakers in the seminar, eyes “unemployed combat veterans … [the] thousands of young men from ethnic minorities [who] will have combat experience from Ukraine” as a prime pool of candidates from which Anglo-American military and intelligence can recruit cannon fodder for the war they are preparing inside Russia.

Like Bugajski, he urges NATO and the EU to begin planning now, to “take advantage of Russia’s weakness and push for a ‘big bang’ enlargement.” Equally necessary, from the standpoint of this military-industrial complex spokesman, is to head off at the pass anyone arguing that “the end of the Russian Federation will remove any need for a strong U.S. military presence in Europe.” Even if Russia disappears, the U.S. and allies must remain on guard “to mitigate, marginalize, contain, deter, and if necessary defeat Russia for the foreseeable future.”

The entire lot of speakers at the seminar were old Cold War ideologues, beating the same drum as they have for decades. There were tactical differences among the speakers on the best way to bring about the breakup of Russia, but all agreed, with one exception, that its breakup is inevitable, and must be promoted.

Case in point: Jamestown Foundation “Distinguished” Senior Fellow Paul Goble, who in the 1980s was an enthusiast of Brzezinski’s scheme for breaking up the Soviet Union through Islamic insurgencies aimed at its “soft underbelly”—the strategy that gave rise to al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorism from the cauldron of war in Afghanistan. Now a professor at the Institute for World Politics Center for Intermarium Studies in Washington, D.C., Goble’s bio includes work at the State Department, CIA, Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Goble argued against banking on national and ethnic movements leading the way in breaking up Russia, recommending instead to work for declarations of independence by large regions. He forecast, with evident glee, that the resource-rich region of Siberia will be the first to declare independence.

No one questioned the underlying premises of their operation. It is taken for granted that Ukraine will defeat Russia militarily, and that Russia’s resources will be sufficiently drained by the combination of costs of fighting Ukraine and Western economic sanctions, that conditions of increased impoverishment and anger can be created in outlying and poorer regions, necessary for Western intelligence agencies to mount serious insurgencies—which do not now exist.

The one exception to support for the breakup scenario was Natalia Arno, president of Garry Kasparov’s Free Russia Foundation, who pointed to the lack of support for “nationalist” movements inside Russia. Her group fears that calls for breaking up Russia will hold back the overall regime change they seek. She was ignored, Bugajski having shot down Arno’s pitch before she was given the microphone; he declared that “the insistence on preserving the state in its current borders is viewed with increasing suspicion among non-Russian regionalists and Russia’s neighbors.”

Enter the Pro-Terrorist ‘Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum’

The “Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum” was officially launched at a May 8-9, 2022 conference in Warsaw, Poland, which brought together Russian opposition exiles, “representatives of nations enslaved by Russian imperialism, and experts and politicians from Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and the United States” to debate the future shape of Russia after it loses the war with Ukraine, according to the Polish Journalists Association (SDP), which opened the conference. Ukrainian, Polish and Lithuanian NGOs had initially organized this forum, according to the Jamestown Foundation. Its focus was the hoped-for impending Russian disintegration and their expectations for help from the West in spurring on that outcome.

It was evident from the start that the “Post-Russia” movement born in Warsaw has never been intended to be “non-violent.”

First is the prominent role played in the Forum by the Russian exile Ilya Ponomaryov (sometimes written “Ponomarev”), notorious for cheerleading overt acts of terrorism and urging that sabotage and arson be carried out inside Russia. Ponomaryov claims that he founded the Forum. The former Russian Duma member has lived in exile since 2014 and operates today out of Ukraine, where he has been given citizenship and claims to have enlisted in Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces.

Shortly after participating in the founding of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, Ponomaryov deployed to a meeting of Kasparov’s Free Russia Forum, and challenged them to support covert acts of sabotage inside Russia. Within hours of the Aug. 20, 2022 car bomb assassination of journalist Darya Dugina on a road in the Moscow Region, Ponomaryov pronounced himself the public spokesman for those behind the assassination, reading a statement from a previously unknown “National Republican Army,” which claimed credit for the murder. While he described himself as merely a supporter who was trusted by the group, but not a member, Ponomaryov hailed Dugina’s murder as a “new page in Russian resistance to Putinism. New—but not the last.”

Once again, after the April 2, 2023 terrorist assassination of Russian war journalist Maxim Fomin, aka Vladlen Tatarsky, in St. Petersburg, Ponomaryov read a declaration from that same National Republican Army, which hailed Fomin’s assassination and the wounding of 30-some of the people present when the bomb in a statuette he was handed exploded. “We call on the people of Russia to follow our example and provide all kinds of resistance to the criminal Russian regime up to its complete destruction. Criminals will not feel safe on Russian soil! Russia will be free!” it read.

In statements aired March 20 on Germany’s Deutschlandfunk radio, Ponomaryov claimed to have an active network of National Republican Army “partisans” (disingenuously using the Russian word for irregular warfare fighters against the Nazi occupiers during World War II) in 40 regions of Russia. He asserted that his partisans were behind unexplained fires at defense industry and scientific facilities inside Russia over the past year. The question has to be asked, whether Ponomaryov’s often extravagant claims are providing cover for not-yet-exposed Anglo-American special operations. Besides being on the ground in Ukraine to train Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel, British and American special ops teams have been especially active in the Baltic states, NATO members where there are many Russian speakers suited for undercover work.

Second is the central role being played by Russia-hating Ukrainian fascists in this operation. Ukrainian politicians have spoken at all of the FNPRF forums to date. Radio Svoboda (a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty operation) described the FNPRF last August as the fourth attempt since 1917 to free the Russian “prison of nations,” writing that once again, as in each of the earlier attempts, “the key to the collapse of the [Russian] empire is in the hands of the Ukrainian people.” In recounting that history, Radio Svoboda proudly reported that the second attempt was initiated in 1943 by the “Bandera OUN” (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists)—collaborators of Adolf Hitler as of 1941, and butchers of tens of thousands of Jewish and Polish civilians in bloody ethnic cleansing in the 1943 Volhynia Massacres—which organized “the first Conference of Enslaved Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia.”

Oleg Magaletsky, a Ukrainian who calls himself “co-organizer” of the Post-Russia Forum, detailed to Texty.org.ua on March 20, 2023 his ideas on how the Ukrainian regime “can speed up the historical process of Russia’s disintegration” by ensuring representatives of these “national” movements are provided with the military aid they require “to rebel and wage armed struggle.” Magaletsky told his interviewer that he agrees with Putin when he says this is a war over whether Russia will be called Russia. “My goal,” he reported, “is for the name ‘Rus’ to remain only in the name ‘Belarus’ on the world map.”

It is relevant in this context, that the sole American who addressed the “Post-Russia” founding forum, by videoconference, was retired Army Col. Christopher Miller.

His official Defense Department bio speaks for itself: Miller’s active duty career was in Special Operations, an expertise he has continued since his formal retirement in 2014, in posts ranging from advising the National Security Council on strategic planning, to serving as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism, and then Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict. His responsibilities in those posts for “overseeing the employment of special operations forces in counterterrorism … unconventional warfare, irregular warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, counter proliferation, sensitive special operations,” clearly have not ended.

Both the public involvement of Anglo-American agents and the size and radicalism of the FNPRF have grown over the four subsequent Forum conferences.

The II Forum, held in Prague, Czech Republic, July 23-24, 2022, “set bold and ambitious goals for the post-Russia future,” the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor reported afterwards, calling it “an extremely significant event that takes Russian protests against the re-invasion of Ukraine to a whole new level.” Jamestown’s gushing praise is not surprising. Its operatives Bugajski and Goble addressed the conference online, Bugajski encouraging the participants with tales from his “Guide to Russia’s Rupture,” and Goble by “reminiscing” about the good old days of Captive Nations Week! Paul Massaro, a staff member of the U.S. government’s CSCE agency, which had sponsored its own seminar on breaking up Russia the month before, also addressed the conference; he is a notorious supporter of Ukrainian Hitler-collaborator Stepan Bandera. Joining the retinue was British intelligence operative Edward Lucas, the former Senior Editor of The Economist, who has written endless columns and books attacking Russia.

Among the “bold and ambitious goals” adopted was a “Declaration on the Decolonization of Russia,” which the FNPRF is entrusted with putting into action. It calls for—

all citizens of indigenous peoples and colonial regions to immediately begin active actions for the peaceful decolonization, liberation, declaration/restoration of sovereignty and independence of their countries [and on] the peoples and governments of the UN Member States to support and assist us … in our efforts to streamline the uncontrolled process of disintegration of a nuclear state.

That assistance must include official recognition of “the independence and sovereignty of the following states of indigenous peoples and colonial areas: Tatarstan, Ingria (historical region in the north-west of Russia, including the current St. Petersburg region), Bashkortostan, Karelia, Buryatia, Kalmykia, the Baltic Republic (Königsberg, East Prussia), Komi, Cherkessia, Siberia, the Urals, the Republics of Don, Tyva, Kuban, Dagestan, the Pacific Federation (Primorsky Territory and the Amur Region), the Moscow Republic, Erzya Mastor ([in] the territory of Mordovia), Sakha, Pomorie, Chuvashia, Chernozyom region, Mordovia, Volga region, Khakassia, Udmurtia, Tyumen Yugra, Mari El, Altai, Ingushetia, etc.”

The Declaration likewise mandates the formation of “National Transitional Governments/Administrations”; regional parliaments to declare state sovereignty and start inter-parliamentary consultations on a mechanism for seceding from the Russian Federation; and constitutions to be prepared.

As for the “peaceful” nature of their call, the declaration calls for “acts of sabotage of imperial orders” and “the formation of national legions (Self-Defense Forces) to protect the sovereignty and rights of our peoples and ensure peace.”

The subject matter of the III Forum, held in Gdansk, Poland, Sept. 23-25, 2022, was scheduled to be more limited in scope, and it received less international attention.

Not so the IV Forum, held in Helsingborg, Sweden two and a half months later (Dec. 7-11), under the pompous title “International Conference for Peaceful Decolonization, Reconstruction and Territorial Organization of the States on the Post-Russian Space.” Their foreign sponsors did not succeed in organizing “member states of the UN Security Council, states bordering the Russian Federation, and international organizations” to participate, as was promised in the II Forum’s “Declaration.” That failure held up their plans to begin the demarcation of state borders, signing “treaties of friendship and cooperation between new states and neighboring countries,” devising mechanisms for dividing property and debts, and similar such steps.

The highlight of this Forum, in which Janusz Bugajski was once again a participant, was the release of the so-called “Declaration of Independence of the Siberian Confederation.”

Not to be ignored was the participation in this forum and the V Forum, of leaders of PanEuropa España, the Spanish branch of the Pan-European Union. That movement was founded in 1922 by Austrian Counts Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Otto van Hapsburg, to organize for a Europe not of nations, but feudal regions run “on the model of the Roman Empire,” a movement much beloved by Hitler’s Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht, and by Winston Churchill.

The V Forum reflected the FNPRF’s greater institutional status. Sponsored by two Polish members of the European Conservatives and Reformers (ECR) Group, ECR Foreign Affairs Coordinator Anna Fotyga and MEP Kosma Złotowski, it was held in the European Parliament building, under the title “Imperial Russia: Conquest, Genocide and Colonization. Prospects for Deimperialization and Decolonization.” Bugajski, Coffey, Lucas, and University of Massachusetts Islamic Studies Professor Brian Glyn Williams (with a long history of working with the CIA and U.S. military in Afghanistan), were present here, in what Lucas described as “Russia’s Collapse: Ringside Seat.”

Most of those same players are scheduled to participate in the April 25-28 VI Forum, which aims this time to gain official U.S. sponsorship. The opening shot on April 25 is a full-day conference on “Peaceful and Non-Violent Decolonization, Reconstruction and Territorial Organization on the post-Russian Space,” at the Hudson Institute’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, which is to be both in-person and live-streamed, for maximum impact. The second day in D.C. starts with a “Public Debate and Direct Dialogue” between the “Free Russia” supporters of a unified Russia and the “Post-Russia” advocates of breaking up Russia (results to be judged by a debate jury consisting of five people from the U.S.A., EU and Ukraine), followed by lobbying by the participating FNPRF people with “representatives of the USA.”

The Post-Russia crowd and their handlers then head to Philadelphia, where April 27 is to be spent “brainstorming” on possible governance models between representatives of the city of Philadelphia and the state of Pennsylvania and “the future heads of independent states of the post-Russian space.” The final shot of this road show will be another full day of speeches April 28 in New York City, on the topic, “Empires always fall. The future of PostRussia: USA’s, regional, and global Win-Win.”

This policy is utopian on many accounts, but do not make the mistake of dismissing it as too extreme, too dangerous, too crazy to actually be adopted and implemented. At this time, it is policy; it is being implemented, and Russia is responding to those facts. Americans and Europeans had better shut this operation down.

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