How Stephen Kinzer’s new bestseller saying Washington started the Ukraine war is topical, readable – and wrong

Since the late 1940s, a clique of influential Americans has hijacked their country’s foreign policy to settle personal and family grudges, using Ukraine as a weapon. The result, as avoidable as it was predictable, has been the disaster of Russia’s invasion. That is the argument put forward by Stephen Kinzer in Boiling Point: How America brought war to Ukraine. He opens with the disastrous clandestine operations that started in 1949, aimed at supporting the underground anti-communist resistance in Ukraine and other countries. They were the work of Frank Wisner, a CIA boss traumatised by witnessing the communist seizure of power in Romania. Other villains include Zbigniew Brzezinski (the son of a Polish diplomat), Madelaine Albright (daughter of a Czechoslovak one) and Victoria Nuland, who has family roots in Moldova and (by marriage) Lithuania. Like the others, Kinzer argues, “she imbibed anti-Russian passion with her mother’s milk”. These sentiments fuelled what Kinzer calls “the inter-agency” – a self-selecting, powerful group of US government officials, fixated on using their country’s foreign policy as a “cudgel” against the Kremlin. To read this story, log in or subscribeEnjoy access to all articles and 25 years of archives, comment and gift articles. Become a subscriber for as low as €1,75 per week.Read without limitsAlready a subscriber? Login