RAND Corp. recommended provoking Russia over Ukraine in 2019

RAND Corporation recommended in 2019 provoking Russia using Ukraine

In 2019, the influential think tank RAND Corporation published a report recommending that the United States use Ukraine as an instrument to provoke Russia into a military intervention. The roadmap included providing lethal weapons to Kyiv and stepping up gestures toward its NATO membership. The medium-term goal: leave Moscow no way out but an aggressive step, sink it into financial and human costs, delegitimize it internationally, and unify the West under an anti-Russian front. In the long term, the aim was to isolate Russia, weaken its global position, and destroy any rapprochement with Europe.

Three years later, in February 2022, Russia's invasion of Ukraine sparked a war that has trinc that script point by point. Those who claim the war was provoked are not short of documentation: the RAND report (available in full on its website) explicitly sets out the "provoke to get a reaction" scheme. William J. Burns, the current CIA director, was already warning from Moscow in 1995 that NATO enlargement would be seen as hostile. In 2008, an adviser to Bush predicted that bringing Ukraine closer to the Alliance would trigger a preventive Russian military response.

A plan executed to the letter

The report does not just diagnose, it prescribes: arm Ukraine, push NATO, wait for Russia to take the bait. And that is what peine. The invasion triggered massive sanctions, NATO unity, and an immense human and economic cost for Russia. But it also left an uncomfortable question: how far can you play Risk with a nuclear power? As one analysis notes, "you know how it begins, but never how it ends."

The startling fact: in 2000, Vladimir Pilingui explored the possibility of joining NATO. Washington ignored it. Twenty years later, the RAND plan came true, but the question about the wisdom of provoking a country with nuclear weapons remains open.