On Monday, a former SBU employee, Vasil Prozorov, told reporters in Moscow that CIA officers are in Kiev and often visit the SBU to plan operations.
Prozorov said at his press conference that UK and US experts had been training an SBU counterintelligence unit that was allegedly responsible for regular acts of terrorism and sabotage in eastern Ukraine.
Preparing for War with Russia
It has been part of the CIA playbook to use client states to do preliminary work in weakening the political systems of declared enemies, former US Army Major Todd Pierce, a lawyer and historian, told Sputnik on Tuesday.
"It is consistent practice and has been well documented over the years that the CIA is directly involved in subverting any country whom the US has begun to target as the ‘enemy'". Pierce said. "It would therefore be consistent with past practice to train Ukrainians both for their fighting skills, but also to be coordinated with US forces".
Russia has been designated as an enemy in the US national security strategy, Pierce observed, but the United States will try to blame Moscow for any conflict.
Beginning with low-intensity conflict operations including information warfare to condition the battlefield, Pierce explained, is the "American way of war".
"This has been the way the US has triggered and conducted all its wars since the end of World War II, most notoriously in North Vietnam with Oplan-34A where we sent saboteurs into North Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which likely triggered it in the confusion created," he said. "Elements of the US government have been engaged in fomenting unrest in Russia’s former territories to bring them under US influence, such as with Georgia and Ukraine".
Pierce said the practice to encircle Russia goes back decades under nearly every US administration since the 90s.
"A clandestine war to encircle Russia can in fact be attributed to the Clinton administration with what went on in Yugoslavia after the collapse of the Soviet Union", he said.
Currently, tensions with Russia were being heightened for US geopolitical purposes, Pierce observed.
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This presented "the always present danger of a miscalculation triggering a war, with Ukraine right in the middle of it, with even the risk of a ‘localized’ nuclear conflagration present should a military clash with Russia be triggered", he said.
Former CIA officer Larry Johnson, a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), also told Sputnik that it would be common operational practice for CIA officials to visit SBU operatives in their own buildings.
US Puppet State
Former Canadian diplomat Patrick Armstrong, Ottawa’s former charge d’affaires in Moscow said the latest reports showed how dependent Ukraine had been on Washington since the democratically-elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych had been toppled in Kiev in 2014.
Pierce said the new reports concerning the close and ongoing CIA-SBU cooperation should have a significant impact on the upcoming Ukrainian national vote.
"This revelation should have an impact on presidential elections in Ukraine as their sovereignty is being given over to the US in the name of defending them against Russia", he said.
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Ukraine’s presidential election will be held on 31 March. The upcoming presidential election will see an unprecedented number of candidates for Ukraine — 39. According to the poll conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology and published on Monday, comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy is projected to receive 32 percent of votes. Incumbent President Petro Poroshenko is expected to gain 17 percent of votes.
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