Antony Blinken has been beating the drum for US military support for the regime in Kyiv against Russia since US President Joe Biden appointed him secretary of state in January 2021.
Confronted with Moscow's refusal to allow the US and NATO to advance one step closer to its territory, he has attempted to stall and divert attention to other issues, while repeating claims Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine.
Blinken previously played the part of cheerleader for US President Barack Obama's bombing of Libya in 2011 and helped mastermind the arming of religious sectarian terrorists in Syria.
Such is his attachment to a neo-liberal pet geopolitical project the European Union that he risked a rift in the US-UK 'special relationship' by attacking Britain's exit from the bloc.
But less well-known are his personal family links to both Ukraine and Hungary, along with the colour revolution network of NGOs bankrolled by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
Blinken's great-grandfather was Meir Blinken, a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant to the US who became a prolific author, writing primarily in the Yiddish language. The elder Blinken was born in Pereiaslav, the city where the Cossacks of the Ukrainian Hetmantate east of the Dneiper river voted in 1654 to become a tributary state of Moscow.
Pereiaslav is part of the governorate of Poltava, where Tsar Peter the Great defeated the invading army of the Swedish king, Charles XII, in 1709. Poltava became a watchword for the fate of future invaders from western Europe, including French Emperor Napoleon Bonapartes' Grande Armée in 1812.
Antony Blinken's father, Donald Blinken, is a retired career diplomat who was US ambassador to Hungary from 1994 to 1997 during the transitional period following the end of the socialist Hungarian People's Republic.
The Soros Connection
Soros' Open Society Archives (OSA), based in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, was renamed the Blinken OSA in 2015 following a large donation to its funds by Donald Blinken and his wife, Vera.
The OSA's website is not bashful about celebrating the former ambassador's pivotal role in expanding NATO to the east — breaking pledges made by US secretary of state James Baker to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 and US president Bill Clinton to his successor Boris Yeltsin in 1993 that the Western military bloc would not do so.
"Donald Blinken served as Ambassador at a crucial time, during the process of Hungary’s becoming member of NATO, at the time of the referendum on NATO membership," it reads. "He played a defining role in setting up the Taszár Air Base that served as the logistical base for the IFOR [the Western military intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina] and later on for SFOR peacekeeping operations in the Balkans."
For his repeated stoking of tensions with Moscow, the secretary of state's father was awarded Hungary's highest civilian honour and the Pentagon's Award for Distinguished Public Service.
Vera Blinken was born in Hungary, but fled the country for the US in 1956 with her mother following the defeat of the attempt to overthrow the socialist state and drag Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet-led counterweight to NATO.
Cold War Spectres
The OSA is a wing of Soros' Open Society Foundations which funds NGO groups working, according to its website, toward "advancing justice, education, public health and independent media" around the world.
Among its first acquisitions was the archive of the Washington-funded anti-Eastern Bloc broadcaster Radio Free Europe, now Radio Liberty. Other artifacts include political materials from subversive organisations in socialist states.
It also holds the personal papers of many former Hungarian anti-communist opposition leaders and exiles, including Béla Király. Király was a general in the army of Hungary's fascist WWII government who fought on the eastern front, and was later given refuge in the US during the Cold War.
Soros has been accused by some of masterminding the 2014 Maidan Square coup in Ukraine through a vast network of 'civil society' groups — with his eye purportedly on destabilising Russia.