Stephen F. Cohen Quotes

There’s a golden moment now to be had for everybody’s security, and it’s been thwarted by this mindless… I mean, you can hate on Trump all you want, but there’s got to be a higher priority and that’s got to be international American security, and we’re letting that opportunity slip away, I fear.

...The Western authorities, who bear some responsibility for what’s happened, and who therefore also have blood on their hands, are taking no responsibility. They’re uttering utterly banal statements, which, because of their vacuous nature, are encouraging and rationalizing the people in Ukraine who are throwing Molotov cocktails, now have weapons, are shooting at police.

Trump comes out of nowhere in 2016 and says, ‘I think we should cooperate with Russia,’...This is a statement of détente...It’s then that this talk of Trump being an agent of the Kremlin begins.

Who is behind all this? ...I don’t have the evidence. But all the surface information suggests that this originated with Brennan and the CIA.

The highest-ranking State Department official, who presumably represents the Obama administration, and the American ambassador in Kiev are, to put it in blunt terms, plotting a coup d’état against the elected president of Ukraine.

If you’re trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful and demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin...

The people who created Russiagate are literally saying, and have been for almost three years, that the president of the United States is a Russian agent, or he has been compromised by the Kremlin.

We are watching history being made, but history of the worst kind... Ukraine is splitting apart down the middle, because Ukraine is not one country, contrary to what the American media, which speaks about the Ukraine and the Ukrainian people...Historically, ethnically, religiously, culturally, politically, economically, it’s two countries. One half wants to stay close to Russia; the other wants to go West.

Notice the intimacy with which the Americans deal with the two leading so-called “moderate”—and these are big shots, they both want to be president—Ukrainian opposition.... Tyagnybok, that they say has got to play a role, he’s the leader of the Freedom Party, the Svoboda Party, but a large element of that party, to put it candidly, is quasi-fascist.... This is the guy... that Senator John McCain in November or December went to Kiev and embraced. Either McCain didn’t know who he was, or he didn’t care.

Since the Clinton administration in the 1990s, the U.S.-led West has been on a steady march toward post-Soviet Russia, began with the expansion of NATO in the 1990s under Clinton. ...Then came the decision to build missile defense installations along Russia’s borders, allegedly against Iran, a country which has neither nuclear weapons nor any missiles to deliver them with.... now the West is at the gates of Ukraine. So, that’s the picture as Moscow sees it. And it’s rational. It’s reasonable. It’s hard to deny.

In four, maybe more decades of... studying Russian-American relations, I never really took seriously the possibility of war between the United States and Russia...

Should—we, American citizens, should be allowed to choose which policy we want? But they conceal it from us. And I’m extremely angry that the people in this country who say they deplore this sort of thing have fallen silent.

We’re not going to be told, just like we’re not being told what’s going on in these private conversations about deposing the president of Ukraine. ...and if the Russians leak them, it doesn’t count. Is that right?

First of all, what everybody must want is peace between Russia and Ukraine...

Fascist or neo-Nazi revivalism is underway today in many countries, from Europe to the United States, but the Ukrainian version is of special importance and a particular danger. A large, growing, well-armed fascist movement has reappeared in a large European country that is the political epicenter of the new Cold War between the United States and Russia—indeed a movement that not so much denies the Holocaust as glorifies it.