In his new book, Boiling Point, Senior Fellow Stephen Kinzer examines the decades-long contest between Washington and Moscow over Ukraine, which he describes as the most sustained covert conflict in modern history.
Kinzer begins in the refugee camps of postwar Europe, where CIA officers recruited their first Ukrainian agents, and follows generations of exiles, rebels and covert operatives from the late 1940s to the end of the Cold War. He writes that U.S. leaders came to view Ukrainians as one of their most effective tools against Moscow and that the CIA continued its efforts even though nearly all the guerrilla fighters it sent into Ukraine were captured or killed.
Kinzer argues that Washington carried that strategy forward after Ukraine’s independence and NATO’s eastward expansion, making Ukraine its most important European project of the 21st century and contributing to the escalation that led to war.