‘Trump and Vance Are Simply Russian Operatives’ — A Q&A with Dr. Michael MacKay
At our Easter Sunday ‘Speakeasy’ tribute to Ukraine with geopolitical analyst Dr. Michael MacKay, he explains Russia’s hand in the decline of Western civilization and how to reverse that trend
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“Oh, well. I thought, what an outrage. What a horrible insult, not only to Ukraine, but pretty much the last 85 years of American history. You know, since the Welles Declaration made in July 1940 was signed between Roosevelt and Churchill, that the United States would never recognize the Soviet Union's occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — that is the United States that came to be admired in the world and the leader of the free world.
“And I thought, oh my gosh, there is this crude Russian hybrid warfare going on here in the Oval Office against a completely blameless man, Zelensky, and a blameless country, Ukraine. And while I was outraged, I also thought, oh, Trump and Vance are simply Russian operatives.
“At this point, they are carrying out an active measure. The whole thing was a setup. There was the the cued question about Zelensky, ‘Do you own a suit?’ Everything was orchestrated. And I thought, how different is this from a Soviet show trial of 1938 when an intellectual was hauled before a tribunal and friends and neighbors denounce them, and then they make a confession, and then they're taken out back and shot in the back of the head.
“And I just thought, that's what it is, so, of course, people wonder why it is, but then again, they don't realize how elite capture works, and how Trump for president has been an active measure of Russia all along. So, yeah, my first reaction was outrage, but immediately recognizing what I was looking at, I understood it was simply a Soviet show trial.”—Dr. Michael MacKay, responding to my question about President Zelensky’s Oval Office visit at our Bette Dangerous Speakeasy, Easter Sunday 2025
As I have written many times before, I saw the Oval Office visit by President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28, 2025, as the day America surrendered to Russia in full view of the world, the day the KGB finally won the Cold War.
And any chance I get to ask a geopolitical analyst their take on that event I do. So I begin this report from our Bette’s Speakeasy event on Easter Sunday with Dr. Michael MacKay’s response to my question. MacKay, who has a doctorate in political philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, has been engaged with Ukraine’s civil society since the renewal of independence — working as a university lecturer, the director of an Internet access project and an election observer. Since the Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, MacKay has unfailingly documented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine daily for a decade.
Please take a moment to return to his quotes above, cement them in your mind, and share his words with your networks. We will never overthrow these Russian operatives if we do not identify them as such. Putin has used Trump, Vance, Musk, and others, to capture the United States, as he has done in many other countries.
How we release ourselves from his grip requires us to learn from other nations, and MacKay helps us do so.
Here is a Q&A transcript from our interview on Easter, edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
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‘Trump and Vance Are Simply Russian Operatives’ — A Q&A with Dr. Michael MacKay
‘Preventable Acts of Terror’
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I’ve had a pretty emotional morning. I’m not superwoman, and the regime’s parroting of Russian propaganda can be emotionally debilitating. So let’s start with what’s on your mind today.
Dr. Michael MacKay: I've got to say that my reaction to these events is, at first, emotional, just like yours. I'm enraged. And you know, whether it was last week's attack on Sumy, these rocket attacks on people coming back from Palm Sunday services, or the week before that, on a playground in Kryvyi Rih. I'm just outraged, incensed, because I see that these are preventable acts of terror.
They're not some act of God, like the weather. They are human caused actions that could easily have been prevented, and my reaction is an emotional one, but then I realized that it's no good if I just vent my anger. So what do I do? Well, as much as I can, I express the response of Ukrainians to an English speaking audience, because it's important to see that, but also to distill these truths about what is going on with these events and however difficult it is, simply present the facts, and, yes, leading my audience to a conclusion, but also letting them draw their own conclusions.
For example, today, I've been reporting a lot of facts about attacks that have been occurring all along the battlefront, and for the most part, I've left it up to my audience to figure out, ‘Hey, didn't, didn't they say something about a ceasefire that Putin made a big deal about?’ And of course, any reasonable person would say, well, it's all nonsense.
This idea of a ceasefire, it was meant to be a nonsense. It was meant to be, first of all, an attack on Ukrainians, but also an insult to the West for its failure to do anything about it and to have this false narrative take over for a few hours.
‘Eviscerating Russian Propaganda’
HSC: (The ‘ceasefire’ was propaganda to mimic being a Christian nation when it’s clear Russia is a terrorist state). You report the reality, and that’s where I want to go next. How are you able to stay so clear-eyed about reading the propaganda narratives and kneecapping them, eviscerating them, where others still don’t see it?
MM: Well, I'd like to say that there is an easy trick to it, but it has taken a lot of work. But the result of observing what's going on has been able to distill the essentials of what is Russian information warfare.
There’s a great amount of noise that comes out of it, because that is a part of it — that there's going to be a lot of noise, a lot of nonsense, but somewhere in that is going to be essential messages. And I've been able to distill it down to a few kind of essential things.
For example, the idea that ‘Ukraine is not a real country’ is a central point from which a lot generates, the idea that ‘Ukrainian isn't a real language. It doesn't have a real history. It’s really the rise of Russia. And you know, they, in fact, stole the name. So Ukraine isn't a country,’ that's a part of it.
Another thing is that ‘democracy isn't real,’ that there isn't a possibility for people of their own will to express their self interest, to collaborate with other people and express it collectively to delegate their authority to elected representatives.
None of this is real to Russian propaganda, because it's all will to power. It's all about domination, okay?
The other is about everything being a zero sum game. There's winners and losers. So these are all essential features of Russian information warfare that everybody is as venal as self serving as Putin is.
And so when someone comes along like Trump, who is also as venal and self serving, then they fall perfectly into this realm, where the idea of a win-win situation seems impossible.
Also, understanding that what Russia does today is an extension of the Moscow Empire, variations of what's been going on for 400 years.
So these are things that I've learned from Ukrainians, from living there, working with Ukrainians, listening to them and paying attention to their point of view, and realizing that there is a wisdom there that is mostly lacking in Western Europe and North America.
I give Eastern Europeans credit for having a greater general level of knowledge and awareness about this. And in light of that, I think it's up to us who are not from that region, to be a little bit more modest, to do more listening and less talking, and also give the benefit of the doubt.
So when Ukrainians say that the end of the war logically has to be the defeat of the Russian invasion invaders and liberation of occupied territory, we should pay more attention to that than some so-called expert who says, ‘Oh, the end of the war is somehow freezing the conflict along the current lines of contact.’ So I see in the Ukrainian point of view, however difficult it might be to achieve, wisdom. And it's completely lacking in the approach that's adopted by, unfortunately, the Americans at the moment.
History Lessons
HSC: I've been reading some essays by Milan Kundera, a notable Czech writer, and he writes a lot about what he calls Central Europe — countries with Western values that had Eastern politics forced upon them.
In 1983 he wrote: ‘One of the great European nations (there are nearly 40 million Ukrainians) is slowly disappearing, and this enormous, almost unbelievable event is occurring without the world realizing it.
And I'm highlighting this because of how many decades ago he wrote this, and I think it's so important that we figure out a way to elevate Ukrainian voices. I don't know how to do that in this noisy time when there's always some other you staged horror event, all these things that are happening at once. How do you elevate those voices so you can hear them loudly? And then also, can you just share with our friends a bit about Ukrainian history, because I think it's been a mystery how important this country is geopolitically and how long and hard they have fought to be independent of their dominant neighbor.
MM: Well, that comment, you say, that was from 1983 right, and that's, of course, right in the middle of the Cold War, the Reagan years, the Thatcher years, and getting towards the beginning of the Gorbachev years.
I think the author there is a little bit too pessimistic at the time about the disappearance of the Ukrainian nation. I can see how someone would think that. But then a mistake that people made in the West was paying more attention to Soviet state structures and less importance to nationalism, and they've always underestimated that.
So for example, at the end of the First World. War, there was the great rise of nationalist movements, the breakup of empires, and there was the Ukrainian National Republic, the Belarus National Republic, the Georgian National Republic. And the great tragedy is none of these were backed by the West. They stupidly backed the Tsarist forces against the Bolsheviks. Then the tsarists eventually lost. So they backed a losing cause, whereas if they had actually backed the nationalists, there wouldn't have been a revival of the Moscow Empire as the Soviet Union.
There would have been this rebirth of nations around 1919. But the great domination of the Soviet Union and then the mistake made in 1991 of letting the so-called Russian Federation become the successor state to that.
These were great mistakes that have delayed the collapse of Empire, which should have happened in 1919 but has still not happened here by 2025. So it's this painful collapse of Empire, which, for some strange reason, I don't understand that we never had the courage to do. Don't forget, in 1919 we didn't even have the excuse of nuclear weapons, which is our current great fear.
But we had no trouble then with dissolving the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Ottoman Empire or the German Empire, although it revived in a ferocious way 20 years after that, but we had no trouble at all with that. No trouble in dissolving the European empires’ hold on Africa and Southeast Asia by the 50s and 60s, and it was pretty much done by the 70s, wasn't it? No trouble at all with that, but incredible trouble with this very strange Moscow empire.
You asked to give a brief history of Ukraine. Well, this is part of how I distill Russian propaganda and filter it out. You know, ‘Ukraine is not a country. Ukraine has only existed since 1991.’
Actually, Ukraine has existed for about 1500 years. We can draw it out as a place called Rus or Kyiv for about 1500 years, and Christianity, about 1200 years old, with the baptism in the Dnipro River by Volodymyr the Great. If you look at the ninth and 10th centuries, and you looked at Europe, then you would say, where is the center of civilization? And you would pick two cities. You would pick Constantinople — today, Istanbul — and Kyiv, these cities that had shining domes and so on.
Now, what was Western Europe like at that time? Feuding kings in wooden longhouses. Germany was almost 1000 years away from being unified. So this is astonishing history.
And then to get in more modern history, people forget that Ukraine declared independence in 1918, and there was an invasion by Russia. Then Ukrainian National Republic, Ukraine, sent an independent delegation to the Versailles conference. And this was one of these great betrayals of the West, that Ukraine, which sent a delegation to the Versailles conference, ended up with no country at all out of that.
And Bolshevik Russia, which didn't bother to send anybody, did. And I think more people know about the betrayal at the Yalta Conference, when all of Eastern Europe was betrayed to the Soviet Union. And we can argue about how maybe Roosevelt was an ailing president at the time, and the concern was about Japan and other mistakes that were made then, but we know the consequences that mistake was: a 40-year-long Cold War.
And then the mistake of 1991 of making the Russian Federation the successor state to the Soviet Union; the mistake of 1994 of taking away Ukraine's nuclear weapons and giving them to the Russian terrorist state; the mistake of 2014 when refusing to respect the Budapest Memorandum and allowing the invasion of Crimea to go ahead; and the mistake that is being made by the United States now, which is to side with the Russians.
‘Trump and Vance Are Simply Russian Operatives’
HSC: Wow. Thank you so much for that history lesson — that is super valuable. So I have a few more questions for you. When you saw what happened in the Oval Office with Zelensky, what was your response, both personally and looking back at it from a geopolitical point of view?
MM: Oh, well, I thought, what an outrage. What a horrible insult, not only to Ukraine, but pretty much the last 85 years of American history. You know, since the Welles Declaration made in July 1940 was signed between Roosevelt and Churchill, that the United States would never recognize the Soviet Union's occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — that is the United States that came to be admired in the world and the leader of the free world.
And I thought, oh my gosh, there is this crude Russian hybrid warfare going on here in the Oval Office against a completely blameless man, Zelensky, and a blameless country, Ukraine. And while I was outraged, I also thought, oh, Trump and Vance are simply Russian operatives.
At this point, they are carrying out an active measure. The whole thing was a setup. There was the the cued question about Zelensky, ‘Do you own a suit?’ Everything was orchestrated. And I thought, how different is this from a Soviet show trial of 1938 when an intellectual was hauled below before a tribunal and friends and neighbors denounce them, and then they make a confession, and then they're taken out back and shot in the back of the head…
And I just thought, that's what it is, so, of course, people wonder why it is, but then again, they don't realize how elite capture works, and how Trump for president has been an active measure of Russia all along. So, yeah, my first reaction was outrage, but immediately recognizing what I was looking at, I understood it was simply a Soviet show trial.
HSC: That is such a brilliant assessment. How do we explain that America is essentially under occupation right now, because I think if we don't explain that, we're going to have a really hard time figuring out how to combat it. You gave me a great line many years ago about how to Putin, Trump is just another Yanukovich. So anything new you might have in your arsenal to help us explain Russia’s hand in all this.
MM: One advantage that the Russians have when they carry out capture of the US government, as they've done, is American exceptionalism, the idea that the US is a special case and so on.
And in many ways, that has been a reasonable assumption when a country is as powerful and influential as the United States is. But when schisms can be drawn, when, for example, the principles of free speech can be perverted so that fake news is put on an equal footing with reporting the truth of events...
So the tactics of the Russians have been altered, because of American exceptionalism. But that also draws Americans away from defense, which is to see, what have other people done and what has succeeded? And to do that now, one way in which American exceptionalism works is to have supreme confidence in institutions — the idea that freedom, civil rights can be institutionalized, has been in the past a reasonable thing in the United States — that you can litigate yourself out of conflict and so on.
But what happens when institutions are captured? That same reliance on institutions becomes a form of subservience. See what happens when Congress becomes a rubber stamp… What happens when they approve an incompetent like Hegseth or a Russian agent like Gabbard? Well, then they're not doing their job. What happens when the Supreme Court is no longer a third branch of government and a check on executive authority…
What happens when federal institutions no longer respect the Constitution, but in fact only respect the personal authority of Trump?
Then institutions have failed.
What happens when elections are influenced by elite capture of the press, for example, and in particular, social media and this environment?
Well, the answer is, if institutions fail, and that leads to a distortion of representative government, then the answer we get from other people, from other countries, is direct democracy.
The answer is to taking the popular sovereignty that does underlie our government back into our own hands.
And you see, Ukrainians have never had that confidence in institutions. They've known that institutions have been either foreign or corrupt. So they never would even have that. So of course, they would go to Maidan and regardless of the consequences, say, ‘Well, I'm here for my children. I'm here for my own dignity and for a positive future for my children.’
And that is kind of natural to Ukrainians, but I get comments from Americans that say, ‘Oh we'll put this right at the next midterm elections.’ And I have to say, ‘Will there be midterm elections? Will they be free and fair? Will they reflect the will of the people?’ And you’ve got to point out, ‘Well, if, Trump doesn't respect the Supreme Court now, then, why would he respect the result of an election in the future?’ It's not consistent.
HSC: It's a great question when he's still tweeting out on Easter Sunday the inaccurate assessment of the results of the 2020 election. My question now is turning to Europe. You've always had a very good idea of what leaders should do in situations like this. What should Europe be doing and thinking about — the EU, France and Germany — is there any battle plan that you have that we could kind of suggest in light of the changing dynamic which you just described so well. Again, I've always thought that everything rises and falls on what happens in Ukraine.
The Danish Model
MM: Well, I'm going to say something that we don't hear enough of in the Western press, and I'm going to say — back Ukraine, but back Ukraine directly.
And here's what I mean by that. For the past 11 years, the armed forces of Ukraine have been the only fighting defenders in Europe against the Russian invaders. No other country, not even the United States, has any experience with fighting the Russian Federation as it really is today — a terrorist state — but Ukraine does, and Ukraine has evolved over the past 11 years from a country whose military was small, somewhat corrupt, and certainly stuck in Soviet methods to being the most effective fighting force in Europe today, and their defense capacity has just exploded.
It is enormous. President Zelensky says that Ukraine now produces 40% of all its weapons domestically, so in light of that, they're now producing a million drones a month. These are a million of these FPV drones that explode loitering munitions, a phenomenal turnaround, and they've held the Russians at bay for 11 years. And if we give them enough support, they can win now.
Countries like Denmark have realized that. They're a rich country, but they're small. And what they've realized is Ukraine can do a lot on its own.
For example, do you know that Denmark gave all their artillery to Ukraine, like all of it, like, ‘what do we need artillery in Denmark for?’ But they did something even better, they said, ‘Why don't we just fund the Ukrainian arms industry, the Ukrainian defense, because that's where it's being manufactured. And the Ukrainians can get it done.’
They can get it done cheaper and more quickly because the urgency of war. And so Denmark has — it’s now called the Danish model, where countries just say, ‘Oh, well, let's contribute, a few 10s of millions of dollars, or ideally even more than that, and give it directly to the Ukrainian defense manufacturers to support the kinds of things they're producing — armored vehicles, artillery pieces, and drones. This is extremely important. It's how the war gets won.
So that, I think is what Europe can do immediately. Of course, long term, the answer is, look to their own defense, which they are going to do, because necessity is the mother invention. But in the short term, this Danish model is the way to go, and it is the way to win the war.
More Maia Sandu, Less Trump
HSC: I love this. Every every interview leads to, like, three other stories. So this is just really great. I can't wait to look into the Danish model more. I think you've answered all my key questions. But just a couple more: the last time you were on RadPod, I did not know about Moldova and its Ilan. And it was fascinating, because you're the one who said, ‘Look at Moldova. They too had an oligarch, Ilan Shor, who owned so much real estate and was doing the work of Russia to influence elections.; So Moldova prosecuted him, seized his assets, gave him a seven and a half year sentence, and then decided to double the sentence to 15 years and now that Ilan lives in Moscow, where he's still trying to sway what's happening politically in Moldova.
And again, you can probably rattle off so many countries that have been attacked very much in the same way, using the same methodology. But when you look at Elon Musk, even though it's a larger scale — richest man — how do you sort of put this in the framework of all the things that you've seen before, with the oligarchs running the puppet presidents from country to country that has been under the influence of these types of active measures?
MM: Yes, we should talk about this oligarch, but let's look at why he's living in Moscow and why Moldova has turned it around. And that is President Maia Sandu. What a remarkable woman. We should be showing her on the news more, but I think your average American doesn't know or care who the President of Moldova is, but her story is fantastic.
I see this almost as like a Hillary Clinton versus Trump thing, and in that 2016 election, by the way, which happened at the same time as the US and a few weeks before. And it's really interesting to me, since I do pay attention — look what happened Moldova and then what happened in the US.
So in 2016 the male Putin puppet won in both Moldova and the US.
But in 2020, she turned it around, and she ran against him. And then in 2024 she did it again, whereas the US went back and Kamala Harris was defeated by Trump.
So having two successive elections where she clobbered this Putin puppet opponent that gave her the legitimacy to go after the most powerful person in the country, which was this oligarch, and she had to do it very carefully, because Moldova is a small country. It's poor, it's partially occupied by Russia, don't forget. But she's saying ‘No, no, no, the path to the EU is structural reform.’ And she just been an amazing president.
What Can Americans Do?
HSC: So that's how that happened. I didn’t know that’s how it came about. From anywhere you can look in the world that's been through something like this before, how do you think Americans have any chance of throwing sand in the gears or trying to overthrow this regime? We know how they did it in 2014 in Ukraine, but what would be your forecast in America? Your new neighbor, Jason Stanley, who wrote How Fascism Works, basically said he sees America turning into a fascist dictatorship. So what can Americans do in this moment to stop that?
MM: Yeah, I never thought that I would see these experts in fascism, Timothy Snyder and so on, basically leaving the United States to come to my country, Canada. You know that to me, that was like something from the past…
But examples, yes, people know about 2013-2014 and the Revolution of Dignity. But let's take another example that's very similar to the oligarch case of the US. And that's Georgia right now, the country of Georgia. Now they're in a rough spot. They are in the grip of a pro-Russian government, and it is under this oligarch, Ivanishvili.
The government is basically his creature, and he is a Moscow oligarch. He's part of the Putin-Kremlin crime syndicate, as these oligarchs are, the Moldova one, this Georgian one, Elon Musk and so on.
And Georgia is not having a good time. They falsified the election. The legitimate President of Georgia is Salome Zourabichvili, another remarkable woman. But they pretended that there's a different president right now, which is ironic, because two regions of Georgia are occupied by Russia in war. So, but what have Georgians done? They've had protests every single night for, it's coming up to 200 days now. They've shut down the main street in the capital Tbilisi.
Now I understand in the US, they've had very large demonstrations in places like Boston and other cities. And that's good to see. And I understand the difficulties of such a large country, geographically dispersed and power dispersed, as well. You can't topple the government in one place, like you can in so many European countries.
But that's what has to be done when representative government fails for all these reasons for democracy to survive — it has to be direct democracy. People say, like a bumper sticker, ‘freedom isn't free,’ and that doesn't mean hiding out in the woods with your guns. It actually means cooperating with other people to practice resistance and to build civil society that is independent of the institutions of government, and that's what people do.
HSC: Thank you so much for that. And my last question for you is from a Canadian perspective, what are you guys thinking about your downstairs neighbors right now?
MM: Well, that's very interesting, because, as you know, we have a federal election, and we'll know the result of it in eight days. That's Election Day, by the way, there's advanced polling. It's very easy to vote here in Canada.
Apparently, two million Canadians have already done advanced polling, and I think the total number of voters is only about 20 million. So that's an incredible number.
Anyway, what are Canadians thinking? It's astonishing. There's surprise and anger and determination, kind of in that order.
I go shopping, and there's a Canadian maple leaf on the Canadian goods, and the goods that don't have that little maple leaf on it, you just don't buy. Anecdotally, nobody's traveling to the US. And people are mostly traveling inside Canada, but also to an extent to Europe as well. It's astonishing.
And believe me, every time Trump says 51st state, they're not treated as the jokes that unfortunately the American media flips them off as — they're actually treated very seriously here.
Prime Minister Carney said the old relationship with the United States is over now, and he's not a crazy radical or extremist or anything. He's as straight as they come. And for him to say that… and the polls favor him winning the election at the moment. So what does that mean when he says ‘the old relationship with the US is over?’
Well, there has to be a new relationship, and it will be a cautious one, a nervous one, and Canadians will just have to look to their own and do that.
When you see Canadians willing to pay more for food and other things rather than buy American, you can see that it’s serious. And when you see the divisions and petty squabbling which Canada has in great measure, you see it be put aside — even Quebec separatists — put aside their issues for a time, then you know it's really, really serious.
HSC: Thank you for that. I mean you just got three of our best and brightest, Tim Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley. So Canada is benefiting from our crisis. Michael, I thank you so much for your time as always, and I would love you to give us one last line or statement on anything that we can share with our networks on why it's so important to support Ukraine.
MM: Support for Ukraine, first of all, it's the right thing to do for all kinds of reasons. But also, it's support that it will be rewarded. It benefits us. They really are fighting for us, and they're doing it really well.
The courage and the wisdom of Ukrainians deserves to be rewarded. They have been fighting without fighting allies by their side for 11 years, and for the past three years, with a very intensive war on all these battle fronts, and they have held their own.
They give us the possibility of victory, not just holding off even longer, but actually winning the war and achieving a good result, which is the end of the Moscow Empire in our lifetimes.
And if you don't see that war has been brought to our shores in these measures of hybrid warfare, what's been done to our political institutions is the equivalent of, in the political realm, to what's been happening militarily to Ukrainian towns and cities being bombed, being devastated, people lives being torn apart…
So by supporting Ukraine, we have the possibility of winning a war — their war is our war.
HSC: If Ukraine wins, Putin's defeated, and that would be good for the world. Thank you so much for being with us today, Dr. MacKay.
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