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Given that the Atlantic Council has been funded by the two manufacturers of the Javelin system, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, this created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. In fact, the think tank presented its Distinguished Business Leadership Award to Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson that same year.
Dubious arrangements like these are not limited to arms manufacturers. Anders Aslund, a neoliberal economist who helps oversee the Atlantic Council's programming on Russia and Eastern Europe, was quietly paid by a consortium of Latvian banks to write an October 2017 paper highlighting the supposed progress they had made in battling corruption.
Aslund was asked to write the piece by Sally Painter, a longtime lobbyist for Latvian financial institutions who was appointed to the Atlantic Council board in 2017. At the time, one of those banks was seeking access to the US market and facing allegations that it had engaged in money laundering.
Pay-for-play collaborations have helped grow the Atlantic Council's annual revenue grow from $2 million to over $20 million in the past decade. In almost every case, the think tank has churned out policy prescriptions that seem suited to its donors' interests.
Government contributors to the Atlantic Council include Gulf monarchies, the US State Department, and various Turkish interests.
In May 2017, Turkish President Recep Erdogan was filmed watching as his personal guards brutalized Kurdish protesters in Washington DC; lost in the headlines was the fact that he was on his way into an event at the Turkish ambassador's residence hosted by the Atlantic Council.
Among the think tank's top individual contributors is Victor Pinchuk, one of the wealthiest people in Ukraine and a prolific donor to the Clinton Foundation. Pinchuk donated $8.6 million to the Clintons' non-profit throughout Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.
Asked if Pinchuk was lobbying the State Department on Ukraine, his personal foundation told the Wall Street Journal, "this cannot be seen as anything but a good thing."
Obama's "point-person" on UkraineIn mainstream media reports about the Bidens, scarcely any attention is given to the critical role that Joe Biden and other Obama administration officials played in the 2013-2014 Maidan revolt that replaced a fairly elected, Russian-oriented government with a Western vassal. In a relatively sympathetic New Yorker profile of Hunter Biden, for example, the regime change operation was described by reporter Adam Entous as merely "public protests."
During the height of the so-called "Revolution of Dignity" that played out in Kiev's Maidan Square, then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the US had "invested $5 billion" since 1991 into Ukrainian civil society. On a December 2013 tour of the Maidan, Nuland personally handed out cookies to protesters alongside then-US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt.
In a phone conversation that leaked two months later, the two US diplomats could be heard plotting out the future government of the country, discussing Ukrainian politicians as though they were chess pieces. "I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience," Nuland said, essentially declaring Arseniy Yatsenyuk the next prime minister. Frustrated with the European Union's reluctance to inflame tensions with Moscow, Nuland exclaimed, "f*ck the EU."
By Feb. 2014, the Maidan revolt had succeeded in overthrowing Yanukovich with the help of far-right ultra-nationalist street muscle. With a new, US-approved government in power, Biden assumed a personal role in dictating Ukraine's day-to-day affairs.
"No one in the U.S. government has wielded more influence over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden," Foreign Policy noted. The Atlantic Council also described Biden as "the point person on Ukraine in the Obama administration."
"Ukraine was the top, or one of the top three, foreign policy issues we were concentrating on," said Carpenter, Biden's foreign policy advisor. "[Biden] was front and center."
Biden made his first visit to the post-Maidan government of Ukraine in April 2014, just as Kiev was launching its so-called "anti-terrorist operation" against separatists who broke off from the new, NATO-oriented Ukraine and its nationalist government and formed so-called people's republics in the Russophone Donbass region. The fragmentation of the country and its grinding proxy war flowed directly from the regime-change operation that Biden helped oversee.
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