larry johnson speaks of russians and war in ukraine; 

 

Hey Mr. Trump? Are you paying attention? In a long interview broadcast on Russian state television on August 14, 2026, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov delivered Moscow’s sharpest characterization in months of where relations with Washington stand in the fifth year of the war in Ukraine. The message was studiously two-sided, and deliberately so: the United States is, in Lavrov’s telling, both a party to the war against Russia and the only country Moscow will still talk to about ending it. Holding those two claims together is the whole of Russia’s current posture toward Washington, and Lavrov spent the interview managing the tension between them rather than resolving it.

The headline of the interview was an escalation in rhetoric, if not yet in action. Lavrov said Russia believes the United States is far more deeply involved in organizing and carrying out Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory than Washington admits, and that this involvement extends to the provision of intelligence. When I was with the CIA, we called this kind of statement, No Shit Analysis. He said Moscow had submitted a formal set of questions to the State Department requesting clarification, specifically citing intelligence-sharing and what he framed as an American role in strikes against Russian civilian infrastructure, including oil refineries.

In casting Ukrainian long-range strikes as effectively American operations, Moscow put the Trump administration on notice about its reason for intensifying its own campaign against the Western supply chain sustaining Ukraine. Lavrov made that intention explicit, warning that Russia would harden its methods “to dismantle everything that fuels Kyiv’s war machine from the West,” and adding that Russia was “already doing this.”..............more..........