One of the most well known instances of Mob/Intelligence cooperation is the JFK Assassination. Well known, except of course if you've been brainwashed by Nationalistic Propaganda Radio or MSM into the Single Bullet Theory.
In that assassination, an expert friend of mine concludes the actual dirty work MUST have been done by a very well trained and professional sharp shooter. Likely Intelligence, not Mob.
So it was the "Tramps" (who were quickly released by the Police) and not the Mobsters (who quickly escaped into the underworld) that successfully shot JFK behind the grassy knoll. The Tramps were CIA.
The mobsters were there as backup AND potential patsies, though had been promised there was a #1 Patsy from intelligence there also, who had been carefully set up. Oswald worked for FBI and was simultaneously a CIA asset. He was not a closet "Communist" he was a onetime Communist Impostor--ie, a spy, and later a Far Right Impostor. His specialty was actually Human Intelligence. He bought a crap gun as a show piece to fit in with the Far Right. A serious sharpshooter would have a serious gun.
Not only was the 6th floor book depository a very challenging (darn near impossible) even with a good gun, the same is shockingly (only slightly less) true for the Grassy Knoll shot. At the best shot point (which was used) the car is taking twisty curves in the road. If you just look at the shot point you say "well that's easy" but it isn't. One millisecond too late and you've lost the target.
Well I bring this up today simply to note, and there are endless other examples, that CIA and Mob cooperation has a long history, which includes Banksters like Epstein (who got away with billions in fraud and a life of sex crime because he was a tool for US and Israeli intelligence...providing endless material for blackmailing those politicians who were not fully toeing the US/Israeli line).
Which, then, brings us to Kolomoisky, himself a notorious mobster billionaire bankster, as well as the guy behind Ukraine's Neo-Nazi militias and since 2019 the President of Ukraine himself.
It's very easy to see then that the "deep state" which really runs Ukraine (behind the screen of even more corrupt than usual bourgeois "democracy") is US/Israeli intelligence.
Of course, long before JFK (himself Mobster/CIA but who started going rogue with the Bay of Pigs) US Intelligence has run the US as well (since the selection of Truman as FDR's VP in 1944 at least). Then the selection of Eisenhower by Dulles, well described in The Devil's Chessboard. Then two generations of Bush's (connected to the same proto-Nazi-CIA bank as Dulles, and deeply involved in Bay of Pigs through the platform of Zapata Oil Company 60 miles from Cuba) including the part with the movie star frontman Reagan (shades of Kolomoisky/Zelensky), Obama (who was lifelong groomed by CIA after his birth to two CIA assets) and Trump (part of the Epstein/Cohn axis of Mob/Intelligence), Clinton (Bill was hippie impostor spy to peace movements in Europe, and Hillary who had long association with Washington Neocons including Kissinger after her beautiful Valedictory speech about humanitarian peace).
This isn’t about pipelines and gas.
I see that mistake being made by a lot of people in the West. Apparently they can only think in such superficial materialistic and commercial terms.
But this war is much much bigger than that.
Look at the map, preferably a topographic one.
One of the most critical points of Russian territory is the one immediately to the east of Ukraine — you cut that off and you have severed their access to the Black Sean, the Caucasus, and the Caspian and you have a wide open lane for attack towards Siberia south of the Urals.
This is what the Germans tried to do in 1942 and it’s the reason a million people died at Stalingrad.
When Ukraine (and Belarus) was part of the USSR, that provided a 1500-km buffer for any such attack.
And again, that played a crucial role in the war — the German plan was to secure everything west of the Urals by the end of 1941. Didn’t work out because it turned out that vast distances matter a lot even for mechanized warfare.
Also, after the war the border was actually anchored at the Carpathian mountains (it’s probably one reason Stalin wanted those western regions so bad) and wasn’t only an open plane anymore, plus there were the additional buffers of the other Eastern Bloc countries in between the USSR and NATO.
But what happens if you give a potential invader a 1500 km head start with modern equipment?
And that is only if we consider traditional land-based warfare.
But we live in a world of cruise missiles, and it is 5 minutes from one to fly from Kharkov to Moscow, if you flood the airspace with such missiles, even the sophisticated Russian air defenses will not be able to stop them all. So the decapitation strike becomes very hard to defend against.
This is why Putin was talking about how “they have created security risks we cannot accept”.
On top of that, one has to consider that the Russians do see themselves, Belarusians and Ukrainians as part of the same larger nation, not as separate entities. And the Ukrainians in particular are a very large component of that larger Russian nation — about a quarter of it.
To have that turned militantly against you is a gigantic historic defeat and simply cannot be allowed.
Gas pipelines are a very minor consideration in that much grander military and historical context.