**Seymour Hersh: 'Something Else Is Cooking' In Ukraine**

Seymour Hersh: 'Something Else Is Cooking' In Ukraine

_Authored by Seymour Hersh, via Scheerpost,_ (https://scheerpost.com/2023/05/19/seymour-hersh-the-ukraine-refugee-question/)

_This story is a follow up to Seymour Hersh’s original report (https://scheerpost.com/2023/02/08/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream-pipeline/) on the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage._

_Sign up at seymourhersh.substack.com (http://chrishedges.substack.com/) so you can support Sy Hersh’s work_

Last Saturday the _Washington Post_ published an exposé of classified American intelligence documents showing that Ukrainian President Volodymyr **Zelensky, working behind the back of the Biden White House, pushed hard earlier this year for an expanded series of missile attacks inside Russia.** The documents were part of a large cache of classified materials posted online by an Air Force enlisted man now in custody. A senior official of the Biden administration, asked by the _Post_ for comment on the newly revealed intelligence, said that Zelensky has never violated his pledge never to use American weapons to strike inside Russia. In the view of the White House, Zelensky can do no wrong.

**Zelensky’s desire to take the war to Russia may not be clear to the president and senior foreign policy aides in the White House, but it is to those in the American intelligence community who have found it difficult to get their intelligence and their assessments a hearing in the Oval Office.** Meanwhile, the slaughter in the city of Bakhmut continues. It is similar in idiocy, if not in numbers, to the slaughter in Verdun and the Somme during World War I. The men in charge of today’s war—in Moscow, Kiev, and Washington—have shown no interest even in temporary ceasefire talks that could serve as a prelude to something permanent. The talk now is only about the possibilities of a late spring or summer offensive by either party.

_**But something else is cooking,**_ as some in the American intelligence community know and have reported in secret, at the instigation of government officials at various levels in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia. These countries are all allies of Ukraine and declared enemies of Vladimir Putin.

This group is led by Poland, whose leadership no longer fears the Russian army because its performance in Ukraine has left the glow of its success at Stalingrad during the Second World War in tatters. **It has been quietly urging Zelensky to find a way to end the war—even by resigning himself, if necessary—and to allow the process of rebuilding his nation to get under way. Zelensky is not budging, according to intercepts and other data known inside the Central Intelligence Agency, but he is beginning to lose the private support of his neighbors.**

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**One of the driving forces for the quiet European talks with Zelensky has been the more than five million Ukrainians fleeing from the war who have crossed the country’s borders and have registered with its neighbors under an EU agreement for temporary protection that includes residency rights, access to the labor market, housing, social welfare assistance, and medical care.** An assessment published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that the estimate excludes roughly 3 million Ukrainian refugees who escaped from the war zone without a visa into any of the 27 European nations that have abolished border control between each other under the Schengen agreement. Ukraine, though not in the EU, now enjoys all the benefits of the Schengen pact. A few nations, exhausted by the 15-month war, have reintroduced (https://substack.com/redirect/9515494f-1981-486c-ba40-597c07d37c35?j=eyJ1IjoiMjIyY2UifQ.-MnNuZ-50qGXFtAk8Moebbb3coRbcXliOvG2u-zm640) some forms of border control, but the regional refugee crisis will not be resolved until there is a formal peace agreement.

The UNHRC reports that free travel from Ukraine into the Baltic states and EU states in Western Europe “makes it particularly difficult to determine exactly how many Ukrainians have reached the EU in the last few months, and where they are now.” The report says the “vast majority” of the Ukrainian refugees are women and children, and one third of them are under the age of eighteen. Seventy-three per cent of the refugees of working age are women, many with children.

A February analysis of the European refugee issue by the Council on Foreign Relations found that **“tens of billions of dollars” in humanitarian aid were poured into Ukraine’s neighbors during the war’s first year.**

> _“As the conflict enters its second year with no end in sight,” the report says, “experts worry tha…

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/seymour-hersh-something-else-cooking-ukraine