Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine
By Scott Horton
(The Libertarian Institute, 690 pages, $23)
NATO’s top military officials recently met with President Volodymyr Zelensky, touring a long-range weapons plant and discussing continued military aid, even as most Ukrainians desperately want an end to the war. After almost three years of relentless fighting, with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded and cities reduced to rubble, the appetite for continued conflict is fading. Despite mounting losses and dwindling morale, Zelensky has confirmed a new Ukrainian offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, ensuring the war drags on.
Reports of catastrophic Ukrainian losses are buried. Meanwhile, every minor Russian setback is magnified to give the illusion that victory is still within reach.
The situation has deteriorated to the point where, as Remix News — a conservative European outlet known for exposing media bias and Western hypocrisy — recently reported, Zelensky has resorted to forcibly conscripting men off the streets. Disturbing accounts describe Ukrainian men being seized from cafés and nightclubs and shoved into vans like fugitives. Under martial law, there is no escape — no right to leave, no right to refuse.
This grim reality is precisely what Scott Horton unpacks in Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine. His methodical research leaves no doubt — Ukraine is not just losing; it was set up to lose from the very start. Horton does not absolve Russia — far from it. He acknowledges that Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 was a brutal, illegal act of aggression.
But the book’s strength lies in its refusal to accept the simplistic, manufactured narrative that the war is merely a battle between good and evil, between Ukrainian democracy and Russian autocracy. Instead, Horton forces the reader to confront a more uncomfortable reality: this war...