Ex-CIA agent and creator of ‘The Americans’ says US and Russia aren’t

With tens of thousands of Russian troops amassed along the Ukrainian border, Moscow finds itself in one of its most tense standoffs with the West since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin denies plans to invade Ukraine, but the United States and its NATO allies are sending military aid to the beleaguered country and the Pentagon announced that up to 8,500 US troops have been put on high alert for a possible deployment to Eastern Europe.

What some are calling a new cold war between Russia and the United States is the focus of “Russia Upside Down,” a new book by former CIA officer-turned-writer and television producer Joseph Weisberg.

Weisberg spent three years with the CIA — a brief spell as a spy recruit that would come in handy a few years later when he drew on his experience to create award-winning spy drama “The Americans.” The show ran for six seasons between 2013 and 2018 on FX, and told the story of two KGB spies in Reagan-era America.

Weisberg says that if Russia invades Ukraine, they will be making “a terrible mistake, both strategically and morally,” but also stresses that “sending US troops to Eastern Europe and the Baltics will only increase the possibility that the [West] stumbles into a war with Russia.”

Speaking to The Times of Israel via Zoom from a hotel room in New York City, the 56-year-old Chicago-born Jewish author says that the “new cold war” isn’t actually all that new. It has its roots, he says, in Russia’s aggressive takeover of Crimea in 2014, which started a proxy war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and drew tough US-imposed economic sanctions on Moscow that have significantly impacted Russia’s economy.

14,000 people have been killed in the ongoing eight-year conflict between Russian-backed separatist forces and the Ukrainian military.

A Ukrainian soldier takes his front line position in a destroyed building in the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, November 18, 2019. (AP Photo/Vitali Komar, File)

Weisberg claims “ending economic sanctions against Moscow could be a useful step” that would help reduce rising tensions between the West and Russia.

“To deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine right now, the US ought to listen carefully to Russia’s concerns, and see how far they can go in meeting the ones that are reasonable,” he says. “I suspect this [diplomatic option] would have a greater chance of deterring a Russian invasion of Ukraine than further threats of economic sanctions.”

And, he says, it’s not as if Russian President Vladimir Putin is making much ado about nothing when it comes to the eastward expansion of NATO.

Weisberg says that at the end of the Cold War, the West tricked the Soviet Union by assuring the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union,…