Earlier this month in The National Catholic Register, Pope John Paul II’s biographer, George Weigel, called Russia, “a modern Moloch, the bloodthirsty Canaanite god against whom the prophets of ancient Israel railed” – in a breathless criticism of President Trump’s Ukrainian peace efforts.
On February 12, 2025, he penned a rant syndicated by The Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver. Titled Russia’s Sacrilegious War on Ukraine, the piece advocated continued war in Ukraine until Russia loses:
There is no happy or just solution to Putin’s aggression that does not end with Putin losing. How that happens is subject to debate. But Putin must lose, both for Ukraine’s sake and for Russia’s…. for America’s sake, and for the world’s.
Weigel has served on the board of the CIA cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with Victoria Nuland. His advocacy helped save the organization in 1993, when it was almost (and should have been) shut down at the end of the Cold War.
The Trump administration has suspended funding for NED, and Elon Musk called it an “evil organization [that] needs to be dissolved.” Arguably, more than any other Washington entity, NED is responsible for inciting civil unrest around the world to serve the purposes of corrupt people.
For over a decade, Weigel has acted as a reliable mouthpiece for NED in its efforts to cause war in Ukraine. Mostly, he has provided a Catholic pretext for awful stuff, based on a tangential association with a long-dead pope.
Whatever its initial intentions – and they were chiefly benevolent – by 2025 NED had become the driving force in a Frankenstein foreign policy that that took its initial design to its rational conclusion: chaos and death.
The details of the Ukraine conflict are rarely covered in the Western media, but they are available to piece together from open sources. In 2010, Ukraine elevated Viktor Yanukovych to president in a democratic election. As reported at the time:
A total of 3,779 observers, including 650 from the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, were dispatched to monitor the election. Ukraine’s presidential election, the fifth since the country regained its independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, was democratic and “organized in a transparent manner,” the OSCE said today in an e-mailed statement.
In 2013, Yanukovych would make the mistake of not signing an association agreement with the European Union and, instead, entertaining a regional economic alliance with Russia. John McCain and other prominent American politicians flew to Kiev to rally support for the EU.
Hellbound and Down 