If Game of Thrones is a saga that centers on ice and fire, spread across two continents involving two major storylines that slowly combine over time, Trump-Russia centers on gas and politics with a similar geographic spread and similar coming together over time. If the primary convergence point in Game of Thrones in this context is the Iron Throne, for Trump-Russia it is Ukraine. Bringing more than two decades of relevant geopolitical analysis and background to bear, including consistently pioneering and prescient coverage of the Trump-Russia saga, independent expert Brian Frydenborg breaks down the core of Trump-Russia—Ukrainian intrigue—as no one else before. Trump’s current Ukraine insanity is just an extension of old Trump-Russia and the media still does not know how to cover it. The only way to get anything approaching a full sense of what is going on with Ukraine, Trump, Russia, and the media is to painstakingly trace the threads of corruption and Russian influence operations related to Putin’s Ukraine drama, Putin’s and his top mafia boss’s co-opting of Trumpworld, and the actors involved throughout the many stages of this overall saga. These threads can be traced from their origins in the 80s and 90s directly into today’s White House and the battlefields in Ukraine. The threads are solid and come together to form a powerful and clear line of remarkable influence of the Russian government in Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian mafia into the major players, policies, and decisions of the Trump White House. As this exploration will make clear, simple logic and the sheer amount of billowing smoke plumes coming from so many points obviously show that Trump has been raised up and co-opted by Russian influence to the point of being an asset—whether willingly or if he is too stupid to realize it, he is a “useful idiot”—for Putin and his allies. Even if the actual flames are obscured, the heat can be felt as we choke on the smoke: those fires still exist and are presented here even if most of the top media news outlets, playing Trump’s and Russia’s game in their inability to sustain focus, have largely missed these conflagrations.