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Posts Tagged ‘Viktor Yanukovych’

America’s election meddling will finally be its own sword to fall on

Posted by M. C. on August 8, 2024

For the United States, the prize in Ukraine has always been the opportunity to fight Russia without committing one dead western soldier. This may change.

Arguably, the best example of U.S. election meddling, especially for one which has so spectacularly backfired on the U.S., has got to be Ukraine. Both in 2004 and 2014, the U.S. created a revolutionary movement and pumped an estimated 4bn USD into it, just to unseat the Russian-leaning incumbent Viktor Yanukovych.

America’s election meddling will finally be its own sword to fall on

Martin Jay

“Interventionism” could simply be called “western-backed coup”. Since the end of the WWII, the U.S., it is reported, has meddled with the elections of 81 countries and so it should come as little surprise that it tried its best to topple Nicolás Maduro, as it had previously in 2019 under Trump. U.S. election meddling though has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War. Previous to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the U.S. was quite brazen about toppling left-wing dictators it hated or supporting right-wing candidates with their campaigns. Most notably its dirty tricks were seen as early as 1948 when it did all it could in Italy to oust a communist government. Later on, in the 80s, while the Cold War was still running and Soviet troops were in Afghanistan, the U.S. gave the contras in Nicaragua 18m USD in profits from the illegal arms sales to Iran, which ultimately led to Daniel Ortega being overthrown in a 1990 election. In the same year, Vaclav Havel was backed to the hilt in Czechoslovakia to be enthroned as a western leader in the first democratic elections to be held there.

The U.S. also backs campaigns to reinstate their puppets, when they lose one in a fair, democratic election. In 1986, for example, in Haiti, the U.S. lost Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” who was the incumbent president and a great ally of the West. Later on, his successor was finally overthrown when another friend was installed after years of a nefarious campaign. Sometimes they threw money at their own favoured incumbents who would be useful idiots to them. In 1996, the Clinton government lent 10m USD to Boris Yeltsin for his own campaign, a staggering amount of money at that time. Other times, they would pump money into campaigns run by opposition groups to oust the incumbent who was considered an enemy of the U.S., disregarding any pretentions of democratic collective conscience. In 2000, five years after the Serbs had been bombed into submission in the Yugoslav War by an illegal air strike campaign – which came about when Bosnian Muslims staged a false flag attack on their own people in a Sarajevo marketplace – the U.S. went all out to fund campaigns for all opposition groups in Serbia which finally led to those groups using the same dictator type tactics when the polls were counted by giving Milosevic to leave quietly with his life, or face the same consequences as Romania’s Ceausescu. The Serbian leader later was to mysteriously die in 2006 while held in prison at a specially convened war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Netherlands.

See the rest here

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The Great John Pilger

Posted by M. C. on January 8, 2024

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

The Great John Pilger

The world suffered a great loss when the Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger died December 30 at the age of 84. One fact stands out foremost in his decades-long career as a writer and intellectual: He opposed war and fascism. He thought that the United States and Britain all too often supported war and fascism, and he often had occasion to criticize other intellectuals as lackeys of the state, in a way that will remind readers of LRC of Murray Rothbard’s similar attacks on “court historians.”

To be against fascism, we have to be able to identify the fascists properly. Pilger argues that in the war between Russia and the Ukraine, those who condemn Putin as a “fascist” have matters backwards. It is the Ukrainian leadership who are the real fascists:

“The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism’, as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy’, which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the US, replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being ‘pro-Moscow’. The coup regime included prominent ‘extreme nationalists’ — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the ‘white supremacist militias’ active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, ‘Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.’ The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the ‘Wolfsangel’, was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbas region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a ‘Putin apologist’, regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a Nato-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbas were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.” See here.

We need to ask ourselves a question about war. Why is it bad? The answer is obvious. It causes an enormous amount of death, injury, and suffering. We see this happening in the war between Israel and Hamas. Millions of Palestinian have been displaced while Gaza has been bombed to smithereens, and the death toll continues to mount. John Pilger strongly supported Palestinian rights, which earned him the obloquy of pro-Israel lobby:

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Facing Unpleasant Facts: What You aren’t Supposed to say about the War in Ukraine

Posted by M. C. on March 20, 2022

The empowerment of far right extremists since the 2014 coup, a significant number with openly Neo-Nazi affiliations, is reflected in the dramatic rise in attacks on Jews, feminists, and the LGBTQ and Romany communities. It has further led to the banning of books that question Kyiv’s nationalist propaganda, which itself features the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators.

https://mises.org/wire/facing-unpleasant-facts-what-you-arent-supposed-say-about-war-ukraine-0

Joseph Solis-Mullen

Having been lied into war in Iraq in 2003, the American public swore it had wised up. Sure, it went on to drop the ball by supporting the Libya intervention, itself prefaced by lies, and supported the government’s intervention in the civil war in Syria (or at least didn’t mind it), even though the US sided with the very Sunni extremists it had been fighting a few years before in Iraq. But these were admittedly obscure conflicts, made all the more so by the blatantly biased coverage of events by Western media, which parroted obvious lies about impending massacres and staged chemical weapons attacks.

But in Europe, where the US had extensive military alliance commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the US population should ostensibly have been more informed and less prone to beguiling, it has been disappointing to see the American public once again so easily led down the path to supporting a war that never had to be—never would have been—but for the policies enacted by our government.

And just as with the baseless rush to war with Iraq, which every outlet of mainstream media loyally supported, those who refuse to repeat slogans of “Ukrainian democracy” or “Russian aggression” are denigrated, either as cowards or as apologists for the heinous actions of others, for which they are obviously not responsible. Besides being inaccurate, the latter accusation is particularly perfidious because it effectively makes reasoned dissent impossible.

But by pretending that history started with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the story is made simple, a clear case of right and wrong. And while it is true that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine and so is responsible for the present war, such a Manichean telling of the story does little to further informed policy discussion. Indeed, that is precisely the point: to ignore the decades of declared Russian security interests in the orientation of states directly at its border, as well as to obscure a history of US meddling in Ukraine.

So unless you think context is irrelevant, that recent history is unimportant to understanding current crises, here are four things you aren’t supposed to say about Ukraine but that are absolutely true and that all Americans should be aware of before forming a hasty opinion regarding a deadly serious matter that until a few weeks ago most knew nothing about.

The “Revolution of Dignity” Was a US-Backed Coup

The 2014 ouster of slightly Russian-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who drew his support primarily from the ethnic Russian–dominated eastern parts of the country, was spun by Ukrainian nationalist and Western media as a ”revolution of dignity.” It was in fact, in the words of Western security analyst George Friedman, ”the most blatant coup in history.” In case the obvious nature of events on the ground weren’t enough, this was confirmed by the leaked phone call between then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, then the US ambassador to Ukraine, during which they picked their favorites for the new Ukrainian leadership and plotted how to prevent the meddlesome EU from screwing it all up by moving too slowly, potentially allowing Russia a chance to interfere in the obviously illegal ouster of an elected government through a street putsch.

The proximate cause of the coup was Yanukovych’s taking of what was essentially a large Russian bribe to eschew an EU association agreement. In a country ranked 122nd in corruption, literally the most corrupt country in Europe, none of this was a surprise. But what was a surprise was the US move to sweep in and take Kyiv—something US foreign policy insiders publicly bragged about in the immediate aftermath.

There Is a Significant Neo-Nazi Problem in Ukraine

This is something that until a few years ago the mainstream media reported seriously on; of course, that was before they knew they were going to have to try and lie us into another war. Now any mention of what was taken to be an obvious problem just a year ago is decried as “Russian propaganda!”

The empowerment of far right extremists since the 2014 coup, a significant number with openly Neo-Nazi affiliations, is reflected in the dramatic rise in attacks on Jews, feminists, and the LGBTQ and Romany communities. It has further led to the banning of books that question Kyiv’s nationalist propaganda, which itself features the whitewashing of Nazi collaborators.

What are we to think when at the same time that public witch hunts for supposed white nationalists are carried out domestically with something near hysterical zeal, state-of-the-art shoulder-fired antiaircraft and antitank weaponry is shipped in great volumes to extremist white nationalists in Ukraine that would make the top of any of our own domestic terrorist watch lists?

We aren’t supposed to think about it all, at least not critically—just like we aren’t supposed to think critically about anything else.

The Russians Always Objected to NATO Expansion into Ukraine

For example, how about the fact our government always knew the Russians vigorously objected to any NATO involvement in Ukraine but downplayed or dismissed the obvious steps they were taking in that direction—downplayed it to themselves, to the American public, and tried to downplay it to the wider European community. Of course, Germany and France knew better and refused to grant a membership action plan to Ukraine despite Washington’s intense pressure. And though blocked from de jure absorbing Ukraine into the alliance, Washington was taking de facto steps to that effect—conducting joint military exercises in Ukraine at the same time that it was shipping the US-coup-installed government sophisticated heavy weaponry whose only obvious use was against Russia. Since at least 2014, when Putin ordered Russian forces to seize the Crimea to protect the only warm water port of the Russian navy after threats by Kyiv to evict them despite Moscow’s legal lease, Washington has known Putin feels particularly threatened in Ukraine. Even in the years since then, Washington has rejected repeated attempts by Moscow to establish an officially neutral Ukraine, including in the weeks leading up to the invasion.

Biden Could Have Prevented the War

Yes, even at that late date in January 2022—and all it would have taken was agreeing to Putin’s minimum terms: Ukraine could never join NATO, and new missiles could not be deployed in eastern European NATO member states. Outrageous and rightly rejected? Not according to Joe Biden, who claimed NATO membership for Ukraine was not on the table nor a serious priority at any point in the foreseeable future. Taking him at his word, why wouldn’t Biden simply agree to put it on paper and prevent what he himself repeatedly said were imminent Russian plans to invade and destroy Ukraine? What we’re told, and have been told since NATO expansion began, is that “keeping the door open” to alliance membership is a ”sacred principle.”

Perhaps it should be made public exactly how many Ukrainian lives the State Department and the Pentagon reckon this principle to be worth and how such calculations are made.

Conclusion

Really, what this looks like is a tragic combination of the brief 2008 Russo-Georgian War and the decade-long Soviet-Afghan War. In the first instance, US encouragement of actions by Tbilisi directly contrary to Russian interests led directly to a Russian military intervention; in the latter case, the leading US policy maker at the time, Zbigniew Brzezinski, admits precipitating that war on purpose: provoking the USSR into fatally overreaching in an attempt to protect an allied government from being undermined by the US—in this case by funding the proto-Taliban mujahideen in Afghanistan from bases in neighboring Pakistan.

As Poland gets set to potentially play Pakistan to Ukraine’s Afghanistan, serving as a staging area and training ground for rebel fighters slipping back and forth across the border to Ukraine, thereby further threatening war between NATO and Russia, we should recall that this all, in a sense, happened because the local governments in Donetsk and Luhansk could see the obvious: what had happened in Kyiv in 2013–14 was a coup, and they refused to recognize the new government. Further, we should remember that it was only when the Ukrainian military attempted to retake these regions by force that Russia intervened—and that since the Minsk Two peace accords failed to bring about a durable ceasefire, over 80 percent of those killed have been ethnic Russians living in the breakaway regions, and they were killed by the government in Kyiv.

With Democrats and Republicans fighting about who supports intervening in Ukraine more, and with uninformed and misled people increasingly calling for even more disastrous interventionist measures, the American public needs to be reminded that it is entirely possible for us to have a foreign policy that keeps us perfectly safe while not getting large numbers of people killed elsewhere, and further, that most of the various crises around the world that we are told the US needs to play a direct and integral part in solving are themselves the direct result of previous US interventions in those places.

Author:

Joseph Solis-Mullen

A graduate of Spring Arbor University and the University of Illinois, Joseph Solis-Mullen is a political scientist and graduate student in the economics department at the University of Missouri. A writer and blogger, his work can be found at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, Eurasian Review, Libertarian Institute, and Sage Advance. You can contact him through his website http://www.jsmwritings.com or find him on Twitter.

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Russia-U.S. Negotiations Continue on Shaky Grounds | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2022

Russia wants the US and NATO to rescind a promise that was first made in 2008 that Ukraine would eventually become a member of NATO. When Viktor Yanukovych was president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014, Kyiv joining NATO was not a concern. But Yanukovych was ousted in a US-backed coup in 2014, and ever since, NATO has significantly increased its cooperation with Ukraine.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/russia-u-s-negotiations-continue-on-shaky-grounds/

by Dave DeCamp

No progress was made during a meeting between NATO and Russia in Brussels on Wednesday as the US and NATO are rejecting a key Russian demand to halt the military alliance’s eastward expansion. But according to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, both sides are open to further talks.

Stoltenberg said during the meeting, NATO members and Russia “expressed the need to resume dialogue and to explore a schedule of future meetings.”

The NATO chief said there are “significant differences” between the military alliance concerning Ukraine. “Our differences will not be easy to bridge, but it is a positive sign that all NATO allies and Russia sat down around the same table and engaged on substantive topics,” he said.

Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman represented the US at the meeting and echoed Stoltenberg’s comments. She said some of Russia’s security proposals were “non-starters” but maintained that there are still issues the two sides can negotiate on, including arms control.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko, who led the Russian delegation in Brussels, had some positive things to say about the talks despite the US and NATO’s stance.

“I think that [this meeting] was absolutely essential. Firstly, it was some sort of a shake-up. If the meeting had not taken place, it would have been impossible to bring up these issues in full action,” Grushko said, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.

Russia wants the US and NATO to rescind a promise that was first made in 2008 that Ukraine would eventually become a member of NATO. When Viktor Yanukovych was president of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014, Kyiv joining NATO was not a concern. But Yanukovych was ousted in a US-backed coup in 2014, and ever since, NATO has significantly increased its cooperation with Ukraine.

On Thursday, the diplomacy between Russia and the West will continue at a meeting of the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. While no breakthroughs have been made, the flurry of diplomacy and willingness to continue dialogue is a sign that the tensions around Ukraine and elsewhere in the region likely won’t lead to further conflict.

This article was originally featured at Antiwar.com

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The Evil Fiona Hill – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 25, 2019

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/david-stockman/the-criminal-fiona-hill/

By

David Stockman’s Contra Corner

It’s beginning to seem like an assault by the Zulu army of American politics – they just never stop coming.

We are referring to the Russophobic neocon Deep Staters who have trooped before Adam’s Schiff Show to pillory POTUS for daring to look into the Ukrainian stench that engulfs the Imperial City – a rank odor that is owing to their own arrogant meddling in the the internal affairs of that woebegone country.

This time it was Dr. Fiona Hill who sanctimoniously advised the House committee that there is nothing to see on the Ukraine front that involved any legitimate matter of state; it was just the Donald and his tinfoil hat chums jeopardizing the serious business of protecting the national security by injecting electioneering into relations with Ukraine.

She warned Republicans that legitimizing an unsubstantiated theory that Kyiv undertook a concerted campaign to interfere in the election – a claim the president pushed repeatedly for Ukraine to investigate – played into Russia’s hands.

“In the course of this investigation,” Dr. Hill testified before the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearings, “I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Folks, we are getting just plain sick and tired of this drumbeat of lies, misdirection and smug condescension by Washington payrollers like Fiona Hill. No Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US election?

Exactly what hay wagon does she think we fell off from?

Or better still, ask Paul Manafort who will spend his golden years in the Big House owing to an August 2016 leak to the New York Times about an alleged “black book” which recorded payments he had received from his work as an advisor to the Ukrainian political party of former president Yanakovych. As we have seen, the latter had been removed from office by a Washington instigated coup in February 2014.

By its own admission, this story came from the Ukrainian government and the purpose was clear as a bell: Namely, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and force Manafort out of his months-old role as campaign chairman – a role that had finally brought some professional management to the Donald’s helter-skelter campaign for the nation’s highest office.

In the event, this well-timed bombshell worked, and in short order Manafort resigned, leaving the disheveled Trump campaign in the lurch:

…… government investigators examining secret records have found Manafort’s name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.

In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies….. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Manafort’s involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine had previously come to light. But as American relationships there become a rising issue in the presidential campaign – from Mr. Trump’s favorable statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation of Crimea to the suspected Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails – an examination of Mr. Manafort’s activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the new government in Kiev.

The bolded lines in the NYT story above tell you exactly where this was coming from. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau had been set up by an outfit called “AntAC”, which was jointly funded by George Soros and the Obama State Department. And there can be little doubt that the Donald’s accurate view at the time – that Crimea’s reunification with Mother Russia after a 60 year hiatus which had been ordered by the former Soviet Union’s Presidium – was unwelcome in Kiev and among the Washington puppeteers who had put it in power.

For want of doubt that the Poroshenko government was in the tank for Hillary Clinton, the liberal rag called Politico spilled the beans a few months later. In a January 11, 2017 story it revealed that the Ukrainian government had pulled out all the stops attempting to help Clinton, whose protégés at the State Department had been the masterminds of the coup which put them in office. Thus, Politico concluded,

Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country...

That is, what is being desperately defended on Capitol Hill is not the rule of law, national security or fidelity to the Constitution of the United States., but a giant Neocon Lie that is needed to keep the Empire in business, and the world moving ever closer to an utterly unnecessary Cold War 2.0 between nation’s each pointing enough nuclear warheads at the other to destroy the planet.

NATO, with just 16 members in 1990, now includes 29 European states, with all of the expansion countries lying east of Germany. As this was unfolding, Russian leaders issued stern warnings about the consequences if America and the West sought to include in NATO either Ukraine or Georgia. Both are considered as fundamental to Russian security.

True, many in western Ukraine have pushed for greater ties to the West and wanted their elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, to respond favorably to Western financial blandishments. But Yanukovych, tilting toward Russia, eschewed NATO membership for Ukraine, renewed a long-term lease for the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, and gave official status to the Russian language. These actions eased tensions between Ukraine and Russia, but they inflamed Ukraine’s internal politics. And when Yanukovych abandoned negotiations aimed at an association and free-trade agreement with the European Union in favor of greater economic ties to Russia, pro-Western Ukrainians, including far-right provocateurs, staged street protests that ultimately brought down Yanukovych’s government. Victoria Nuland gleefully egged on the protesters. The deposed president fled to Russia.

Nuland then set about determining who would be Ukraine’s next prime minister, namely Arseniy Yatsenyuk. “Yats is our guy,” she declared to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. When Pyatt warned that many EU countries were uncomfortable with a Ukrainian coup, she shot back, “Fuck the EU.” She then got her man Yats into the prime minister position, demonstrating the influence that enables US meddling in foreign countries.

That’s when Putin rushed back to Moscow from the Winter Olympic Games at Sochi to protect the more Russian-oriented areas of Ukraine (the so-called Donbass in the country’s east and Crimea in the south) from being swallowed up in this new drama. He orchestrated a plebiscite in Crimea, which revealed strong sentiment for reunification with Russia (hardly the “sham referendum” described by Taylor) and sent significant military support to Donbass Ukrainians who didn’t want to be pulled westward.

The West and America have always been, and must remain, wary of Russia. Its position in the center of Eurasia – the global “heartland,” in the view of the famous British geographic scholar Halford Mackinder – renders it always a potential threat. Its vulnerability to invasion stirs in Russian leaders an inevitable hunger for protective lands. Its national temperament seems to include a natural tendency towards authoritarianism. Any sound American foreign policy must keep these things in mind.

But in the increasingly tense relationship between the Atlantic Alliance and Russia, the Alliance has been the more aggressive player – aggressive when it pushed for NATO’s eastward expansion despite promises to the contrary from the highest levels of the US government; aggressive when it turned that policy into an even more provocative plan for the encirclement of Russia; aggressive when it dangled the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia; aggressive when it sought to lure Ukraine out of the Russian orbit with economic incentives; aggressive when it helped foster the street coup against a duly elected Ukrainian government; and aggressive in its continued refusal to appreciate or acknowledge Russia’s legitimate geopolitical interests in its own neighborhood.

George Kent and William B. Taylor Jr., in their testimony last week, personified this aggressive outlook, designed to squeeze Russia into a geopolitical corner and trample upon its regional interests in the name of Western universalism. If that outlook continues and leads to ever greater tensions with Russia, it can’t end well.

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Joe Biden’s Ukraine Scandal Is His Policy, Not Personal Interests – Bloomberg

Posted by M. C. on May 15, 2019

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-08/joe-biden-s-ukraine-scandal-is-his-policy-not-personal-interests

By

…The conflict of interest story isn’t worth much on its merits. But if it plagues Biden, he will deserve it for the ham-handed way he interfered in Ukrainian politics — a snake-pit that isn’t kind to badly informed outsiders. Biden’s cowboy-style interventions didn’t do Ukraine any good, and its wily politicians ran circles around him. Americans shouldn’t pay too much attention to the shaky corruption allegations, but Biden’s record in Ukraine doesn’t speak well for his judgment on foreign policy.

The central allegation spun up by Trump and his allies involves Hunter Biden’s work for the oil and gas company Burisma Holdings, where he served as a board member from 2014 until recently. Burisma is owned by Mykola Zlochevsky, who had been a cabinet minister under President Viktor Yanukovych. Zlochevsky fled Ukraine after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity that deposed Yanukovych, and was put under investigation by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office. Last year, Biden famously boasted that he had forced Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire the prosecutor general by threatening to withhold a $1 billion U.S. loan if he failed to obey.

Now, that prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, says he was fired because he was pursuing Zlochevsky and Burisma. “I didn’t get the hints that we should stop the investigation of Burisma wrongdoing,” he said in an interview published this week, in which he also accuses Biden of pursuing “personal interests” in Ukraine and recruiting Ukrainian officials to protect them — charges Biden denies.

Shokin’s claims are highly questionable. The illegal enrichment and money laundering investigation against Zlochevsky was started in August 2014 at the request of Shokin’s deputy, Vitaly Kasko. He had a strained relationship with his boss, and resigned in early 2016, two months before Shokin’s firing. Shokin didn’t actually lead the Zlochevsky investigation, so his removal wasn’t necessary to stop it. Besides, Kasko denies there was any U.S. pressure to end the investigation: He told Bloomberg News that the case had been dormant for a while when Shokin was fired.

It’s likely, however, that Poroshenko was indeed interested in ending the Burisma investigation for reasons that may or may not have had anything to do with the Bidens. Global corruption watchdog Transparency International closely followed the transformation of the criminal investigation into a demand for back taxes. “There are reasonable grounds to believe that close associates of current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko have significantly assisted Mykola Zlochevsky in dismissing criminal cases against him,” Transparency wrote in a detailed brief on the history of the Zlochevsky investigation…

Trump partisans will try to use the Burisma case to pump up the shaky claims into a scandal against Biden. But Biden opened himself up to the smears by diving into the Ukrainian cesspool — and bragging about it. Shokin’s words would be that much less credible had Biden not boasted that he’d personally gotten the prosecutor fired. Although Ukrainian anti-corruption activists had been clamoring for Shokin’s dismissal and his days in office were probably numbered, Biden decided for some reason to claim credit — a move as nearsighted as it was unnecessary.

Biden’s other boasts about Ukraine reveal a naivete about the country’s political landscape and the forces shaping it. In his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden described making a call to Yanukovych “in late February of 2014, when his snipers were assassinating Ukrainian citizens by the dozens” to tell him to “call off his gunmen and walk away” because “his Russian friends” wouldn’t rescue him from the disaster. “The disgraced president fled Ukraine the next day,” Biden wrote.

If indeed Biden called Yanukovych the day before his flight, that would have been Feb. 21, when Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal with opposition politicians that would have kept him in office for a transition period with drastically reduced powers. Protesters seized the government quarter in Kiev in the next few hours, and Yanukovych fled to his country residence, fearing for his life. It’s impossible to know now if it was Biden’s alleged call, coupled with the takeover of government buildings, that gave Yanukovych the idea the deal was never meant to be kept. If so, Biden could have inadvertently helped to set off the chain of events that led to the Russian takeover of Crimea as a reaction to what Russian President Vladimir Putin saw as a U.S.-led coup.

In other Ukraine interventions, Biden tried to keep the peace between Poroshenko and his first prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, whom Biden described as a “young patriot” in his book — long after the Yatsenyuk became deeply unpopular thanks to the corrupt schemes of his associates. Poroshenko listened to Biden’s exhortations about working with Yatsenyuk, then pushed him out anyway once Yatsenyuk had been thoroughly discredited.

Biden has publicly insisted that the Ukrainian authorities get tougher on corruption. He even made an impassioned speech about it to the Ukrainian parliament in 2015. But at the same time, he likely led Ukrainian leaders to believe that maintaining a good relationship with the U.S. vice president meant more than any substantive anti-graft measures when it came to getting foreign aid. Poroshenko, Biden wrote in his memoirs, “knew I had gone to bat for him to get aid from the International Monetary Fund and loan guarantees from the United States.” The IMF, of course, is supposed to issue loans based on strict criteria, not on political support; if Poroshenko indeed “knew” anything of the sort, it must have contributed to his imitation of reforms for the sake of foreign sponsors such as Biden. It didn’t help him much with Ukrainian voters this year, though.

Generally, open meddling in the politics of a foreign country, even one as troubled as Ukraine, isn’t a great idea for a U.S. politician, even if he was personally handed the Ukraine portfolio by the president. It’s even worse when the politician doesn’t have a clear idea of the consequences. The election of populist political novice Zelenskiy is a direct consequence of Poroshenko’s bungling rule, assisted by a bungling, boastful Biden. Once Zelenskiy takes office this month, the U.S. will have to turn a new leaf with Ukraine…

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LMAO: 'Creepy Joe' Says He's 'The MOST Qualified Person In ...

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US government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman

Posted by M. C. on September 19, 2017

Will Manafort get a fair trial before he is hanged?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/politics/paul-manafort-government-wiretapped-fisa-russians/index.html

US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.
Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.
Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.
Inconclusiveness hasn’t stopped anyone yet.

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Ukraine-We Are Going to Save The Country, God Help Them

Posted by M. C. on February 23, 2014

Like a lot of other places, the current Ukraine population evolved from the influx of various peoples. Most are of Slavic heritage. In the 30s and 40s the Russians added some of Poland and Romania to the mix. Not surprisingly they can have their differences. The Western half of the country leans towards the EU and the Eastern half looks to Russia. Ukraine is complex.

Ukraine needs help. The EU offered few hundred million dollars worth of loans and reform demands while Russia offered 15 billion dollars worth loans and discounted oil and gas.

Chaos has since ensued, with our helping hand. Our point person for government overthrow is Victoria Neuland, the FU lady. Read the rest of this entry »

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