Hope for Ukrainians, at Last
Eric Zuesse
Finally, it appears that there is realistic hope for an end to the brutal, far-right, regime that U.S. President Barack Obama, through his chief agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, had imposed upon Ukraine, by means of an extraordinarily violent coup in February 2014, which replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected sitting President, by a rabidly anti-Russian imposed regime.
Although, until recent days, there were signs that none of the three leading Presidential candidates in Ukraine’s upcoming March 31st election would veer far off the coup-installed regime’s had-right path, that has changed drastically in recent days.
On March 15th, French Ambassador to Ukraine, Isabel Dumont, communicating privately on behalf of all seven of the G7 Ambassadors, warned Ukraine’s far-right Minister of the Interior, Arsen Avakov, that “the G7 group is concerned by extreme political movements in Ukraine.” As America’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported this on March 22nd, under the headline “G7 Letter Takes Aim At Role Of Violent Extremists In Ukrainian Society, Election”, the G7’s concern referred specifically to “products of the Azov Battalion.”
This battalion is (though RFERL carefully ignores the fact) a white-supremacist Ukrainian organization. Its founder and leader, Andrei Biletsky (or “Beletsky”), calls his movement “Ukrainian Social Nationalism,” and he has laid out in writing its program as “racial purification of the Nation” and specifically as a return to “old Ukrainian Aryan values forgotten in modern society.” His followers had, under Obama (during and since the coup), powerfully helped to install the far-right new regime, which now possibly could finally end — Obama’s coup in Ukraine thus to become terminated in abject failure (which it actually already is) and ultimately abandonment by the Europeans (unless the U.S. Government gets out of there).
Avakov had, himself, been instrumental in the campaign to exterminate anyone in Ukraine who opposed the political movements active in Ukraine that had supported Hitler against Stalin during the 1940s. This is why Ukraine’s hard-right calls itself “Social Nationalist” in order to hide its admiration for what had been German National Socialism or the original Nazism — the ideological pattern for all nazisms (racist fascisms) since.
In 2004, America’s CIA instructed Ukraine’s Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine to rename itself the “Freedom,” or Svoboda, Party, in order for more Ukrainians, and most Americans, to find it acceptable publicly to back. (Though this name-change turned out to be a successful tactic, the Party never won even as much as 2% of the vote nationwide. It was nothing without the CIA, but still is almost nothing, even after the name-change.)
Then, on March 23rd, UA Wire headlined “Front-runner in Ukraine’s election race names condition for returning Crimea”, and reported that the leading candidate, Volodmyr Zelensky, suddenly made the radical statement: “Crimea will return only when power changes in Russia. There is no other choice.”
He was, tactfully — so as not to be killed by the racist anti-Russians who had carried out the coup on behalf of Obama — asserting implicitly that he rejected the constant refrain by the other two leading candidates, Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, that Ukraine must invade and conquer Crimea. The far-right were passionate about restoring Crimea to Ukraine, which it had been (part of Ukraine) starting in 1954, and up till the coup in 2014. U.S. President Barack Obama was steadfast in his support of Ukraine’s far-right, to the extent even of overriding his Secretary of State John Kerry when Kerry ordered Poroshenko to stop promising Ukrainians that he would return to Ukraine the two territories that had rejected the coup-imposed regime, Crimea and Donbass. Obama sided then with Kerry’s subordinate, Nuland, against Kerry, and told Poroshenko that invading Crimea and Donbass would be okay.
Zelensky was now saying that the restoration to Ukraine of the two rejectionist territories would require a change-of-government in Russia, and a change-of-heart in the residents of those two former Ukrainian regions. He tactfully avoided noting that neither condition would be likely to be possible anytime soon, and (especially after the post-coup Ukraine’s intense hostility toward those rejectionist regions) probably never. Any Russian Presidential candidate who would repudiate Putin’s support of those rejectionists couldn’t stand any chance of being elected as a President of Russia, and Zelensky (like any other politician) knows this; but, perhaps, Ukraine’s voters don’t, and Zelensky needs their votes.
Zelensky himself had been endorsed on 21 February 2019 by NATO’s Atlantic Council, in an article “Why Zelenskiy Is the Only Decent Choice for Ukraine”, and this is despite the continuing insistence by 98%+ (virtual unanimity) of both houses of the U.S. Congress — almost the entire U.S. Congress (419 to 3 in the House, and at first 97 to 2 in the Senate and then 98 to 2 there) — to sanction Russia and to arm Ukraine however much will be necessary in order for Ukraine’s Government to conquer the two rejectionist parts of former Ukrainian territory. Behind the scenes, there is now immense pressure from the EU (such as that Atlantic Council writer, who is a former high official of the EU) against the U.S. regime’s insistence upon Ukraine’s conquest of those two former Ukrainian territories.
Zelensky had previously been in the employ of Ihor Kolomoyskyi, the Ukrainian aristocrat about whom I had headlined on 18 May 2014, shortly after the coup, “The Key Man Behind the May 2nd Odessa Ukraine Trade Unions Building Massacre: His Many Connections to the White House”. As I mentioned there, Arsen Avakov and Ihor Kolomoyskyi had jointly planned that massacre. So, either Kolomoyskyi has now decided to cast his lot no longer with America but with the EU against America, or else Zelensky has decided on his own to cast his lot with the EU against America. (Kolomoysky has heretofore been particularly a patron of the family of Joe Biden.)
On March 21st, I headlined “Three Neo-Nazis Lead Ukraine’s Presidential Contest”, and reported that “Zelenskiy has no political track-record, but only political blatherings, by which his alleged policy-views can become (however dubiously) inferred by voters.” But now, with his clear (though entirely tactful) break away from Kolomoyskyi’s political record, Zelensky is, at the very least, pretending to be decent. And the EU and even NATO are clearly coming out against the virtually unanimous policy of the U.S. Congress to push Ukraine toward outright war against Russia, and are backing, instead, Zelenskiy — the only leading candidate who is against invading Crimea and Donbass.
The present international trend is toward a break-up of the Western Alliance. Obama’s coup in Ukraine has set this into motion. Trump has since been accelerating the process, by continuing Obama’s policies towards Ukraine, and towards Russia (and generally, by Trump’s other policies, some of which don’t continue Obama’s). There is bipartisan, near-100%, support in the U.S. Congress for that anti-Russia policy, and also for Trump’s anti-Iran policy; and, so, the tensions toward ending NATO are increasing, regardless of what the outcome of Ukraine’s Presidential election turns out to be.
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I think your optimism is flawed, Eric. Zelenskiy is fully backed and financed by Kolomoyskyi – he is Kolomoyskyi’s puppet.
Kolomoiskii is an amoral shit, but he cares nothing for Ukraine. He cares only for “Israel” and “Igor Kolomoiskii”, not necessarily in that order.
This may or may not be good news.
The best news regarding the possible salvation of the Ukraine ,that I have heard since the 2014 coup .
Thank you Eric.There is hope after all .Maybe the future election of Zelensky will prove the turning point for the Ukraine and bring back a degree of normalcy to the country .The perpetrators of the May 2nd Odessan Trade Union bldg and the people burned alive should be tried and given the most severe sentences , to demonstrate to the Ukrainian people and the world at large that this will not be tolerated .This would go a long way to undo the damage that US/CIA and Nuland gang has done to this part of the world.
The top of the hit list should be Obama/Cheyney/Nuland/Biden/Pyatt
Sadly the fact that EU was supposed to persue this trades union massacre and make sure it happened only leads me to believe the current news is only a warning just to cover up as much as possible their misdeeds..
Let’s hope the brutal coup regime does come to an end. Another positive is that one of Kiev’s spooks has defected to Russia but you cannot read about it in our media and might not even be able to read the following.
https://johngossip.blogspot.com/2019/03/former-sbu-officer-exposes-ukraine.html
But I hope you can.
Thank you for the link John.I was able to open it .I had seen on another link the link to the MH17 but not anything else.I have archived it .
Cheers.
Thanks summitflyer. I was only in FB and WP jails for 24 hours and am out now.
I think what really characterises the journalism at the Guardian and to great extent the BBC, is that it’s mostly propaganda. Propaganda in the service of the interests of tiny fraction of the UK’s population. Probably only a few thousand people. And they call this… ‘democracy’! The elite public schools and universities produce skilled propagandists, especially for the media, who know what’s expected of them and what one can and cannot write about the UK*s foreign policy and those of our allies. This is why coverage of events in the Ukraine is so dreadfully uninformative, false and often grotesque. My favourite piece in the Guardian was when they discovered the ‘feminist Amazons’ on the frontline. Sassy women, in uniforms, brandishing guns, what’s not to like? Not much according to the Guardian’s stupid reporters, who are so ignorant, that they didn’t notice the Nazi symbols on the trucks, the helmets and the uniforms! It would be funny, if it wasn’t so tragic and dangerous.
How many Guardian journalists does it take to recognise a neo-Nazi? Just one, all the rest then turn their heads away and pretend not to have noticed.
Too busy looking at the sassy ladies .LOL
Look, nobody is independent. Journalists are often briefed with the plans the big boys have and The Guardian is not an exception. They want to get their next invites.
The big boys had planned to make the EU and NATO one area of strong US influence. TTIP was the belt and road to achieve that, NATO country Turkey into the EU, EU close country Sweden into NATO etc. Ukraine was due for both, but several events made that impossible and then came a rupture of the whole system from Brexit plus no delights from Turkey.
Ukraine was no longer attractive without Sevastopol. Ukrainians would also need to learn that they will have to take immigrants/asylum seeker quotas if they ever did enter the EU. Ukraine might like to focus on improving their own country. Stretch out your right arm and see what you find at the end of it – then start working.
Heaven help the people living in the Ukraine, which was always an ethnic patchwork and a geographically ill-defined area. I probably shouldn’t mention this, but one of my uncles, coming as he did from an ‘Austrian’ family, was recruited into the Waffen SS, not that he really had much of a choice at the time. The Germans were desparate for manpower and his background and looks meant he was close to being an Aryan poster-boy. He died in Berlin in 1945. Not that being in the Waffen SS helped the rest of his family. In late 1944 my grandmother and two of my aunts were brutally murdered by Bandera’s rampaging militia who were engaged in a massive pogrom and killing spree aimed at Jews and Poles.
My father grew up speaking German, Polish and Yiddish as he was a citzen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Then, for a few years the borders changed and he was suddenly, a Pole, though part of an Austrian ethnic minority. Then he spent years in Russia as a Polish prisoner in Siberia way up beyond the Arctic Circle, then transferred to Central Asia. Then post WW2 our hometown in what had become western Ukraine, became part of the Soviet Union and he was offered a Russian passport and membership of the Commnist Party of the USSR. If he was still alive, I suppose he’d now be classified as a Ukrainian citizen!
As far as I can tell, the Guardian’s writers know next to nothing about any of this, my father’s case being far from unique, not only that, they don’t even know how much they don’t know! The complexities of an area like Western Ukraine, espcially Galicia, which was a real melting pot under the Austro-Hungarians, are completely lost of the ladies and gentlemen from the home-counties and Oxbridge who invest the Guardian with their ignorance and conceit that seem to go hand in hand.
Philippe Sands, the Human Rights lawyer, in his book East West Street, deals with Galicia where his family came from. It’s a masterpiece.
You get glimpses of this from other sources. I was reading a piece by Joseph Conrad recently about his early life. Although Conrad is one of the great authors of English literature of the late 19th / early 20th century he was actually born in Poland, or rather the Russian part of what would become Poland again after WW1. His father was a well known Polish nationalist; after his death Joseph was sent to live with relatives in the south in what we’d know today as Ukraine — reading between the lines its difficult to tell whether Conrad was Polish, Ukraine or whatever, the cities and their communities stay the same but what country they’re part of seems to have been ever changing.
Another telling piece about the makeup of this are is a history of the Wehrmacht in Russia that describes the populace’s reaction to the 1941 invasion as a liberation in the West but then resistance stiffening as the armies traveled further east as the makeup of the population changed. Knowing this and the detail about Federal areas in Crimea due to the military facilities there explains the post-coup situation very well and suggests that the suggestion of Ukraine being a federation might have been the most practical solution to its government even if it wasn’t the one that hard liners like Nuland wanted.
As for the Guardian and its writers, as someone born and raised in Britain I can tell you that the traditional view of the world as seen by the British divides it into four categories. There’s the British themselves, a race apart. Then there are Foreigners — people who live on the other side of the Channel. Then there are the Colonies (which still includes the US) and then there are Others, the bits that nobody is interested in. Obviously this description is a bit tongue in cheek but it serves us well with our perceptions of everywhere east of Germany, its like a vast wasteland populated by weird tribes that continues until China. Its something of an awakening to discover that the reality is that its full of ordinary people living ordinary lives.
I grew up in West Berlin and my family had links, as had my spouse who came from Wroclaw/Breslau. I understand. What I do not understand is that Ukrainians had not made anything of their country in the first 20 years they were independent. They couldn’t say ‘today is today and let’s get moving’? They did not invest on Crimea (the Mriya resort near Yalta was financed by Sberbank, Russian). All they could think of was getting into NATO and EU because they thought they’d get freebies for their hatred of Russians. That’s not a strategy for success. They perpetuate the deficiencies. Now, Ukraine looks like Argentina, never getting there.
Ending NATO has to be the EU policy to prevent war again in Europe. It is clear they have no voice, must spend money solely to benefit US arms companies.
The sooner they make the break the better.
My country, the UK, is a toothless vassal, but there is no support for warmongering outside the troughers in London. The Scots would leave NATO tomorrow if a European alliance were to replace it.
The real question is whether EU idiots think they can start colonial nonsense in Africa again using an EU army.
They would do better building trade instead.
In fact the Azov Battalion which started life as small scale neo-nazi militia grew and was integrated into the punitive regular forces of the Ukranian state formation of the National Guard, although still sporting the Waffen SS insignia, the wolfsangel on their sleeve. Other militias included Right Sector who played a prominent role in the Maidan coup, and who received training from US, Canadian and British advisers in Poland and Georgia as well as the Ukraine itself. The politics of these militias is unreservedly fascist with a lineage going back to the Bandera fascists of the OUP Ukrainian Insurgent Army which carried out the massacres of Poles, Jews and Russians in Volyhnia and Galicia 1943-45. They were ably assisted by the 14th Waffen SS Galician Division, made up of recruited Ukrainians and other nationalities, which carried out similar purges. They were eventually driven out of Ukraine by the Red Army after the battle of Brody. The remnants surrendered to Anglo-American forces in Italy (Rimini) in 1945. Many emigrated to the United States and Canada, which is why they have such a vociferous voice in Canadian politics.
It irks me to know that my country Canada is so involved with the Nazi / fascist sector in the Ukraine ,It is also very obvious it is all about the votes , as many immigrated here after WW2 . I have in laws that are descendants of the Ukrainian immigration .We just don’t talk about it . It is too painful for most of us.