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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