Poroshenko, a Disaster for Ukraine ?

 

 

Thirteen years after the end of the Soviet Union, the American press establishment seemed eager to turn Ukraine's protested presidential election on November 21 into a new cold war with Russia. Stephen Cohen                     Is Porosheko still working for his former masters in Washington, DC? Two diplomatic messages from the WikiLeaks Public Library on U.S. Diplomacy indicate that newly elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko was an agent for United States State Department.   The West created [Ukrainian] President [Petro] Poroshenko, but he is in many respects the tail that wags the dog, they cannot always rein him in. He is the rogue player, he is the joker in this hand,”  Martin Sieff  April 4th 2016 Update:https://www.rt.com/op-edge/338675-ukraines-petro-poroshenko-biggest-loser/ Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko: The biggest loser from the Panama Papers?  The outcome of the elections was known in advance - Poroshenko was declared the winner of the race. The results will further split the country. many regions refuse to recognize as President this cocolate king who is notorious for pocketing government money. Poroshenko has no chance to stop the bloody conflict even scrupulously carrying out all the orders given by Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt. Besidess,the mission of putting an end to the bloodshed has never been set by his US bosses... Gregory Kolyada

Democracy, which Kiev so much adores and venerates together with the “civilized countries”, as President Poroshenko puts it, is about learning to live with differences, by respecting and accommodating it. I do not see any sign of if coming from Kiev. What Ukraine really needs is a President and a government that listens to all Ukrainians and respects their right to be different. Yes, the majority of Ukrainians want to be part of Europe. But there is also the other Ukraine that wants to keep close ties with Russia. Any political project of state-building in Ukraine will succeed only if this other Ukraine is heard and accommodated.

Halyna Mokrushyna

It has become evident that Washington is using Ukraine as a battle ground to achieve their hegemonic goals against Russia. While Merkel and Hollande are attempting to negotiate a peace accord by meeting with Putin and Poroshenko, Kerry is deliberately undermining this attempt by independently asking Congress for funds to strengthen Kievs military capacity. Washington is not interested in peace because it doesn't fit with their battle to bankrupt Russia and unseat Putin. Porkyshenko is their loyal soldier in this battle and willing to sacrifice Ukranian lives. He sits in the command post in Kiev with his American allies, Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt.

Don Currie

A reenactment of 'Dr Strangelove' Starring Poroshenko

'Billionaire Poroshenko started his business by laundering the money of 'Soviet times’ administrators. He has never been an entrepreneur to start a business of his own. The story is invented. He made a head start thanks to the criminal connections of his father sentenced for large-scale theft in 1986. Having served the sentence, Poroshenko Sr. launched his own business and involved his son in the activities. Poroshenko Sr was rewarded for his merits in 2009 the Hero of Ukraine decoration bought for him by his son. The business was dirty, it all started with plundering state property. The Poroshenko family had plans to expand the activities beyond Ukraine.  Poroshenko is well known for misappropriating budget funds. He has the reputation of someone who knows how to make money out of thin air. Many times he has been accused of being involved in large scale corruption schemes, open lobbying, embezzlement of budget allocations, tax evasion, illegal operations to acquire shares, and physically threatening political opponents and competitors. '

Forbes lists Petro Poroshenko as the 130th wealthiest person in the world with 1.6 billion dollars. 

open lobbying
Poroshenko has received a hero’s welcome in the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration, and the media, as well including their counterparts in Canada. In fact, Poroshenko has recently addressed a joint session of Congress, an honor bestowed only on America’s closest allies, especially Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who has spoken twice to joint sessions. Netanyahu typically comes to Washington when he expects to return to Jerusalem with financial guarantees, military aid packages, and other largesse courtesy of the American taxpayers. Poroshenko and other leaders know this and try to emulate the influence of the Israel Lobby that ensures huge assistance packages for their client.

Corruption is a major problem for Ukraine. It has become a simple, effective and sometimes the only way to do things in a lot of cases: getting a medical certificate, the permit for construction or a job, entering a university. In most cases one has to grease the hand. Even to bury someone one must pay a bribe for a place at a cemetery.
 

Graft has become the main source of income for many public sector employees. This has largely eliminated the stimulus for the government and society to reform. Corruption has become the norm for governmental relations 

Depending on the region the bribe for avoiding being sent to war fluctuated from 500 euros to 2000 euros. Special pay is envisaged for a chance to choose the military service and the place of deployment. The failure to tackle the rampant and deep-seated corruption plaguing the Ukrainian people could quickly squash any optimism that the revolution and the recently signed EU Association Agreement herald a better future.

The speech to the joint session of Congress will place Poroshenko on the same level as other present and past U.S. allies. However, Poroshenko’s speech will be forgotten as soon at it is given. Today, few, if any, older members of Congress would recall similar addresses by NATO allies such as Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Dutch Queen Beatrix, or Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. All those speeches became, as will Poroshenko’s, insignificant footnotes of history.

Pavel Gubarev a leader of the Donetsk Republic (who was wounded and  hospitalized in an assassination attempt in October 2014) says: "We want to create a fundamentally new state based on social justice  and equality of people. We now have a chance, an opportunity to reboot . When people understand that the new state will protect their rights and interests, they will be happy and will support us. We wanted the new government to ensure the rights of the Russian-speaking population and to consider an autonomous status for the Donbas area. However, we never saw any desire of the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev to find a compromise. How will I explain to the families who have lost loved ones in the fighting what they died for if we negotiate with Kiev? For the return of the oligarchs?"

The yes vote in the self-rule referendum in the Donbas was born as much from a sense of difference between eastern and western Ukraine as from deep disillusionment about the extent to which the Ukrainian state symbolized the kind of social justice to which Gubarev aspires.

 Soviet-style egalitarianism mixed with cultural mythology,geography and the historical precedent of Donbas may not only appeal to those who supported the the referendum but is also an attractive geopolitical concept from Moscow’s perspective.

President Barack Obama during a meeting at the White House praised Petroshenko for signing the recent “Association Agreement” with the European Union and encouraging the military exercises being conducted in Ukraine by Ukrainian and NATO forces (also the Sea Breeze naval exercises recently completed with the US Navy in the Black Sea).

Canada Defense Minister Valery Heletey recently announced that NATO countries are delivering weapons to Ukraine for use against the Russian speaking population of eastern Ukraine. There are no guarantees that NATO weapons will not end up in the hands of ultra-rightwing Ukrainian militias from Kiev sporting Nazi helmets. These same miltias have entered eastern Ukraine with genocide in their foremost thoughts.

Putin has recommended forming a federal system of government in Ukraine that would give a freedom of expression between the different languages, and aspirations of the people in Kiev and those in the Eastern cities of Donestk and Luhansk.  Ukraine could successfully use this rational approach by following Canada's federal system that recognizes the distinct cultural and language differences of  it's French and English speaking  citizens.  Quebec where most of it's French speaking citizens live maintains strong cultural and commercial ties with France. 

The Kiev government is dysfunctional and bankrupt and is deploying Western taxpayer money to wage a vicious war on several million Russian-speaking citizens in the Donbas (Donestk and Luhansk region).This area is the traditional center of greater Russia’s coal, steel and industrial infrastructure. Donbas and Russia have been Siamese twins economically and politically for centuries. Under Poroshenko Kiev carries on with a senseless and murderous shelling and  bombing of these cities on it's eastern border with Russia. 

NATO is itching on the sidelines to enter the fray using the return of  Crimea to Russia as it's justification. The fact that Crimeans in an open vote overwhelmingly elected to leave Ukraine is of course viewed by Poroshenko as illegal even though there is precedence for such a vote in Kosovo's choice to declare independence from Serbia and Canada's referendum in 1995 on Quebec's choice whether to remain in Canada or become an independent state. 

Update Feb 24th 2015: Excerpts from Robert Parry's observations in Consortiumnews.com.

There is a madness to the Kiev regime that the West doesn’t want to recognize because to do so would upend the dominant narrative of “our” good guys vs. Russia’s bad guys. If we begin to notice that the right-wing regime in Kiev is crazy and brutal, we might also start questioning the “Russian aggression” mantra.The deputy foreign minister announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.The deputy foreign minister, Prystaiko, announced that Kiev is preparing for “full-scale war” against Russia and wants the West to supply lethal weapons and training so the fight can be taken to Russia.Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable about Prystaiko’s “Dr. Strangelove” moment is that it produced almost no reaction in the West. You have a senior Ukrainian official saying that the world should risk nuclear war over a civil conflict in Ukraine between its west, which favors closer ties to Europe, and its east, which wants to maintain its historic relationship with Russia.

 No European government, since Adolf Hitler’s Germany, has seen fit to dispatch Nazi storm troopers to wage war on a domestic population, but the Kiev regime has and has done so knowingly. Yet, across the West’s media/political spectrum, there has been a studious effort to cover up this reality, even to the point of ignoring facts that have been well established.

 Ask yourself why our mainstream media is hiding the truth from the American Public

 The New York Times and the Washington Post have spearheaded this journalistic malfeasance by putting on blinders so as not to see Ukraine’s neo-Nazis, such as when describing the key role played by the Azov battalion in the war against ethnic Russians in the east.

The Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.

The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11, depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. he Post’s stirring words fit with the Western media’s insistent narrative and its refusal to include meaningful background about the Azov battalion, which is known for marching under Nazi banners, displaying the Swastika and painting SS symbols on its helmets.

The New York Times filed a similarly disingenuous article from Mariupol on Feb. 11,2015 depicting the ethnic Russian rebels as barbarians at the gate with the Azov battalion defending civilization. The Times left out the salient and well-known fact that the Azov battalion is composed of neo-Nazis.

Based on interviews with militia members, the Telegraph reported that some of the fighters doubted the Holocaust, expressed admiration for Hitler and acknowledged that they are indeed Nazis.
Andriy Biletsky, the Azov commander, “is also head of an extremist Ukrainian group called the Social National Assembly,” according to the Telegraph article which quoted a commentary by Biletsky as declaring: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”


An Orwellian World
In a “normal world,” U.S. and European journalists would explain to their readers how insane all this is; how a dispute over the pace for implementing a European association agreement while also maintaining some economic ties with Russia could have been worked out within the Ukrainian political system, that it was not grounds for a U.S.-backed “regime change” last February, let alone a civil war, and surely not nuclear war.

 In our land of the free, there is no “official narrative” and the U.S. government would never stoop to propaganda. Everyone just happily marches in lockstep behind the conventional wisdom of a faultless Kiev regime that “shares our values” and can do no wrong — while ignoring the brutality and madness of coup leaders who deploy Nazis and invite a nuclear holocaust for the world.

 


Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland of "fuck Europe" fame is  the wife of arch-neocon policy wonk Robert Kagan. While knowing full well Poroshenko's corrupt past she can be sure to line up Congress and the media to hype Porky as the “Saviour of Ukraine” while, at the same time heaping scorn on Russia. This is the same couple who advocated the disastrous wars in Iraq and Libya in the name of 'regime change' that destroyed those nations, leaving millions dead and clearly contributing to the birth of ISIS. They were only prevented from doing the same in Syria by Putin although they keep trying . Here she is handing out cookies in Ukraine. 

NATO and Victoria Nuland - Ugly Cold War Relics

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
  Voltaire

 “War is what happens when language fails.”
― Margaret Atwood

  I bear solemn witness to the  fact that NATO heads of state and government meet only to go through the tedious motion of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat
Pierre Eliot Trudeau

 Critics of NATO claim its noble sounding ideals of “establishing peace” and constant “humanitarian intervention” during times of conflict are really euphemisms for a strategy of Western powered and financed imperialist expansion.
 Ashahed M. Muhammad

NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) was founded in 1949. The first NATO Secretary General, Lord Ismay stated in 1949 that the organization's goal was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." The members agreed that an armed attack against any one of them in Europe or North America would be considered an attack against them all. The Treaty member states at the time included the USA and Canada in North America plus 26 West European countries. It has since expanded to include East European countries originally members of the Warsaw pact. Today NATO members maintain a military strength of 3.3 million active and reserve military personnel and with an annual budget in excess of one trillion dollars. Clearly NATO provides a lot of employment. 

Much has changed since 1949 but NATO retains the same goals to keep an enemy out, and to keep anyone opposing the alliance down. With so many careers dependent on thinking within the box NATO is a mental trap they can't escape. Currently there are no enemies threatening the alliance so one has to be invented otherwise NATO becomes an unwieldy and inflexible behemoth that serves no unified purpose. It is self-evident that conflicts such as in Syria and Ukraine and tensions with Iran can be better handled by bringing together nations that include those outside NATO's orbit such as Russia, Iran and China.  For example Russia has negotiated the destruction of Assad's chemical arsenal and curbed the excesses of a mixed bag of rebels while American policy has floundered. NATO with its antagonistic view of Russia and Iran should not have any involvement in any of this. NATO has become a barrier to rational commercial and military alliances by identifying enemies where none exist. Its ancient mission is searching for a cause.

An overwhelming majority of Crimea's citizens (predominately Russian speaking) voted to rejoin Russia for a better life rather than continue as part of a corrupt Ukraine whose inept and unelected leader ( supported by a meddling US) stupidly threatened to deny Russian speaking citizens the right to use their language. The south eastern region of Ukraine is made up of 8.3 million Russian speaking citizens, amounting to 33% of Ukraine's population. If the Canadian Prime Minister decided to deny French Canadians the right to their language it is unlikely that the country would survive. This is the situation in Ukraine. By Crimeans voluntarily deciding to break away from Ukraine it rekindled the cause of NATO's old warriors who have viewed the Ukraine as their battle ground for placing missiles  pointing at  Russia's along its borders. They found their justification to bring back the Cold War.  The usual robotic response of Europe's NATO members was to accept American direction to apply sanctions and more sanctions and the fracking industry has found a justification for polluting the environment to produce this highly expensive gas to replace cheaper gas from those evil Russians.  Happily this is falling apart as German business barons are aggressively objecting  to any breakdown in their growing commercial ties with Russia. Also good news in Crimea when MacDonald halted their operations Burger King immediately announced they would take over, so the silly season is  breaking down.
 Helmut Schmidt, the much respected ex chancellor of Germany has commented that Russia's actions in Crimea are completely understandable and the idea of sanctions "a stupid idea" The BRICS group (Chinese, Indian, Brazilian,South Korean) take the same position supporting Russia, so NATO's American "Old Warriors" and their servants in Europe's members of NATO face quite a head wind. What we have here is a very large and obsolete institution  in search of a mission and unable to change course. With Russia, its targeted enemy a nuclear power, NATO is impotent and floundering.

The West is broke so all they can offer the Ukraine is the arrival of the IMF who as in Greece, Portugal and formerly in Yeltsin's Russia, undertook IMF programs of propping up banks while implementing severe austerity programs to pay for it. The end result is a lowered standard of living, the country faced with selling off its heritage and assets to the highest bidder to pay off the bankers and the emergence of carpet baggers who become a wealthy oligarchy. Putin brought this to an end in Russia and brought the nation out of poverty. He has also subsidized the Ukraine, offered additional funding as an alternative to the West's cashless IMF program and approached the EU to sit down and discuss it.  But NATO members cannot consider talking to the enemy although cracks are showing.

The Trouble Maker - Victoria Nuland, US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs
 

 Contributing to chaos in Ukraine and irritating Russia along its borders seems to be its only course of action for NATO and this is  being assisted by the notorious Victoria Nuland,, (of "Fuck Europe" fame), who claims that the US has invested 5 billion dollars meddling in the Ukraine. Ms Nuland's specialty is 'Regime Change'. Her husband is historian Robert Kagan, Council on Foreign Relations member, and co-founders of the think-tank "Project for the New American Century" (PNAC). The PNAC called for, among other things, regime change in Iraq and a strategy for securing America's global control.

 

As Principal Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2003 to 2005 and later as U.S. Ambassador to NATO from July 2005 to May 2008, Victoria Nuland previously held important insider roles during Washington’s decisions to invade Iraq, occupy the country and later increase the number of American troops during the “Surge” of 2007.

Victoria Nuland's 'Regime Change'  objectives in Ukraine and now in Venezuela are consistent with realizing PNAC objectives. Founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan (her husband). The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) stated goal is "to promote American global leadership." In other words world dominance or global hegemony.

A leaked phone conversation between Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt clearly reveals their meddling in governing issues in Kiev. The EU and US have carried out a classic coup d'état in Ukraine using ultra-right forces as human resources that includes anti-Semites, Nazi movements, and racial purists. What's the objective in all this? Clearly the setting up of an American/EU puppet leader and the arrival of NATO as a bayonet pointing to Russia. Understandably Putin's response has been to place a strong military presence on its border. Its a Mexican Standoff. Putin defused Nuland's attempt to initiate regime change in Syria by negotiating the destruction of all chemical weapons. She is angry and is using regime change through Kiev to get back at him.

Where do we go from Here?

NATO can't offer a solution; it's the core problem by thinking of nations as friends and enemies. Its also largely financed and driven by US leadership (75% of its military budget). Since WWII US leadership hasn't performed very well; defeated in Vietnam, destroyed Iraq, entangled in Afghanistan, messed up Libya, currently confused in Syria and propping up and forming alliances with right wing and backward governments like Saudi Arabia who finance radical movements throughout the Middle East.
 
Where do we go from here and what do we stand for? I really don't know. I just know that NATO is obsolete and a dangerous communications barrier that no longer needs to exist.  All nations need alliances but not through NATO's monolith .

I would like  to hear the comments of anyone who has taken the time to read this.