Contra Cold War Redux: 1. The Euromaidan Regime Change
This war did not begin on 24 February 2022. It began at least eight years ago, in the winter of 2013, when far-right, foreign-backed Ukrainians stormed their capital city and seized power.
‘Ukraine is the biggest prize.’—Carl Gershman (President of the US National Endowment for Democracy) in The Washington Post, 26 September 2013
‘The main obstacle [to NATO] is not Russian opposition…but low public support for membership in Ukraine itself.’—F. Stephen Larrabee, specialist on Soviet-East European affairs and East-West relations for US National Security Council, ‘Open Ukraine: Changing Course Towards a European Future’
‘F—k the EU!’—Victoria Nuland (US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs) on the EU-led negotiations to resolve the crisis in Ukraine civilly, 2014
‘The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinformed by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of US-orchestrated regime change efforts, including the Kosovo campaign, Iraq, Libya, and the 2003-05 “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.’—unclassified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, 28th June 2017
This war did not begin on 24 February 2022. It began at least eight years ago, in the winter of 2013, when the lawful government of Ukraine was overthrown in a far-right, foreign-backed regime-change in the country’s capital city.
In 2013, Ukrainian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych asked for ‘association agreements’ from the European Union and the Russian Federation in order to provide Ukraine with economic relief. The EU’s agreement was exclusive (meaning it would have precluded another deal with Russia) and required Ukraine to accept loans from the International Monetary Fund (meaning ‘austerity measures’). The RF’s agreement, by contrast, was not exclusive and thus did not preclude Ukraine from entering into another agreement with the EU. Moreover, instead of requiring Ukraine to cut public services and privatise national industries/resources, the RF’s agreement gave Ukraine $15 billion in aid and dropped a requirement controversial among pro-EU Ukrainians that Ukraine join the Eurasian Customs Union. At an EU summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, Pres. Yanukovych declined to sign the EU’s agreement with the IMF conditions. Although Pres. Yanukovych attempted to continue negotiating the terms of an association with the EU, the EU terminated negotiations. It was at this point that the ‘Euromaidan’ protests began in Kiev, named after its ‘Maidan’ city square.
American journos and pols described Pres. Yanukovych as ‘pro-Russia’ in order to delegitimise him as a Ukrainian, but this is as reductive as it is deceptive. Pres. Yanukovych had every right to reject the EU’s ultimatum. Was it ‘pro-Russia’ for him not to want to alienate Russia, which at the time was Ukraine’s largest and oldest trading partner? Or not to subject the Ukrainian economy to more of ‘shock doctrine’ neo-liberal policies which the post-Soviet world had suffered? Also, even if Pres. Yanukovych were ‘pro-Russia,’ he also happened to be democratically elected. The south and east of Ukraine, where Pres. Yanukovych was from and the regions of the country which turned out to elect him in 2010, is, through past and present ties, also ‘pro-Russia.’ What is this other than democracy? Pres. Yanukovych was corrupt, yes, and that no-strings-attached $15 billion very well may have been a bribe, but corruption is a systemic problem in post-Soviet states not specific to him, and the ‘anti-Russia’ politicians who succeeded him have been no less corrupt.
Was the Euromaidan a bottom-up mass-movement of the pro-West Ukrainian volk against the pro-Russia Ukrainian reich? If so, then as Abraham Lincoln said in 1848:
Any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to be liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movements.
Imagine how much more democratic a decentralised ‘America’ would be today had Honest Abe taken his own advice! As the historian William Appleman Williams wrote, ‘the cause of the Civil War was the refusal of Lincoln and other Northerners to honor the revolutionary right of self-determination—the touchstone of the American Revolution,’ and ‘neither Lincoln nor the majority of Northerners entered the war in an abolitionist frame of mind or entertaining abolitionist objectives.’ But I digress...
As dumb as ‘The Daily Show’ was is, because it was Comedy Central and the guests on it were speaking jokingly, sometimes they spoke too openly. In 2014, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Gideon Rose, was interviewed by Stephen Colbert, and the two joked openly about how Ukraine had been the girlfriend of Russia, ‘an abusive boyfriend from the hood,’ and the USA was trying to get Ukraine to ‘trade up to a nice yuppy.’ Imagine, if you will, Russian journos and pols talking that way in public about our relationship with Mexico (which I have heard described elsewhere as ‘America's first romance...but now she’s fat, pregnant, and wants to move in, and America has to decide, “Is that my kid?”’). Is that the way that we Americans would like to be treated? If not, then why is that the way that we are treating the Russians?
In December of 2013, shortly after Pres. Yanukovych left the EU summit and early in the Euromaidan, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland boasted at a conference on Ukrainian business at the National Press Club that the USA had spent $5 billion since 1991 funding ‘pro-democracy’ groups in Ukraine which had culminated in the Euromaidan. In that speech, she urged Pres. Yanukovych ‘to listen to the Euro-Maidan,’ and according to her, ‘The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies.’ Sec. Nuland, accompanied by the US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, visited the Euromaidan in person to cheer on the protestors and even hand out cookies. Imagine, if you will, Russian foreign ministers and ambassadors showing up in person at, say, the protests in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after the murder of George Floyd, to meet with BLM/Antifa leaders about defunding the police, decriminalisation, and deincarceration.
In any event, what were these American-funded ‘pro-democracy’ groups to which Sec. Nuland referred and what did they do?
Ten years earlier, during Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ a reporter for The Guardian answered that question:
With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt machine, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory—whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilised by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.
But while the gains of the orange-bedecked 'chestnut revolution' are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass-marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box...
The Democratic Party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican Party's International Republican Institute, the US State Department, and US Aid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute.[US Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev, by Ian Traynor, The Guardian, 25 November 2004]
This systematic interference in another country’s ‘democracy’ puts the present American mania over ‘Russian interference’ in perspective. At most, ‘the Russians’ (that is, the ‘Internet Research Agency’) used the increased online traffic from the 2016 election to advertise its products, which you can see here and judge for yourself whether they influenced your vote in 2016.1
Although these American governmental and non-governmental ‘pro-democracy’ organisations were able to mobilise massive crowds in Kiev, they were not as able to win the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. In February of 2014, shortly before the peaceful protests broke down and a violent riot broke out, Keith Darden and Lucan Way (two political scientists studying public-opinion surveys from Ukraine, reported in The Washington Post that ‘none show a significant majority of the population supporting the protest movement and several show a majority opposed.’ According to Messrs. Darden and Way, the most accurate of the polls ‘shows the population almost perfectly divided in its support for the protest: 48 percent in favor, 46 percent opposed.’ Although Pres. Yanukovych was the primary target of the Euromaidan for his corruption, polls showed that he ‘is still apparently the most popular political figure in the country.’ Messrs. Darden and Way also reported that ‘there is little evidence that a clear majority of Ukrainians support integration into the European Union,’ with ‘around 40-45 percent support for European integration as compared to about 30 to 40 percent support for the Customs Union—a plurality for Europe but hardly a clear mandate.’ How these results were regionally distributed was not reported.
During the Euromaidan, Sec. Nuland and the Amb. Pyatt were caught on an intercepted call king-making the leaders of the post-Euromaidan regime in Kiev. According to Sec. Nuland, of the three opposition leaders, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitaly Klitschko, Mr. Yatsenyuk should be on the inside and Messrs. Tyahnybok and Klitschko on the outside. As Sec. Nuland put it, ‘Yats is the guy,’ but ‘he needs to be talking to [Tyahnybok and Klitschko] four times a week.’ Sec. Nuland told Amb. Pyatt that ‘Biden's willing’ to go along with everything they were planning, but that the Vice President's national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had told her that they needed to talk with him first ‘for an atta-boy’ and ‘to get the deets to stick.’
The US State Department dismissed the intercepted Nuland-Pyatt call as ‘Russian tradecraft’ (a Cold-War term referring to techniques and technologies of intelligence services), which was somehow satisfactory enough for American journos and pols. Imagine, if you will, the NSA intercepting a call between high-ranking Russian officials in a neighboring country of ours stage-managing the optics of a regime change in that country. Let us say that this is country is Canada during the ‘Trucker Convoy’ and we caught the Russians talking about which anti-American opposition leader they planned to replace Justin Trudeau after removing him from office. Now imagine that when this intercepted call goes public, the Russians dismiss it as ‘American tradecraft.’ Would we accept that excuse? If not, then why are we offering such a stupid excuse ourselves? Are our leaders that stupid? Or do they think that we are that stupid? Surely they know that the Russians are not that stupid.
After six years and counting of RussiaGate (the genesis of which was July of 2016), not a single piece of evidence of ‘interference in our democracy’ as blatant as the Nuland-Pyatt call has been produced. Please remember this every time some American official is pontificating about Ukraine's ‘sovereignty and democracy.’ This call, which we were never supposed to hear, reveals how little respect the Americans actually had for Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy. The Americans had no problem with interfering in Ukraine’s sovereignty and democracy so long as it was in their own interest and not in the interest of the Russians. Call that realpolitik, if you will, but spare us this moralism.
Vice Pres. Biden, who had been put in charge of Ukrainian affairs for the Obama-Biden Administration, is now US President. Mr. Sullivan, who was the Vice President’s national-security adviser, is now Pres. Biden’s national-security adviser. Sec. Nuland, who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, is now the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. All of the Americans who were on that call or who were mentioned on it have, in true oligarchic fashion, ‘failed upward.’
Who exactly is Sec. Nuland, this éminence grise in Ukrainian-American affairs? She was a holdover from George W. Bush’s administration, where she was the chief foreign policy adviser to Richard Bruce Cheney—yes, ‘Dick Cheney.’ The Blue Party may have forgotten how much they used to loathe Vice Pres. Dick Cheney for masterminding the tyrannical terror of the War on Terror, but I can still remember when they, with far better reason, felt about him the way that they feel now about the Slavic bogeyman Vladimir Putin.2 She subsequently served as Pres. Bush’s ambassador to NATO. Her husband, Bob Kagan, along with Bill Kristol (two sons of conservative intellectuals who are living evidence that talent skips a generation), founded ‘Project for a New American Century,’ a neo-conservative think tank which influenced Vice Pres. Cheney and many other members of the Bush Administration. Sec. Nuland, then, is no dovish Obamaite or even a Clintonite paying lip service to multilateralism and soft/smart power; she is a Bushite neocon who believes in the unilateral usage of hard power for the advancement one what she considers to be American national interests. (I do not use the conventional Americanism ‘hawkish’ to describe such foreign policy because the comparison is rather too complimentary to neocons and too uncomplimentary to hawks.)
In the Euromaidan, these governmental and non-governmental pro-democracy groups from the USA and EU which Sec. Nuland boasted of funding repeated the ‘colour revolution’ tactics of the Orange Revolution. Whilst it was these astro-turfed Ukrainian liberal democrats who got most of the Western publicity, it was grass-roots Ukrainian right-wingers who did the street-fighting that eventually forced Pres. Yanukovych out of the capital and then out of the country, specifically ‘Svoboda’ (formerly known as the ‘Social-Nationalist Party’) and ‘Right Sector.’ Justin Raimondo, writing at Antiwar.com, described this as ‘A Monster Reawakens: The Rise of Ukrainian Fascism’ and pointedly asked, ‘What Color is Ukraine’s Color Revolution?’
Svoboda (‘Freedom’ in Ukrainian), formerly known as the Social-Nationalists (a name with disturbing undertones for those who know their history), was founded in 1991 by Andriy Parubiy and Oleh Tyahnybok, two far-right Ukrainian white nationalists. ‘In view of the prospects of mass-degradation of people and entire nations, we are the last hope of the white race, of humankind as such,’ Messrs. Parubiy and Tyahnybok declared in their party platform. ‘We must resolutely separate ourselves from the North-Eastern neighbour [i.e. Russia].’ Mr. Parubiy also led the Social Nationalist Party’s militant wing, ‘Patriot of Ukraine,’ which perpetrated pogroms against ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.
Mr. Parubiy proclaimed himself the ‘commandant’ of the Euromaidan and became the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament (‘Verkhovna Rada’) in the post-Euromaidan regime. The leader of Mr. Parubiy’s Social-Nationalist Assembly in the Rada, Andriy Biltesy, has vowed ‘to prepare Ukraine for further expansion and to struggle for the liberation of the entire White Race from the domination of internationalist speculative capital [i.e. Jewish bankers]’ and ‘to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival against the Semite-led Untermenschen.’ Vadym Troyan, a former member of the Social Nationalist Party’s ‘Patriot of Ukraine’ militia, was appointed Kiev’s chief of police in the post-Euromaidan regime.
Prior to the Euromaidan’s transformation of National Socialists ‘Social Nationalists’ like Svoboda into pro-West freedom fighters, American journos and pols knew them as people like Ihor Miroshnychenko—the Svoboda parliamentarian who, when Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis complained about facing discrimination when she visited her country of birth, publicly retorted that she was not Ukrainian but was a ‘Jewess’ (a racist and sexist slur).
During the Euromaidan, Mr. Miroshnychenko was famous for storming the offices of the Ukrainian national public broadcasting company with a gang of other Svoboda members, physically assaulting the president of the company, and forcing him to write a letter of resignation on the spot. Svoboda broadcast footage of this attack on its social-media channels. This was the undignified underbelly of the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ which Western journos and pols did not show the public.
In 2017, Mr. Parubiy traveled to Washington D.C., where he met with his American counterpart, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan as well as Sen. John McCain, for a photo-op renewing inter-parliamentary ties. In 2018, Mr. Parubiy returned to Washington to speak at two forums hosted by the American Foreign Policy Society and NATO’s ‘Atlantic Council’ think tank. One of the attendees of the conference was Michael Carpenter, the former foreign-policy adviser to Vice Pres. Joe Biden and director off the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. Mr. Carpenter praised Mr. Parubiy as ‘a conservative nationalist who is also a patriot who cares about his country,’ and dismissed his neo-Nazi background as ‘Russian propaganda.’
Mr. Parubiy’s Social-Nationalist Party co-founder, Oleh Tyahnybok, has called for a war on the ‘Muscovite-Jewish mafia,’ has attacked the role of ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’ (a term coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf referring to the disproportionate membership of Jews in Communist parties such as the Bolsheviks) in Ukraine, and claims that there is still a cabal of ‘Jewish oligarchs who control Ukraine.’ For such statements, he was expelled from the Ukrainian parliament, but he returned to power as one of the opposition leaders of the Euromaidan. Sec. Nuland and Amb. Pyatt referred to him by name as one of the opposition leaders to whom their chosen leader, Mr. Yatsenyuk, should be talking weekly for advice.
Sen. McCain traveled to Kiev during the Euromaidan to stand on a stage in the city square and blather banalities like ‘we are all Ukrainians now!’ next to ‘pro-democracy’ figures like Mr. Tyahnybok, whom two years earlier the Simon Wiesenthal Center had cited on its list of ‘Top Ten Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Slurs’ from world leaders.3
Do you see how ‘The New Cold War’—as Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel put it—has corrupted us, how it has broken our moral compass? We are willing to ally with evil men like Messrs. Parubiy and Tyahnybok, even though we are not yet willing to admit that is what we are doing. Is ‘Putin’s Russia’ really so evil that it justifies bringing people who literally glorify Adolf Hitler into power?
‘Right Sector,’ the other street-fighters of the Euromaidan, was founded as the merger of various neo-Nazi Ukrainian paramilitary forces, such as ‘Trident,’ the Ukrainian National Defense Force, ‘White Hammer,’ and the aforementioned ‘Patriot of Ukraine.’ Right-Sector forces bear the black-and-red flag of the Banderites, who were Ukrainian nationalists that collaborated with the Nazis. (Black and red represent ‘blood and soil,’ respectively, which is a key tenet of Nazi ideology and which Americans may remember was chanted by the ‘very fine people’ at the notorious Charlottesville march along with ‘Jews will not replace us!’). The founder of Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, whose forces already unofficially ruled the streets of Kiev during the Euromaidan insurrection, was officially put in charge of the Ukrainian national police.
On 21 February, the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Poland, representing the European Union, finalised a compromise with Pres. Yanukovych to resolve the crisis democratically: He assented to special elections held ahead of schedule and to limitations on his powers in the interim. It was after the announcement of this civil compromise that the militant forces which had been lurking amidst the masses of peaceful protestors in Kiev struck. ‘We don't want to see Yanukovych in power,’ declared Volodymyr Parasyuk (one of the Euromaidan militants and a member of one of the many political parties named after Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis), ‘and unless this morning you come up with a statement that he steps down, then we will take arms and go, I swear.’ After Pres. Yanukovych agreed, in effect, to step down, and ordered the police to stand down, unknown sniper fire suddenly opened up on protestors and police alike. In the chaos that ensued, the Svoboda and Right Sector paramilitaries stormed the state buildings in Kiev (as well as Pres. Yanukovych’s own home in Kharkov) and forced Pres. Yanukovych literally to flee for his life in a helicopter. ‘We warned them,’ stated Andriy Parubiy (that neo-Nazi who traded in his brown shirt for a three-piece suit), ‘that Maydan would take actions if our requirements weren't met in the nearest time.’
Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet, in an intercepted call with EU official Catherine Ashton, shared the details of his conversation with Olga Bogomolet, a Ukrainian doctor who was in charge of a medical team on the scene:
Paet: ‘All the evidence shows that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people in the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.’
Ashton: ‘Well that’s, yeah…’
Paet: ‘And she also showed me some photos and said that as a medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting…’
Ashton: ‘Yeah…’
Paet: ‘Same type of bullets…and it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.’
Ashton: ‘I think they do want to investigate, and I didn’t know...pick that up…gosh.’
That is, the opposition committed a false-flag attack on its own side in order to break the ceasefire and seize power by force instead of following the civil transfer of power negotiated by the EU. ‘Gosh’ is right, lady!
There is now reason to believe that the snipers belonged to the Georgian Foreign Legion, a gang of mercenaries comprised of political extremists and fugitives from justice whose leader, Mamuka Mamulashvili, has been fêted in Washington D.C.
The rump Ukrainian parliament, with neither a quorum nor a majority, nevertheless established an interim government comprised primarily of figures from the Svoboda and Right Sector paramilitaries occupying Kiev. The aforementioned neo-Nazis Messrs. Parubiy and Yarosh were made the head and deputy head of the national security council, respectively. Ihor Tenyukh, a member of Svoboda’s political council, was made the defence minister. Oleh Makhnitsky, a Svoboda parliamentarian in the Rada, was made prosecutor-general. Yuri Michalchyshyn, the chief ideologist for Svoboda (the former head of the—no joke!—‘Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center’ and less of a Holocaust denier than a Holocaust apologist), was put in charge of the Ukrainian intelligence service’s ‘Department of Propaganda.’ Oleksandr Sych, a Svoboda parliamentarian in the Rada and another party ideologist, was made the deputy minister of economic affairs. Svoboda member Serhiy Kvit was put in charge of the education ministry. Andriy Moknyk, Svoboda’s envoy to fellow European fascist parties, was made the minister of ecology. Ihor Shvaika, an agribusiness-oligarch and member of Svoboda, was made the minister of agriculture. Remember, Svoboda originated as the ‘Social Nationalists.’ Nomen est omen.
Mr. Yatsenyuk did indeed become the Ukrainian prime minister, just as Sec. Nuland and Amb. Pyatt planned with Vice Pres. Biden’s apparent approval. American officials in Kiev like Sec. Nuland and Amb. Pyatt immediately and enthusiastically recognised this new regime, in spite of the fact that it had been installed without an election and in violation of the constitution. PM Yatsenyuk promptly signed the association agreement with the EU that Pres. Yatsenyuk was trying to renegotiate and began imposing neo-liberal ‘shock doctrine’ policies in order to receive IMF loans, including increasing the retirement age and freezing pensions.
Oleksandr Turchynov, a ‘Fatherland’ parliamentarian in the Rada and the former head of the Ukrainian intelligence service, was voted by the Rada to be an interim president. Petro Poroshenko, who was elected president shortly thereafter, was an oligarch known as ‘The Chocolate King.’ Another oligarch, Yulia Tymoshenko, the founder of the ‘Fatherland’ party to which PM Yatsenyuk belonged, was elected to the Ukrainian parliament. Known as ‘The Gas Princess’ for controlling one-fifth of the entire economy through a state-run monopoly that she used to launder over $200,000,000 in embezzled funds, Ms. Tymoshenko had also been Ukraine’s first and only female prime minister. Ms. Tymoshenko was an unindicted co-conspirator in the aforementioned corruption trial (Ukrainian prime minister Pavel Lazarenko was the defendant) and was eventually imprisoned for corruption herself. In the midst of the Euromaidan, this oligarch who looted public funds and natural resources was rehabilitated as a political prisoner, whose release protestors and Western officials demanded. After Pres. Yanukovych fled the capital and then the country, Ms. Tymoshenko was released from prison and proceeded to Maidan Square where, to a crowd of tens of thousands, she hailed the dignity of the revolution. As Dr. Johnson put it, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.’
In an exemplary case wherein foreign influence and corruption intersected, Pres. Poroshenko appointed Mikheil Saakashvili the governor of the Odessa oblast. You may remember Mr. Saakashvili from Georgia, where in 2003 he came to power in the foreign-backed ‘Rose Revolution’ on the streets of Tbilisi. Mr. Saakashvili, educated at the law schools of Columbia University and George Washington University on a fellowship from the US State Department, made for the ideal colour-revolution leader. Naturally, he was a proponent of Georgia joining the EU and NATO, but a funny thing happened on the way the West: His attempt to reconquer the pro-Russia peoples’ republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia which had broken away from Georgia accidentally started a war with Russia which he could not win and which his would-be Western allies would not fight.
Mr. Saakashvili’s fate was rather ironic. He was the figurehead of a revolution against corruption, but in power he succumbed to the very forces he supposedly overthrew, embezzling public funds for private use (including thousands of Euros for ‘massage therapists’ flown in from around the world). He was the figurehead of a so-called ‘peaceful protest,’ but when facing protests against him he cracked down on them with even more brutality than his predecessor. When Mr. Saakashvili’s party lost the parliamentary elections, he fled to the USA (where he lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and lectured at Tufts University) and then to Ukraine where he had a friend in former Ukrainian president Viktor Yuschenko (who, like him, came to power in another foreign-backed colour revolution in the capital city). Georgia has charged Mr. Saakashvili with corruption and is currently seeking his extradition. Pres. Putin called Mr. Saakashvili’s appointment by Pres. Poroshenko ‘an insult to all people of Odessa, to all Ukrainians,’ and asked, ‘Are there no professional, capable, and fit Ukrainians for this job?’
One way of understanding the Euromaidan is to think of it as the replacement of an old class of pro-Russia oligarchs with a new class of pro-West oligarchs, with various far-right extremists catapulted from gangs on the street into the suites of power. Some ‘revolution of dignity’!
Another way of understanding the Euromaidan is to imagine it in corporate terms. Imagine that Ukraine Inc. has issued a ‘request for proposal’ (RFP). Imagine that EU Inc. and Russia Inc. are other firms which each submit a bid. Imagine that Ukraine Inc. initially favours EU Inc.’s proposal, but after noticing some deleterious terms in the fine print, declines EU Inc.’s bid in favor of Russia Inc.’s proposal. Now imagine that EU Inc. partners with the corporate-raider firm USA Inc. to stage a hostile takeover of Ukraine Inc. and awards the proposal to itself. This is, figuratively, more or less what happened. Some ‘revolution of dignity’!
One other way of understanding the Euromaidan is to contrast it with Armenia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ in 2018. Both were former Soviet states reacting against a corrupt ruling class that was dysfunctional and overly dependent on Russia. Yet the former resulted in Russian intervention whilst the latter did not. Why? Because the former was a ‘colour revolution’ and ‘regime change’ heavily funded and directed by anti-Russia external interests (US and EU governmental and non-governmental organizations) in collusion with anti-Russia internal interests (Svoboda and Right Sector), whilst the latter was a popular revolution which resulted in a civil transfer of power and posed no threat to Russian interests in the region.
As one journalist for The Daily Beast put it a year after the Euromaidan, the post-Euromaidan regime was not comprised of ‘the youthful technocrats and hipster reformists lionized in the Western press,’ but by ‘uniformed militia from nationalist movements, war veterans, and some dubious character with criminal records.’ That is putting it mildly.
Next: ‘2. Punch Arm an Nazi Azov!’
Previous: ‘Introduction’
Reminder: After 22 months of non-stop news coverage the Special Counsel Investigation concluded without indicting any American citizens for colluding with the Russians. In the words of the Special Counsel himself, ‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.’ Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur: ‘What is freely asserted can be freely deserted.’ RussiaGate was not just a farce, but a fraud.
Now, absurdly, Dick Cheney has been rehabilitated amongst Blue-State Americans for his criticism of Donald Trump. The same Americans who protested the last ‘War on Terror’ are now, on questions of war, torture, surveillance, detention, and censorship, every bit as right-wing and repressive as was Mr. Cheney when he was Vice President (with the greater danger of having the news and entertainment media on their side) and far more than ever was Pres. Trump. Mr. Cheney and his daughter, Liz (a U.S. Senator from Wyoming on the ‘Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol’) have become the Red-Party faces of the ‘War on Terror’ that the Blue Party, unspeakably, is plotting to bring home to these U.S. of A. It is not, as Mr. Cheney claims, that ‘in our nation’s 246-year history there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,’ but rather that there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to the Cheneys than The Donald.
During the Ukrainian civil war that resulted from the far-right, foreign-backed Euromaidan regime-change, Sen. John McCain also traveled to the front to meet with nationalist forces (such as Dnipro-1 Battalion, after Amnesty International accused that unit of war crimes, including ‘using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare’), no doubt on another mission of mercy.