Our Ukrainian foreign policy adventure

[pscot]

Forcing a nation to live under a neoliberal economic regime so that American corporations can exploit it freely, as the Obama administration proposed when it designated Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister in 2014, is never to be cheered. Turning a nation of 46 million into a bare-toothed front line in America’s obsessive campaign against Russia is never to be cheered. Forcing the Russian-speaking half of the country to live under a government that would ban Russian as a national language if it could is never to be cheered. The only regret, a great regret of mind and heart, is that American failures almost always prove so costly in consequence of the blindness and arrogance of the policy cliques.

Readers may remember when, with a defense authorization bill in debate last June, two congressmen advanced an amendment banning military assistance to “openly neo-Nazi” and “fascist” militias waging war against Ukraine’s eastern regions. John Conyers and Ted Yoho got two things done in a stroke: They forced public acknowledgment that “the repulsive neo-Nazi Azov battalion,” as Conyers put it, was active, and they shamed the (also repulsive) Republican House to pass their legislative amendment unanimously.

Obama signed the defense bill then at issue into law just before Thanksgiving. The Conyers-Yoho amendment was deleted but for a single phrase. The bill thus authorizes, among much, much else, $300 million in aid this year to “the military and national security forces in Ukraine.” In a land ruled by euphemisms, the latter category designates the Azov battalion and the numerous other fascist militias on which the Poroshenko government is wholly dependent for its existence.

An omnibus spending bill Obama signed a month later included an additional $250 million for the Ukraine army and its rightist adjuncts. This is your money, taxpayers, should you need reminding. As Obama signed these bills, the White House expressed its satisfaction that “ideological riders” had been stripped out of them.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/23/this_is_how_we_spooked_putin_what_the_new_york_times_wont_tell_you_about_the_american_adventure_in_ukraine/

[newthinking]

1. It doesn't help that VP Biden's son and Kerry's Nephew

Are working for Bursima holdings: An Oil and Fracking company that is after the resources under the Donbass (the region that is resisting Kiev). That is a huge conflict of interest that can seriously effect the situation (and likely has as Biden has been spent an unusual amount of time and interest in Ukraine).


Joe Biden Is Visiting Ukraine — And It Could Get Really Awkward

https://news.vice.com/article/joe-biden-is-visiting-ukraine-and-it-could-get-really-awkward

At the end of September, Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt got up in front of a group of businessmen and investors at a conference in the city of Odessa and told them that Ukrainian prosecutors were protecting the corrupt owner of an energy company that employs Biden's son, Hunter, instead of prosecuting him.

"We have learned that there have been times when the Prosecutor General's Office not only did not support investigations into corruption, but rather undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases," Pyatt said in Ukraine's main port city.

He then pointed specifically to a case involving former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of the Burisma Holdings energy firm, which hired Hunter Biden to its board of directors shortly after the Euromaidan revolution overthrew Zlochevsky's former boss Viktor Yanukovych.

Burisma likely hired Biden's son in the hopes that some of the family prestige would rub off on the company in the uncertain times that followed the revolution, Daria Kaleniuk, director of Ukraine's Anti-Corruption Action Center, told VICE News.

"They want there to be less suspicion that they're involved in corrupt under-the-table dealings and are instead seen as operating in line with international standards," Kaleniuk said, adding that Burisma received gas production licenses in questionable circumstances under the former regime.

[yurbud]

4. and we call other governments corrupt

[bemildred]

2. Poroshenko Orders Ukrainian Military Focus On Crimea, Black Sea

Ukraine is planning a "substantial enhancement" of its military position around the Black Sea and on the border of Crimea as part of a strategy of regaining the territory that Russia annexed two years ago.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced the initiative on Friday, commemorating the second anniverary of the Russian annexation. "Crimea was, is and will be an integral part of the Ukrainian state and the country-criminal will be forced to return the loot," Poroshenko said.

"I am confident that we will certainly return these two administrative territories under the Ukrainian sovereignty. This extremely complex and promising process has already begun. Today, I have instructed to organize a special session of the National Security and Defense Council to clarify our strategy for the reintegration of Crimea," he said.

This strategy will include building up Ukraine's military capacity along the Black Sea and the Kherson oblast, which borders Crimea, Poroshenko added: "The Ministry of Defense and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are instructed to submit proposals for substantial enhancement of military capacity of Ukraine in Kherson region and along the entire Black Sea coast. Russia has increased its military presence in the region, completes the peninsula’s transformation from a flourishing international resort into a big military base, which poses a nuclear threat not only to Ukraine, but also to all countries of the Black Sea region."

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/77576

[newthinking]

3. The current corrupt government is far more unpopular than Yanukovich.

The economy is almost 3rd world now and so all they have is to try and strike up rage at the "enemy".

They best way to show up the Donbass and Crimea would be to end up with a better life for the rest of Ukraine. But the current government was never interested in Democracy and a better life for the people there; only power and wealth for themselves and hatred of those who they did not like.