David Roman:
"As a Wall Street Journal correspondent who helped to cover the revolution and its aftermath, I must correct the impression left by her review that a courageous popular response to armed repression led to victory for the protesters. On the contrary, on the last days of February 2014, armed thugs – many, if not most, heavily armed far-right and neo-Nazi activists from western Ukraine – stormed Maidan square, killing and capturing police officers and forcing the hand of a government that, as well as being unpopular, was bankrupt and diplomatically isolated.
Some people (and I would hesitate to say they are all connoisseurs of fascist insurrections) may think this good and proper, so that the Ukraine has a pro-EU, pro-American government. Personally, I was struck by the image of a democratically elected president escaping his country in the middle of the night, chased by hooligans holding Waffen-SS banners."
"Thanks to two great instances of Russian espionage, we were treated to the spectacle of the EU envoy telling her bosses that she was pretty certain that far-right Ukrainians had killed protesters in Maidan while posing as police to get us, the gullible Western media, to hate the Russians even more, if that were at all possible; and a phone conversation in which Victoria Nuland, a top US official in charge of “supervising” (that is, directing and coordinating) the social media revolution, told the American ambassador who the next Ukrainian leader would be, and responded thus to his objections about the European allies’ lack of knowledge of the matter: "fuck the EU".
Ukraine remains mired in bankruptcy and corruption, led by a government that is happily commemorating Nazis as heroes of the Second World War, while begging for NATO membership and American cash. But the US did gain a permanent US military base, in Ochakov, not far from Odessa, built under the current administration. That, as George W. Bush would put it, is a mission accomplished."
trmusson.dreamhosters.com
Tom |
