ERIC ZUESSE -- Ukrainegate: Is It Waterloo for Trump, or for America’s ‘News’-Media?

Ukrainegate: Is It Waterloo for Trump, or for America’s ‘News’-Media?

Eric Zuesse

October 19, 2019

© Photo: Wikimedia

This article contradicts US-and-allied accounts of events and is therefore linked to documentation at each allegation which is particularly at variance with those ‘mainstream’ accounts (or otherwise not sufficiently publicized in The West).

During February 2014, the Democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych became overthrown. Like all of Ukraine’s post-Soviet Presidents, he was corrupt. But that’s not the reason why he was overthrown. And he wasn’t overthrown by Ukrainian voters. He was overthrown because he had turned down the offer from America’s democratically elected President Barack Obama to bring Ukraine into NATO. And he was overthrown by agents of Obama. It was a US coup, though not represented as such in The West.

Yanukovych had met with Obama at the White House several times, starting in April 2010, to discuss mainly mutual national-security concerns and energy policies. His biggest difference of opinion with Obama seems to have been about the longstanding US policy to bring Ukraine into the anti-Russian military alliance, NATO. Secondarily, there was an additional issue of bringing Ukraine also into the US-initiated (as part of its Cold War against the Soviet Union) EU (which is Western-allied, and, of course, west of Ukraine). Yanukovych actually wanted to join the EU, so long as this wouldn’t require him to abandon Ukraine’s existing trade with Russia (to its east). America, and its EU, as part of their secret continuation of the Cold War after Russia had ended it on its side in 1991, made membership by Ukraine conditional upon Ukraine quitting its trade with Russia. However, the EU’s offer to Ukraine included no compensation to Ukraine for the $160 billion net cost to Ukraine that would result from Ukraine’s losing its Russian trade and joining the EU. The EU wasn’t willing to pay that, because they didn’t actually crave Ukraine; and the US had a cheaper way to do it, which would be that coup, to bring Ukraine first into the EU, and then ultimately into NATO — the EU membership being preparation for Ukraine’s becoming accepted into NATO. Yanukovych, publicly, and repeatedly, stated that his position was “We’ll maintain a neutral status” on any US-v.-Russia matters, and he stuck by it. This is the reason why he became overthrown. He refused the EU’s offer, which Obama had been trying to get Yanukovych to accept. Starting in 2011, the Obama Administration prepared a coup (based upon corruption-charges against him) to replace Yanukovych and to install a rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian Government that would be 100% committed to the US Government and its allies. This coup succeeded.The current US President, Donald Trump, is now in a position where he will have to either explain all of this to the American people (which would require both courage and intelligence in order for him to do), or else he will become forced out of office and replaced by his Vice President, Mike Pence, on account of the myth continuing, about how and why Ukraine’s Government changed in February 2014.

The Democratic Party’s threat to force Trump out of office and to bring in Mike Pence as America’s President could become responded to by a threat from Trump to explain and document to the American people what America’s ‘news’-media — both Democratic and Republican — have been hiding (and lying about) regarding the overthrow of Yanukovych and the aftermath of that actual coup by Obama, which America’s ‘news’-media continue to refer to as having been instead a ‘democratic revolution’ in Ukraine. For Trump to be able to turn the Democratic Party’s Ukrainegate charges, against himself, into a knife piercing the heart of the Democratic Party’s leadership, he’d have to go aggressively after the Democrats’ chief Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoysky, who was the actual benefactor of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, and whom Joe Biden, and the entire Democratic Party, have been hiding from the American public. They hide it not so much to protect Joe Biden, as to protect Barack Obama, whose reputation today’s Democratic Party leadership protect at all costs, because Obama’s crimes in regard to Ukraine were also their own crimes in regard to Ukraine. Ihor Kolomoysky was Obama’s man, and so Kolomoysky was also the Democratic National Committee’s man, the key Ukrainian oligarch for their neoconservative agenda, and — since he was a neoconservative — not a person that even Republicans would want to expose. Consequently: for Trump to expose him would also go against the Republican National Committee.

All of America’s ‘news’-media — of both political Parties — are hiding the truth about Ukrainegate, by falsely alleging that the Yanukovych-supporter Mykola Zlochevsky is the controlling owner of Burisma Holdings (which paid Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden), and by hiding that the Obama-supporter Ihor Kolomoysky actually was and is the controlling and deciding owner of Burisma Holdings and was by far the most important of Ukraine’s oligarchs who supported Obama’s coup and who helped to make it succeed. Hunter Biden’s boss wasn’t the pro-Yanukovych Zlochevsky, as America’s ‘news’-media falsely allege; it was instead the pro-Obama Kolomoysky, who had assisted the bloody coup that those ‘news’-media continue to call a “democratic revolution.” But even Trump himself hasn’t yet revealed any of this. Why? Will he do it only if and when the Democratic House actually impeaches Trump and then sends his impeachment into the Republican Senate for the final decision — though, even in that Republican forum, there exists overwhelming support for expanding NATO to include Ukraine?

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Ihor Kolomoysky was riding high, as the Obama Administration’s favorite Ukrainian oligarch, the man who, like Obama himself, championed to become Ukraine’s President the rabidly anti-Russian and pro-privatization, neoliberal/libertarian, former gas-minister of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko. On 16 January 2008, the Republican US Senator Richard Lugar (a friend of Obama) said in Kiev, “Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Parliamentary Chairman Arseniy Yatsenyuk have signed the statement calling for consideration on Ukraine’s entry into the NATO membership action plan.” Though Tymoshenko rose to become briefly Ukraine’s Prime Minister under Yushchenko, her lifetime ambition has been to be the President herself. She supported the idea of Ukraine’s joining NATO even when (as had been the case until 2014) all polls showed that only around 25% of Ukrainians supported joining NATO. Ukraine joining NATO is a hot-button issue not only in Russia but in Ukraine itself. For Ukraine to join that military alliance against Ukraine’s adjoining nation, Russia, would be — but in reverse — as if, in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev had gone ahead with his plan to place nuclear missiles near America’s border, but Ukraine’s joining NATO would actually be even more of a provocation against Russia than Khrushchev’s Cuban missile threat had briefly been against America, because this could involve US missiles being stationed all along the 1,625-mile Russian-Ukrainian border, not 94 miles away from America, on just an island. But this is what Obama was secretly determined to do, and what Tymoshenko was even publicly in favor of carrying out. However, she avoided pushing for it, because NATO was too unpopular in Ukraine, and she knew that as an actual campaigning issue, it would destroy her Presidential chances. Only as Ukraine’s President could she actually carry out such an initiative. This is why Obama wanted her to become Ukraine’s President.

Kolomoysky not only supported her early in her political career but he also did so in the latest Ukrainian Presidential contest, preferring her even above Kolomoysky’s own employee who ended up winning the election, Volodmyr Zelensky, who calls Kolomoysky “my business partner.” So: in Ukrainian politics, Kolomoysky is extremely powerful, and there is even a large “Kolomoysky bloc” in Ukraine’s Rada or parliament.

During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukranians wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup — “the most blatant coup in history” — a survey found that “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” Obamas’s Ukrainian coup made the difference. It was entirely illegal, but it produced the sudden and stunning transformation, of Ukraine, into a US satellite-state, afraid of Russia, and eager to join NATO.

The person who organized and ran Obama’s policy on Ukraine was Victoria Nuland, who nominally worked under Secretary of State John Kerry but actually took her instructions directly from Obama; and, on 27 January 2014, she instructed America’s Ambassador in Ukraine to have “Yats,” Arseniy Yatsenyuk — a member of Tymoshenko’s inner circle — appointed to lead Ukraine as soon as the democratically elected President of Ukraine would be overthrown, which then happened during 18-24 February 2014; and “Yats” formally received the appointment on February 26th and promptly replaced Ukraine’s top generals so as to prepare an ethnic cleansing campaign to kill and scare out of Ukraine’s far eastern districts (mainly into adjoining Russia) enough pro-Russians in Ukraine so as to eliminate those voters and thereby reduce significantly the likelihood of Ukraine’s ever again electing a government that, like the overthrown one, was not rabidly anti-Russian. The target there is the residents, the civilian population, to terrorize them into leaving, because 90+% of the people who live there had voted for Yanukovych against Tymoshenko. Only with an anti-Russian electorate could Ukraine even possibly become a member of NATO; and, under Yatsenyuk, Ukraine became committed to joining NATO. Not only was Yanukovych’s overthrow the most blatant coup in history, but it was followed by one of the most blatant ethnic cleansings in history, and it was even overtly inspired by Hitler’s example; and whether many of the 2.5-million-plus refugees from it will ever want to move back can reasonably be doubted. So, Obama’s plan has been extremely successful, thus far.

On Thursday, 7 February 2019, the Voice of America proudly bannered “Ukraine Amends Constitution to Cement EU, NATO Course”and reported that “Ukraine on Thursday adopted ‘historic’ changes to its constitution, spelling out the ex-Soviet country’s aspirations to join the EU and NATO two months before a crucial presidential vote.” Furthermore, the man who had been the Ukrainian leader of Obama’s coup (and who is shown at 2:40 in this 12 February 2015 BBC video denying that there was any such coup), and who was one of two co-founders of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (Ukraine’s main nazi Party), Andrei Parubiy — who was now the Speaker of Ukraine’s Rada — announced “the irreversibility of our European choice.” This vote made a crime for any future Ukrainian President to oppose Ukraine’s joining NATO. No matter what Ukraine’s war-weary voters might think, their nation was now legally committed to a bigger war, against the giant nation across their longest border.

NATO’s campaign to win Ukraine as a member had actually started in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact and communism all ended and Russia ended the Cold War on its side but the United States Government secretly remained still committed to conquering Russia. On 14 April 2010 the man whom Obama overthrew in 2014 had met with him in the White House to discuss what the US would offer in order to persuade him to push actively for Ukraine to join NATO, but no deal managed to be struck; and, by the time of 2011, the Obama Administration in secret actively started planning its coup to overthrow him.

Kolomoysky was very actively involved in that coup, and this is one of the reasons why the Obama Administration had him appointed to become in early 2014 the Governor of the Dnieperpetrovsk region of Ukraine which immediately adjoined the far-eastern districts in Ukraine where gas was said to be plentiful but hostility against Russia was conspicuously lacking. Kolomoysky was Ukraine’s largest private owner of gas-exploration rights in Ukraine, and his land was in precisely those adjoining regions.

Kolomoysky joined with the newly installed Yatsenyuk government’s minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov to plan and organize the 2 May 2014 burning-alive of an uncounted number of people inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building who had been distributing in Odessa anti-coup-regime leaflets; and, as I mentioned and documented in that report, which was dated 16 days later, Kolomoysky was, himself, the biggest of the “Kings of Ukrainian Gas” and owned the controlling interest in the largest private Ukrainian gas-exploration company, Burisma Holdings, which had just three days earlier, on May 13th, publicly announced its having appointed to that company’s board Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. (At that time, Kolomoysky owned the controlling interest in Burisma, and Zlochevsky owned only a minority interest in the company.)

So: Obama, who had placed this rabidly anti-Russian Government into power, now had in his own US Administration the intensely nepotistic Joe Biden, who throughout his long career had been using public office in order to enrich his sons and thereby create and establish a dynasty of wealth, upon the basis of Biden’s practice of crony capitalism, which the Obama Administration publicly condemned against Ukraine’s democratically elected President, whom Obama had overthrown alleging that he had been practicing nepotism in Ukraine. (Obama didn’t demand his V.P. not to do what Ukraine’s President was being accused of having done. Instead, US ’news’-media hid, and continue to hide, the Bidens’ having been doing it. They hide it by continuing to refuse to report that Hunter Biden’s actual boss was Kolomoysky, and that Joe Biden therefore was assisting Hunter by requiring Ukraine to prosecute the pro-Yanukovych Zlochevsky instead of the newly installed junta-backing Kolomoysky.)

As I have recently documented, the way that America’s ‘news’-media cover this up is by hiding that the controlling owner of Burisma Holdings is — and since 2011 has been — Kolomoysky, and by blaming instead Mykola Zlochevsky, who had sold that controlling interest to Kolomoysky’s PrivatBank in 2011. As I showed there, that clearly intentional, and continuing, misidentification of the actual man who was Hunter Biden’s boss, is crucial to the ongoing misrepresentation of why Hunter Biden had been hired by Burisma. Only if Zlochevsky had been his boss could Hunter Biden not have been working for the gangster Kolomoysky, who had massacred those opponents of the Obama-installed regime, and who is now holding his former employee and Ukraine’s newly elected President Volodmyr Zelensky hostage in order to reverse the Poroshenko-IMF (etc.) disposession and nationalization of Kolomoysky’s PrivatBank that had been imposed because of Kolomoysky’s massive thefts from Ukraine’s Government. And this misidentification of Hunter Biden’s boss is, in turn, crucial to the hiding of Barack Obama’s guilt in the entire affair — including that the February 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych was a coup and no ‘democratic revolution’ such as the US-and-allied press reports it as having been — (which even Republican Party ‘news’-media continue to hide, since America’s campaign to conquer Russia is bipartisan).

Furthermore, several of the snipers who had participated in Obama’s coup (though none of them knew that it came from Obama), have since confessed to it, quite voluntarily, first in that 12 February 2015 BBC video, I previously referred to, and subsequently in this two-part Italian TV documentary.

On 8 October 2014, I posted a statement-by-statement fully linked-to-sources disproof of Joe Biden’s 3 October 2014 speech about Unkraine at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He lies at least as flagrantly as does our current President. In fact, US President Obama was, himself, behind the 17 July 2014 shoot-down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 by Ukraine, as well as of its being blamed against the Russian Government.

Some people say that Donald Trump is nothing more than a stupid psychopath, but others say that he’s super-intelligent and is a master of playing political multiple-dimensional chess. The outcome of the present impeachment proceedings against him will clearly show whether he’s stupid or smart, because if he’s smart, then he will expose, at an appropriate time, that Hunter Biden’s actual boss was (along with Arsen Avakov) the mastermind of the 2 May 2014 extermination, inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building, of opponents, of the February 2014 Obama coup-installed and rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian regime. That would take courage for Trump to do — and it would be his first serious challenge against America’s lying press, and would be totally out of character for him to do — but his only alternative is to continue hiding Obama’s actual guilt in the entire Ukrainian matter. Trump didn’t cause Ukraine to go fascist and even nazi; Obama did; but, thus far, Trump has continued Obama’s Ukrainian policy, and he might go down to defeat in 2020 if he continues doing so. That would show he’s quite the opposite of brilliant, and of courageous, and not anywhere near to being even decent. It might be his last chance to save himself; but, as of now, there’s no indication that he’ll do any such thing. This is what the US Government has now come down to.