by Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture:

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.

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