New York Times admits Ukraine’s Yanukovich was right not to sign EU deal

Bryan MacDonald is an Irish journalist, who is based in Russia 

Published time: 27 Dec, 2016 14:00

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Anti-government protests at the Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev, January 30, 2014. © Gleb Garanich / Reuters 

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Three years after the event, the establishment media is finally issuing mea culpas for its self-interested support of 'Euromaidan,' the Western-backed ‘regime change’ crusade which destroyed Ukraine.

I was wondering how long this would take. But now that it’s happened let's raise a Christmas glass to the New York Times and its reporter, Andrew Kramer. Because they’ve finally admitted that those of us who opposed Kiev’s ‘Euromaidan’ movement were right. Furthermore, America’s ‘newspaper of record’ has acknowledged how, despite its own fervent encouragement of the violent coup, former President Victor Yanukovich was correct not to sign a tightfisted free trade deal with the European Union.

The NYT uses the collapse of Ukraine’s once lucrative agriculture industry to illustrate its climbdown. Especially the poultry business, which due to miserly EU quotas, and the loss of the Russian market, has been decimated.

“The sector accounts for about 40 percent of Ukraine’s exports. But tariff-free quotas for most agricultural products, under the trade deal, are tiny,” Kramer writes.

“Allocations for honey, for example, were so low that they were filled in the first six weeks of the year. Quotas to export eggs to the Europe Union equate to around 1.5 percent of just (one single company) Avangard's annual output, let alone that of the entire sector.”

The ‘Gray Lady’ admits how “the deal provided a double blow to the agriculture sector: It went far enough to enrage Russia, but stopped short of immediately opening a lucrative new market.”

RTGeverifieerd account‏@RT_com

‘To maintain financial stability’: Ukraine nationalizes PrivatBank

Waking up

Accepting that the EU arrangement is bad business also kiboshes the long-held NYT narrative where Yanukovich served as Moscow’s “pro-Russian” placeholder. The fact he negotiated with Brussels until the very last moment before rejecting their association agreement, has always countered this lazy supposition anyway. Yet, the simple black and white truth is that Russia offered better terms. A $15 billion loan and gas discounts, plus continued access to an economy which Kiev was already heavily integrated with.

However, back in late 2013, if you warned how the EU pact wasn’t a clever idea for Ukraine, you were called a “useful idiot” or a “Russian stooge.” This was despite the fact that such a position was the only logical analysis of the situation. There has never been a country in world history which wrecked relations with its main, nation-state, trading partner and immediately prospered from it.

Also, the EU accord wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. Despite all its idealistic talk, Brussels insisted upon stingy quotas on Kiev's exports and offered no guarantee Ukrainians would promptly receive even visa-free travel from Schengen states. Indeed, more than three years on, and having bent over backward for Eurocrats, they still can’t freely enter the bloc.

As I wrote at the time: “According to statistics the benefits of acceding to the Free Trade regime amount to €490 million per annum. However, if President Putin decided to pull the plug on Ukrainian access to his market (which, ironically, Poroshenko partially later did in a sort of petulant suicide), the loss of the Russian and Belarusian outlets would amount to €16 billion annually.” Hence, the idea that Yanukovich worked in concert with the Kremlin was always preposterous. On the contrary, many Russian officials disliked him because they felt he played them off against Brussels for too long.

RTGeverifieerd account‏@RT_com

EU-Ukraine association deal won't make Kiev candidate member – EU Council

False promise

Of course, it was a fallacy to suggest how Ukraine’s standards of living and economic well-being could swiftly improve through ties with the EU. On the contrary, honest analysts could clearly see that even if it had been suddenly offered rapid full membership, Ukraine would go into a tailspin. Because its industry and workforce aren't competitive and haven’t kept up technologically during the last 20 to 30 years. Not to mention how its education system is a shambles, where professorships are usually purchased, and it’s almost impossible to graduate without greasing a palm or a dozen. Thus, it's impossible to be sure if younger Ukrainians are qualified to the extent their parchments imply.

Kramer’s piece highlights the economic emergency in Ukraine right now. He quotes Oleg Bakhmatyuk, owner of the aforementioned ‘Avangard:’ “We need capital investment and trade investment,” he said.

Read more

5 facts you need to know about Ukraine-EU trade deal

“There’s no liquidity. We are losing our export market. As an agricultural territory, we are moving backward.”

And it's not just agriculture. Heavy industry has been choked by obstructions on cooperation with its natural Russian partners. For instance, Antonov, the iconic airplane manufacturer, found itself declared bankrupt earlier this year. This was especially sad considering Ukraine had been an aviation superpower in its own right, punching way above its size

Meanwhile, Kramer also cites some positives from the EU relationship. Such as how the western edge (around fanatically pro-Brussels Lvov) has benefited from some investment and “niches like a ski manufacturing industry have done well.” That said, no country has ever been built on making skiing gear. And to even attempt such a thing would be the start of a slippery slope.

By finally admitting the reality on the ground in Ukraine, the NYT might have begun a process which will see it start to report the truth from there. Also, the impending arrival of Donald Trump as president has probably focused some minds.

Being right about Maidan, and the dangers it presented, didn’t make those of us who called it correctly “useful idiots.” Accurately representing the situation in Petro Poroshenko’s Ukraine won’t transform the New York Times’ editors into “Kremlin stooges” either.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/371934-ukraine-eu-yanukovich-nyt/

Lying About Ukraine

ERIC ZUESSE | 02.01.2017 | WORLD

New York Times Continues Lying About Ukraine

The New York Times’s hiding — for nearly three years after this massively important historical event — the U.S.-imposed bloody coup that occurred in Ukraine during February 2014, makes the Times’s hiding of it from the public, become by now no longer merely egregious ‘news’-reporting, but finally lying about history: it’s an egregious lie about a major event of recent world history — a worse lie as each year passes without the Times’s acknowledgment that they had been hiding it from their readers, all along; hiding the news, until it became history — a lie which is harder to extricate themselves from, as each year passes and as this event becomes more and more important, because it accumulates more and more consequences, all of which are bad. 

So: when will the NYT finally come out publicly acknowledging that the coup existed — that it was a «coup», and no ‘revolution’ (such as they’ve falsely claimed it to have been, and still refer to it)? Will it remain unstated (to have been a coup), until decades later?

This was historically a very important event, because it directly precipitated America’s pretext for openly restoring the Cold War — 25 years after the 1991 end of the Soviet Union, and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance, and of their communism. The U.S. sanctions against Russia, and NATO’s pouring troops and weapons onto and near Russia’s borders, were hostile U.S. and European acts carried out under the shoddy pretext of Russia’s having accepted the will of the residents in Crimea — which had been part of Russia for hundreds of years until the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 — to become again part of Russia, which rejoining of Russia was precipitated (virtually forced) by Obama’s coup, the coup that overthrew the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted. Obama never gave a damn about what the people of Crimea wanted. (Perhaps that’s why Crimeans’ approval of the U.S.’s role in Ukrainian affairs, which was 6% before the coup, plunged to 2.8% after the coup — according to Gallup.) 

The master-liar Obama called this Putin’s «conquest» of Crimea, but Obama never questioned, much less denied (as he does to the people of Crimea) the right of self-determination of peoples in regards to Catalonians in Spain, nor to the Scotch in UK. But when it happens in a former part of Russia, as a direct consequence of Obama’s own (what’s basically) conquest of Russia’s next-door-neighbor Ukraine (like Mexico is to the U.S.), Obama exhibits the audacity to call this Putin’s «conquest of land», and to say that Russia must suffer for it. Obama should be prosecuted for it (and for the even bloodier consequences of his coup), by the International Criminal Court, but instead he ‘prosecutes’ (actually persecutes) Russia. What type of world is this?

That the coup was a bloody false-flag U.S. coup, was obvious to Petro Poroshenko (subsequently to become Ukraine’s President, and commanded by Obama) even as early as when the coup had ended on February 26th of 2014 — and Poroshenko acknowledged it at that time, to the European Union’s investigator who had been sent in to find out how this blatantly illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, had, in fact, occurred. 

As the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor himself, on 19 December 2014, called this overthrow, it was «the most blatant coup in history» — and the reason why it was so, is that, because of the widespread new cellphone technology, this was the first coup ever to have been extensively recorded and uploaded to the internet, even while it was happening. A compendium of these videos was uploaded to youtube on 18 March 2014 (just weeks after the coup), which provided the world virtually a ringside seat to the unfolding of this coup; and subsequently more and more details about the coup’s background became revealed, and an 80-page scholarly analysis of all of the evidence regarding the moment of the coup itself, «The ‘Snipers’ Massacre’ on the Maidan in Ukraine», confirmed that the massacre — the coup-event — was perpetrated by the same group that organized and commanded the mass-demonstrations against the democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych (and the U.S. preparations for it went back to at least 1 March 2013, and the advance-planning for it was done by the U.S. State Department at least as far back as 2011); so, one would have to be an imbecile to question any longer that it was a «coup» — at least as much a «coup» as were America’s previous coups, such as when the U.S. government did it to Iran in 1953, and to Guatemala in 1954, and to Chile in 1973 — and to so many others. (But, of course, those coups too were denied by U.S. ‘news’ media at the time, and for a long time afterward.)

And anyone who would deny that it was a U.S.-run coup would be disproven by the smoking-gun on that matter, which was the youtubed phone-conversation on 4 February 2014 — 18 days prior to the coup’s culminating event — in which Arseniy Yatsenyuk was chosen by Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland to run the Ukrainian government as soon as the coup would be completed (which happened on February 26th). Nuland was there telling the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine whom he should get placed in charge of Ukraine after the democratically elected President would be gone.

It’s one thing to perpetrate a coup; but it’s entirely something else then to punish the target — which typically is the leader (such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Viktor Yanukovych, and Bashar al-Assad) of a nation who is friendly toward Russia, because Russia is Washington’s permanent obsession to weaken; Russia itself was the real target in perpetrating Ukraine’s coup — as Obama and his European vassals did by punishing Russia for responding to that coup on its very doorstep and taking its own necessary defensive measures against America’s aggression, especially in light of Ukraine’s having now been told by Obama’s gang, that it should apply for NATO membership — which Ukraine did.

It’s all covered-up with lies. When will this scam against the U.S. public, by the U.S. ‘press’, ever end? How can a country with such rotten ‘news’media — keeping things like this secret from the American people — be an authentic democracy? It can’t. And it isn’t.

Even Russia’s newsmedia play-down the extent and significance of this problem. Russian Television published, on December 27th, an opinion-article, from a non-staff writer, headlined «New York Times admits Ukraine’s Yanukovich was right not to sign EU deal», which merely argued that Ukraine’s having rejected Russia’s offer and gone with the EU’s offer (the offer from America’s vassal-aristocracies across the Atlantic) has harmed Ukraine’s farmers. This article simply ignored the crucial fact: that Yanukovych had turned down the EU’s proposed terms for Ukraine to join the EU, because of its cripplingly-high price-tag: $160 billion.

But actually, America’s coup in Ukraine did a lot worse to Ukraine than just harm to Ukrainian agriculture.

I headlined on 23 December 2015, «Gallup: Ukrainians Loathe the Government that Obama Imposed», and reported that that day’s Gallup poll report showed that «17% approve of the job-performance of their President, Petro Poroshenko. While the pre-coup President, Viktor Yanukovych, was in office, 2010-2014, that figure had been averaging about 23%, and was never as low as Poroshenko’s is now.»

Subsequently, polling by Ukraine’s Sofia Center for Social Studies (for example in November 2016, and also in September 2016) showed similarly low approval-ratings for the Obama-stooge regime. And all of these polls — Gallup’s and Sofia’s — excluded the two breakaway regions, one of which (Donbass) had voted 90% for Yanukovych, and the other of which (Crimea) had voted 75% for him, both of which knew the Obama-stooge regime only as bombing them, and so would have had 0% approval for its current leader Poroshenko.

In other words, even without the two most pro-Russian, anti-U.S., regions, being reflected in these post-coup polls, the approval-rating for the U.S.-stooge regime, within the more-pro-U.S. part of the remaining rump Ukraine, was even lower than the lowest-ever approval-rating for the Yanukovych government had been over all of Ukraine.

Obama — and his vassal-aristocracies in Europe and elsewhere — are imposing economic sanctions against Russia for Russia’s having allowed the people of Crimea to rejoin Russia, after the hell that Obama’s team had imposed upon Ukraine. Obama calls that Russia’s ‘conquest’ of Crimea.

Who is the liar here? Is it the U.S. regime and its propaganda-organs?

Or is it the Russian government?

In a brilliant summary by Paul Craig Roberts, published on December 28th, and titled «What Is Henry Kissinger Up To?» is stated the forces that are still trying, inside the United States, to conquer and subdue America’s next President, Donald Trump. But all of this is really about whether the plan that George Herbert Walker Bush initiated on the night of 24 February 1990, for the U.S. aristocracy to take over Russia, will now — and finally — end. No one can understand current history, without understanding that plan, the U.S. aristocracy’s double-cross of Russia, which left only a one-sided (Russian) end of the Cold War, while the other side (America’s side) continued it, sub-rosa, right up until the present.

The NYT’s lies are in service to the forces that are still trying to continue — and to intensify — the Cold War. And Paul Craig Roberts stated accurately whom those forces actually represent. It’s not the American public.

Tags: Ukraine  US 

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/01/02/new-york-times-continues-lying-about-ukraine.html