All posts tagged: Maidan

Canadian FM Freeland Was Slated to Be George Soros’ Authorized Biographer

Published by

by John Helmer, via Russia Insider A Toronto newspaper has revealed that Canada’s leading Russia hater, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, had a deal with George Soros (lead image) to write his biography after she had lost her journalist jobs at the Financial Times and Reuters, and before she started her run for election to the Canadian parliament. On August 16 the Toronto Globe and Mail reported Soros is a “close friend” of Freeland, and that with her he has “very great hopes for Canada”. Before she decided to run for parliament, the newspaper says Freeland had a “deal” for “a sort of authorized biography of George Soros”. Soros’s spokesman in New York, Laura Silber, refused to answer repeated questions last week for clarification of the terms of this deal or the compensation Soros agreed with Freeland. Freeland’s first filing to the Canadian parliament’s ethics watchdog was registered on May 1, 2014. There is no mention of Soros, but there is “income received under a book collaboration agreement with an individual”. Freeland refused last week to identify that individual by name. …

Putin is Weaponizing Popularity: Newsweek is not Amused

Published by

by Mark Chapman, a.k.a. Kremlin Stooge “The mind, placed before any kind of difficulty, can find an ideal outlet in the absurd. Accommodation to the absurd readmits adults to the mysterious realm inhabited by children.” – André Breton How appropriate, to say nothing of au courant,  to kick off this post with a quote from André Breton; a French poet, writer, and author of “The Surrealist Manifesto”, he is best remembered as the founder of Surrealism.  And oh, Mama; surreal is what we have for you today. Yes, having weaponized everything from refugees to referendums, Putin has finally rolled out his magnum opus: he has weaponized his own popularity. Except it is somehow a secret.  What a good thing that we have Newsweek to brief us on how that works, because at the outset I confess I am puzzled as to how secret popularity could function as a weapon. I hate to give away right at the beginning how numbingly idiotic the piece is, but I am afraid most of you would guess as soon as …

Crimeans Recount Their Experiences When The West Took Ukraine

Published by

by Eric Zuesse This news-report consists of a compilation of accounts that Crimeans have given to human rights groups or directly posted to the internet, regarding their experiences when the freely elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who had received 75% of the votes of Crimeans, was violently overthrown during January and February of 2014. On 20 February 2014, eight busloads of people from Crimea, who had come into Ukraine’s capital Kiev and were holding signs there demonstrating in opposition to the “Maidan” movement, which was seeking to oust Yanukovych, were violently attacked by “Right Sector” people who were leading the Maidan movement; and those terrified Crimeans then scrambled back into their buses, which promptly sped southward, toward home in Crimea. An organization “Ukraine Human Rights” created and posted to the internet, on 14 August 2014, a 25-minute video, with English subtitles, telling these people’s stories. It’s titled “The Pogrom of Korsun”, and it reports, with testimony and some of the videos from survivors, the attacks against those buses when a gang of Ukraine’s Right …

Jean-Claude Juncker Damns Obama’s Plan for Ukraine

Published by

by Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org Jean-Claude Juncker, the most powerful person in Europe, the chief of the European Commission and therefore Europe’s closest equivalent to America’s President, said, in a little-noticed comment on March 3rd, “Ukraine will definitely not be able to become a member of the EU in the next 20-25 years, and not of NATO either.” The article reporting this, at europeonline-magazine.eu, also observed that, “The commission, the EU‘s executive, plays a leading role in accession negotiations between the bloc and aspiring members.” The main reason why U.S. President Barack Obama had perpetrated his coup in Ukraine in February 2014, and why his CIA hired racist anti-Russian paramilitaries to carry it out as they did behind the cover of the popular anti-corruption “Maidan” demonstrations in Kiev, was in order to get Ukraine into NATO, so that U.S. missiles can be placed near-enough to Moscow for a blitz-attack so as to conquer Russia. That would be America’s ultimate “regime-change” operation (toward which the regime-change in Ukraine is merely one of the most important steps); but the European Commission’s Jean-Claude Juncker …

Ukrainian radicals trash Russian banks on anniversay of Maidan (w/ VIDEO)

Published by

 RT reports Ukrainian radicals wrecked the offices of Russian companies Sberbank and Alfa-Bank in Kiev as they marked the second anniversary of the bloody Euromaidan riots, which left around 100 dead and led to major unrest in the country. The angry mob accused the Russian banks of “financial occupation of Ukraine,” throwing rocks and other foreign objects at the buildings and shattering their windows. The police prevented the radicals from setting the Sberbank office doors on fire, but the attackers managed to get inside the Alfa-Bank office. They trashed the furniture and glass partition walls inside the bank, shouting nationalist slogans, including: “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!” The offices of the eastern Ukrainian oligarch, Renat Akhmetov, were also attacked in the capital on the same day. Many of the protestors were wearing balaclavas and camouflaged uniforms with the insignia of the radical Right Sector movement, recently branded “illegal” by Ukraine’s Judge Advocate General. Members of the volunteer battalions which participated in Kiev’s military campaign in East Ukraine, activists from the far-right Ukrainian Insurgent Army …

French Canal+ documentary: Ukraine, The Masks of the Revolution

Published by

Screencap from the documentary. Ukraine’s authorities have urged a French broadcaster to take a documentary titled ‘Masks of Revolution’ off the air. They claim the movie misrepresents Maidan events, and have a list of their own suggestions for what needs to be shown. Paul Moreira’s “Ukraine: The Masks of the Revolution” was aired by French national TV Canal+ on February 2. Watch the trailer and the documentary in full with English subtitles at the LiveLeak link below it. Documentary: Ukraine – Masks of revolution. Eng. Subs.

More than half of Ukrainians ready to start new Maidan

Published by

A rally on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in early December 2013. Photo Gleb Garanich/Reuters RIA reports: Kyiv, October 19. More than 50% of Ukrainians are ready to start a “new Maidan” if the quality of life in the country continues its rapid decline. These are the results of a new survey made by the [Ukrainian] polling organization “Rating”. According to data published on the official website of the organization, only 28% of Ukrainian citizens think it is better to put up with financial difficulties for the sake of preserving order in the country, while 53% of respondents said that in case of a significant deterioration in living conditions it is better to take to the streets to protest. “Characteristically, these figures almost match those that were recorded in December 2013  [when the mass Euromaidan demonstrations leading to the fall of the Viktor Yanukovych government started in Ukraine] (29 and 50%, respectively),” – said the representatives of “Rating”. […]

Searches in Kiev: Svoboda party members suspected of Maidan mass murder

Published by

About one hundred people, including 18 police officers, were shot to death by snipers in Kiev’s Independence Square on February 20 2014,Con l’Ucraina antifascista reports: Aleksandr Aronets, spokesman of Svoboda in Kiev, reports [see below] that this morning there were raids against members of Svoboda, on suspicions of mass murder during the Maidan – murders that were attributed to “snipers of former President Yanukovitch and to Berkut [the police]. Among the materials in the hands of investigators is a video [see below] where you see someone shoot from a window of the hotel “Ukraine” on Independence Square, protesters and police. The room in question (no. 1132) was occupied by the Svoboda deputy Oleg Pankevich. Recall that the National Fascist party Svoboda was one of the main organizations to take part in the violence that led to the coup, with the not hidden support of the EU and US. In fact its leader Oleg Tjagnibok had numerous meetings with John McCain, Victoria Nuland and European representatives, like the then High Representative for EU Foreign Affairs, Catherine Ashton. …

What Freedom Now Means in Ukraine

Published by

by Vaska Here are the main points Anatoly Karlin, writing in “The Maidan Retroactively Criminalizes Itself,” makes on the repression which masquerades as freedom in the new, Empire-backed Ukraine: “1) The utter hypocrisy (and hardheaded practicality) of a regime that came to power through an illegal coup on a wave of mass riots now banning the same thing that got them into power in the first place. And of course the incredibly hardline restrictions on free speech implicit in all this, which are and will continue to be abused (Your neighbor’s dog is too loud? Maybe he’s a separatist!). Lest one think this all just talk, consider the case of Ruslan Kotsaba, a (West Ukrainian!) journalist arrested for making a video in which he came out against mobilization, which is strictly speaking without legal basis during a time in which war has not been declared, i.e. up till now. He faces up to 15 years in prison. This is just what is probably the most visible case; there have been sackings, denunciations, business shakedowns, arrests, …

Reuters: Flaws found in Ukraine’s probe of Maidan massacre

Published by

by Systematic Protesters evacuate a wounded demonstrator from Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev on February 20, 2014. (Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images) […] In April, prosecutors arrested three suspects, members of an elite unit within the “Berkut” riot police. Senior among them was Dmytro Sadovnyk, 38, a decorated commander, who was accused of ordering his men to fire on the crowds on the morning of Feb. 20. The three stand accused of massacring 39 unarmed protesters. On Sept. 19, the case took a turn when a judge released Sadovnyk into house arrest – and, two weeks later, he went missing. Maidan activists were outraged, convinced that a corrupt system had let a killer escape. The judge was placed under investigation. The prosecutor said in a statement: “D. Sadovnyk, suspected of committing an extremely grievous crime, aiming to avoid punishment, disappeared from his place of permanent residence.” But in a country where justice often isn’t blind, there’s another possibility: Sadovnyk was being framed, and saw flight as his best option. In court last month, he called the …

New Law Lets Poroshenko Seize Assets at Will

Published by

The Verkhovna Rada in Kiev today approved the bill on Martial Law, which now makes it legal to detain and intern foreign (Russian) citizens just for owning the wrong passport. The new legislation bestows much wider new powers to Ukraine’s President in case martial law is declared. Russian blogger El-Murid highlights a very interesting aspect of the new law, allowing for the quick, arbitrary extrajudicial confiscation of property owned by the wrong people. The law allows for the nationalization, without explanation and applying existing procedures, in the interest of the country’s defense. This gives the President virtually unlimited powers to redistribute property, which, in the circumstances of the erupting oligarchic war will automatically make him no longer first among equals, but really the top person with unlimited powers. Naturally, if martial law is declared. The procedure of the eventual return of expropriated assets has apparently been regulated in a very sparing manner, and there are plenty of options to bypass this minor obstacle: you can declare the asset owner an enemy of the nation, and …

Ukraine is worst of Obama’s many foreign policy disasters | The Japan Times

Published by

By William Pfaff, The Japan Times The most devastating reproach historians are likely to make to Barack Obama’s record in the White House is his devastating failure in foreign policy — a failure that stems from his willingness to leave the warrior ideologues of the State and Defense Departments in place after he became president. To them he added ideologues of a new and equally interventionist persuasion, which he found congenial: that of humanitarian action, scarcely relevant in resisting the Islamic caliphate that emerged as a major force in the concluding half of his second term. By then he also faced a Republican congressional majority distinguished by its ignorance — worse than his own in foreign policy matters — and its vindictiveness. He arrived in office to a military leadership lacking a political strategy to shape its tactics in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When he asked for options and political counsel on ending the Mideast wars — as he had promised the electorate — he was insolently given settled plans by the generals for …

Ukraine’s Political “Suicides” Make no G News

Published by

An Odessa prosecutor reportedly took his life in a 9-storey fall today. This is just the latest in a wave of strange suicides of former and current Ukrainian public officials. It brings the bodycount to no less than seven recent deaths, barely reported by the Western press: Oleksandr Peklushenko, former governor of the Zaporozhye and member of Yanukovich’s party, died from a gunshot to the neck on 12 March. A member of Ukraine’s Party of the Regions, he was being investigated over the dispersal of protesters last year. Stanislav Melnyk, 53, an ex-MP was found shot dead in his bathroom on 9 March Mykhaylo Chechetov, former party deputy chairman, died after apparently jumping from a window in his 17th-floor flat on 28 February; he had been accused of abuse of office and fraud Serhiy Valter, a mayor in the south-eastern city of Melitopol, was found hanged on 25 February; he too had been accused of abuse of office Oleksandr Bordyuh, a former police deputy chief in Melitopol linked to Mr Valter, was found dead at …

Guardian-watch: The referendum that never was

Published by

by BlackCatte The Guardian’s slide from liberal, informed media outlet, to crass, Ministry of Truth propaganda-sheet, gathers pace every day. Yesterday, for example, came this offering: Vladimir Putin describes secret meeting when Russia decided to seize Crimea Brief, yet crammed with splendid examples of honest, objective reporting, and paradigm-neutral language. For example… “In a trailer shown Sunday for an upcoming documentary on state-run Rossiya-1 television called “Homeward bound”, Putin openly discusses Moscow’s controversial grabbing of Crimea a year ago.” See that? Crimea was “grabbed”. It’s official. Not “liberated” like Iraq or Libya, or Kosovo. Grabbed. “Putin recounts an all-night meeting with security services chiefs to discuss how to extricate deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, who had fled a pro-Western street revolt in the Ukrainian capital Kiev.” Who knew that multi-million dollar-funded, nazi-infiltrated, CIA-handled Maidan Experience was just a big old spontaneous street revolt? Who knew those carefully-placed snipers murdering people on both sides were just ordinary everyday folks up there in their perches on a whim, like latter-day sans-culottes at the Bastille? But it gets better. …