At Globalist Kenneth Courtis explains that Ukraine’s biggest problem is Ukraine:
Ukraine’s President, 51-year old Petro Poroshenko – or Porky, as he is known to all Ukrainians – is at single digits in the polls. With elections scheduled for 2019 that cannot sit well with the oligarch-turned-president.
But in their assessment of him, Ukrainians are simply echoing the disdain that, all smooth-talking rhetoric aside, he has shown them. Remember that he promised to divest himself of certain assets – presumably acquired “legally†once he was elected.
What has happened is the opposite. His group has acquired more state assets at below rock-bottom prices. His firms are already lined up at the trough to gobble up all kinds of stuff in the coming wave of privatizations that the IMF has instructed the county to carry out.
Porky is pretty much the chocolate king of Eastern Europe and the CIS. People on the ground tell me that his three most profitable chocolate factories are in, yes, Russia…
All that sweet stuff can’t obscure the harsh realities. Real wages of workers have been chopped by more than half over the last three years. The emerging middle classes have been crushed.
Read the whole thing. It isn’t long.
What eludes me is why we should support the present kleptocratic government which overthrew the previous kleptocratic government which succeeded the kleptocratic government before that.
At least Yanukovych was legitimately and democratically elected. He is the only person in Ukrainian history to have that achievement. But he had to go because he accepted a Russian debt deal that was better than the EU debt deal.
Yanukovych’s election also explains much of the Ukraine’s current pain. He won every single oblast east of the Dnieper River and Crimea with majorities of over 60% to over 90%. He was the Russian candidate for the ethnic Russians. On the other hand, his opponent, the infamous and irascible Iulia Timoshenko, won every oblast west of the Dnieper by similar margins.
The Dnieper is also the great economic border: separating the industrial east from the agricultural west; and a religious border, separating the Catholic west from the Orthodox east; and a cultural border, separating the Polish/Lithuanian west from the Russian east.
Historically, Russia conquered the east first, taking it from some the Khanate of Crimea, then acquiring the west when the Polish/Lithuanian empire collapsed. The west was also the site of Stalin’s pogrom against the Kulaks and the Tsars’ pogroms against the Jews. The western Ukrainians also eagerly joined the Germans during WW II and had and still have their own Nazi party. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for Stalin), the real German Nazis would have nothing to do with them.
Pottery barn rule, if we break it, we…
This a very interesting article. For once, a commentator who pulls no punches. The comments are also really interesting. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau both warned that the eastern expansion of NATO would ‘poison’ –their term– our relations with Russia for generations. And So it has happened. If there was a mountain range somewhere between the the Franco-German border and Moscow, and if Russia had access to an ice-free port year round on a major ocean, maybe the geopolitical situation of Ukraine would be very different. But like the US could not countenance that Canada or Mexico be part of a military alliance hostile to America, so Russia can not accept nothing different for the Ukraine, and in particular for Crimea. With the deep divisions in Ukrainian society– religious, culture, economics, politics, historic– in reality it would be better for all if the country was run as a highly decentralized federation, say like Canada is run, then naturally the parts of the country with a strong ethnic Russian majority would be naturally friendly with Russia and would provide Russia with a greater sense of security. What the events of the last 3-4 years have done is to ‘poison’ for generations the West’s relations with Russia, pushed Russia into a tight strategic alliance with China, and led to still more corruption in Kiev and across the country