There’s not much point in staging a coup if you don’t influence who is placed in power in the aftermath. Of course in order for a puppet government to be effective, they can’t be perceived as such. You wouldn’t want the natives to get restless would you?
TheĀ evidence that the U.S. was behind the toppling of the Ukrainian governmentĀ early this year is so overwhelming at this point that the subject really isn’t up for debate, however initially it was unclear how the election of Petro Poroshenko fit in. The ecstatic response by Washington when he was declared the winner, and their unbending support in spite of hisĀ ongoing military assault against civilians in the east, made it clear that he was the chosen one, but the paper trail wasn’t immediately obvious.
As it turns out, the evidence that Poroshenko is in the pocket of the U.S. State Department has been available all this time, you just had to know where to find it. InĀ a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko”.
A separateĀ cable also released by WikileaksĀ makes it clear that the U.S. government was considered Poroshenko corrupt.
“Poroshenko was tainted by credible corruption allegations, but wielded significant influence within OU; Poroshenko’s price had to be paid.”
The U.S. government knew Poroshenko was dirty, but he was influential, and arguably their most dependable mole.
Perhaps the most interesting revelation comes from aĀ 2009 cableĀ where Poroshenko told then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton he supported “the opening of a U.S. diplomatic presence in Crimea” and “He emphasized the importance of Crimea, and said that having U.S. representation there would be useful for Ukraine.” Poroshenko’s role as an informant for the U.S. government continuedĀ in cables in 2010 as well.
Reading through the cables, I have to wonder if Poroshenko was actually breaking Ukrainian law by sharing the kind of strategic information that he did. Considering that this information was certainly used when planning the coup against Yanukovich, one could argue that he committed treason.
Poroshenko, however, isn’t the only Ukrainian politician mentioned. For example, the cables mention the scandal surrounding Oleksandr Turchynov’s destruction of SBU documents tying Julia Tymoshenko to organized crime, and note that the accusation that Tymoshenko wanted Turchynov get the Interior Minister position so that she could gather damaging information on her enemies.Ā The cableĀ refers to this accusation as “not farfetched”. Turchynov went on to be installed as the acting president of Ukraine in the provisional government.
In order to grasp the extent of the U.S. government’s tinkering in Ukraine it is worth reading the documents for yourself.
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1 Comment
I detected something inconsistent in this reading of the story and asked a colleague who reads Ukrainian and has been trying hard to follow the situation — especially the travails of the independent Left there — in his blog, at http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv-ukrtaz/:
His reply confirmed what I suspected, that Our Ukraine was the name of an organization, despite the writer’s claim that US operatives were using ‘our’ in the possessive. If you look at the original source of that piece, it’s very weird IMO that the author refuses to identify himself or his political orientation: http://scgnews.com/who-is-scg.
My friend writes:
Our Ukraine (OU) is the name of a political party (ex-Pres. Yushchenko’s party, which Poroshenko was involved in; he was a minister for Yushchenko, and later was a minister for ex-Pres. Yanukovich). It’s not clear to me why this article includes the phrase “Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko” in bold-face, but if it’s intended to suggest anything other than a well-known fact–that Poroshenko had a high ministerial position under Yushchenko and was therefore an OU insider–then the author has already discredited him/herself as an ignoramus on Ukrainian politics. I’ll be generous and assume that that’s not what’s being suggested.
Despite all the proclamations about “overwhelming evidence,” I don’t see anything particularly incriminating in what follows. Who in Ukraine’s governing elite isn’t “tainted by credible corruption allegations”? And what in those conversations with Clinton et al shows that Poroshenko was an “informant for the U.S. government”? Wasn’t he the foreign minister at the time? If these conversations were juxtaposed with any conversations he was having with other government representatives (e.g., from Russia, the EU, et al.), I suspect they’d just show some shrewd manuevering to be in everyone’s good graces. That would be consistent with Poroshenko’s actions and words for years now: play all sides, but lean west (i.e. toward a European style polity). It’s now essentially his foreign policy. For a country as economically and politically weak as Ukraine, it’s a realistic and pretty reasonable policy. What “strategic information” is being shared in those conversations? (I’ve read them pretty qu
ickly, so help me out if you see something more there than what I’ve seen.) And why not a U.S. diplomatic presence in Crimea? It was an Autonomous Republic of Ukraine at the time (and still is, on paper, as far as the UN is concerned, despite Russia’s having taken it over). It would have been a very good idea to have a US consulate there–even a prescient idea, as it could have helped prevent Russia’s takeover of it. Too bad they didn’t listen to their “mole”…