NATO loses in the Ukraine election

Submitted by gjohnsit on Mon, 04/01/2019 - 9:42pm

The Atlantic Council, NATO's think tank, and VoiceOfAmerica assured us that nothing would change with the Ukraine election. That Ukraine's march toward the West would continue.

Then the election happened.

This headline is a smear by warmongers. Volodymyr Zelensky isn't pro-Russia.
However, he isn't anti-Russia, which is a huge change from President Petro O. Poroshenko, who came in a distant second.
Turnout was estimated at about 63 percent, slightly more than the 60 percent who voted in 2014.
That's not all.

A better-than-expected showing for Russia-leaning candidates in the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election could mean forces loyal to the Kremlin make inroads at the country’s parliamentary vote later this year.

While two pro-Western candidates will go head to head in a runoff in three weeks, Russia-friendly Yuriy Boyko and Oleksandr Vilkul garnered a combined 15 percent.

This is also a smear, Boyko and Vilkul aren't "loyal to the Kremlin", but they are pro-Russian.
Between Boyko and Vilkul's votes, plus Zelensky's votes, it virtually assures that Ukraine won't have an anti-Russian President in a few months.

Tags:

Ukraine

Election

Vote

Comments

Submitted by Pricknick on Mon, 04/01/2019 - 10:33pm

Thanks gjohn

I've been watching this but could couldn't come close to you in explaining it.
One less puppet for Uncle Insane.

—

Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Submitted by The Voice In th... on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 9:00am

But one more for Putin.

@Pricknick

—

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Submitted by shaharazade on Mon, 04/01/2019 - 10:36pm

I guess that's good news?

All I know about the Ukraine is that Hillary, Kerry and Co. fucked them over and went with the Nazis contingency. Sorry but the world as it stands is so fucked up I can't keep track of the players or the plays. There all obscene and guess who stands in the center of this global nightmare instigating all this darkness. Hummmmmm.....USA,USA,USA. Makes me want to puke. Makes me feel like voting for anyone I'm allowed to is nothing but a crime against humanity. Including Bernie or anyone the powers that be kindly allow us to consider under their carefully controlled game. Oh well. Guess I'm glad that the Ukraine may just get out from under their whatever. Hey maybe if people globally all stood up and refused to vote for any of these assholes they fling out there what would happen? Nothing most likely as there is always the specter hanging around of what will happen to your life if you step out of line.

Submitted by Pricknick on Mon, 04/01/2019 - 10:45pm

You would still have so called rulers.

@shaharazade

Hey maybe if people globally all stood up and refused to vote for any of these assholes they fling out there what would happen?

If nobody voted, nothing would change unless there's revolt.
Kinda like what we're quickly approaching.
It's vote, revolt or die.

—

Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Submitted by dkmich on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 7:20am

Don't know anything about the Ukraine.

Are there good guys and bad guys and which is which. Some news media, eh.

—

"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Submitted by The Voice In th... on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 9:01am

All bad guys

@dkmich

—

I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Submitted by Pricknick on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 11:01am

That's like saying

@The Voice In the Wilderness
that everybody here is bad or good. Saying they're all bad is a rather broad brush stroke.

—

Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Submitted by MinuteMan on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 8:28am

Blackout?

Maybe it's about time for a set of inexplicable power failures? Of course, that would likely out Russia into position to ride in as a savior but flexibility of mind is not something this administration's experts (and those that preceded it) are known for: they've been using the same Regine-change playbook since the time of the shah if not before.

Submitted by Linda Wood on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 9:30am

And proxy wars

@MinuteMan

since this same oil and financial cabal armed Hitler.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Trading_Enemy_excerpts.html

Submitted by gjohnsit on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 10:46am

Biden and Ukraine

corruption

Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

“I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko.

“Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat.

Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired.

But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member.

U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

Submitted by DonMidwest on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 11:46am

Biden's son on board of Ukranian energy company

@gjohnsit Hunter Biden’s new job at a Ukrainian gas company is a problem for U.S. soft power

article from 2014
and then an article from 2015 by James Risen

WASHINGTON — When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch

**
well at least Joe Biden acknowledged that his oldest son, Beau, may have died from burn pits in Iraq.

son had been atty general of Delaware

hate amazon.com but

The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiers

A chapter on Beau Biden.

did a search on

us military acknowledge deaths from burn pits

lots of stuff. Claims denied for many if not most. More cover up.

corruption Two years after leaving office, Joe Biden couldn’t resist the temptation last year to brag to an audience of foreign policy specialists about the time as vice president that he strong-armed Ukraine into firing its top prosecutor. In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. “I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recalled telling Poroshenko. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time,” Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations event, insisting that President Obama was in on the threat. Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden’s account, though they claim the pressure was applied over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day. Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine’s parliament obliged by ending Shokin’s tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired. But Ukrainian officials tell me there was one crucial piece of information that Biden must have known but didn’t mention to his audience: The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden’s younger son, Hunter, as a board member. U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden’s American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts — usually more than $166,000 a month — from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia.

Submitted by DonMidwest on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 11:50am

more about Biden came up on a search

@DonMidwest running for office leads to lots of stories

Hunter Biden on his affair with brother Beau’s widow: 'Love people and find a way to love yourself'

15 min ago
Joe Biden's 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed probe is revived

Submitted by Bob In Portland on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 11:45am

Look at who voted

This is the problem with the fascists in Kiev.

They were always a minority in their own country. Yes, a kinda sorta pro-Russian wins. But only people living in the rump state of Ukraine could vote. No Crimeans and no one in Donbass could vote. In the election before the coup those regions voted about 90% for Yanukovich, the guy thrown from power, in large part because they are ethnic Russians and in large part because the coup essentially cancelled their votes. If Ukraine would ever unite and vote there would be a big enough majority to wipe the fascists from power for a long, long time.

This also means that the rump state cannot resume it's war. If it does, with Americans and American equipment and American training of the fascist forces, Russia will protect Donbass, and the rump state will lose. In their last war Kiev had a huge problem with deserters and people avoiding the draft. Some left for the West, millions crossed the border to Russia. But if they did win in some miracle, they would be absorbing those parts of Ukraine that have been willing to fight against the fascists. That means no real elections because the millions of ethnic Russians, joined with the others in Ukraine who didn't vote fascist this time, would make that majority bigger.

The reality of Ukraine today is that the tighter the fascists turn the screws on Donbass the less support they have at home.

There is no reason that Ukraine can ever pull itself out of the horrible economic mess it's in. Russia's new gas pipelines, Nordstream II, the Turkish pipeline and possibly the proposed one under the Black Sea, and the newly proposed pipeline from Qatar gas fields through Iraq and Turkey to Europe, would eliminate any value of the pipelines that transverse Ukraine. Ukraine will have no power to shut them down or sabotage them or steal from them anymore because Russia will probably shut them down themselves with the least hint of fascist hanky panky. Which will leave Ukraine with very little energy.

The current construction of Ukraine, including the recently departed chunks of it, was created by a reorganization of the USSR back in the fifties. I haven't seen it written but I suspect that when Khrushchev redrew the borders it was to keep an equal amount of ethnic Russians loyal to the USSR to counterbalance the fascists in the northwest corner of the country. It would not be surprising that when the wheels begin falling off the NATO-created wagon that regions like those surrounding Odessa and those in the northeast corner of the country will break off from the rump state because of the terrible economics of the regime, repulsion to the regime, or just because they fear for what happens to non-fascists when fascists are going down. What is left of Ukraine would be battling along the boarder of Poland, another bitter little fascist state, fighting over territory that is ethnicallyy Polish.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.

Submitted by DonMidwest on Tue, 04/02/2019 - 8:38pm

Holodomor - Soviet famine in Ukraine killed millions

I knew that millions and millions died in the Eastern European states. This genocide happened in peacetime. I had never seen this massacre. Estimates run as high as 12 million.

from wiki

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р;[a][2] derived from морити голодом, "to kill by starvation")[3][4][5] was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine,[6][7][8] and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine[9] or The Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33.[10] It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.[11] Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine[12] and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.[13]

Holodomor

It came up in an article by a woman commenting on blaming Russia for Trump's election. She goes to the opening of the KGB spy museum in NYC which is opening just in time for renewed Soviet hysteria.

Here is the flavor of the article

Throughout the tour, I was texting with my friend Alex, who emigrated from the USSR as a child and remains my go-to source for intra-former Eastern Bloc gossip.

“There are exhibits like this throughout Eastern Europe,’ he replied. “the worst one is in Budapest, called the ‘House of Terror.” Supposedly about the ‘twin evils of authoritarianism’ but there’s literally one room about the Nazi occupation and the rest of the building about communism.” (Fact-checking indicates it now has two rooms dedicated to Nazis.) He also expounded on the little chauvinisms of intra-Soviet inside baseball:

“Lithuania is probably the most ardently anti-Soviet out of the former republics . . . I think that’s kind of a conscious construction of post-Soviet nationalism. It’s happening in Ukraine too, but I don’t think this kind of sentiment was really there in the post-Stalin period. Hell, my grandfather survived Holodomor and still ended up being a proud party member and recipient of the labor medal.”

This is one of my favorite qualities found so often in the American children of the former Soviet Union; they don’t take things personally. They never know why everyone is so mad all the time, or why American leftists treat political disagreements like moral failings. The most selfish person I ever met was the excessively handsome grandchild of kulaks who had their orchards expropriated for the benefit of the Soviet people. When I asked him what he thought about his grandmother narrowly escaping Hitler only to then have her apples seized by Stalin, he merely shrugged and said, “Well . . . they had to take the land. That’s how expropriation works.”

Night at the Museum The history of communism is American history