Posted on 03/06/2022 11:10:15 AM PST by knighthawk
One dead Slav is as good as another. Pump our oil!
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or serious. If the latter, then you truly are a racist.
Not to mention that Slavs, Ukrainians and Russians, are our fellow Christians. I don't want either of them to die.
True some of that
Stalinist Russians enslaved and murdered Uke farmers before WW2
It was ideological and political driven genocide
However, helping the Germans kill 200,000 Poles and Jews should be little much for Uke nationalists and Banderite apologists to try to justify. After 1945 it was time to stop being nazi.
The 10,000 est ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine that the Uke extremist military and militia, with their black sun badges and wolfs head patches, have been killing since 2014… with weapons we gave them….are not communists.
Let me get this straight we have neoNAZIs (Ukraine) fighting against Putin and neoNAZIs (Russian) fighting against Ukraine?
During WWII, Soviet Union was resupplied through lend lease act from USA. So the Red Army received all those trucks, jeeps, tanks, etc from the factories in the industrial heartland in good old America.
Russia (the Soviet Union) was wholly mobilized “war economy” before 1941. Their own military production was enormous before a single German crossed the border. The war itself only intensified this economic focus even more, to an almost absurd degree, as the German advance overran the most productive portions of the Soviet Union.
A very high proportion of the machine tools and workers in the arms factories were evacuated to the Urals to maintain production. The sheer scale of all that is easy to say but very difficult to imagine.
There were vast tank and aircraft factories with shoddy roofs over them, in the Siberian winter, building 23-24,000 tanks in 1943. All of those specialized factories are long gone, and so is the heavy industrial infrastructure behind that.
These days these things are built in small numbers in an almost craft basis, not in serial production. It will take Russia years to rebuild and reconfigure to increase production.
This is a MSM story about Ukraine-Russia, which means it’s probably bullshit.
The demonstrations which began in Kyiv in November 2013 – called "Maidan", or "Euromaidan" – were a result of the Ukrainian people's frustration with former President Yanukovych. The protesters' demands included constitutional reform, a stronger role for parliament, the formation of a government of national unity, an end to corruption, early presidential elections and an end to violence.
. Yanukovych ran again for President in 2010, with a platform that included Ukraine’s request to become part of the European Union. He won the election by obtaining in the second turn 48.95% of the vote against 45.47% of his opponent Julia Tymošenko.
After his election, however, Yanukovych made little progress with the negotiations to join European Union. Instead, its government became increasingly authoritarian.
On November 21, 2013, Yanukovych abruptly announced that he would not sign the Association Agreement with the European Union that had been agreed upon, and would rather enter into a treaty of economic cooperation with Russia. This was a complete about-face with respect to the program on which he had been elected. However, the European Union issue was not the only reason that led students to Maidan Square in Kiev on the same day, November 21, to protest. The European about-face came on top of years of repressive policies and accusations of massive government corruption.
One of Yanukovych’s attitudes that angered many Ukrainians was his denial of the Holodomor, a key part of Ukrainian historical memory.
When Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during his visit to Ukraine went to pay his respects to the victims of the Holodomor, many of whom were ancestors of Canadian Ukrainians, at the Kiev memorial of the genocide, Yanukovych declined to participate and told Harper there had been no genocide. As some scholars have noted, many non-Ukrainians failed to understand the enormity of Yanukovych’s claim. It was as if a president of Israel would publicly deny the Holocaust.
What started in Maidan Square as a small and peaceful protest mostly by university students escalated to violence and to a revolution, which was called Euromaidan or the Revolution of Dignity. What changed the course of the events was the brutal repression of the students by police on November 29. Dozens of students were badly beaten. Many who went to Maidan Square after November 29 would probably not have protested for the European Union, but took to the streets to denounce police brutality, which they regarded as evidence of the authoritarian drift of the Yanukovych government.
The number of protesters in Kiev, originally a few thousands, escalated to 400,000 according to the most conservative estimates or 800,000 according to the most generous. One difference with the 2004 Maidan was that “local Maidans” also erupted in Lviv and other cities, making the movement calling for the resignation of Yanukovych national.
What also escalated in and around Maidan Square was the violence. By the end of the demonstrations, there had been 108 casualties among the protesters, and 13 among the security agents. Most of the victims were killed by snipers.
Who were these snipers? Several Ukrainian personalities blamed Russian agents. The mainline theory, shared by most scholars who wrote on the Euromaidan, is that the snipers were part of the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) and had been dispatched by Yanukovych.
Euromaidan ended when Yanukovych realized that the Parliament would act against him. On February 21, 2014, he signed an agreement with the opposition leaders brokered by the European Union that called for new presidential elections within 2014 and the formation of an interim government leading to them. However, in the night between February 21 and 22 Yanukovych escaped to Karkhiv and then to Russia.
He later claimed that he just went there to “visit,” but the claim defies credibility considering that he destroyed thousands of personal documents and his main aides escaped with him. The claim that Yanukovych was compelled to leave Kiev because the protesters had stormed the presidential office and his residence is also false
Vladimir Putin himself stated in a press conference that these events happened “after” Yanukovych had left Kiev to go to Karkhiv (from where he went to Russia).
On February 22, the Ukrainian Parliament voted with a 73% majority, which included members of Yanukovych’s own party, to “remove” him from the presidency.
The Parliament decided not to follow the formal, and lengthy, procedure for impeachment. While Putin called this decision “unconstitutional” and a “coup,” the Parliament relied on legal opinions stating that the situation was different from the impeachment of a President in office. Yanukovych had self-impeached himself with his feet by leaving Kiev and his office, which also created a situation of urgency.
The Ukrainian Constitution allowed the Parliament to call for new presidential elections in case of need, and the fact that the President had deserted his duties had created this need. Both Western and Ukrainian experts have expressed different opinions about the nature of the February 22 vote, acknowledging at the same time that the situation of a President fleeing his country was unprecedented.
While constitutional questions can continue to be discussed, it is clear that what emerged on February 22 was the position of a large majority of the Parliament, which was in turn supported by a large majority of the Ukrainian citizens. The Parliament rapidly organized presidential elections, which were certified as fair by international observers, and led to the presidency of businessman Petro Poroshenko, who remained in power until 2019, when he failed to win re-election and was defeated by current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Russia considered the removal of Yanukovych invalid and reacted immediately, on February 22, by invading Crimea,
Russia showed a certain ability in 2014 in intercepting and recording phone calls and having them posted on YouTube or published by propaganda media. Just as a “snipergate” was created around the phone call of Estonian Foreign Minister Paet we discussed in the previous article of this series, the “smoking gun” offered for the theory that the United States had “admitted” they had organized a 2014 coup against Yanukovych was a leaked phone call whose recording was posted on YouTube in early February 2014.
In that call, Assistant US Secretary of State (and present Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden Administration), Victoria Nuland, who accompanied Kerry to his Munich meeting with Ukrainian opposition leaders, was talking to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. The transcript was published by the BBC.
The conversation made headlines particularly for the coarse language of Nuland, who used a four-letter word to describe what she saw as the inaction of the European Union. In fact, Nuland also discussed different Ukrainian opposition personalities, expressing her preference for Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who would become Prime Minister on February 27, over other figures
In the conversation, Nuland favored Yatsenyuk because he was a competent economist rather than because he was more pro-American than other leaders. One can derive from the conversation that Nuland had a low opinion of the European Union diplomacy, and that the United States followed the Ukrainian crisis with great interest. What it does not prove is that the U.S. organized Euromaidan.
When they realized that the Nuland-Pyatt conversation was not the smoking gun they were looking for, Russian agitprops quoted a speech Nuland gave to the US-Ukraine Foundation in Washington DC on December 13, 2013, where she said: “Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”
In Russian propaganda, this became the theory that the U.S. had invested $5 billion to create Euromaidan. One wonders why Nuland, if she was the sinister mastermind behind Euromaidan, publicly confessed the $5-billion investment in a speech that was published in official websites of the U.S. government a few days after it was given.
The few journalists who cared to investigate determined that the figure of $5 billion was indeed accurate, but represented the total U.S. expenditures to support Ukraine in the twenty years between 1991 and 2011. The U.S. spent similar sums to support other Eastern European states where there were no revolutions, colored or otherwise.
This money did not go to support militias or protesting students. For instance, $1.1 billion went to promote start-ups and fostering economic growth. $40 million funded anti-AIDS programs and reproductive health (but also an anti-malaria campaign), which conservative Ukrainian Christians criticized as including support for abortion, but certainly had nothing to do with Euromaidan. A sum not disclosed for national security reasons supported the reorganization of the Ukrainian military and police—which at the beginning of Euromaidan largely sided with Yanukovych. And so on. Obviously, Nuland’s famous $5 billion figure referred to a different period of time and different projects, and had nothing to do with Euromaidan.
It was the removal by a vote of the Parliament of a President who had reneged his electoral program for obscure reasons, had ordered the police to mercilessly repress what was initially a peaceful protest, and finally had fled the country. Yanukovych was removed by a large majority of the Parliament, including members of his own party, which then organized new democratic elections as soon as possible—not the typical behavior of putschists.
On the other hand, what was clearly organized and directed from abroad was the “Russian Spring” in Crimea and Donbass, followed by Russian military invasion. The Russians came to believe their own propaganda on color revolutions directed from abroad—and created their own. Yes, the West supported Euromaidan and the opponents of Yanukovych, just as Russia supported the pro-Yanukovych camp. But it was not the West that created what was a popular revolution against what most Ukrainians perceived as a morally bankrupted government.
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