Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

A top U.S. diplomat tried to play down the damage to Washington's diplomacy in Ukraine from a leaked telephone call, but Angela Merkel - already furious with Washington for several months over reports that U.S. officials bugged her own phone - found Nuland's remarks "totally unacceptable", a spokeswoman for the German chancellor said.

In some of the sharpest language yet, the Kremlin's point man on Ukraine, Sergei Glazyev, urged the Ukrainian leader to stop negotiating with "putschists". He accused Washington of arming, funding and training the opposition to take power.

Nuland called the remarks "pure fantasy".

"He could be a science fiction writer," she said.

Dmitry Rogozin hopes that economic cooperation between Russia and Ukraine will create more workplaces and eventually extinguish the social tensions ravaging the country.

Russia’s deputy PM in charge of the defense industry wrote in his Tweeter on Friday that he planned to call an urgent meeting dedicated to cooperation with Ukraine. He mentioned such branches of industry as aircraft building, engine building, ship building and also the rocket and space industries.

“While pro-Western people were weaving intrigue and getting into scandals, Russia was helping Ukraine to restore economic ties with our enterprises. This means the creation of thousands new workplaces,” Rogozin wrote.

“Maybe when it happens there will be less unemployed and resentful people taking foreign payments for launching pogroms in their own cities. I hope this will be so,” the Russian official added.

The statement follows Rogozin’s warnings, dated November last year, when the official said that Russia would remove all ‘sensitive’ production facilities from Ukraine if the association agreement with the EU is signed. He also noted that he did not believe Ukraine can count on eventual EU entry anyway.

the family's original surname being Nudelman.

Orion is run by Randy Scheunemann, a former advisor to Donald Rumsfeld who helped set up the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was a leading advocate for the U.S. invasion in 2003. The committee in turn was created by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose other leaders included Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard.

Back to the latest Mrs. Nuland’s diplomatic collapse made public, it is hardly an unwilling and regretful fault. Andrey Akulov from Strategic Culture Foundation has published a brilliant report (Bride at every wedding, Part I and Part II) a couple of days ago depicting a blatant lack of professionalism and personal intergity of Mrs. Nuland. He described in details her involvement in misinforming the US President and nation on the circumstances of the assassination of the US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens in Benghazi in September 2012 and her support of the unlawful US funding of a number of the Russian “independent” NGOs seeking to bring a color revolution to Russia.

State Department’s Victoria Nuland, the leader of «folks», is at the head of the process. She is openly supporting the opposition. She has visited the protesters’ headquarters and held rousing speeches in front of the excited crowds. The Assistant Secretary openly admitted that the US spent billions of dollars on ‘democratizing’ Ukraine. There is also a reason to believe that if worst comes to worst and the situation would make the US and Russia join efforts like they do in Syria, Mrs. Assistant Secretary will be a wrong person in the wrong position and at the wrong time. Because then there will be a need for constructive approach instead of brazen behavior unworthy of someone who is a career diplomat. Otherwise what career diplomats are for?

The worsening political and economic circumstances in Ukraine has prompted the Fitch Ratings agency to downgrade Ukrainian debt from B to a pre–default level CCC. This is lower than Greece, and Fitch warns of future financial instability.

“Intensification of political and economic stress is such that default on government debt becomes probable,” Fitch said in an e-mail.

On the brink of default, the Ukrainian economy has taken a further beating as protests drag on in the capital Kiev. Foreign debt is $140 billion, nearly 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

“There are emerging signs of stress in the banking system. Demand for foreign currency cash has risen, potentially leading to further steep exchange rate depreciation. These developments pose liquidity and asset quality risks, given the large amounts of foreign currency debt on private sector balance sheets,” the note said.

With its soup kitchens, its snow-clearing operations and its security patrols, the organisation on its square had the impenetrable yet ruthlessly organised logic of an ant colony. In a zone where there was no police or real hierarchy of public order, everyone seemed to get by. Donation boxes to help fund the movement overflowed with colourful Ukrainian notes, and wellwishers drove hundreds of miles from western Ukraine, bringing carloads of warm clothes and provisions.

There was a sense of humour about the protests as well. Last week a golden toilet was placed on the pedestal where Vladimir Lenin had stood until he was ripped off his perch in December last year, a dig at the corruption of those in power.

A Ukrainian judge who recently sentenced several political protesters to house arrest has been shot dead by unknown attackers, police said Wednesday.
Alexander Lobodenko, a 34-year-old district court judge, was shot several times in the back by two assailants on a street near his home in central Ukraine late Tuesday night, the country’s Interior Ministry said.
One of the bullets grazed his spine, according to a statement on the Kremenchug district website, and Lobodenko died in intensive care at about 2 a.m. Wednesday.
Police have opened a criminal case into the death and said that Lobodenko was likely killed as a result of his judicial work. They did not speculate about which of the judge’s decisions may have motivated the attack.
One of Lobodenko’s most recent rulings, according to the Ukrainian newspaper Telegraf, sentenced two pro-European activists on January 28 to two months of house arrest.

Thomas Graham, who was senior Russia adviser to President George W. Bush, said the Obama administration is trying to show friends and foes that it is relevant in Eastern Europe at a time when U.S.-Russia relations have deteriorated.

"The administration felt that it had to stand up and show that it had a spine on these issues," Graham said.

But he and others said the United States is not in a strong position to influence the outcome of the Ukrainian crisis.

"The strength of motivation is on the Russian side," said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Washington-based Brookings Institution think tank.

"It's a hard problem," Pifer said. If the United States and EU promised cash-strapped Ukraine $15 billion, "Putin would say fine, here's $25 billion. He's in a position to outbid us on this one."

A memorandum titled “Save Ukraine!” was published on February 12 in the edition of the Russian weekly Zavtra. Written by experts for the Izborsk Club, an influential intellectual group accorded prominence by President Vladimir Putin in recent months, the statement defines a “fascist and Nazi creeping coup” in Ukraine as a strategic threat to the Russian Federation.

While holding the United States and the EU responsible for the regime-change project in Ukraine, the memorandum calls for summoning the USA to crisis-avoidance consultations under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Ukraine’s sovereignty or, if Budapest Memorandum signers Ukraine or Britain refuse such a conference, undertaking emergency Russian-American diplomacy based on the precedent of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—when the world went to the brink of nuclear war.

Several of the evaluations and ideas in the memorandum coincide with last week’s interviews and articles by Presidential advisor Academician Sergei Glazyev and retired Gen. Leonid Ivashov, who are Izborsk Club participants and were among the co-authors of the club’s early 2013 military strategic white paper (see “U.S. Moves toward Nuclear First Strike Capability,” [1] EIR, March 15, 2013).

The “Save Ukraine!” memorandum states that the situation in that country

“is approaching a boundary limit, beyond which lies the danger of Ukraine’s going fascist.”

Mikhail Dobkin, governor of the major industrial city of Kharkiv, has formed a “Ukrainian Front” to unite supporters of Yanukovich and “clean and purify our Ukrainian land of those who come here with plans for occupation”.
Describing opposition leaders as “a band of rabid nationalists”, Dobkin said the Ukrainian Front would use legal methods to resolve the country’s crisis, but “when we see that peaceful attempts to bring order to our country are exhausted, we will do it in a different way”.
The group is forming a “national guard”, comprising Cossacks, veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, martial arts clubs and the Night Wolves biker gang, which espouses Slavic and Russian Orthodox traditions and has ridden with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.---

Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in 1959. For some of Ukraine’s protesters – such as the ultranationalist Svoboda party and revolutionary Right Sector – Bandera and his fighters are heroes, their actions justified by their independence struggle for a people oppressed for centuries by foreign rulers, and their reputation subsequently besmirched by Moscow’s propaganda. And while the Ukrainian Front glorifies the Soviet wartime victory, many in western Ukraine recall it as purely a change in occupying regime, from German to Russian.