The leaked private phone conversation between senior US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the American ambassador to Ukraine – in which Nuland is heard to disparage the European Union with a vulgar expletive – comes as a welcome relief. It is a moment of clarity, in which the US government inadvertently comes clean on its hidden agenda.
All the elusive speculation about what Washington’s agenda in Ukraine is now laid to rest. Nuland’s own words make it clear that the US agenda is all about orchestrating regime change in Kiev. Needless to say, that constitutes an infringement of that country’s sovereignty and should now be a matter of applying sanctions under international law against the US.
It also undermines the political cause of protesters in Maidan Square. They are now seen, more than ever, as a Trojan Horse for external political interference in Ukraine. This is not a cause of patriotism, as we have been led to believe in the Western media, but rather more like grubby treachery to serve a foreign agenda.
For nearly three months, the American and European governments have been playing a frustratingly devious game of piously pretending to support “the people of Ukraine” in their bid for attaining EU integration and democracy. The charade has been frustrating because there is abundant evidence to show that both Washington and Brussels are engaging in regime change by subterfuge, but all the while the West maintains that it is simply acting as an honest broker to resolve a regional political crisis.
Now, thanks to Nuland’s foul-mouthed indiscretion, the speculation is over. Washington is in the business of orchestrating a coup d’état – just as many Ukrainian and Russian politicians have been claiming all along but couldn’t quite pin down as fact.
Of course, the term of regime change is given a politically correct-sounding label of “facilitating a technocratic government”. But it is a Washington-orchestrated coup nonetheless whereby a governing authority is imposed by fiat on a foreign nation.
Adding to the authenticity of the covert plan is the anger with which Washington responded to the embarrassing disclosure of Nuland’s conspiratorial briefing with the US ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt. Both the White House and the State Department denounced the leak as a “new low” in Russian diplomacy without denying the content of the phone call and its spellbinding revelation. In other words: we have been caught with our pants down, and that exposure is “an outrage”.
It is not clear which party actually exposed the American naked agenda of regime change – whether it was the Ukrainian or Russian secret service or some other source. The ethics of intruding on a private diplomatic communication can be debated. But this is unequivocally a case of the ends justifying the means because the ends in this case is the public interest to know what the US and its European allies are really up to in Ukraine.
Nuland’s imperious discussion on the composition of a new US-backed technocratic government in Ukraine – Washington prefers the Homeland Party leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk over the ADAR leader Vitaly Klitscho – puts everything in a new light.
American Vice President Joe Biden’s repeated phone calls to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich urging him to “take immediate steps to resolve the crisis”; and similar high-profile public calls from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, EU chiefs Herman Van Romquy and Jose Manuel Barroso, as well as NATO and the American and European media, all criticising the Kiev government while lionizing the protesters in Maidan Square – this is clearly now seen as a concerted campaign to destabilize the elected Ukrainian authorities. Nuland has confirmed it.
These are not the interventions of some helpful bystander, but rather they are all complementary efforts at regime change.
Interestingly though, Nuland’s disparagement of the EU (“f..k the EU,” she is heard to say) also reveals a sharp rivalry between Washington and Brussels in trying to mould the new Ukrainian governing junta. Obviously, these “allies” have their own national interests in play.
Last week, a Financial Times headline read: ‘West steps up bid to woo Ukraine as hryvnia falls to five-year low’. The report told how the International Monetary Fund and the EU were putting together a financial bailout for the embattled Ukrainian economy and its sliding hrynia currency. Clearly, the economic woes of Ukraine have been exacerbated by the ongoing street protests that the West has had a hand in fomenting, and now the West is using the crisis as a leverage on the government of Yanukovich.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton – speaking from Kiev on yet another official visit as an uninvited broker between the government and protesters – said that any financial aid was contingent on IMF-sponsored economic reforms.
The IMF economic reforms that Ashton alluded to are part of the long-term agenda of the US and the EU for opening up the Ukraine economy to Western capital. This goes back to the Western-sponsored Orange Revolution of 2004, which ushered in disastrous IMF-style shock therapy for the majority of Ukrainians. Those reforms under the former President Viktor Yushchenko were abandoned when Yanukovich was elected in 2010. Now it seems Washington and Europe want to turn the clock back to an era that the electorate had rejected.
But let’s return to the shadowy role of Victoria Nuland, the US Assistant Secretary of State. She has visited Ukraine on at least four occasions in recent weeks, each time pretending to act as interlocutor with the Kiev government, but whose partisan politics evidently lie with the Maidan protesters, who have used wanton violence to forcibly occupy government buildings and disrupt civilian administration in the Ukrainian capital.
Such seditious conduct by a Russian dignitary on the streets of Washington DC would spark an international incident. But Nuland and American arrogance seems to know no bounds.
Prior to her recent phone indiscretion, Nuland made another telling public remark on Washington’s involvement. On 13 December, she addressed a little publicised summit in the US capital, entitled the US-Ukraine Conference.
The event was sponsored by Chevron and ExxonMobil. Nuland told the partisan audience (her speech is available on YouTube) of how the US government has invested $5 billion in Ukraine since its independence in 1991 to “promote good governance and democracy”. This is Washington-speak for infiltrating its political agenda on a foreign government under the auspices of the CIA-linked USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and various other so-called think tanks. Think about it: $5bn. That’s a serious “investment”.
In her address to that Washington gathering, Nuland stipulated that the official US “vision” for Ukraine was for the former Soviet Republic to have a “European future” and that “IMF reforms were necessary”.
The senior US diplomat swooned about “feeling the energy” of the crowds at Maidan Square and how they were “protesting peacefully” with “enormous restraint”. This is the same crowd that later killed one policeman in Kiev, injured hundreds more officers and have set public property alight with petrol bombs.
But it was the following slip-of-the-tongue admission by Nuland to the Washington conference that bears close attention. At the event – dated December 13 – she tells the audience that she had just returned from Kiev on her “third trip in five weeks”. That puts her first visit to the Ukrainian capital some time in early to mid-November. So Nuland was in Kiev up to three weeks before the “spontaneous outbreak of protests” that apparently occurred after November 24, when the Yanukovich government rejected the EU trade agreement. Western politicians and media claim that these protests erupted in popular response to Yanukovich’s decision to decline the EU trade pact.
This begs the questions: what was Nuland doing in Ukraine three weeks before the protests apparently erupted; whom did she meet; and what were they discussing?
Ukrainian security sources are now claiming that they have evidence from computer files obtained after a raid on Yatsenyuk’s Homeland Party last month, which show that the protests had been planned long before the Kiev government dropped the EU pact at the Vilnius conference at the end of November.
Certainly, there are other signs of a premeditated insurgency in Kiev. The deployment of paramilitary riot techniques and methodical sabotage of government offices strongly suggest that the public demonstrations are being orchestrated by professional agents.
When Vitaly Klitscho returned from the Munich Security Conference last week, during which he briefed various Western political figures, including US Secretary of State John Kerry, his first port of call in Kiev was to inspect ranks of masked paramilitaries. Klitscho urged supporters to “set up vigilantes in every yard and on every street”.
Days later, the former heavyweight boxer was seen in the Ukrainian parliament wearing a suit and tie, along with his fascist political partner, Oleg Tyahnybok of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party. They unsuccessfully tried then to introduce new legislation curtailing the power of President Yanukovich.
Having failed in parliament, Klitscho and Tyahnybok were once again back on the streets rallying the vigilantes again to assert their political agenda.
Ironically, these same protesters claim they want to join the EU because they yearn for the “rule of law”.
But to paraphrase their Washington mentor, Victoria Nuland, it would seem that the only credo the Kiev agitators have is: “F..k the law!”
Reprinted with permission from the Strategic Culture Foundation.
