Consortiumnews
Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
A Ukraine Link to North Korea's Missiles?
August 15, 2017
Exclusive: By orchestrating the 2014 "regime change" in Ukraine, U.S.
neocons may have indirectly contributed to a desperate Ukrainian factory
selling advanced rocket engines to North Korea and endangering America,
writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
U.S. intelligence analysts reportedly have traced North Korea's leap forward
in creating an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking U.S.
territory to a decaying Ukrainian rocket-engine factory whose alleged role
could lift the cover off other suppressed mysteries related to the
U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.
North Korean missile launch on March 6, 2017.
Because the 2014 coup - overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych -
was partly orchestrated by the U.S. government's influential
neoconservatives and warmly embraced by the West's mainstream media, many of
the ugly features of the Kiev regime have been downplayed or ignored,
including the fact that corrupt oligarch Igor Kolomoisky was put in charge
of the area where the implicated factory was located.
As the region's governor, the thuggish Kolomoisky founded armed militias of
Ukrainian extremists, including neo-Nazis, who spearheaded the violence
against ethnic Russians in eastern provinces, which had voted heavily for
Yanukovych and tried to resist his violent overthrow.
Kolomoisky, who has triple citizenship from Ukraine, Cyprus and Israel, was
eventually ousted as governor of Dnipropetrovsk (now called Dnipro) on March
25, 2015, after a showdown with Ukraine's current President Petro Poroshenko
over control of the state-owned energy company, but by then Kolomoisky's
team had put its corrupt mark on the region.
At the time of the Kolomoisky-Poroshenko showdown, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko,
chief of the State Security Service, accused Dnipropetrovsk officials of
financing armed gangs and threatening investigators, Bloomberg News
reported, while noting that Ukraine had sunk to 142nd place out of 175
countries in Transparency International's Corruptions Perception Index, the
worst in Europe.
Even earlier in Kolomoisky's brutal reign, Dnipropetrovsk had become the
center for the violent intrigue that has plagued Ukraine for the past
several years, including the dispatch of neo-Nazi militias to kill ethnic
Russians who then turned to Russia for support.
Tolerating Nazis
Yet, protected by the waves of anti-Russian propaganda sweeping across the
West, Kolomoisky's crowd saw few reasons for restraint. So, among the
Kolomoisky-backed militias was the Azov battalion whose members marched with
Swastikas and other Nazi insignias.
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As
filmed by a Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
Ironically, the same Western media which heartily has condemned neo-Nazi and
white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, adopted a much more
tolerant attitude toward Ukraine's neo-Nazism even as those militants
murdered scores of ethnic Russians in Odessa in May 2014 and attacked ethnic
Russian communities in the east where thousands more died.
When it came to Ukraine, The New York Times and other mainstream outlets
were so dedicated to their anti-Russian propaganda that they veered between
minimizing the significance of the neo-Nazi militias and treating them as
bulwarks of Western civilization.
For instance, on Feb. 11, 2015, the Times published a long article by Rick
Lyman that presented the situation in the port city of Mariupol as if the
advance by ethnic Russian rebels amounted to the arrival of barbarians at
the gate while the inhabitants were being bravely defended by the forces of
civilization. But then the article cited the key role in that defense played
by the Azov battalion.
Though the article provided much color and detail and quoted an Azov leader
prominently, it left out the fact that the Azov battalion was composed of
neo-Nazis.
This inconvenient truth that neo-Nazis were central to Ukraine's
"self-defense forces" would have disrupted the desired propaganda message
about "Russian aggression." After all, wouldn't many Americans and Europeans
understand why Russia, which suffered some 27 million dead in World War II,
might be sensitive to neo-Nazis killing ethnic Russians on Russia's border?
So, in Lyman's article, the Times ignored Azov's well-known neo-Nazism and
referred to it simply as a "volunteer unit."
In other cases, the Times casually brushed past the key role of fascist
militants. In July 2015, the Times published a curiously upbeat story about
the good news that Islamic militants had joined with far-right and neo-Nazi
battalions to kill ethnic Russian rebels.
The article by Andrew E. Kramer reported that there were three Islamic
battalions "deployed to the hottest zones," such as around Mariupol. One of
the battalions was headed by a former Chechen warlord who went by the name
"Muslim," Kramer wrote, adding:
"The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century
Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right
Sector, a Ukrainian militia. Right Sector formed during last year's street
protests in Kiev from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups like
White Hammer and the Trident of Stepan Bandera.
"Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi, using the 'Wolf's Hook' symbol
associated with the [Nazi] SS. Without addressing the issue of the Nazi
symbol, the Chechen said he got along well with the nationalists because,
like him, they loved their homeland and hated the Russians."
Rockets for North Korea
The Times encountered another discomforting reality on Monday when
correspondents William J. Broad and David E. Sanger described U.S.
intelligence assessments pointing to North Korea's likely source of its new
and more powerful rocket engines as a Ukrainian factory in Dnipro.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Of course, the Times bent over backward to suggest that the blame might
still fall on Russia even though Dnipro is a stronghold of some of Ukraine's
most militantly anti-Russian politicians and although U.S. intelligence
analysts have centered their suspicions on a Ukrainian-government-owned
factory there, known as Yuzhmash.
So, it would seem clear that corrupt Ukrainian officials, possibly in
cahoots with financially pressed executives or employees of Yuzhmash, are
the likeliest suspects in the smuggling of these rocket engines to North
Korea.
Even the Times couldn't dodge that reality, saying: "Government
investigators and experts have focused their inquiries on a missile factory
in Dnipro, Ukraine." But the Times added that Dnipro is "on the edge of the
territory where Russia is fighting a low-level war to break off part of
Ukraine" - to suggest that the Russians somehow might have snuck into the
factory, stolen the engines and smuggled them to North Korea.
But the Times also cited the view of missile expert Michael Elleman, who
addressed North Korea's sudden access to more powerful engines in a study
issued this week by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"It's likely that these engines came from Ukraine - probably illicitly,"
Elleman said in an interview with the Times. "The big question is how many
they have and whether the Ukrainians are helping them now. I'm very
worried."
Yet, always looking for a chance to shift the blame to Russia, the Times
quickly inserted that "Mr. Elleman was unable to rule out the possibility
that a large Russian missile enterprise, Energomash, which has strong ties
to the Ukrainian complex, had a role in the transfer of the RD-250 engine
technology to North Korea."
Of course by that standard - "unable to rule out the possibility" - almost
anyone could be put under suspicion. One source familiar with the U.S.
intelligence assessments said there is even suspicion that some operatives
in Israel played a role in transferring the rocket engines to North Korea.
The source cited Israel's historic arms-trade with North Korea dating back
to Israel's covert arms pipeline to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the
1980s.
Israel, a rogue nuclear-weapons state itself, also has a history of
collaborating with other "pariah" states on nuclear proliferation, including
apartheid South Africa which joined Israel in nuclear tests before the
democratic election of Nelson Mandela.
Kolomoisky cultivated close ties between Israel and Dnipro by helping to
construct one of the largest Jewish centers in the world in the Ukrainian
city, which has fallen on hard times since the 2014 coup shattered economic
ties with Russia and left the Yuzhmash factory with little work.
Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky confronting journalists after he led an
armed team in a raid at the government-owned energy company on March 19,
2015. (Screen shot from YouTube)
Yet, while the Ukraine crisis may have reduced living standards for average
Ukrainians, it was an important catalyst in the creation of the New Cold War
between Washington and Moscow, which offers lucrative opportunities for U.S.
military contractors and their many think-tank apologists despite increasing
the risk of nuclear war for the rest of us.
In particular, U.S. neoconservatives have viewed heightened tensions between
the West and Russia as valuable both in driving up military spending and
laying the groundwork for a possible "regime change" in Moscow. The neocons
have wanted to retaliate against Russian President Vladimir Putin's role in
frustrating neocon (and Israeli-Saudi) desires to overthrow Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad and to bomb Iran, which Israel and Saudi Arabia now view as
their principal regional adversary.
The neocon/Israeli-Saudi interests have produced many strange bedfellows
with weapons flowing to Al Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, and - because of
Putin's assistance to Syria and Iran - the tolerance of neo-Nazis and
Islamic militants in Ukraine.
The MH-17 Case
Kolomoisky's operation in Dnipro also has come under suspicion for a
possible role in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on July 17,
2014. According to a source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts, Dnipro
was the center of a plot to use a powerful anti-aircraft missile to shoot
down Putin's official plane on a return flight from South America, but
instead - after Putin's plane took a more northerly route - the missile
brought down MH-17, killing all 298 people aboard.
Quinn Schansman, a dual U.S.-Dutch citizen killed aboard Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17 on July 17, 2014. (Photo from Facebook)
For reasons that have still not been explained, the Obama administration
suppressed U.S. intelligence reports on the MH-17 tragedy and instead joined
in pinning the shoot-down on ethnic Russian rebels and, by implication,
Putin and his government.
In the West, the MH-17 shoot-down became a cause celebre, generating a
powerful propaganda campaign to demonize Putin and Russia - and push Europe
into joining sanctions against Moscow. Few people dared question Russia
alleged guilt even though the Russia-did-it arguments were full of holes.
[See here and here.]
Now this North Korean case forces the issue of Ukraine's reckless behavior
to the fore again: Did an inept or corrupt Ukrainian bureaucracy participate
in or tolerate a scheme to sell powerful rocket engines to North Korea and
enable a nuclear threat to U.S. territory?
In response to the reports of possible Ukrainian collusion in North Korea's
missile program, Oleksandr Turchynov, secretary of the Ukrainian national
security and defense council, issued a bizarre denial suggesting that The
New York Times and U.S. intelligence agencies were pawns of Russia.
"This information [about North Korea possibly obtaining rocket engines from
Ukraine] is not based on any grounds, provocative by its content, and most
likely provoked by Russian secret services to cover their own crimes,"
Turchynov said.
Press reports about Turchynov's statement left out two salient facts: that
as the interim President following the February 2014 coup, Turchynov ordered
Right Sektor militants to begin the bloody siege of rebel-held Sloviansk, a
key escalation in the conflict, and that Turchynov was the one who appointed
Kolomoisky to be the ruler of Dnipropetrovsk.
