Escalating the new Cold War with Russia via Ukraine: Bidens Unprincipled
Stands Involving Covert Operations, Blackmail, Corruption, Nepotism and
State Terrorism
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - February 20, 2021 0
Biden, next to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019), addresses
Ukraines parliament. [Source: voxnews.com]
Part 5 in our Biden Series: The long suppressed facts involving Biden and
the Ukraine are clear, documented, and undisputed, even though you will
never read them in The New York Times.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And even a liar like Donald Trump
can sometimes tell the truth. During the 2020 election campaign, Trump
accused Biden of corruption with regard to secret deals involving the
Ukraine and China, in which the Vice President venally leveraged the power
of his office and title to enrich himself and his son in clear violation of
the law.
In that charge, Trump was absolutely right. But he did not know the half of
it. Joe Bidens history of deceit and corruption did not begin with the 2020
election campaign, nor is it limited to his dealings with the Ukraine and
China, although they are a good place to start unraveling the myth of Joe
Biden as secular saint, whose incorruptible honesty and nobility of
character have been so vigorously propagated by corporate media and
internalized even by large segments of the left.
For example, let us look at Ukrainegate and Joe Bidens part in it.
On Eastern Sunday, 2014, Joe Biden boarded Air Force 2 bound for Kyiv. Two
months earlier, Ukraine had been roiled by protests centered in Maidan
Square which resulted in the toppling of pro-Russian President Viktor
Yanukovych in a coup détat. Biden had known Yanukovych well, speaking to
him on the phone nine times during the crisis. The official purpose of
Bidens trip, according to journalist Evan Osnos, was to reassure Ukraines
fragile new government and deter Vladimir Putin from moving deeper into
Ukrainian territory.
Once in Kyiv, Biden met with Vitali Klitschko, a 67 former heavyweight
boxing champion known as Dr. Iron Fist before he entered politics, who was
supported by the State Department, and Petro Poroshenko, the future
president who had made his fortune in the candy business.
Biden promised in the meeting a small aid package$58 million in election
help, energy expertise and nonlethal security equipment including radios for
border patrol. More importantly, Biden wanted to convey a message for the
new leaders in Kyivnamely that regaining legitimacy would require change
beyond just resisting Russian interference. Addressing parliament, Biden
said that you have to fight the cancer of corruption that is endemic in
your system right now.[1]
Ring Hollow?
Bidens words came to ring hollow over timecertainly in the eyes of many
Ukrainians.
A month after Bidens speech, his youngest son, Hunter, was appointed to the
Board of Directors of and head of legal affairs for Burisma, an oil and gas
company owned by former ecology minister Mykola Zlochevsky, who was then
under investigation for money laundering and tax fraud.
Mykola Zlochevsky. A State Department official called him an odious
oligarch. [Source: kyivpost.com]
Hunter was paid $83,000 per month for five years (at least $3.6 million in
total), even though he had no previous experience in Ukraine or in the oil
and gas business, and never visited Ukraine for company business during his
time on the board.[2]
Hunter Biden [Source: wsj.com]
Dismissed from the Navy for cocaine use mere months before his Burisma
appointment, Hunter was no stranger to trading on his fathers name for
influence.
He had served on the board of Amtrak, the train his father famously rode to
work every day, became senior vice president of MBNA, a bank that was a top
contributor to Joe Bidens Senate campaigns, and was appointed to the board
of the National Democratic Institute, which pushed for regime change in
Ukraine before the Maidan Square protests.
In December 2015, when Vice President Biden again visited Ukraine, he gave
an ultimatum to now-President Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk that they fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who had six
active criminal cases against Burisma.
If they did not fire Shokinwhom Biden claimed was corruptBiden said that
the U.S. would not provide Ukraine with a $1 billion loan.
Biden subsequently called Poroshenko eight times in four days to reiterate
his demands and called again afterwards to express his satisfaction with
Shokins removal in March 2016.
According to Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a former member of parliament,
Poroshenko paid bribes amounting to $2 million to get the parliament to
sanction Shokins removalwhen initially it was reluctant to do so.
Biden brazenly admitted to blackmail before the Council on Foreign Relations
in January 2018, stating that he told Poroshenko that his plane was leaving
in six hours and that he wouldnt get his $1 billion if the prosecutor was
not fired
well son of a bitch, he [Shokin] got fired
.and they put in his
place someone solid.
Viktor Shokin [Source: rferl.org]
Shokin had been a relatively honest prosecutor, whereas his successor, Yuriy
Lutsenko was anything but solid.
For one thing, Lutsenko did not even have a law degree, marking him as
ill-qualified for the position of Prosecutor General.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia and Governor of the
Ukrainian province of Odessa in 2019, called Lutsenko a filthy creature
and typical crook who closed corruption cases for dough.
In 2010, Lutsenko was convicted and sent to prison for four years for
embezzlement and abuse of authority while serving as Minister of the
Interior. The abuse included appointment of his personal driver as an
intelligence officer, illegal wiretapping and use of state resources for his
private entertainment and a fancy holiday in the Seychelles with his
wife.[3]
Within two months of Lutsenkos appointment, in January 2017, the case
against Burisma was closed after Zlochevsky paid a $7 million finewhen he
stood accused of defrauding the government of $40 million.
Yuriy Lutsenko [Source: nbcnews.com]
Less than a week later, Biden returned to Ukraine for his last visit as Vice
President and praised the progress in the country since the Maidan protest,
singling out the anti-corruption prosecutor for special praise.
Viktor Shokin provided an interview to ABC Newswhich never airedin which
he stated that he had been given hints to stop the investigation into
Zlochevsky and Burisma, which proved to be his undoing.
Shokin noted that he had plans to interrogate Hunter Biden and Devon Archer,
a financial adviser to John Kerry later convicted of defrauding the Oglala
Sioux tribe, who was also appointed to Burismas board, and said that, if
Biden had evidence of his corruption that justified his firing, he would
have presented itwhich he did not.[4]
Joe and Hunter Biden golfing in the Hamptons in 2014 with Devon Archer who
served on the executive board of Burisma with Hunter. [Source: nypost.com]
In hindsight it is clear that, in order to avoid prosecution and loss of his
lucrative business, Zlochevsky had paid a bribe to Biden Sr. through his
son.
In 2015, George Kent, the State Departments anticorruption coordinator for
Europe and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, had
raised concerns about Hunters appointment at Burisma, stating it was very
awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.
Kents concerns went unaddressed.
George Kent [Source: nytimes.com]
Biden claimed that he had never spoken to my son about his overseas
business dealings.
However, a trove of documents recovered from Hunters laptop computerwhich
Hunter never picked up from a repair shop in Delawarepointed to a meeting
between Joe Biden and Vadym Pozharskiy, an adviser to the board of Burisma
in April 2017 in Washington D.C., which Hunter had set up.
In one email, Pozharskiy wrote:
Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to
meet your father and spend some time together. Its really an honor and
pleasure. As we spoke yesterday evening, would be great to meet today for a
quick coffee. What do you think? I could come to your office somewhere
around noon or so, before or on my way to airport. Best, V.
[Source: nypost.com]
No Ordinary Company
Burisma Holdings was no ordinary company but central to larger geopolitical
intrigues playing out in the new Cold War.
Founded in 2002 and incorporated in Cyprus in 2006, Burisma benefited from
concessions granted to Zlochevsky when he served as Minister of Ecology, a
position that was responsible for giving out licenses for oil and gas
extraction.
[Source: burisma-group.com]
After the Maidan coup, Burisma received U.S. AID funding as part of a $13.5
million energy security and reform project promoted by Joe Biden, whose main
goal was to lessen Ukraines energy dependence on Russia.
Burisma at this time poured $250,000 to the pro-NATO, anti-Russian Atlantic
Council think-tank, which adopted a proposal for arming the Ukrainian
military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles, which
Biden advocated for.[5]
Biden is given an award by the Burisma-funded think-tank, the Atlantic
Council. [Source: consortiumnews.com]
Journalist John Helmer found strong circumstantial evidence that the central
shareholder of Burisma was not Zlochevsky, but Ihor Kolomoisky, Ukraines
most powerful oligarch who kept a live shark in a huge tank in his office to
intimidate visitors.
Ihor Kolomoisky [Source: wikipedia.org]
According to Helmer, Kolomoisky controlled Burisma through the two genuine
directors of Burismas boardAnzelika Pasenidou and Riginos Kharalambuswho
worked for a Cyprus-based law firm connected to Kolomoisky.[6]
The Ukrainian media had reported that Shokins predecessor as Prosecutor
General, Vitaly Yarema, was ousted on February 11, 2015 because he had
reopened the Burisma investigation aiming not at Zlochevsky, but Kolomoisky,
who had him fired.
In considering all this, Bidens corrupt actions related to Burisma and his
son appear designed to have advanced the proxy war against the Russians in
Eastern Ukraine.
Kolomoisky financed private militias, such as the 2,000-person Dnipro
battalion and neo-Nazi led Azov battalion, which played a key role in
halting the advance of rebels from their strongholds in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The war in Eastern Ukraine broke out after these latter two provinces voted
to secede following the Maidan coup, drawing the Russians in subsequently.
Kolomoisky was appointed as Governor of his home Dnipropetrovsk region near
the wars front line.
Dnipro battalion funded by Kolomoisky at a cost of $10 million. [Source:
businessinsider.com]
His militias were crucial to the war because the Ukrainian military was
ambivalent about fighting its own citizens and the militias could be
financed privately.
The militias were implicated in war crimes including illegal abductions,
unlawful detention, robbery, extortion and even possible executions.
Their ranks included 17,000 foreign mercenaries from over 50 countries,
including some U.S. white supremacists who came to Ukraine to fight the
Russians.
In January 2016, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Ash Carter pressured
Congress to remove an amendment sponsored by John Conyers (D-MI) and Ted
Yoho (R-FL) banning funding for the Ukrainian far-right Azov Battalion.
A young Azov recruit holds his rifle during basic training. His tattoos
feature symbols often used by right-wing radicals around the world,
including the Black Sun and Thors Hammer. [Source: time.com]
A telling sign of Burismas fronting for a CIA black operation was its
appointment of Cofer Black to its board in February 2017.
Black was a top CIA official whose experience running clandestine wars went
back to the Reagan administrations covert action program in Angola, where
the CIA armed anticommunist warlord Jonas Savimbi.
From 2005 to 2008, Black served as vice chairman of Blackwater. He had also
run the CIAs anti-bin Laden unit before forming his own private
intelligence company, Total Intelligence Solutions.[7]
Cofer Black [Source: wikipedia.org]
Author Russ Bellant has compared Biden to JFK and Allen Dulles who raised a
private army to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
In both cases, the U.S. government used private companies to raise revenues
and fronts for arms smuggling and clandestine operations run by right-wing
extremists.
Neither Kennedy nor Dulles, however, involved their own family members in
extortion schemes.
Biden: A Bridge Between Cold War I and Cold War II
Bidens support for a proxy war against Russia is not surprising given his
background.
As CAM previously reported, Biden was mentored as a twenty-nine-year-old
kid in the Senate in the early 1970s by W. Averell Harriman, one of the
fathers of the Cold War.
Harriman was the son of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman and founding partner
of the top Wall Street investment firm, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., which
invested in lucrative mining ventures in the Soviet Union that were
abrogated by communist nationalization decrees.
The loss of profit helped fuel Harrimans lifelong hatred for Soviet Russia.
He pressed for anti-Soviet policies as U.S. ambassador to the USSR from 1943
to 1946 and as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific
Affairs and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the early 1960s
when he supported an escalation of the Vietnam War.[8] Harriman also
directed the Marshall Planan economic aid program targeting Western Europe
that was designed to isolate the Soviet Union, among other goals.
W. Averell Harriman [Source: adst.org]
Joe Biden followed his mentor by working to advance U.S. foreign policy in
the Cold War.
In 1976, Biden told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he had no
illusions about Soviet intentions and capabilities in the world and
expressed agreement with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) that
isolationism was a dangerous and naïve foundation upon which to rest our
foreign policy.
In January 1980, Senator Biden sponsored a congressional resolution with
Frank Church (D-ND) promoting a boycott of the Moscow Olympics because of
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and in December 1982 sponsored a
resolution with Senator Paul Tsongas (D-MA) promoting material support for
the Afghan mujahadin, CIA-backed Islamic jihadists that fought against
Soviet occupation.
When Biden earlier met with Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin during arms
control negotiations, he brashly told him Im from Delaware and we have a
sayingyou cant shit a shitter. This was translated into Russian as you
cant fool a comrade.
At that time, Biden was considered a proponent of arms control negotiation
and détente which Harriman had also come to support by this time.
Biden supported the SALT II arms control treaty signed by Jimmy Carter and
Leonid Brezhnev in June 1979, and visited Moscow in 1988 as part of a
delegation that aimed to ratify the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
(INF), which set limits on mid-range nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden (right) sits opposite Andrei Gromyko, chairman of the Presidium of
the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, during negotiations in Moscow in 1988 to
ratify the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty. [Source:
theguardian.com]
If we had the Biden of the 1970s and 80s [in the White House], people
would not be worried, said Sergey Karaganov, a prominent foreign policy
expert who said he had played a role organizing trips attended by Biden in
the 1980s.
Bidens attitude toward Russia became more hostile by the time of Cold War
II.
In the 1990s, as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden
championed the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, a policy that angered the
Russians who had been promised in 1991 that NATO would not be expanded
eastward toward its border.
In April 1998, Biden voted no on limiting NATO expansion to Poland,
Hungary and the Czech Republic, a measure vetoed by President Clinton.
NATO expansion absorbed Eastern Europe, leading to conflicts over the
Ukraine and Georgia in the 2010. [Source: peacehistory-usfp.org]
George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine who had
worked under Averell Harriman when he was ambassador to the Soviet Union,
warned that NATO expansion would amount to a strategic blunder of epic
proportions and the most fateful error of American policy in the entire
post-Cold War era.
The reason is that it would inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and
militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, restore the atmosphere of the
cold war to East-West relations and impel Russian foreign policy in a
direction decidedly not to our likingwhich is exactly what happened. [9]
George F. Kennan in the 1990s warned against NATO expansion, which Biden
supported. [Source: russiamatters.org]
After the Senate vote ratifying NATO expansion into Poland, Hungary and the
Czech Republic on April 30, 1998, Biden told the Washington Post quite
dubiously that NATO brought the West a half-century of security, and this,
in fact, is the beginning of another fifty years of peace.
Biden added that
in a larger sense, well be righting a historical injustice forced upon the
Poles, Czechs and Hungarians by Joseph Stalin [Secretary General of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1922-1953, and Soviet Premier,
1941-1953].
Spoken like a true cold warrior.
Senator Joe Biden listening to President Bill Clinton during a NATO
expansion meeting in 1997. [Source: cbc.ca]
Support for Color Revolutions
In 2009, Biden supported Ukraines bid for NATO membership, conceiving of
Ukraine as an important country whose integration into the West would
undercut Russian power.
Five years earlier, Biden had supported a color revolution after contested
elections, which replaced Viktor Yanukovych with Viktor Yuschenko as
Ukraines head of state.
Yuschenko was favored by the U.S. because he wanted Ukraine to join NATO,
had followed an IMF program of neoliberal austerity as head of the Ukrainian
Central Bank in the 1990s, and told Moscow that it had to vacate its naval
base in Sevastapol in the Crimea by 2017.
Biden and Yuschenko in 2009. [Source: nbcnews.com]
The U.S. government spent at least $34 million promoting regime change in
2004 in Ukraine through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), while
hedge-fund billionaire George Soros pitched in another $1.6 million.
NED activists and Soros-funded groups employed a broad public relations
strategy to aid the color revolution, busing paid out-of-town protesters
into Kyiv, creating an online TV protest station and agitation
paraphernalia, and providing offshore training to the anti-Yanukovych
student leadership based on a template revolutionary strategy and the
writings of Gene Sharp they had previously successfully employed in Serbia
with a youth group called Otpor.
2004 color revolution in Ukraine. [Source: cfr.org]
When he visited Ukraine as Vice President in 2009, Biden said that he was
still inspired, as many Americans are by what happened here less than five
years ago, the sea of orange that flooded independence square, the hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians demanding peacefully that their votes be counted
and that their voices be heard is something that will not be forgotten for a
long, long time.
Biden continued: Forty years before that momentous event of 2004, former
president Eisenhower in Washington D.C. had unveiled a monument to the great
Ukrainian poet Shevchenko dedicated to liberation, freedom and independence
of all captive nations
Forty years later in 2004, we saw the power of what
a free people demanding justice could accomplish.
While the color revolution was unfolding, Senator Biden had supported Senate
resolution 485 condemning fraud in Ukraines 2004 election.
He also supported Senate Resolution 202 condemning the Stalinist regime for
causing the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) of the 1930s that allegedly killed
millions of people. The latter resolution was opposed by Russia which
contests Stalins responsibility for the famine.
Russias perspective has been validated by historian Mark Tauger, whose
research determined that Ukraines famine had environmental causes, which
Soviet policies aimed to overcome.
Bidens Cold War outlook was apparent in his sponsorship of the Silk Road
Strategy Act of 1999 and 2006, which aimed to expand U.S. investments and
influence in the oil-rich countries of Central Asia in order to undercut
Russian power.[10]
Senator Biden also sponsored the 2003 Belarus Democracy Act, whose intention
was to provoke a color revolution in Belarus resulting in the overthrow of
Socialist leader Alexander Lukashenko who had successfully resisted
Western-imposed privatization measures (shock therapy) and secured low
poverty and inequality levels.[11]
Biden characterized Lukashenko as a neofascist head-case.[12]
Biden, by contrast, lavished praise on Georgian President Mikheil
Saakashvili (2004-2013) who was sentenced to three years in prison in
absentia for covering up the murder of a Georgian banker, Sandro Girgvliani.
Saakashvili also violently cracked down on opposition protestors and
triggered a war with Russia when Georgian forces invaded the breakaway
provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in August 2008.
Saakashvili pins a medal on Biden in July 2009. [Source: facebook.com]
In 2004, Biden had sponsored an amendment with John McCain to honor the
people of Georgia on the first anniversary of the Rose Revolution, another
NED-sponsored action which had brought Saakashvili to power.
Besides triggering the war with Russia, Saakashvili supported NATO
membership for Georgia, inaugurated a Bechtel-constructed oil pipeline that
bypassed Russia, and sent Georgian troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
On the eve of the Russia-Georgia war, Biden sponsored a resolution
condemning Russia for allegedly making provocative statements toward Georgia
and denouncing any efforts by Russia to assert greater influence over the
breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Biden claimed was a
thinly veiled effort at annexation.
The New York Times reported, however, that most residents of South Ossetia
especially wanted to become part of Russia.
Their goal was to reunite with the North Ossetians in Russia to restore
Alania, an ancient kingdom they believe was home to their ancestors, the
Scythians, appealing directly to the Russian Duma in 2004 to appropriate
their territory.
Murad Dzhioyev, South Ossetias minister for foreign affairs, stated:
Everything Saakashvili does is organized by your country [the U.S.], and
every child here knows this. Western taxpayers should think where their
taxes go. We are killed by Western weapons.[13]
Georgian tank rampages through South Ossetia in August 2008 in another
unjust war backed by Biden. [Source: theguardian.com]
Standing up to the Kremlin
Bidens approach to Georgia and Ukraine was consistent with his
second-career act as a new Cold Warrior.
In the mid 2000s, Biden began warning the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
about Russias growing authoritarianism, stating that, since Putin took
office in 2000, Russia had experienced in my eyes, the biggest rollback of
democracy thats occurred anywhere in the world in decades.
[Source: peacehistory.usfp.org]
Putins predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, however, had ordered Russian soldiers to
storm the parliament resulting in the death of over 100 people, and won
thoroughly corrupted elections in 1996 in which he was assisted by U.S.
consultants.
In 1993, Senator Biden promoted a $1.6 billion aid package to Russia, whose
purpose, according to Strobe Talbott, President Bill Clintons point man on
Russia, was an investment in revolution, an attempt to help Russia complete
the destruction of one system and the building, virtually de novo, of a new
one.
Under this new system, major social gains resulting from state-funded
education, health care and housing in the Soviet-era were reversed, and
state industries were sold off to Yeltsins cronies for a fraction of their
worth under an ill-conceived privatization scheme.
Millions lost their life savings after Russia defaulted on its debt and
devalued its currency in response to crippling hyperinflation. According to
World Bank data, life expectancy for men plummeted from 63 ½ in 1991 to 57 ½
in 1994.
[Source: economist.com]
In the January/February 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, Biden co-authored an
article with his aide Michael Carpenter, How to Stand Up to the Kremlin
which accused Putin of brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western
democracy around the world through coordinated attacks across many
domainsmilitary, political, economical, informational.
These charges were part of a vendetta against Putin who had reasserted
Russian control over its economy and begun to reverse the disastrous
policies advocated by Biden and other Clintonites in the 1990s.
Biden and Carpenter called for the forward deployment of NATO troops and
military capabilities to Eastern Europe to deter and if necessary defeat a
Russian attack [against one of the alliances member states,] heightened
efforts to root out disinformation, especially on social media, and the
imposition of greater costs on Russia for its violations of international
law and other countries sovereigntyincluding through tougher sanctions,
which were already very harsh.[14]
Biden followed up his Foreign Affairs piece by attacking Donald Trump during
the 2020 election campaign for his alleged subservience to Putin and for
being Putins puppy.
This even though Trump had expanded sanctions on Russia and pulled out of
the INF treaty which Biden had supported in the late 1980s.
Obamas Point-Person on Ukraine
During his vice presidency, Biden was appointed as the Obama
administrations point person on Ukraine and traveled there a record six
times.
Bidens foreign policy adviser Michael Carpenter stated that Ukraine was
one of the top three foreign policy issues we were concentrating on. Biden
was front and center.
During Bidens December 2015 visit where he engaged in blackmail, Biden gave
a stirring speech to the Ukrainian parliament in which he said that the
world had been transfixed by the thousands of brave Ukrainians storming
the Maidan, demanding a revolution of dignity and then was horrified when
the peaceful patriots were met by violence.
Biden speaks before the Ukrainian parliament on the same visit in which he
blackmailed Ukrainian leaders. [Source: nytimes.com]
The heavenly hundred endured fire and ice snipers on rooftops and paid
the ultimate price of patriots the world over, their blood and courage
delivering to the Ukrainian people a second chance for freedom.
Biden pays tribute to the heavenly hundred. [Source: kyivpost.com]
Bidens assessmentrepresenting the official U.S. government viewleft out
the fact that many of the Maidan square protesters were admirers of Stephen
Bandera, a Nazi collaborator in World War II, and had fascist sympathies.
Bidens patriots included far-right neo-Nazis, featured here in the Maidan
protests. [Source: opendemocracy.net]
A percentage of the heavenly hundred were also killed by snipers who were
insurgents participating in black-flag operations that were designed to
discredit Yanukovychs security forces.
Biden left out further that 48 Yanukovych supporters were killed after
far-right activists forced them into a trade union building in Odessa and
then burned it down.[15]
Burning of trade union building in Odessa on May 2, 2014, which Biden never
acknowledged. Forty-eight people were killed by right-wing extremists.
[Source: theguardian.com]
Yanukovych for his part was willing to accept a deal that would have
restored the 2005 constitution and power-sharing arrangement and set up
elections for December.
The Maidan protesters rejected the compromise, although they did not amass
enough signatures for impeachment, thus necessitating the overthrow of
Yanukovych through a coup.[16]
Biden in his December 2015 speech claimed that Russia had started the war in
Eastern Ukraine by occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory and that the U.S.
does not, will not, never will recognize Russias attempt to annex Crimea.
In reality, the war in the East started when the post-Maidan government
refused to recognize the Eastern provinces vote to secede from the Ukraine.
The refusal to recognize Crimea was similarly a political decision stemming
from Americas vendetta against the Putin government which was more
nationalistic than its predecessor.
Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to rejoin Russia, which remembered Yuschenkos
promise to close down its naval facility at Sevastapol by 2017.
Crimeans cheer results of referendum which put Crimea back under Russian
control. [Source: time.com]
Bidens characterization of the leaders of the Eastern Donbass province as
separatists, thugs and criminals was not one shared by people of the
region.
Nor was Bidens strong praise for Petro Poroshenko, a billionaire
representative of the countrys oligarchy, who presided over a regime that
was considered the most corrupt in Europe.[17]
In a January 2017 speech, Biden told Ukrainians that Poroshenko had
overhauled your [Ukrainian] government, your economy, your entire political
system.
But Poroshenko was so unpopular that he lost the 2019 elections resoundingly
to a comedian with no previous political experience.
Biden, when addressing Ukraines parliament, advocated for IMF austerity
measures requiring sacrifice such as raising the pension age, which helped
seal Poroshenkos political fate.[18]
Poroshenko also supported fracking, to the benefit of Burisma, and the
privatization of Ukrainian farmland.
The latter was opened up to chemical products sold by Monsantowhich
invested $140 million in building a new seed plant just weeks after the
Maidan coupand by DuPont, the Delaware based corporation that Biden had
deep ties to. DuPont opened a seed plant in Ukraine in 2013 to support
increased demand for Pioneer brand corn hybrids.[19]
Biden and Poroshenko enjoy a laugh. [Source: wsj.com]
Within the Obama administration, Biden promoted greater economic aid and
military support to Ukraine for the conflict in the east that resulted in
the deaths of more than 13,000 people and displacement of over one million
more.
Home destroyed in Donetsk after shelling by Ukrainian military. Biden
lobbied for greater military assistance to Ukraine despite its sponsorship
of wide-scale human rights abuses. [Source: abc.net.au]
On his 2014 Easter visit to Kyiv, Biden pressured the Ukrainian government
through aid inducements to sustain the war in the East in the face of troop
desertions.
Biden in turn spearheaded the effort to send U.S. troops to train Ukrainian
Special Forces, to provide critical military equipment, including armored
Humvees and surveillance drones, and valuable security and intelligence
support.
Column of Ukrainian military tanks rolls through Donetsk. [Source: cfr.org]
He further lobbied for the provision of Javelin anti-tank missiles and other
lethal weapons, which were authorized only under President Donald Trump.
Ukrainian service members ride on armored personnel carriers with Javelin
anti-tank missiles during a military parade in Kyiv on August 24, 2018.
[Source: slate.com]
Who Paid the Piper?
Bidens actions in Ukraine was shaped in part by the roster of defense
contractors who have funded his political campaigns and stood to benefit
from an expansion of the new Cold War.
Lockheed Martin, one of the main manufacturers of Javelin anti-tank
missiles, gave Biden $422,088 during the 2020 campaign through individual
employees, and spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year.
Raytheon Technologies, which also manufactures key parts of the Javelin
missile, gave $493,294 to Biden in the 2020 election cycle compared to
$425,972 to Donald Trump. Biden appointed a member of its Board of
Directors, former General Lloyd J. Austin III as Defense Secretary.
Bidens home town of Scranton has a large Ukrainian-American community and
Bidens top assistant, Michael Carpenter, was a member of the U.S.-Ukraine
Foundations Friends of the Ukraine Network (FOUN), a lobby group supported
by retired military officers and Pentagon officials which has pushed for
aggressive measures directed against Russia.
In 2018, Carpenter hosted Andriy Parubiy, a far-right Ukrainian legislator
and founder of the neo-fascist Social-National Party, when he visited
Washington.
Michael Carpenter [Source: global.upenn.edu]
Why Did Biden Get away with It?
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden benefited from the support of
the mainstream and even progressive media, which failed to properly report
on his corrupt dealings in Ukraine and accepted Bidens claim that any
reports of malfeasance were Russian disinformation.
The few journalists who tried to discuss the story were vilified, including
Glen Greenwald, who resigned from The Intercept because it refused to
publish his piece on the topic.[20]
When Bernie Sanders loyalists criticize Bidens foreign policy, they focus
on Iraq and Israel, but never Ukraine.[21]
The reason for all this is simple: Unlike during the first Cold War, when
there was at least some space for reasonable debate, the political climate
has become increasingly authoritarian and oppressive.
Stopping the Ukraine War or détente with Russia is not a fashionable cause
on the left because of its current fixation with identity politics and race;
the victims of the Ukraine war are white.
Additionally, the U.S. left has been so intent on destroying Donald Trump
that they fell into line with the rhetoric of the new Cold War since Trump
was accused of being a Russian agent.
The main beneficiary of all this has been Biden who rivals Donald Trump and
others, like Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, as one of the most corrupt and
unprincipled men to have been elected U.S. President in the modern era.
