Declassified CIA Documents Reveal That U.S. Hand Picked Officials In Ukraine After 2014 Coup.

A Declassified CIA Document Accidentally Revealed That The U.S. Hand-Picked The Ukrainian Government After 2014 Coup.

Accidentally Exposing The Coup.

Recently, the CIA director John Ratcliffe put out heavily redacted CIA documents pertaining to Ukraine, in an apparent attempt to embarrass the Trump administration’s political opponent, Joe Biden.

The document was clearly put out for partisan reasons, redacting large sections, likely pertaining to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, and focusing on Joe Biden’s corruption.

One of the only sections not redacted in the document states that “officials within the Poroshenko administration privately mused at the U.S. media scrutiny of the alleged ties of the U.S. Vice President’s (then Joe Biden) family to corrupt business practices in Ukraine”, adding that “these officials viewed the alleged ties of the U.S. vice president’s family to corruption in Ukraine as evidence of a double-standard within the United States government towards matters of corruption and political power”.

While this section was clearly meant to be the focus of the declassified document, it also accidentally uncovered a more important revelation: that the United States was hand-picking officials in the government of Ukraine after backing a coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

The section states that, “These officials highlighted that, prior to the visit (from Joe Biden), the Poroshenko administration and other Ukrainian officials expected the U.S. Vice President to discuss personal matters with Poroshenko during the visit, and had assumed that the U.S. Vice President would advocate in support or against specific officials within the Ukrainian government”.

While the focus of the documents seems to be complaints that Joe Biden “had come to Kiev almost exclusively to give a public speech”, the more important line shows that the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government struck a deal with the United States, allowing the U.S. to hand-pick who is in and out of the government.

Turning Ukraine Into A U.S. Client State.

This document adds further evidence to the fact that the United States overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014, in order to turn Ukraine into a client state to fight Russia.

In 2013, Carl Gershman, who at the time was the head of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)- a cutout of the CIA’s regime change arm- wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post where he advocated for regime change in countries surrounding Russia, in hopes that as a result, “Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself” adding that “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.

As journalist Brank Marcetic reported that same year, the NED poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into NGOs like New Citizen, which the Financial Times said, “played a big role in getting protests up and running” against Viktor Yanukovych.

The protests were soon overtaken by far-right militants, including the Right Sector and Svoboda party.

The United States supported these militants in their quest to violently overthrow the Ukrainian government, with U.S. senators John McCain and Chris Murphy even traveling to Ukraine and standing next to Oleh Tiahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda party, as he called to overthrow the Ukrainian government.

Militants from Right Sector eventually fired snipers into crowds gathered in Ukraine’s Maidan Square, and then falsely blamed the massacre on Yanukovych’s police forces, in order to justify removing him in a violent coup.

After the coup had taken place, Chris Murphy returned from Ukraine and bragged on C-Span that the U.S. was behind it. Murphy bragged, “With respect to Ukraine, we have not sat on the sidelines; we have been very much involved. Members of the Senate have been there, members of the state department that have been there on the (Maidan) square”.

Murphy added, “The Obama administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions, and as I said, I really think the clear position of the United States has been in part what has led to this change in regime”.

He also stated, “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.

The Economist Jeffery Sachs was asked to advise the new government, and U.S. officials bragged to him that they were behind the coup, leading him to quickly leave Ukraine.

Sachs later revealed that, “I flew there (to Ukraine) … and when I got there somebody representing an American NGO … somebody explained to me how much American money had gone into pumping up the Maidan (coup). I saw it (the Americans said) we gave 50 thousand to this one (think tank), 5 million to this one, 5 thousand to this one, and so forth”.

Before the coup, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught handpicking who would be in and out of the new Ukrainian government, eventually deciding that “I think Yats is the guy,” referring to Ukrainian opposition figure Arseniy Yatseniuk, who became interim Prime Minister of Ukraine after the coup.

One reason for this, as Forbes magazine noted, was because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.

Another reason, as Konstantin Bondarenko- one of Ukraine’s leading political scientists- documented in his book, was that “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”He added, “this was why Western politicians, diplomats, and civil society representatives actively supported the Euromaidan as a mechanism for overthrowing Yanukovych, even going as far as providing financial support for the ‘revolutionary’ process.”

At the time in 2014, George Friedman, the director of the U.S. government tied private intelligence firm Stratfor, said :

At the beginning of this year there existed in Ukraine a slightly pro-Russian though very shaky government. That situation was fine for Moscow: after all, Russia did not want to completely control Ukraine or occupy it; it was enough that Ukraine not join NATO and the EU. Russian authorities cannot tolerate a situation in which western armed forces are located a hundred or so kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh.

The United States, for its part, were interested in forming a pro-Western government in Ukraine. They saw that Russia is on the rise, and were eager not to let it consolidate its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of the pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow the U.S. to contain Russia.

Russia calls the events that took place at the beginning of this year a coup d’etat organized by the United States. And it truly was the most blatant coup in history.

This continued well beyond the 2014 coup. Bondarenko noted that “On March 7 (of 2019), U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale held new meetings with the main presidential candidates,” including the current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky where, “Zelensky was clearly told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine and the need to follow the rules set by the American authorities in Ukraine after Maidan: cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements [the peace agreement to end the civil/proxy conflict in Eastern Ukraine], and protecting the interests of transnational corporations, among other things”.

Bondarenko noted that, “[then U.S.-backed Ukrainian president Petro] Poroshenko fully relied on his U.S. curators, believing that the State Department would see him as the only viable candidate to lead the country as the main outpost of American policy in Eurasia” but then “could not believe that the State Department would view him with indifference and reach the same agreement with Zelensky.”

The Ukrainian Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski, documented how Ukraine became a “client state” of the United States after the 2014 coup in his recent academic study of the Ukraine war, noting that:

Various evidence shows US administration involvement in appointments and dismissals of top Ukrainian government officials and in key policy and military decisions in Ukraine since the Maidan.

The Ukrainian media, Ukrainian and US officials, and a declassified transcript of a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine also revealed that the US and other Western governments told the Maidan government leaders not to use military force during the Russian annexation of Crimea in order to avoid a war with Russia.

Similarly, the Maidan leader of Ukraine, Oleksander Turchynov, declared in April 2014 “anti-terrorist operation” in Donbas and ordered the use of force against separatists and the Igor Girkin-led unit right after a secret visit of the CIA director. A former Ukrainian official stated that he witnessed that the CIA director during his secret visit to Ukraine in April 2014 pressed the Maidan-led Ukrainian government leaders to use force in Donbas.

The Western governments and foundations, such as Soros foundation, funded all but one of about two dozen Ukrainian NGOs, which initially issued in 2019 a collective statement that any talks with Donbas separatists were impermissible after the head of the Zelenskyy’s presidential administration supported creation of a consulting group with representatives of the separatist-controlled Donbas during the Minsk negotiations.

The nearly perfect alignment of the Ukrainian and US government policies after the Maidan is also consistent with Ukraine becoming a US client state and remaining during the Ukraine-Russia war.

Now, declassified CIA documents show that the United States has been hand-picking who will be in and out of the Ukrainian government since 2014.

This was all done to use Ukraine to “weaken Russia” and has continued throughout the ongoing proxy war that started in February 2022.

As Katchanovski noted, “Without massive Western military, financial, and humanitarian aid, Ukraine would have lost the war much sooner and would have been forced to reach a peace deal with Russia largely on Russian terms. Zelenskyy admitted during his US visit in September 2023 in the US Congress that ‘if we don’t get the aid, we will lose the war.’ Josep Borrell, the EU chief for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, also stated in October 2024 that ‘if we stop supporting Ukraine, the war will be over in fifteen days and Putin will achieve his goals.’ The prolongation of the war without real prospects of Ukraine winning the war also meant large military and civilian casualties, economic and other damage, and much worse conditions for Ukraine for any future peace deal” adding that, “Various evidence of US and UK direct involvement in planning, training, intelligence gathering, arming, and financing of the Ukrainian forces, in particular, for the Kherson and Kharkiv counter-offensives in 2022 and the summer 2023 counteroffensive, is also consistent with the proxy war and Ukraine as a US client state”.

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