Professor Jeffery Sachs Is Right About The Maidan Coup In Ukraine.
The Professor Jeffery Sachs Was Smeared For His Comments On The Maidan Coup In Ukraine, But The Facts Show He Is Correct.
The Columbia University Professor and Economist Jeffery Sachs recently appeared on the Italian TV show PiazzaPulita, where he correctly stated that the United States funded and backed the 2014 “Maidan Coup” in Ukraine against Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Sachs said, “The United States paid for the overthrow (of Yanukovych). I was there,I saw it, I was taken around the Maidan by the people who paid for it”.
For stating these facts, the Italian politician and supporter of the Ukraine proxy war, Carlo Calenda, said to Sachs, “I think you are lying”, and accused the professor of “making Putinist propaganda”.
But a look at the facts shows that what Sachs said is 100 percent accurate and that Carlo Calenda is the actual propagandist.
Sachs, in the interview, says, “I was taken around, and they (Americans) explained to me, we gave 15,000 to this one, 20,000 to that one”.
What Sachs is referring to is the fact that the CIA, through its cutouts like NED and USAID, funded the NGOs that sparked the protests, which eventually led to the coup against Yanukovych.
Sachs explains this further in his article on the subject, where he wrote, “I happened to see the US complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about US funding of the Maidan protest.”
One does not need to take Sachs’s word for it, this is all backed up by publicly available information.
The head of the NED (National Endowment for Democracy) , a cutout of the CIA meddling arm, Carl Gershman, even boasted about this plan in the Washington Post before enacting it.
He wrote, “the United States needs to engage with the governments and with civil society in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova” in order to bring about regime change, adding, “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help”.
He wrote that he believed this would lead to regime change in Russia, writing:
Russian democracy also can benefit from this process. Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. There are signs of the emergence of a new Russian nationalism: the strong performance by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow’s recent mayoral election and polls that show greater opposition to Putin in the Russian provinces, his traditional support base. This nationalism is concerned not with the restoration of Russia’s imperial greatness, which would be inconceivable if Ukraine joined Europe, but with fighting corruption and addressing the severe economic and social problems of the Russian people.
Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.
In this plan, Gershman bragged, “Ukraine is the biggest prize”.
As journalist Brank Marcetic noted, “In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running,’ led by a pro-EU opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives”, such as the NED.
This is far from the full extent of the U.S. involvement in the coup against Yanukovych.
The protests were soon overtaken by far-right extremists, who wanted to overthrow Viktor Yanukovych in a violent coup.
Marcetic noted:
The driver of this violence was largely the Ukrainian far right, which, while a minority of the protesters, served as a kind of revolutionary vanguard. Looking outside Kyiv, a systematic analysis of more than 3,000 Maidan protests found that members of the far-right Svoboda party — whose leader once complained Ukraine was run by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” and which includes a politician who admires Joseph Goebbels — were the most active agents in the protests. They were also more likely to take part in violent actions than any group but one: Right Sector, a collection of far-right activists that traces its lineage to genocidal Nazi collaborators.
The American Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy even went to Ukraine and stood alongside Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far-right Svoboda party while he called to violently overthrow Yanukovych.
After the far-right militants succeeded in their coup, Murphy returned to the U.S. and bragged that the U.S. was behind it.
On C-Span, 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” adding, “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” and concluding, “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office”.
To justify supporting the Maidan coup, Murphy cited a sniper massacre that took place in Ukraine’s Maidan square, which at the time was falsely blamed on Yanukovych’s forces.
But witness testimony, forensics, ballistic examinations, and video evidence collected by the Ukrainian Canadian professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, Ivan Katchanovski, show that the sniper massacre was carried out by militants from right sector, who then later falsely blamed Yanukovych’s forces.
In his most recent book, Katchanovski documents U.S. officials admitting to backing the coup based on the false claim that Yanukovych was behind the massacre, writing:
Then US Vice President Biden revealed in his memoirs that during the Maidan massacre he called Yanukovych and told him that ‘it was over; time for him to call off his gunmen and walk away’ and ‘he shouldn’t expect his Russian friends to rescue him from this disaster,’ that ‘Yanukovych had lost the confidence of the Ukrainian people, I said, and he was going to be judged harshly by history if he kept killing them.’ Biden wrote that ‘the disgraced president fled Ukraine the next day—owing to the courage and determination of the demonstrators—and control of the government ended up temporarily in the hands of a young patriot named Arseniy Yatsenyuk.’ The US vice president also revealed that he ‘had been warning him for months to exercise restraint in dealing with his citizens.’
Katchanovski also noted, “The far-right Svoboda party leader and the deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament from Svoboda stated in their separate interviews that a Western government representative during their and other Maidan leaders meeting told them a few weeks before the Maidan massacre that the Western governments would turn on Yanukovych after casualties among protesters would reach 100. The Maidan opposition right after the massacre called the killed Maidan protesters the ‘Heavenly Hundred.’ Some Maidan protesters and other people, who were not on the Maidan and died from illnesses and other causes were included in the ‘Heavenly Hundred’ to bring the number of the victims to 100.”
Along with this, the United States installed the new government in Ukraine after Yanukovych was deposed.
Then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on tape deciding who would replace Yanukovych, eventually deciding that “Yats is the guy”, referring to opposition politician Arseniy Yatseniuk, who became interim prime minister of Ukraine after the coup.
As Forbes magazine noted , “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund’s demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency. Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind.”
Konstantin Bondarenko, one of Ukraine’s leading political scientists, noted, “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” adding, “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.”
George Friedman, the head of the U.S. government-connected Stratfor, private intelligence outfit, explained at the time:
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.
The U.S. continued to pick who went in and out of the Ukrainian government long after the coup.
Newly declassified CIA documents from 2015 wrote that when then U.S. vice president Joe Biden went to Ukraine to meet with then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, “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”.
Ivan Katchanovski noted that after the coup, Ukraine became a client state of the U.S, writing, “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” adding, “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.”
While Calenda smeared Jeffrey Sachs for stating these facts, the evidence shows that Sachs’s assessment of the Maidan coup is exactly correct.
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Excellent piece
Brilliant work! I was just getting to the point in my research paper where I will be discussing the 2014 coup, and I will likely use Katchanovski's work and Sach's statements as well.