Fresh evidence of how the West lured Ukraine into its orbit ($663 Million)

[TT_Progress]

Fresh evidence of how the West lured Ukraine into its orbit

The West is demonizing President Putin when what set this crisis in motion
were recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU

Christopher Booker
The Telegraph

How odd it has been to read all those accounts of Europe sleepwalking into war in the summer of 1914, and how such madness must never happen again, against the background of the most misrepresented major story of 2014 – the gathering crisis between Russia and the West over Ukraine, as we watch developments in that very nasty civil war, with 20,000 Russian troops massing on the border.

For months the West has been demonising President Putin, with figures such as the Prince of Wales and Hillary Clinton comparing him with Hitler, oblivious to the fact that what set this crisis in motion were those recklessly provocative moves to absorb Ukraine into the EU.

There was never any way that this drive to suck the original cradle of Russian identity into the Brussels empire was not going to provoke Moscow to react – not least due to the prospect that its only warm-water ports, in Crimea, might soon be taken over by Nato.

When the European Commission told a journalist that, between 2004 and 2013, these groups had only been given €31 million, my co-author Richard North was soon reporting on his EU Referendum blog that the true figure, shown on the commission’s own “Financial Transparency” website, was €496 million. The 200 front organisations receiving this colossal sum have such names as “Center for European Co-operation” or the “Donetsk Regional Public Organisation with Hope for the Future” (the very first page shows how many are in eastern Ukraine or Crimea, with their largely Russian populations).

Full Story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/vladimir-putin/11023577/Fresh-evidence-of-how-the-West-lured-Ukraine-into-its-orbit.html

[Tommy_Carcetti]

1. Looks like someone's gone west. nt

[MBS]

2. as I've posted elsewhere, the author is a climate-change denier and generally not interested in fact

see http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1016&pid=99745

He's anti-science, anti-environment (he's claimed repeatedly that asbestos is no more toxic than talcum powder), pro-"intelligent design", pretty much a professional fact-twister. Personally, I wouldn't trust anything he says.

Here (again) is a passage from a 2011 piece in the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/oct/13/christopher-booker

The superhuman cock-ups of Christopher Booker
The journalist makes so many errors that you would be forgiven for thinking he did it deliberately to waste everyone's time

Does Christopher Booker exist? Or is he simply a device invented to waste as much of other people's time as possible? Might he in fact be a computer programme randomly generating nonsense in order to keep scientists, environmentalists and public health campaigners so busy refuting it that they can't get on with what they ought to be doing? I ask because it seems almost impossible that one man could make so many superhuman cock-ups.. . .Veteran journalists assert that there was once a real Christopher Booker, who was capable of intelligent and even penetrating journalism, and that the man who wears his clothes today bears no relationship to the one they once knew. Has he been replaced by a replicant, remotely controlled by an evil genius in a concrete fortress, surrounded by a piranha-stocked moat? Or has he simply been playing to the gallery for so long that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction?

In either case, scarcely a week goes by in which he fails to publish at least one excruciating howler. It doesn't matter what the subject is: whether it is asbestos or the European Union, speeding or the family courts, he makes such a remarkable concatenation of mistakes that, if he didn't take himself so seriously, you could almost swear he was doing it deliberately.This time-wasting exercise would be best ignored if it were not for two things: that the Sunday Telegraph continues to give him a platform for this rubbish, and that his cock-ups have consequences.
Much of his journalism consists of the reckless endangerment of the public. In a long series of articles he has falsely claimed that the danger from white asbestos is insignificant. To support his contention that innocent parents are being harassed by over-zealous officials, he relayed a partisan account which served to minimise and dismiss the serious injuries inflicted on a small baby . The judge pointed out Booker's "significant factual errors and omissions". And he went on to say: "All of this underlines the dangers inherent in journalists relying on partisan and invariably tendentious reporting by family members and their supporters rather than being present in court to hear the evidence which the court itself hears."

He has published scores of articles insisting that global warming isn't caused by humans, and suggesting that we can carry on burning fossil fuels without regard for the climate. Even when the people he cites as his sources (the health and safety executive in the case of asbestos) try to correct him, he keeps repeating the myth.. . his all-time cock-up of cock-ups, in which he pointed out, in February 2008, that "Arctic ice isn't vanishing after all." The "warmists", he said, had made much of the fact that in September 2007 northern hemisphere sea ice cover had shrunk to the lowest level ever recorded. But now the ice cover had bounced back, proving how wrong they were. He even published a graph to demonstrate that the ice had indeed expanded between September and January. In other words, Booker appeared incapable of distinguishing between summer and winter.

[cprise]

3. Yet its not a problem when deniers support Obamacare, free-trade treaties

, other Democratic initiatives... is it?

Then the tone is, "Look if even so-and-so can see the light that just proves how right we are".

[MBS]

4. he's got the facts wrong on this too

He's so blinded by hatred of the EU that he's decided they're never right, which has led him round the bend to an adamant "Ukraine, the EU and the West are always wrong, Russia right" world view, blaming the EU for the Ukraine crisis, even if the facts don't line up his way.
. . In July, he tried to blame Obama for not preventing the Malaysia airlines disaster...
He really is over the top.

[TT_Progress]

7. Interested in arguing the facts?

The primary fact in the story is the 650 million.

That comes from an EU transparency site. Are you sayng you have evidence that the EU site is incorrect?

[Igel]

5. We really need to get over ourselves.

I mean, really: This has as its basic premise the idea that all "lesser peoples" ultimately do what we want and can't make up their own minds for local reasons.

All politics is local--to us. Our enemies are everybody's enemies. Putin must be good because he opposes our domestic ideological enemies. With that kind of thinking, who needs a brain?

Most pro-unity Ukrainians fighting view themselves as fighting an imperialist aggressor, which is precisely what Russia was for 400 years. It takes little "luring." A lot of Ukrainians don't much like the EU, but know that at the hands of the Russians they've suffered horribly as an ethnicity and usually as individuals. The young view the Russians in Ukraine even more harshly in some ways, because they are real throwbacks: a motley assortment of monarchists, Stalinists or at least Brezhnevists, Slavophiles and nationalists. So he new DPR flag is a throwback to the old Russian imperial flag from the mid-late 1800s, on purpose: but even worse, it wasn't the most common or popular one, but became popular among Russian monarchists in the 1990s. (Rather like the Confederate battle flag was more popular among white Southerns in 1980 than it was in 1863.)

For them, it's a fight for independence. The EU is a tool. A possible protector.

For the pro-Russian separatists, Russia is a dream or a patron. Empire. Glory. Domination. Being feared and powerful. Dignity is found in oppressing others--and even if you're a poor Russian peasant you were still better than dirty Jews, stupid khokhols (Ukrainians), or some Kazakh or Georgian. Just as even Southern white trash could still feel superior to a wealthier African-American.

In some cases they also believe that gold will fall from the sky. Crimean Russians are upset that pensions went up 40% but food prices doubled. Gold has not fallen from the sky, even though Putin raided the state pension fund to help fund Crimean projects.

Locals often have their own reasons for doing things and deserve at least enough respect to be heard. Instead of being used as tokens for somebody else's second- or third-hand political rhetoric.

[MBS]

6. this is excellent.

Thanks for this rich and well-informed analysis.

[TT_Progress]

8. The current Ukraine government is the most divisive the country has had

Last edited Thu Aug 14, 2014, 01:47 AM - Edit history (1)

since the USSR broke up.

Respectfully, Your "analysis" is a fairy tale.

Ukrainians, while having differing levels of feelings about their relationship toward Russia got along very well before maidan.