Could Obama's Legacy Be Destroyed by His Ukraine Policy? What to Do About It —

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-zuesse/57929/could-obamas-legacy-be-destroyed-by-his-ukraine-policy-what-to-do-about-it

Could Obama's Legacy Be Destroyed by His Ukraine Policy? What to Do About It —
Barack Obama | Ukraine
by Eric Zuesse | August 28, 2014 - 8:00am

The Ukrainian Government that the Obama Administration installed after Obama’s successful coup d'etat in Ukraine is now crashing and burning in the process of the newly installed Government’s ethnic-cleansing program to get rid of the people in Ukraine's southeast, the area of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for the President whom the Obama Administration (the State Department and the CIA) had overthrown in February. The residents there rejected this new Government; this new Government is trying to exterminate them; and the local rebel-fighters against that are winning, and are decimating thousands of troops who were sent in to kill them and their families, and are shooting down many of the bombers that have been sent in to bomb them.

The Ukrainian Government prior to the coup had been economically sustained by borrowing both from Russia to the east, and also from the EU and U.S. to the west (with a substantial portion of the U.S. portion of that debt consisting of IMF loans -- the U.S. Government is the major donor to the IMF). These loans were, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, largely being pocketed by the well-connected former communist nomenklatura or insiders who had been given formerly state-owned industries during the Harvard-designed privatization program throughout the former U.S.S.R.

These new oligarchs (such as the current Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who received the Leninska Kuznya shipyard and some state-owned chocolate factories, as well as a few other companies in retailing and news-media) got the benefits of those loans and socked away much of their consequent accumulating wealth in offshore tax-havens, so that the mounting sovereign debt of Ukraine is already crushing the Ukrainian population by severe cutbacks in Government expenditures for social services, road maintenance, and other government services, while those oligarchs have palatial residences in Western Europe. The public, in other words, suffer the debts, while the "oligarchs" or aristocrats (the former communist insiders) are now multi-billionaires; and one of them, Ihor Kolomoysky, was assigned a crucial Governorship, from which post he has largely masterminded and overseen the ethnic-cleansing campaign, which is clearing away the local residents in the land-area of the gas-fields Furthermore, in order for Ukraine to pay its debts, it is selling off the assets that had formerly produced income for Ukraine (largely for Ukraine's skimming oligarchs) such as selling off the gas pipelines that carry gas from Russia to Europe. The biggest portion of Ukraine's income was the transit-fees from these pipelines, and now these fees will go to investors in Europe and America, instead of to Ukraine. But Ukraine needs this money desperately right now, because the EU won't extend more credit, and the U.S. is already beginning to wake up to its disaster in Ukraine.

So: this costly war will leave behind a failed-state in northwestern Ukraine, and a separatist southeast, which will likely seek and receive membership in the Russian Federation. The perhaps more than a million refugees from Obama's ethnic-cleansing program in the southeast will probably return to and rebuild their bombed-out land, and likely receive a kind of Russian Marshall Plan to assist in that effort.