Republicans Cry "Election Fraud" in Ukraine

[Robbien]

<snip>

Does this sound familiar: Republicans calling for activists to overwhelm the vote count and overturn the results? At a press conference the morning after the election, US Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair, with long-standing ties to the CIA, and Bush's official envoy for the Ukrainian elections, called on Ukrainians to take action against their government regarding the election results.(1)

Why? Quitely possibly the most important election this year might not have been in the United States, the European Union, nor even Venezuela, but in Ukraine this past Sunday, 21 November 2004. The outcome of this election will have a direct impact on the global balance of power between the United States, the European Union, and the Russian Federation for many years to come.

After a decade of "shock therapy" at the hands of US and European advisers designed to cripple the economies of the former Soviet republics, the ascendance of Vladimir Putin as Russia's president has caused a sea-change turn around, with the reestablishment of governmental authority over the oligarchs and their mafia, economic growth after the most catastrophic depression in the world, and the reemergence of Russia as a strategic power. Those former Soviet republics with heads of state that came from the old political-industrial mangerial class, such as Belarus, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and most of Central Asia, are gravitating back toward a reviving Russia after following devasting International Monetary Fund dictates while stranded on their own during the Yeltsin era.

<snip>

One of the top goals of the US and European governments in the region is to stop this trend by keeping apart the largest of these republics, Ukraine, severely damaging attempts at rebuilding economic, political, and military ties. Keeping apart the Ukraine, known as the "breadbasket" of the former Soviet Union with nearly 50 million people, would be akin to trying to rebuild the United States without the industrial heartland of the Midwest.

much more at:
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1122-12.htm

[MisterP]

1. intriguing take on Pootie-Poot:

I feel that, as he works on being the biggest fish in a big pond, he's squashing many of the big-but-not-as-big fish--namely, the oligarchs who're fattened off Russia's natural resources, wrongly sold off in the race to follow Thatchernomics.

[russian33]

2. The way I look at it, someone had to stop them

They robbed the country and it's people blind (thank you Mr. Yeltsin), and are now filthy rich, and have a problem with Kremlin trying to reign that in now...guess they really thought they can get away with it.