and I don't know how many millions from Soros. I heard as high as $100 million but haven't found a link.
Bush Adminstration Spent $65 Million to Help Opposition in Ukraine
December 10, 2004
By: Matt Kelley
Associated Press
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WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has spent more than
$65 million in the past two years to aid political organizations in Ukraine, paying to bring opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to meet U.S. leaders and helping to underwrite exit polls indicating he won last month's disputed runoff election.
(snip)
But officials acknowledge some of the money helped train groups and individuals opposed to the Russian-backed government candidate — people who now call themselves part of the Orange revolution.
For example, one group that got grants through U.S.-funded foundations is the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, whose Web site has a link to Yushchenko's home page under the heading "partners." Another project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development brought a Center for Political and Legal Reforms official to Washington last year for a three-week training session on political advocacy.
(snip)
The four foundations involved included three funded by the U.S. government: The National Endowment for Democracy, which gets its money directly from Congress; the Eurasia Foundation, which gets money from the State Department, and the Renaissance Foundation, part of a network of charities funded by billionaire George Soros that gets money from the State Department. Other countries involved included Great Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
Grants from groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development also went to the International Center for Policy Studies, a think tank that includes Yushchenko on its supervisory board. The board also includes several current or former advisers to Kuchma, however.
IRI, Craner's Republican-backed group,
used U.S. money to help Yushchenko arrange meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney , Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage and GOP leaders in Congress in February 2003.(snip)
http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=10108&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported====
(snip)
the U.S. government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), which is administered by the U.S.-based Freedom House.
PAUCI then sent U.S. government funds to numerous Ukrainian non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This would be bad enough and would in itself constitute meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. But, what is worse is that many of these grantee organizations in Ukraine are blatantly in favor of presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
Consider the Ukrainian NGO
International Center for Policy Studies. It is an organization funded by the U.S. government through PAUCI. On its Web site, we discover that this NGO was
founded by George Soros' Open Society Institute. And further on we can see that
Viktor Yushchenko himself sits on the advisory board!
(reluctant snip)
This May, the Virginia-based private management consultancy Development Associates, Inc., was awarded $100 million by the U.S. government "for strengthening national legislatures and other deliberative bodies worldwide."
According to the organization's Web site, several million dollars from this went to Ukraine in advance of the elections.
(snip)
http://antiwar.com/paul/?articleid=4135==================
THE ELECTION crisis in Ukraine highlighted once again how much the mainstream media reads straight from the White House script.
Still breathless from cheerleading the destruction of Falluja, the media fell right in line with the administration, portraying the standoff as a Cold War-style battle between a Russian-sponsored authoritarian, Viktor Yanukovich, and the Western-backed democrat, Viktor Yushchenko.
Journalists failed to mention that the supposed Moscow puppet, Yanukovich, did Bush’s bidding last year by dispatching Ukrainian troops to Iraq. The same newspapers that ignore or deride protesters in the U.S. enthused over mass demonstrations in Kiev staged by supporters of Yushchenko.
They dutifully repeated Bush’s pronouncement that the upcoming election rerun “ought to be free from any foreign influence." Someone at the White House forgot to tell Republican Sen. John McCain, who chairs the International Republican Institute, and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, his counterpart at the National Democratic Institute. Both outfits--which are part of the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy--were active in Ukraine supporting Yushchenko’s candidacy.
(snip)
There’s no doubt that supporters of the Russian-backed Yanukovich stole the November 21 runoff election. But for all his opposition imagery, Yushchenko is a status quo politician--which in Ukraine means being an insider with ties to superrich “oligarchs” like Yulia Tymoshenko, who became wealthy through corrupt privatization of state-owned industry following the collapse of the former USSR in 1991.
(snip)
http://www.socialistworker.org/2004-2/523/523_03_Ukraine.shtml
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