© Gleb Garanich / ReutersAnti-government protests at the Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev, January 30, 2014.
Three years after the event, the establishment media is finally issuing
mea culpas for its self-interested support of 'Euromaidan,' the Western-backed 'regime change' crusade which destroyed Ukraine.
I was wondering how long this would take. But now that it's happened let's raise a Christmas glass to the
New York Times and its reporter, Andrew Kramer. Because they've finally admitted that those of us who opposed Kiev's 'Euromaidan' movement were right. Furthermore, America's 'newspaper of record' has acknowledged how, despite its own fervent encouragement of the violent coup, former President Victor Yanukovich was correct not to sign a tightfisted free trade deal with the European Union.
The
NYT uses the collapse of Ukraine's once lucrative agriculture industry to illustrate its climbdown. Especially the poultry business, which due to miserly EU quotas, and the loss of the Russian market, has been decimated.
"The sector accounts for about 40 percent of Ukraine's exports. But tariff-free quotas for most agricultural products, under the trade deal, are tiny," Kramer writes.
"Allocations for honey, for example, were so low that they were filled in the first six weeks of the year. Quotas to export eggs to the Europe Union equate to around 1.5 percent of just (one single company) Avangard's annual output, let alone that of the entire sector."
The 'Gray Lady' admits how "the deal provided a double blow to the agriculture sector: It went far enough to enrage Russia, but stopped short of immediately opening a lucrative new market."
Comment: As Mercouris points out, given the conditions of the investigation, the results are open to challenge. Both the Syrians and Russians deny their presence at the location of the attack, but that would be expected even if they were present. As to the photos not showing any impact craters, that was the Russians' response to the unfounded assertions that they were responsible. But that does not discount the possibility that the SAAF used, as the report says, "non-precision unitary bombs and/or smaller blast-incendiary air-to-ground weapons." At the very least it is a plausible scenario.
Interestingly, the Russians did present the ground for the UN scenario, by providing drone footage of the convoy accompanied by rebel heavy weaponry. The implication: the rebels were using the convoy as "humanitarian cover". In an information war as dense as this, it can be difficult if not impossible to get to the truth of things. So while the UN report may be open to question, at the very least it exonerates Russia and Syria of the charges levelled at them by their enemies.
Previous reports and analyses of the convoy attack: