© Matt Kenyon‘The Ukrainian faultine has the potential to draw in outside powers and lead to a strategic clash.'
We've been here before. For the past couple of months street protests in Ukraine have been played out through the western media according to a well-rehearsed script. Pro-democracy campaigners are battling an authoritarian government. The demonstrators are demanding the right to be part of the European Union. But Russia's president Vladimir Putin has vetoed their chance of freedom and prosperity.
It's a story we've heard in one form or another again and again - not least in Ukraine's western-backed Orange revolution a decade ago. But it bears only the sketchiest relationship to reality. EU membership has never been - and very likely never will be - on offer to Ukraine. As in Egypt last year, the president that the protesters want to force out was elected in a poll judged fair by international observers. And many of those on the streets aren't very keen on democracy at all.
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Ukraine has long been the focus of Western meddling as part of a larger geo-strategic game aimed at countering Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1994 that "it cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire." A little over a year ago, the US implicitly released a statement via then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that it would do whatever is within its means to roll back Russia's economic integrationist efforts. After describing Russia's Eurasian Union plans as "a move to re-Sovietize the region", she proceeded to threaten that "we know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it."
Undoubtedly, the world is now witnessing what the US had in mind when it threatened to "slow down" and "prevent" economic cooperation between Ukraine and Russia. With Ukrainian stability cracking under the pressure of continued chaos and the economy on the brink of near-total collapse, the lie of EuroMaidan's 'pro-EU integrationist' goals have been revealed. Either the EU will in no way accept a future failed-state Ukraine, licking its wounds from prolonged civil strife, to enter into the organization, or it, in coordination with its NATO overseers, had it planned all along to collapse the country and profitably rebuild it under the aegis of the West. Either way, the fabled 'path to Europe' has been exposed as the sham that it is, and absolutely nothing of positive value can come to the average citizen from what the militant participants have done to their country in the name of 'Euro-integration'.
And Ukraine's fascist Neo-Nazi color revolution backed by U.S.