BIG things are happening in Ukraine!!
Don Hank
You may recall that Petro Poroshenko had tried really hard to derail Trump’s campaign. Like his Italian
counterpart Renzi, he put all his eggs in the Hillary basked and is now fighting for his career.
But
recently, the Congress, sensing Trump’s aversion to Poroshenko, gave
Trump a gift in the form of a
healthy cut to the aid package it had intended to send to Kiev to kill
hapless citizens in the East of Ukraine. Why do Americans not protest
this barbarism? I will never understand it.
Meanwhile, sizing up the s
ituation in the US, Putin decided to recognize docs, eg, passports issued in
Novorossia, thereby raising the status of these people closer to an internationally recognized independent region or nation.
Around
this time, perhaps smelling blood in the water, the E. Ukraine
pro-Russian republics of Lugansk
and Donetsk decided to pull a fast one on Kiev – which had been
shelling civilians in their territory for years and had been promised
lethal aid by the US mafia known as Congress -- and call their bluff. It
seems Kiev had blockaded roads and railroads into
and out of the Lugansk and Donbass People’s Republics in an effort to
bring these runaways to heel. BTW, this was highly illegal and violated
the Minsk agreements. But instead the pro-Russians outsmarted these
brain-dead ninnies, an easy enough feat. They
issued an ultimatum and said that if the Kiev government did not lift
the blockade by a certain date, they would seize the major businesses
and industries in their territory. Now it seems these industries were
vital to pay taxes and feed Western Ukraine. You’d
think a regime with normal intelligence would take this seriously and
sit down to bargain with the rebels. But mosgt of the world is still
living in the past, when the US could snap its fingers and get anything
it wanted for any anti-Russian regime anywhere,
no matter how corrupt. And Ukraine rivals Haiti in corruption. But not
this time, Kiev.
The
ultimatum deadline came and went and the Lugansk and Donbass leaders
[President Igor Plotnitsky in
Lugansk, Prime Minister Aleksander Zakharchenko in Donbass] kept their
word. They seized the factories and immediately offered items like coal
and other energy to Russia and ONLY Russia, in order to keep bread on
the table. Western Ukraine gets to starve,
just as it wanted E. Ukraine to starve – tit for tat]. NOW, however,
the Kiev government is faced with a humanitarian crisis of the kind it
imposed on the rebels for years. What went around came around. Yeah,
McCain and Soros were fighting like mad to achieve
that lethal aid to kill civilians in Donbass and Lugansk. But they, as
well as their partner in crime Petro Petroshenko, the Ukraine leader
(whose days are probably numbered) are left with a punishment of their
own making.
Redneck pickup trucks used to travel thru my old neighborhood with bumper stickers emblazoned with the
words: Payback is a b—tch.
And so it is.
But read about it below.
The
long-awaited meeting between Petro Poroshenko
and Donald Trump, expected to take place late last month, never
materialized. Instead, the leaders ended up holding telephone talks,
details of which remained undisclosed. Ukrainian observers are concerned
that Trump's cold shoulder indicates that Washington's
patronage for Kiev is coming to an end.
The
introduction in the LDPR of the external control at former
facilities of the Ukrainian oligarchs can pose a serious threat to the
regime in Kiev, if the Republics are able to demonstrate a higher
economic growth than in Ukraine, believes Vasily Volga, the leader of
the «Union of Left Forces» and the former deputy
of the Verkhovnaya Rada.
If
this experiment fits into the system of international payments
and budget forming enterprises of the DPR [Donetsk People’s Republic]
and LPR [Lugansk People’s Republic] begin to work for the budgets of the
Republics with a population of no more than 3 million people, their
budget will double the budget of Kiev where almost
4 million people live.
It
may happen that these two small unrecognized republics, which are
now experiencing enormous difficulties in the social sphere, will turn
into something that can be compared to Catalonia in Spain. The DPR and
LPR can become the leaders in GDP per capita [I tweaked the translation
here]. This will allow the authorities of
these republics to maintain a level of social security, that Ukraine
has never dreamed of.
Yesterday,
there was a real panic in Kiev. The Cabinet window were
lit all night. There is one meeting after another there, and no one
knows what to do with all this. It turns out that in the case of a real
blockade, Ukraine is unable to survive not only without Russia, but even
without Donetsk and Lugansk.
God
forbid, there will be interruptions in the single energy complex.
We have very high risks for operating NPPs. In addition, last year the
DPR and LPR paid 34 billion USD, if I'm not mistaken, to the Ukrainian
budget. The loss of such a sum is an enormous loss for Ukraine,
especially when we have almost lost the right to the
international credit. Moreover, we are still burdened with the court
decision on payment of the so-called Yanukovych’s debt.
We
are now witnessing interesting things. States do not die immediately
- bang and they have collapsed - they die gradually. Of course, in
historical retrospect, it occurs instantly. A few years for the state is
a moment for the man. But the death within several years, it is what we
are observing now.
I
have recently had an opportunity to travel in Ukraine - the collapse
of the transport infrastructure is reaching a peak. The majority of
Ukrainian roads are not just worn out, they simply do not exist. The
same thing is happening in the energy sector. Scheduled maintenance has
not been conducted for three years, and such scheduled
preventive maintenance is required on a quarterly basis.
Of
course, we will live somehow. People lived somehow in the primitive
communal system, they survived on gathering, dug up and ate roots. But
our problem is that we live in the area saturated with high-tech
facilities. If they are not maintained, if the state does not have the
funds for it and the energy sector does not have
enough power, we may end up not with gathering, but with rolling
man-made disasters which will follow rolling blackouts.
In Ukraine, they talk about the stabilization, but it is a stabilization
when, say, they have reached the bottom and, all of a sudden, there is a knock from beneath - I mean the LDPR blockade.
The Republics of Donbass, whose documents had been recognized by Russia the day before, go on the offensive.
Today, the
LDPR authorities have put forward an ultimatum to official Kiev, if by
Wednesday, March 1st, the blockade undertaken by the Ukrainian radicals
is not stopped, Lugansk
and Donetsk will nationalize all enterprises under the Ukrainian
jurisdiction and redirect them to the cooperation with the Russian
Federation.
This is announced in a joint statement by Igor Plotnitsky and Alexander Zakharchenko.
‘Using the
radicals, Kiev has organized and is continuing the blockade of railways,
and threatening to block the road communication between the Republics
of Donbass and Ukraine.
This directly contradicts the spirit and letter of the Minsk Agreements
and, in principle, characterizes the current authorities of Ukraine as
unable to take care of the citizens. Many enterprises have been forced
to stop their work as a result of the criminal
actions of the Kiev authorities.
We have to declare that if by 00:00 on Wednesday
(March 1st, 2017), the blockade is not lifted, we will introduce
external management at all enterprises under the Ukrainian
jurisdiction, working in the DPR and LPR. We will stop supplying coal
to Ukraine. There is neither the capacity nor the payment scheme for the
coal supply. We will re-construct all the production processes and
direct them to the market of Russia and other
countries. This was one of our first program promises at the time of
the proclamation of our Republics,’ the document says.
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