US impeachment furor sabotages Ukraine peace talks
by Fininan Cunningham, …with Russia Today, Moscow
[ Editor’s Note: It looks like we are one step away from a search for Mr. Z’s stained tie now, just in time for the holidays. But political satire like that does not bode well for a new young president who is still trying to find his national stage legs.
It seems he will join the growing list of collateral damage victims who have gotten involved with Trump. As Cunningham clearly lays out below, the impeachment hearings have narrowed his options at a critical foreign policy period for his country.
But the damage could spread beyond him personally, as it undermines his ability to deter the Ukrainian extremists who are trying to derail any Donbass agreement that does not further subjugate the people there under the Kiev regime.
The Minsk agreement means absolutely nothing to the Neo-Nazis there, while it means everything to Zelensky at his young age, now that he is possibly looking at losing a meeting with Putin because he will be viewed as not strong enough politically to carry through on any deal.
On top of the Minsk deal, Zelensky has his feet in the fire due to the Russian gas transit contract to Europe ending on December 31. Ukraine has been acting like it has some kind of a superpower status over Russia to force Putin into a sweetheart deal to make Zelensky look good at Putin’s expense.
Zelensky of course has US and some EU support in beating Putin on a new deal, where he is offering a one-year extension, and the Ukies want a 10-year extension. Putin will not have a warm and fuzzy feeling over that, after watching the US and some elements in the EU do everything possible to make the Nordstream 2 pipeline one that would never ship a barrel of oil after billions of investment.
Yes, Putin has his Nordstream 2 capacity to theoretically ship extra gas to Europe that would not go through Ukraine where it would get its transit fees, which a lot of Ukrainian pols are used to getting their fingers on.
Poland has been very hostile to Putin and already has its own Baltic pipeline supply deal coming from Norway, but that is in the bush right now. Putin needs a deal that does not generate new hostilities and fan the US’ axis claim that over-dependence on Russia for energy is a security risk.
December is going to have geopolitical news like we have not seen with a Senate impeachment-trial backdrop. The Senate would never convict Trump of anything, unless it was on camera. But 50% of Americans are polling that they want him impeached and the 2020 election sharks are circling in the water… Jim W. Dean ]
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– First published … November 26, 2019 –
The much-anticipated meeting between Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and Russia’s Vladimir Putin is in danger of being a lost opportunity for peace. Washington’s political infighting has stacked the odds against a successful summit.
Weeks of impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives, accusing President Trump of abusing his office with regard to Ukraine, have achieved very little except for two things. Ukraine’s international image has been trashed with corruption claims and depiction of the country as having vassal-like dependency on the US, and secondly, demonization of Russia which has been heightened as an “aggressor” supposedly out to destroy Ukraine.
The irony is that Washington purports to be an ally of Ukraine to promote democracy, sovereignty, and independence of the former Soviet republic. But the upshot of the impeachment inquiry is that Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty is gravely undermined.
When President Zelensky holds multilateral talks soon with Putin, the Ukrainian leader will have little room to maneuver as a result of the cacophony back in the US.
The two leaders are due to meet on December 9 in Paris as part of a four-way summit also involving German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. The meeting is a return to long-suspended peace talks and an attempt to revive the 2015 Minsk accords for ending conflict in eastern Ukraine.
It is over three years since the so-called Normandy Format last convened. The Minsk peace deal was never implemented, mainly because former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, refused to fulfill commitments to give regional autonomy to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine. Consequently the war has dragged on for nearly five years.
Zelensky was elected by a landslide vote in April primarily on the ticket that he would seek a peace settlement. In September, he agreed in principle to grant special status for the Donbas breakaway region of eastern Ukraine.
Subsequently, though, Zelensky has appeared to backpedal on how much autonomy he is willing to countenance. Troops under his command have begun withdrawing from the front line with separatists, but it is not clear if that move marks a reliable de-escalation.
Alexander Lukashevich, Russia’s permanent representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, stated on November 21 that forces under Kiev’s command are still violating terms of a truce by not removing combat hardware from the line of contact. “This, to put it mildly, non-constructive approach to preparations for the Normandy meeting causes justified concern,” he added.
In a move seen as a trust-building gesture, Russia recently returned three Ukrainian naval vessels which it had confiscated last year after an infringement of its territory in the Kerch Strait.
The forthcoming meeting in Paris thus holds a fledgling start to finding a peaceful resolution to a conflict which has resulted in over 13,000 dead and millions displaced from their homes.
However, the impeachment debacle in Washington has painted Zelensky as a pathetic politician “who loves Trump’s a**” and “who will do anything” to curry favor with the president. The Democrats and obliging former US diplomats who had worked in Ukraine are claiming that Trump pressured Zelensky to dig dirt on Joe Biden, his would-be Democrat rival in next year’s election.
So zealous are Trump’s political opponents in Washington, together with the liberal media and US intelligence agencies, to pin an impeachable offense on him, that the Ukrainian president has ended up a lame-duck leader in the collateral damage.
This has generated much mockery among Ukrainians of the former comedian-turned-president, who has been nicknamed “Monica” in reference to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for his sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinksy.
Even before the hearings in Congress got under way, Zelensky had been under fire from Ukrainian nationalists who accuse him of “capitulating” to Russia over his willingness to negotiate a peace settlement in eastern Ukraine. Kiev has seen large rallies of up to 20,000 protesting Zelensky’s peace efforts as a betrayal.
In a recent media interview, American professor Stephen Cohen, an astute observer on Russia-Ukraine, says that Zelensky is in a very precarious situation. Despite being overwhelmingly elected to find a peaceful solution to Ukraine’s conflict, the new president, says Cohen, has to contend with far-right paramilitary leaders who view any peace deal negotiated with Russia as treasonous. Zelensky has been subjected to death threats.
As Cohen points out, if the US was genuinely concerned about establishing peace and democracy in Ukraine, then Washington should be fully supporting Zelensky’s overtures to Moscow, to let him and the Ukrainian people know “we got your back.”
But as it is, Zelensky is going into negotiations with Putin as an isolated figure who has been demeaned by Washington’s squabbling and caricatured as a stooge.
Thus, what is being set up for the Ukrainian leader is an almost impossible task. If he were to agree with Putin to a further withdrawal of military forces from the contact line with pro-Russian separatists, or if he commits to implementing Minsk provisions for regional autonomy, then the uproar in Washington is predictable. Zelensky will be cast as selling out to Putin and capitulating to “Russian aggression.”
Such is the delirium of Russophobia in Washington, where Democrats and so-called ‘Russia experts’ like Fiona Hill have labeled Trump a “Kremlin agent” and “Bolshevik,” the next sequence in their narrative is that Trump abused his office in order to get Zelensky to surrender to Putin. Now we’re really talking impeachment, so it goes.
Missing from the political fight in Washington are the following key issues: it was American and Europe interference in Ukraine, not Russian, that plunged the country into ongoing conflict.
That interference peaked with the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014, which led to Crimea seceding in a referendum and joining the Russian Federation. The coup also led directly to the war in eastern Ukraine by a neo-Nazi regime in Kiev against the ethnic Russian population who understandably have demanded autonomy.
The $400 million in military aid that Trump is accused of using as leverage on Zelensky, obscures the bigger picture of why the US has sent a total of $1 billion in military aid to the country in order to antagonize Russia. This has long been the agenda of Washington’s foreign policy establishment, to destabilize Russia by pushing Ukraine to join the NATO alliance.
The impeachment hearings against Trump have obscured and turned reality on its head. The anti-Trump Democrats, media and ‘deep state’ operatives want to exclude any wider investigation into corrupt dealings by the former Obama administration in Ukraine by asserting that any such claims are merely “Russian disinformation.”
Moreover, not only is the truth about Washington’s corruption in Ukraine being concealed, but the vassal status of Ukraine is complete by it not having any freedom to negotiate its way out of conflict or restoring normal neighborly relations with Russia.
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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VT never gave a pass to the Obama on the Ukraine coup and we have large number of articles in the archives to prove. We also roasted him over Syria for years, but gave him credit when it was due when stopping the big US bombing attack over one of the fake gasings early in the war. And we also did some of the major story work on MH-17 as we had a whole team of experienced investigators working on it. Due to hackings that have tried and been successful in erasing some of our stories, and even editing parts of them, we now have to save them off line to be able republish the originals. We have to do the same with Google now when breaking the links, and they are doing this with NEO,also. They don’t do this to people unless their material hurts the Deep State. It is the current badge of honor in the business. Whenever they hit us we just go right back at them to show it never puts a dent in us.
Hundred percent agree. It’s despicable that Zelensky gets smeared with this moniker, when the Obama regime, including Obama, Biden, Clinton, Nuland, and Pyatt, along with its lackeys in Ukraine, including Yarosh and Tymoshenko, facilitated the whole Maidan Coup, but through collective amnesia, including the VT editors, get a complete pass. The democrats in power in the US are just as subversive as the republicans, if not more so, and will not accept that the unipolar model of the world is over! By the way, where did Ukraine’s gold reserves disappear to?
Gall, VT has always published a lot of different views. We have never been, nor do we ever want to be an ideological website where people come to get their “fix” everyday. We have had millions of people like that pass through VT. They come here until they see something they don’t like, and then leave. We read stuff all day long that we don’t like because its all part of being informed as to what the various positions are out there, and who and why people are promoting them, as the “starting point” of evaluating whether they have merit, which is a constant ongoing process here, a huge amount work we do to try to make it easier for our readers. And of course it is up to the readers to make the call on who is credible. We also “adjust” positions as new information comes in, just like a battlefield cmdr. does.
“Trump is the Chosen One, sent by God” – Rick Perry.
“Saying no to Trump is saying no to God” – Televangelist Paula White. New Spiritual Advisor.
His Attorney General was LITERALLY a #HotTubTimeMachineSalesman and #TimApple was THE dumbest lie of All-Time, so…
In the Orwellian mind of this article’s author…
His mighty word can expose the impeachment and destroy the DeepState!
Yes, PLEASE #TrumpTestify!… Under Oath!
HALLELUJAH!!! 🕺💃
Poor #DramaQueenDon Trump! All he wanted was one malinki favor and the DeepState goes nuts! [Starting in JUNE, when the OMB official (and military vet, vs Bonespurs Trump) responsible for signing the freeze, questions the legality… Like others in the OMB Legal Division, who even resigned].
Questioning legality! How DeepState!
Poor Zelensky! He was “strong” by agreeing with Trump “Not 100, but 1000%”. Just not “strong” enough to announce a Biden #WitchHunt fast enough.
He was “weak” in saying he didn’t want to interfere in US politics: to hesitate becoming a Swamp Politician.
… So the DeepState forced poor Sondland to admit that HE painted Zelensky as “Loves your ass” weak. To Trump. On a cell phone…
“Impeachment (NOT the underlying illegal acts!) turns reality on its head”.
Perfectly Orwellian/Trumpian.
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