Napetost v Ukrajini - Krimu

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Corporate video of the Kedr hunting club

The Kedr hunting club occupies nearly 100 hectares of reserve forest adjoining Yanukovych’s billion-dollar Mezhyhirya residence, which was returned to the state after the former leader fled to Russia, where he is dodging mass murder charges levied by the new Ukrainian government.
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Ex-presidents Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, billionaires Viktor Pinchuk and Vadim Novinsky as well as a whole array of ministers, officials, members of parliament and businessmen were among those who joined Kedr’s ranks to go hunting with Yanukovych.

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Enemies of Hillary Clinton waiting to discredit her bid for the White House are likely to seize on news that one of the biggest benefactors to the Clinton Foundation has been trading with Iran and may be in breach of US sanctions imposed on the country.

Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, 54, has courted the Clintons for at least nine years – in the United States, the Alps and Ukraine.

Earlier this year, he was confirmed as the largest individual contributor to the Clinton Foundation, whose aims include the creation of “economic opportunity and growth”. He also has links to the Tony Blair Foundation and represented its biggest single donor in 2013.

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Pinchuk stayed somewhere in the middle. “The goal of a businessman is to do everything to avoid bloodshed and to bring about peace and compromise,” he told me during one of our conversations as the deadly three-month thriller in the square played out.

That thinking reflects a view he has held for some time: “It’s not necessary to be a member of the European Union,” he told me a year ago. “But European values”–meaning civil society, the rule of law, human rights, freedom of speech–”will solve a great number of Ukraine’s problems.” Yet he added: “Ukraine cannot be successful without Russia.”

Such equivocating stemmed from a harsh reality: Pinchuk’s fortune is tied to trade with Russia. Lest he forget that, Vladimir Putin’s regime recently imposed crippling tariffs on his core asset, the steel tube company Interpipe. His father-in-law is former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, the onetime patron of Victor Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed president who just fled his own country and reportedly spirited off billions of dollars. Every logical fiber in Pinchuk’s formidably logical head dictated that he defend the status quo.

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The U.S. government is missing – or withholding – audit documents about the finances and possible accounting irregularities at a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund when it was run by Ukraine’s Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who has become the face of “reform” for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev and who now oversees billions of dollars in Western financial aid.

Before taking Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister in December 2014, Jaresko was a former U.S. diplomat who served as chief executive officer of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by Congress in the 1990s with $150 million and placed under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to help jumpstart an investment economy in Ukraine.

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Huge 100+ column of activists headed to Poroshenko's residence to campaign for dismissal of dodgy Prosecutor Shokhin

Was at mezhyriye five years ago at protest outside Yanukovychs opulent mansion. Plus ca change, one might say...

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Journo: "If you don't believe in democracy, which current system do you approve of?"
Malofeev: "Vatican and Saudi Arabia"

Malofeev: "We live under greatest leader of the century"
Journo: "But can you express your opinion freely?"
"Yes. It coincides with Putin's"

Malofeev: "I was in Libya during Gadhaffi. Minimal salary $3k. Who rebels with such pay? Was also in Iraq&Syria before. Wonderful countries"

Malofeev: "Same in Ukraine. People lived better. They wouldn't rebel on their own. Someone wrote slogans. CIA, or free-masons, or oligarchs"

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Joint Contact Team Program-Ukraine (JCTP). The mission of the Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP) is to deploy US military teams to Ukraine to acquaint the Ukrainian military with various aspects of western militaries. The program was developed in 1992 to assist the armed forces of Ukraine, as the military of one of the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe.

International Military Education and Training (IMET): The IMET Program provides training in the United States to selected foreign military and related civilian personnel. The overarching security cooperation objective is to promote stability, democratization, military professionalism, and closer relationships with NATO.

Foreign Military Sales/Foreign Military Financing: The FMF program assists the Ukrainian military in conducting defense reform by providing funds for Ukraine to purchase US military equipment and services.

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Behind the scenes, the IMF is currently under fierce pressure from Washington to quickly rewrite the international rules in favor of Ukraine. That might mean that Russia’s loan to Ukraine in the form of Eurobond purchases in December 2013 could be treated as commercial credit. Washington is trying to use the IMF to help Kiev force Moscow to accept a restructuring of that debt. The IMF has remained remarkably silent in recent months as Kiev has suggested that Moscow agree to restructure its Eurobond debt, although the fund should have explained to Kiev that Ukraine’s debt to the Russian Federation came from an official, state-issued loan and is thus not subject to restructuring.

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The vanguard of the putschist junta in Kiev is the fascist paramilitary organisation, Pravy sektor, and the fascist political party, Svoboda. It was soon rumoured that the CIA and other US agencies had taken over a floor of the Security Service of the Ukraine (SBU) building in Kiev. The Ukrainian and US flags flew symbolically outside. That of course was only the beginning. Fascist flags, banners, symbols soon appeared in torchlight parades, and the World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was elevated to the status of father of the new Ukrainian state. Now of course there are US, Canadian, and Polish military «advisors» in the Ukraine. Who knows who else?

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The finance minister is a US citizen; the governor of Odessa, Mikhail Saakashvili, is a cowardly fugitive from a Georgian arrest warrant. The American ambassador in Kiev acts as proconsul; US directives are sent to the present so-called president, chocolate mogul Petro Poroshenko. US and western military supplies are reported to be flowing into the Ukraine in exchange for a garage sale of Ukrainian economic resources. Is it not ironic that a Ukrainian «nationalist» movement should so readily abase itself to foreign powers? Foreign control in Kiev, Putin recently commented, insults the peoples of the Ukraine. This is true, but it will also impoverish them.

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The situation in the DPR has been slowly getting worse. The settlements of Zhabunki, Ozeryanovka and Panteleymonovka and the area of “Volvo Center” in Donetsk were fired with mortars of 82 mm calibre from the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the sector of the Troitskoe settlement.
Over the past week the DPR military have recorded 93 violations of the ceasefire regime with mortars and MRLS use.

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The first round of municipal elections in Ukraine, held one week ago, shed light on the catastrophic social and political conditions in the country. Nearly 21 months after the coup that overthrew President Viktor Yanukovych, followed by the signing of an association agreement with the European Union (EU), the country is in social and economic free-fall.

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Ukraine’s economy shrank by over 7 percent last year, and this year the decline is expected to approach 12 percent. Inflation is running at 50 percent. In the first six months of 2015, real wages dropped by a quarter. “This is the result of the reforms implemented by the government in exchange for loans from the West.

The minimum wage in Ukraine is now less than that of Ghana and Zambia. Ukraine’s gross domestic product is half that of the European Union’s poorest country, Bulgaria.

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Ukraine has technically pulled out of a deep recession after the economy posted a 0.7 per cent real increase in gross domestic product during the third quarter of this year compared to the second quarter.

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Moody's Investors Service has today upgraded Ukraine's government issuer rating to Caa3 from Ca. The rating outlook was changed to stable from negative.

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