Showing posts with label Ukrainian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ukrainian. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Ukrainian "black ledger" a forgery concocted by Clinton team and its Ukrainian donors By Wayne Madsen Report




Ukrainian "black ledger" a forgery concocted by Clinton team and its Ukrainian donors By Wayne Madsen Report
The Ukrainian government ledgers recently disclosed by the right-wing government in Kiev and which allegedly contain records of under-the-table payments by the former Ukrainian government to Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort are rank forgeries, according to well-placed sources who spoke to WMR on conditions of anonymity.

Although our sources admit that Manafort was paid by his Ukrainian clients for political consulting services, they also point out that Manafort's company at the time was Davis Manafort, Inc., a partnership based in Alexandria, Virginia, between Manafort and John McCain's former presidential campaign manager, Rick Davis. The media, including the pro-Clinton New York Times, made no mention in its reporting on the Manafort-Ukraine relationship of the inclusion of Davis and McCain in the Ukrainian political consulting deal. Later, McCain actively supported the 2014 coup against Davis Manafort's client, then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Manafort's and Davis's consulting business in Ukraine was under the aegis of the since-dissolved Davis Manafort International.

Manafort's name allegedly appeared in a handwritten ledger of political payoffs by the former ruling Party of Regions of the now-exiled Yanukovych. The ledger was "found" in the abandoned headquarters of the political party, which was overthrown in a 2014 coup financed by the United States and George Soros and his International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and Open Society Foundation (OSF). Also involved in the coup planning was then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, and Victor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian steel and uranium magnate who has donated as much as $25 million to the Clinton Foundation and who maintains a close relationship to Hillary and Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea and son-in-law Marc Mezvinsky. Also reportedly involved with 2011 to 2012 discussions at the State Department concerning the future the putsch against the democratically-elected Yanukovych government was Melanne Verveer, a Ukrainian-American State Department official under then-Secretary of State, Clinton, and Douglas Schoen, a longtime political consultant to the Clintons. Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine in 2010.

According to leaked Soros files, others involved in the 2014 coup against Yanukovych included David Meale (Economic Counselor to Pyatt); Lenny Benardo (OSF); Yevhen Bystrytsky (Executive Director, IRF); Oleksandr Sushko (Board Chair, IRF); Ivan Krastev (Chariman, Centre for Liberal Studies, a Soros-funded operation in Sofia, Bulgaria); Sabine Freizer (OSF); and Deff Barton (Director, U.S. Agency for International Development, Ukraine [USAID is a conduit for the Central Intelligence Agency]). Soros was also present at a post-coup meeting on March 21, 2014 that involved U.S. support for the "New Ukraine." Soros pushed for sanctions against Russia for refusing to recognize the coup government, which included neo-Nazis, and rejected a federalized Ukraine that would grant self-government to the Russian-speaking eastern Donbass region.
The so-called "black ledger" is said to cover the years 2007 to 2012 and consists of 400 pages "removed" by the newly-formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau from Party of Regions bound ledger books. As any forensic specialist is aware, the removal of bound pages from a ledger renders the authenticity of both the ledger and its information highly suspect. The new bureau is rife with operatives of Soros, who, according to files hacked from Soros computers, actually ran Ukraine shortly after Yanukovych was deposed in the themed "Euromaidan" uprising of 2014. Although Manafort was charged with accepting $12.7 million from Yanukovych's party, no records of such payments are found in the pages released by the Anti-Corruption Bureau.


A very poor quality image of a page from the alleged Party of Regions payments ledger. Paul Manafort's name does not appear on the page released by the Ukrainian government. Knowledgeable sources told WMR that the ledger is a forgery concocted by the Ukrainian government of President Petro Poroshenko, Victoria Nuland at the State Department, George Soros, Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, and the Clinton presidential campaign.
Pinchuk's involvement in the Democrats' operation against Manafort, who resigned as Trump's campaign manager after the Ukraine story hit the press, is problematic. In addition to donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, Pinchuk's annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) summit held in Yalta on the Black Sea coast of Ukraine has drawn participation from Bill Clinton; former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; former NATO military commander, Clinton confidante, and noted anti-Russian polemicist General Wesley Clark; former George W. Bush chief adviser Karl Rove; disgraced and criminally-convicted former CIA director David Petraeus; Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice; former President of Georgia and current governor of Odessa Mikheil Saakashvili; disgraced former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn; former Polish foreign minister and noted neo-conservative Radoslaw Sikorski, who is married to Washington Post neocon columnist Anne Applebaum; Bill Clinton pal and journalist Strobe Talbott; and Wikipedia's dubious and disingenuous co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Rove's connections to Pinchuk are noteworthy, considering the fact that he has been covertly advising the Hillary Clinton campaign. The appearance of Ukrainian forgeries in an attempt to derail the Trump campaign bears all the markings of a typical Rove dirty tricks operation. Rove has also been a longtime political enemy of Manafort and Davis.

Friday, April 04, 2014

THE ROVING EYE - The US-Russia Ukrainian deal - By Pepe Escobar




THE ROVING EYE
The US-Russia Ukrainian deal
By Pepe Escobar

By the time you read this Russia will have invaded Ukraine. Well, that's what the Supreme Allied Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, US Air Force General Philip Breedlove, is spinning. Breedlove Supreme says the Russians are "ready to go" and could easily take over eastern Ukraine. Western corporate media have already dusted off their Kevlar vests.

Now compare Breedlove Supreme with a grown-up diplomat, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has called on NATO to please de-escalate the "unreasonable" warmongering rhetoric, which also includes officially ending all civilian and military cooperation with Russia and planning more military moves in Eastern Europe.

While NATO - shorthand for the Pentagon's European division - freaks out, especially via its outgoing secretary-general, Danish patsy Anders Fogh Rasmussen, let's see where we really stand on the ground, based on leaks from both Lavrov's and US Secretary of State John Kerry's camps.

The heart of the matter - obscured by a rainbow bridge of hysteria - is that neither Washington nor Moscow want Ukraine to become a festering wound. Moscow told Washington, officially, it has no intention of "invading" Ukraine. And Washington told Moscow that, for all the demented rhetoric, it does not want to expand NATO to either Ukraine or Georgia.

Whatever Washington's actions, they won't convince the Kremlin the putsch in Kiev was not orchestrated in large part by goons allied to Kaghanate of Nulands - aka US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nulands. At the same time, the Kremlin knows time is on its side - so it would be totally counterproductive to even contemplate "invading" eastern Ukraine.

Compound the vicious catfight among dodgy factions in Kiev, from fascists to Saint Yulia "Kill all the Russians" Timoschenko; Gazprom raising the price of natural gas by 80%; and the International Monetary Fund about to unleash some nasty structural adjustment that will make Greece look like Cinderella playing in a rose garden, and all that Moscow needs to do is sit back, relax and watch the (internal) carnage.

The same applies for the Baltics - which, as NATO hysteria would have it, might be invaded next week. As the Baltics are part of NATO, then we would really have the Brussels Robocops going ballistic. Yet only trademark arrogant/ignorant neo-cons believe Moscow will break complex political/trade relationships with Europe - especially Germany - risking a hot war over the Baltics. The Germans don't want a hot or cold war either. Even in the extremely unlikely event that would happen, what would macho, macho NATO do, under Pentagon's orders? Invade Russian territory?

That does not even qualify as a lousy joke.
By the way, as bad jokes ago, it's hard to top Olli Rehn, vice president of the Kafkaesque European Commission, stressing that " in the interests to maintain peace and stability on our continent" the European Union is part of the 11 billion euro (US$15 billion) IMF/disaster capitalism package to plunder, sorry, "help" Ukraine, and this while EU citizens are unemployed and/or thrown into poverty by the millions.

As for Berlin's top priority, that is to at least try to steer the EU out of an almighty crash, which implies keeping the equally economically devastated Club Med and Central Europe on board while fighting off the rise and rise of nasty, "normalized" neofascism. "Massive undertaking" does not even begin to describe it. Why add a confrontation with Moscow to this indigestible bouillabaisse?

New axis in the house
Moral high ground epiphanies such as this Guardian editorial ("he gained a peninsula but lost a country") are pointless. Same for minion Poland freaking out and asking for more "protection" from the Brussels mafia.

Predictably, Western corporate media is spinning Putin "blinked" when he phoned US President Barack Obama to try to set up a solution package - which includes, crucially, a federalization of Ukraine. The Obama administration - even staffed by astounding mediocrities - knows this is the only rational way ahead. And no amount of "pressure" will bend Moscow. Those go-go days of imposing whatever whim over serial drunkard Boris Yeltsin are long gone. At the same time, Moscow is a realist player - fully aware that the only possible solution for Ukraine has to be worked out with Washington.

So Ukraine is essentially a detail - and "Europe" is no more than a helpless bystander. Who are you gonna call in "Europe"? That Magritte-style nonentity European Council President Herman Van Rompuy? Anyone who's been to Brussels knows that "Europe" remains a glorified collection of principalities bickering in a smatter of languages. Machiavelli would easily recognize it as such.

To top if off, the Obama administration has no clue what it wants in Ukraine. A "constitutional democracy"? Moscow might even agree with that, while knowing, based on rows and rows of historical/cultural reasons, it's bound to be a failure. The red line though has been spelled out over and over again: no NATO bases in Ukraine.

Rational players in Washington - a certified minority - certainly have noticed that if you don't play ball with Moscow, Russia will play very hard ball within the framework of the P5+1 (the UN Security Council permanent members plus Germany) negotiations on the Iranian nuclear dossier.

Only the blind won't see that Moscow and Tehran are evolving towards a closer strategic partnership as much as Moscow and Beijing. There's a real strategic geopolitical axis in the house - Moscow-Beijing-Tehran - and the whole developing world has already noticed that's where the real action is. But as far as Ukraine is concerned, the stark fact is this is all about the US and Russia.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.