Russian Foreign Ministry has expressed its surprise at the EU refusal to comment on the leaked phone conversation between the EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet. Earlier the Estonian Foreign Ministry confirmed the authenticity of the recording that suggested the snipers who shot at protesters and police in the Ukrainian capital Kiev were allegedly hired by the new coalition, and not ousted President Yanukovich. The Voice of Russia’s political analyst Dmitriy Babich expressed his opinion.
How can you comment on this conversation?
I think it is just astounding what Mr. Paet had to say because basically the Western press has been saying for all these days that the file only came from the government side and it was taken as an axiom by most of the media in the West. And now we find out from Mr. Paet who talked to some opposition activists of the civil society actually. So they acknowledged that the bullets and the weapons used to kill on both sides were basically the same and that the main suspicion is not actually with Yanukovych but with what Mr. Paet called ‘the opposition coalition’. But I would like to remind you that part of this opposition is the neo-Nazis party called ‘Svoboda’. Until 2004 it was called National Social Party of Ukraine. If you read its program, they suggest that people should identify their ethnic origin in their passports, that what the call Ukrainophobia should be punished, should be seen as the criminal offence and they make quite a few other suggestions which remind one of the Nazi Germany.
So the opposition is actually responsible for the killings?
Well, I think basically that the main problem is the bias of the Western media because just if you watch television, if you watch the television images of these three months, you can see that these so-called peaceful protesters attacked police much more often than the police attacked them. The most typical situation is the police standing on the street blocking the path to the Presidential administration, hiding behind their shields, and the “peaceful protesters” in the Western understanding of this word, first they throw at them stones and Molotov cocktails, and then they attack them with metal chains, metal sticks and this is all just civil society on protest against the corrupt government. I am afraid this lead conversation will not be investigated for the very simple reason. The new prosecutor general of Ukraine Mr. Makhnitskiy, he is a member of the Svoboda party. So for more than a decade he believed that people should be checked for their loyalty for the Ukraine state on the lie detector, that people who lied about having a double citizenship, most likely Russian citizenship should be deprived of their property. So you can imagine what this kind of person will do with this recorded conversation. He is not going to investigate it.
Is there any chance that Maidan, which is still a force in Ukraine will somehow press the authorities, force the authorities to start the investigation?
I think that what you call Maidan is just a crowd, which can be manipulated like any crowd. And crowds are incapable of investigations. Crowds are moved by hate or love, they are moved by primitive emotions. And the crowd that we have seen in the center of Kiev for these three months was an evil crowd. Even its supporters agree that about 50% was moved because of hatred for corruption and 50% moved by hatred for Russia and Russians. I think that ethnic hate is a lot worse than corruption and certainly these people are not going to push for a fair investigation and they are not going to accept the results of a fair investigation because in their hearts they have already blamed their enemies from everything.
Let’s get back to this tape. If we listen to it carefully, to what Mr. Paet and Catherine Ashton were talking about and to what they said, they actually never said that these facts should be concealed. So probably, is there a chance that international community, the so-called international community would somehow, especially now when it is leaked, press the authorities to still investigate it?
No, I don’t believe in it because the international community had every evening lots of television images before its eyes and it continues to pronounce the same lies. They have seen the Molotov cocktails, they have seen the policemen killed and mutilated, and they continued calling these people peaceful protesters for three months. So do you think that after this huge lie they are going to investigate just one small lie that conspired in the recorded phone conversation? No, the EU and the US engaged themselves 100% on the side of the opposition. They failed to guarantee the Agreement on division of power, which was signed between Yanukovych and the opposition on the 21st of February. Their attitude is not compromised in the investigation. Their attitude is media on slot and victory. And victory under the slogan “the winner takes all”. That’s their attitude, it is extremely destructive.
If we talk about situation in Ukraine. The two politicians are actually talking about credibility of Ukrainian politicians and they also say that the only one who is more or less popular both in so-called civil society and among Maidan and also in eastern Ukraine is Mr. Poroshenko. Do you think that actually reflects the state of affairs in Ukraine that no one is popular there except for one or two people?
The problem is that all their conversation is extremely amateurish. These are the people who have very superficial knowledge of Ukrainian politics. But they feel themselves empowered to discuss and decide who is going to be the next government and their attitude is based on hear-see things like “I liked this Olga, I think she should be the next Minister of Health”. Poroshenko is sympathetic to me; I think he should be a member of the new government. That reminds me of Victoria Nuland’s conversation that was also recorded how she says to the American Ambassador in Kiev “Okay, Yatzenuk, she calls him Yatz, he started with economics, so he probably should be in the next government”. You know, Klitch, this is the way she calls Klitchko “I don’t like him. He shouldn’t be in that government”. She probably doesn’t like him because he is a boxer and that doesn’t reflect well on her image of a member of government. So this talk is just laughable, it is extremely amateurish. And I think it is tragic that these kinds of people actually decide the fate of the country that has a population of 46 million. And this people lecture Russia and they lecture Ukrainians on how they should live, how bad we all are, and this is just pathetic. This is the only word I can find for it. Pathetic.
Source: Voice of Russia