Via RT: “Gilbert Doctorow of Russia Insider pointed out that Yatsenyuk’s resignation occurred shortly after Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU had been rejected in a Dutch referendum.
“This raised the feeling of crisis within the Ukrainian political elites and made [Yatsenyuk’s] departure something essential so they would have a sacrificial lamb and they would appear before Europeans in particular, and IMF as well, to be making some progress in putting their house in order,” he told RT.
Doctorow said that Kiev is keenly aware of what its European partners are saying about Ukraine’s EU aspirations. “The Ukraine is not going to join the EU any time soon, in fact, not in the next 20-30 years, which in political terms [means] never,” he said, adding that this was very damaging to the Ukrainian leadership’s image at home.”
quadrangleonline.com: ‘Dutch Reject EU-Ukraine Association Agreement in Referendum’
EUR-Press Office Retweeted April 10, 2016
(Brookings scholar focusing on arms control, Russia and Ukraine. Retired career diplomat. Hobbies include mountaineering)
‘Drat those Panama Papers! Do you feel a coup coming on, son?
Might we wonder what this is really about?
I sure wish Stephen Cohen were on the Twit machine…
‘US ‘Information War’ and the Embryonic Kerry–Lavrov Détente; Is the recent tsunami of anti-Putin news reports meant to undermine US–Russian negotiations on Syria and Ukraine? by Stephen F. Cohen, April 6, 2016
It’s a radio program, but this is part of the gist:
“But the Panama Papers did far more political damage to Petro Poroshenko, president of the Washington-backed government in Kiev, revealing that had personally established offshore accounts and, still worse, while his Ukrainian army was suffering a humiliating military defeat at the hands of the Russian-backed rebels in Eastern Ukraine, in August 2014. (Unlike Putin, Poroshenko and his offshore accounts were named in the investigation.) With the Kiev government already in deep political and economic crisis, this is a further, and possibly fatal, blow to Poroshenko’s standing with the Ukrainian elite and people. Calls for his impeachment are already being made. Cohen asks how the Obama administration will deal with this latest crisis of its “Ukrainian project,” as it is sometimes derisively termed. Will it, can it, replace Poroshenko—or even any longer control the politics of Kiev?”
Noodleman’s war
