Monday, January 26, 2015

Strange Meeting in Donetsk on January 26: the Spirit of the Minsk Pact is not dead yet; Surkov is still at work

Viktor Medvedchuk, who heads a politically insignificant organization, "Ukrainian Choice," made a quick visit to Donetsk on January 26 where he met with the heads of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky. He also met with the envoys of the two republics for "Minsk negotiations." Medvedchuk went to Donetsk officially as Poroshenko's envoy. Dmitriy Peskov, Putin's spokesman (press-secretary), praised the meeting with "cautious optimism," reiterating the standard content of the Minsk Agreements. Putin is the godfather of Medvedchuk's daughter Darina.

You might also remember that Medvedechuk represented the Kiev regime together with Kuchma at the first round of the talks held on June 21 in Donetsk. During that meeting, it was not clear whom exactly or which side he was supposed to represent, except that Medvedchuk was sitting next to Kuchma on the side of the table opposite to the side representing Donetsk and Lugansk. Memorably, at the end of the meeting, Oleg Tzarev went into a small rent of thanking everyone for coming with no one paying attention to him and rushing to get out. Even the wikipedia entry also confirms that "it was unclear who [Medvedchuk] represented there."

On 24 June 2014, three days after the meeting, the Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic informed (were instructed to inform) the OSCE that Medvedchuk was appointed their representative in the negotiations with the Ukrainian Government. Pay attention to the date when it happened. It was just when the siege of Slavyanask was to be hermetically sealed off with no plan on the part of the Donetsk leadership (with the Kiev mayor and the police chief still in town) 1) to build any real defense of Donetsk at that moment and 2) with no intention or desire to send any relief force to Slavyansk. But on 8 July 2014--after Strelkov's arrival to Donetsk with his soldiers from Slavyansk, which undermined the clever plans--then Prime Minister of the Donetsk People's Republic Alexander Borodai stated that Medvedchuk "has no right to represent either the Donetsk People's Republic or the Lugansk People's Republic" and that he was a "mediator in the negotiations." In fact, while still in Slavyansk, Strelkov sternly warned that Medvedchuk should not be trusted with any position on behalf of the Donetsk People's Republic. As it has been revealed later (I believe that Boris Rozhin wrote about somewhere), part of the "clever plan" alias the Minsk deal was that Medvedchuk would be appointed by the junta (or jointly with the junta) as the head of the Donetsk (and perhaps also Lugansk) region--over the heads and without any consent or support (to speak of) from the militia or the local people for whom their uprising was as much as antifascist as anti-oligarchic. Strelkov knew about this plan and said that perhaps anyone else then might do--only not Medvedchuk for Christ's sake.

When the Minsk "ceasefire" was still fresh and hopeful ("Donbass is Ukraine," and to say that Slavyansk is not Ukraine was held as a proof of "complete idiocy," and all would be fine and victory would be won and the junta defeated, if only the "regions" of Donetsk and Lugansk can be plugged back under the sovereignty and whip [and Molotov cocktails] of the Banderite junta and under Ukie flags for a promise not to expand NATO ever again--again and to forget at least for a bit of time about Crimea), Medvedchuk showed up in close proximity to Putin at the F1 race in Sochi on October 12, 2014:

For your information, Putin is for some reason marked on the photo as No. 5 and Medvedchuk as No. 3. I am a low tech guy (a student of philosophy), so I am just using someone else's numbering here.

In 2013 Medvedchuk was publicly attacking the European Union, at one point comparing it to the Nazi Third Reich [wikipedia]. On 30 November he also condemned the Maidan, which Poroshenko was financing and sponsoring and which made the latter eventually the country's president. Due to the Crimean crisis he was put on the Canadian and the US sanction lists on 17 March 2014. So, being on the US sanctions list over Crimea, he now represents Poroshenko, the head of the junta in Kiev in talks with the two people's republics.

For Ukrainian nationalists, Medvedchuk is believed to be "the head of the pro-Russian fifth column in Ukraine."

He used to be a politically very powerful person in Ukraine--till January of 2005, when he lost his position as the Head of President Kuchma's Administration. His political power has always a character of eminence grise--of a man from behind the scene, mainly outside the public view.

If Kuchma fully trusted this man to be his right hand for many things, would not the working class people of Donbass want to do the same? To place trust and their fate, and most importantly power, power over their fate and struggle, into the hands of this man?



Medvedchuk, as you can see from the photo, otherwise looks almost like a perfectly likeable and trust-inspiring person. At least in comparison with Surkov or Poroshenko himself. Well, I studied a bit of Leo Strauss and the sophists, so I am sensitive to the importance of those little words like "almost." Easily any lady or even a man would not feel bad about meeting this person along on the street in the dark. Surely no skeletons in the closet here.

The one fact plain enough, though, is that he is one of the Ukrainian notorious oligarchs.

Further from Wikipedia: "Medvedchuk's father, Volodymyr Medvedchuk, avoided being drafted into the Red Army during the "Great Patriotic War" due to his Pott disease. During Nazi Germany's occupation of Ukraine he worked for the German administration in a labor camp from April 1942 to November 1943. The section provided enforced deportation of the local able-bodied Ukrainian youth to work in Nazi Germany. After the retreat of German forces Volodymyr Medvedchuk was arrested by SMERSH on August 7, 1954 and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment and four of exile in Siberia "for participation in Ukrainian nationalistic activities"."

So while Zakharchenko justly declared that the Army of Novorossiya needs to defend the civilians of Donbass from incessant shelling, which not only did not stop because of the Minsk "ceasefire," but was allowed to go on with impunity, Surkov and Company decided to act and to reclaim their lost "high moral ground," which they never held anyway unless you call yielding to the demands and the will of the Nazi junta as such.

http://ria.ru/world/20150127/1044442017.html

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