Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseyuk Resigns
By Eric Zuesse
11 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org
On Sunday, April 10th, Arseniy Yatseyuk, finally officially resigned, though his actual service as Ukraine’s Prime Minister ended in the very closing days of December 2015. He had been selected by U.S. President Obama’s agent on Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, on 4 February 2014, to lead Ukraine as that country’s new Prime Minister — to lead it as soon as the Obama-planned Ukrainian coup overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych would be completed (which happened 22 days later).
As this reporter had noted on 15 January 2016, “Yats” (as Nuland affectionately called him) had been effectively ousted from power by the man, Petro Poroshenko, who had subsequently won the 25 May 2014 Ukrainian Presidential election, beating out Obama’s choice, Yulia Timoshenko (the head of Yats’s party), in the by-then rump Ukraine (i.e., without the participation of Crimea and Donbass, both of which areas of Ukraine had voted over 75% for Yanukovych and thus refused to accept Obama’s coup and the legitimacy of the Ukrainian ‘election’ to replace Yanukovych).
As Ukraine’s new President, Poroshenko continued (and intensified) the bombing campaign that had been started by Yatsenyuk to slaughter the residents of Donbass (whom both he and Yatsenyuk called all ’terrorists’ for refusing to accept their coup-regime), and he repeatedly expressed his determination also to invade and retake Crimea. Obama supported Poroshenko on both matters, and so too did Yatsenyuk, who remained in power in Ukraine as Prime Minister until this April 10th.
As I had noted when reporting on this matter back on January 15th of this year, Yatsenyuk even at that time, “seems to have been ousted,” and:
The person who ousted him appears to have been the former CIA asset whom the U.S. Administration allowed to run as a candidate in Ukraine’s Presidential election on 25 May 2014, and who had won that election — the billionaire Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko had assisted in the coup, and admitted it to the EU’s investigator who was sent right after the overthrow. (The information that it had been a coup instead of an authentic revolution came as a shock to the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister.)
This apparent ouster was first reported by the TV channel 112 Ukraine, which is owned by a publicly unnamed anti-coup politician, whom the government has been trying to dispossess of the channel, but hasn’t yet succeeded in achieving that.
Furthermore. I noted:
Prime Minister Yatsenyuk’s official website appears remarkably empty now. Its “Upcoming Events” page shows nothing at all. The “News” page is also interesting. On January 15th, the only headline is "Ukraine launched a new Silk Road bypassing Russia.” That news-item doesn’t even mention Yatsenyuk.
From that time till his official resignation four months later, Yatsenyuk’s office achieved nothing; and, finally, he succumbed, which will now enable Poroshenko to name his replacement.
According to German Economic News, which is the most reliable in-depth news-source on such matters, the U.S. President’s "new favorite [to become Ukraine’s Prime Minister] is the former Georgian President Saakashvili, who now acts as governor of Odessa. Several months ago, Saakashvili called ‘Jaz' the center of corruption in Kiev, and demanded dismissal of the entire political elite in Kiev. Saakashvili is considered one of the favorites to succeed Yatsenyuk. He is the subject of an international arrest warrant for allegedly having embezzled the former Soviet state, Georgia’s, government, while he was their President.”
Saakashviili might be favored by U.S. President Obama because, after Saakashvili escaped from Georgia, he lived in the United States, where he nurtured political contacts, especially in ‘neo-conservative’ circles (of which Obama and especially Hillary Clinton are members). (Victoria Nuland, and her husband, both strong ‘neo-conservatives,’ are also close friends of Ms. Clinton.) This is also the reason why the U.S. regime had Poroshenko appoint the Georgian Saakashvili to be the Governor of the Ukrainian region of Odessa. That’s a region where the public, especially in the city of Odessa, have been especially bitter against the Obama-coup regime, because of the White-House-Yatsenyuk team’s massacre of over a hundred coup-opponents at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa on 2 May 2014.
So: whereas Obama had replaced the corrupt Yanukovych with the even more corrupt Yatsenyuk, and then allowed onto the team Poroshenko (who was only acceptable to Obama, not preferred by him to become President), the expectation is now that the accused Georgian embezzler Saakashvili will soon become Yatsenyuk’s replacement — all courtesy of the U.S. government, and with the support of its European allies: all allegedly seeking here to ‘clean up the corruption in Ukraine'. Poroshenko, who has a lower approval-rating among even just the rump-Ukrainian public — Ukraine without the portions that had voted at the highest percentages, as high as 90+%, for Yanukovych, and which would thus now disapprove almost 100% of Poroshenko — than Yanukovych ever had, in the entirety of Ukraine (including those, Yanukovych's highest-approval, areas), and so whose approval rating is by far lower than Yanukovych’s ever was, is now to be making the decision to choose the replacement of the man who had started the bombing campaign against Donbass.
Whomever Poroshenko chooses to replace “Yats” will presumably be committed to whatever U.S. President Obama wants him to be committed to, because, otherwise, the bankrupt Ukrainian government won’t continue to be able to go deeper and deeper into debt. Without the U.S. President’s backing, Ukraine’s government won’t be able to continue to be funded by the taxpayers in the U.S. and EU — absorbing the losses from a Ukrainian government whose only real product now is the further impoverishment of the publics not only in Ukraine but throughout the West. Saakashvili, according to German Economic News, will likely fill the bill.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.