Eric Zuesse

The Czech Republic’s President Milos Zeman said, in an interview, in the January 3rd edition of Prague’s daily newspaper Pravo, that Czechs who think of the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych, on 22 February 2014, as having been like Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic “Velvet Revolution” are seeing it in a profoundly false light, because, (as Russian Television translated his statement into English) "Maidan was not a democratic revolution.” He said that this is the reason why Ukraine now is in a condition of “civil war,” in which the residents of the Donbass region in Ukraine’s southeast have broken away from the Ukrainian Government.

He furthermore said that, "Judging by some of the statements of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, I think that he is rather a prime minister of war because he does not want a peaceful solution, as recommended by the European Union (EU), but instead prefers to use force.”

He added, by way of contrast to Yatsenyuk, the possibility that Ukraine’s President, Petro Poroshenko “might be a man of peace.” So: though Zeman held out no such hope regarding Yatsenyuk (who was Obama’s choice to lead Ukraine), he did for Poroshenko (who wasn’t Obama’s choice, but who became Ukraine’s President despite Obama’s having wanted Yatsenyuk’s sponsor, the hyper-aggressive Yulia Tymoshenko, to win the May 25th Presidential election, which was held only in Ukraine’s pro-coup northwest, but claimed to possess authority over the entire country).

What this statement from Zeman indicates is that the European Union is trying to deal with Poroshenko, as the “good cop” in a “good cop, bad cop” routine, with Yatsenyuk playing the bad cop; and, so, the EU’s policies regarding Ukraine will depend upon what comes forth from Poroshenko, not at all upon what comes from the more clearly pro-war, anti-peace, Yatsenyuk.

Furthermore, Zeman’s now publicly asserting that the overthrow of Yanukovych was a coup instead of having merely expressed the democratic intentions of most of the Maidan demonstrators, constitutes a sharp break away from U.S. President Barack Obama, who was behind that Ukrainian coup and who endorses its current leaders.

Zeman isn’t yet going as far as Hungary’s President Viktor Orban did in his siding with Russia’s President Putin against America’s President Obama, but Zeman is indicating that, unless Obama will get Poroshenko to separate himself more clearly from Yatsenyuk (whom the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland actually selected on February 4th to become Ukraine’s Prime Minister in the coup just 18 days later, and so there can be no reasonable question that he is an Obama stooge), Czech policy regarding Ukraine will separate away from Obama’s war against Putin, and will join instead with Putin’s defense against Obama’s Ukrainian assault.

Zeman is thus now in very much the same position that Orban had been prior to Orban’s clear decision recently to side with Putin: each is a head-of-state of a former Soviet satellite nation, which had waged a democratic revolution (in 1956 in Hungary, and in 1968 in Czechoslovakia) against the Soviet communist tyranny. He is saying to his own countrymen, that the tyrant now is the United States, under its President Barack Obama, and is not Russia, under its President Vladimir Putin. That’s a seismic shift, away from the U.S., because of the Ukrainian coup.

Zeman was careful in his selection of which Czech news-medium would hold this interview with him. As wikipedia has noted, Pravo “is the only Czech national daily that is not owned by a foreign company.” The message that this fact sends to Czechs is that Zeman wanted to make clear that foreign influences, and any currying of favor with aristocrats (who own the ‘news’ media) in foreign countries, will not dictate his policies; only the Czech Republic’s own democratic values, and the behavior of Poroshenko, will. Zeman is indirectly telling Obama: Back off from me — you’re trying to get too close, and I won’t tolerate this. When Victoria Nuland said “F—k the EU,” she expressed Obama’s view, and all of them recognized the fact; some, like Orban and Zeman, don’t like to be treated this way; others, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, seem not to mind.

It’s also interesting that the first two EU nations to indicate that they might leave the EU for an alliance with Russia are both former Soviet satellite countries that revolted against the Soviet dictatorship; both are Eastern European, not Western European. Perhaps these leaders are more loathe to be controlled by tyrants than are the ones for whom the very idea of being subordinate to a tyrant is just a mere abstraction. (Merkel, however, seems simply to love whatever is conservative, even if it might happen to be nazi, as in Ukraine.)

In any case, Ukraine’s coup has already produced one earthquake of historical magnitude, in Hungary, with Orban, and might soon do the same in the Czech Republic, with Zeman (which will depend upon Poroshenko reducing his war against Ukraine’s former east — which, in turn, will depend upon what instructions Obama provides to Poroshenko).

The European Union could actually be in the process of breaking up; and not only because of the Ukrainian civil war, but also because Obama’s forcing each and every one of the EU nations to choose up sides in Obama’s Ukrainian war against Putin will have very different economic effects upon the various individual EU member-nations, some of which will lose far more business with Russia, from adhering to Obama’s sanctions against Russia, than will others that go along with those sanctions.

U.S. President Obama is thus now pressing his pedal to the metal in order to achieve maximum destructive force against Russia, regardless of how many or what nations will follow him — perhaps even over the cliff, into a nuclear war. Obama is, in effect, now saying to each and every European head-of-state: Either you’re with us, or you’re against us. He’s George W. Bush II, only with regard to Russia, instead of to Iraq.

It’s “choosing up sides” time, yet again; and, this time, Obama and Putin are both waiting, no doubt each somewhat nervously, to see what his team will consist of, and what the opposing team will turn out to be.

However, there can be no reasonable doubt that Obama was the aggressor here. A coup followed by an ethnic cleansing is nazi, not at all democratic. That’s not opinion; it’s fact; and so it warrants to be noted in a news report, even though (if not especially because) others don’t report this fact, so that it’s still news, for long after it should have been reported as being “news.” Unfortunately, it remains as news, even today.

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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 .