Stephen Lendman

In February 2014, Washington replaced Ukrainian democracy with fascism in Europe’s heartland - illegitimately installed officials waging war on their own people.

Fundamental human and civil rights were abolished. Police state viciousness replaced them. Regime critics risk prosecution, sentencing, imprisonment or assassination.

Two years after fascists seized power, conditions for ordinary Ukrainians are deplorable. According to Germany’s daily broadsheet Junge Welt, they’re “staggering.”

“Since the end of the Yanukovych era, the average income has decreased by 50%,” it reported - on top of 2015’s 44% inflation, nearly reducing purchasing power by half, making it impossible for most Ukrainians to get by.

They’re suffering hugely, deeply impoverished, denied fundamental social services, abolished or greatly reduced en route to eliminating them altogether.

Ukraine’s economy is bankrupt, teetering on collapse, sustained by US-controlled IMF loans, violating its longstanding rules, a special dispensation for Ukraine.

It loaned billions of dollars to a deadbeat borrower unable to repay them, an unprecedented act, funding its war machine, turning a blind eye to a hugely corrupt regime persecuting its own people.

Ukraine’s GDP is in near free-fall, contracting by 12% last year, projected to continue declining sharply this year and beyond.

The average pension was cut to 80 euros monthly (around $90), an impossible amount to live on, forcing pensioners to try getting by any way they can, including growing some of their own food in season.

US anointed illegitimate oligarch president Petro Poroshenko is widely despised. So are other key regime officials.

They blame dismal economic conditions mainly on ongoing civil war - US-orchestrated and backed naked aggression against Donbass freedom fighters, rejecting fascist rule, wanting fundamental democratic rights, deserving universal praise and support.

According to Junge Welt, regime critics call Kiev claims lame excuses. “What matters is (it’s) done little or nothing to prevent corruption and insider trading,” elite interests benefitting at the expense of everyone else, stealing the country blind, grabbing all they can.

Complicit regime-connected oligarchs profit hugely in Ukraine, benefitting from grand theft, super-rich Dmitry Firtash apparently not one of them, calling Kiev “politically bankrupt.”

Days earlier, Ukrainian Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius resigned, followed the next day by his first deputy, Yulia Kovaliv, his remaining team, two deputy ministers and Kiev’s trade representative.

Parliament speaker Volodymyr Groysman warned of Ukraine “entering a serious political crisis.” Resignations followed nothing done to address vital reforms needed.

In his resignation letter, Abromavicius said corrupt officials blocked them, wanting control over state enterprises for their own self-interest, including natural gas company NAK Naftogaz.

“Neither I nor my team have any desire to serve as a cover-up for the covert corruption, or become puppets for” regime officials “trying to exercise control over the flow of public funds,” he explained.

Firtash blasted corrupt Kiev officials, saying no reform program exists. (T)he most important thing for (regime officials) is…profit(ing)” at the public trough.

“What I see today in Ukraine is the failure of” US policy, “external forces” controlling things, wrecking the country politically and economically.

He supports closer Russian/European relations. “Kiev los(ing) the Russian market had a catastrophic impact on the…economy,” he explained.

He supports European nations, Russia and Ukraine working together cooperatively “at the same table…”

“The last thing Europe needs today is a (politically and economically unstable) Ukraine,” a US-installed puppet regime, a metastasizing cancer in Europe’s heartland.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III".

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