Wayne Madsen
Editor’s note: Now that security forces in Ukraine are allegedly shooting protestors,
corporate media coverage in the United States will focus on the
violence and calls for President Viktor Yanukovich to step aside. The
situation in Ukraine, however, is not entirely as the corporate media
would have us believe. Wayne Madsen provides a look at the effort by the
United States to destabilize not only Ukraine, but Russia. The crisis
in the Ukraine provides an additional headache for Russia as it deals
with terrorist threats on the eve of its hosting the Winter Olympics in
Sochi.
Police crackdown on the streets of Kiev.
One “themed revolution”, for which the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) and its allied operatives of the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED) and the George Soros Open Society Institute have
become so infamous, went virtually unnoticed in the English language
Western media.
In 2010, anti-Russian government provocateurs, financed by Western
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), staged a number of protests
featuring plastic blue buckets. The buckets were meant to symbolize the
portable flashing blue lights, known in Russian as migalki, used atop
many vehicles for Russian VIPs, including government officials and
private businessmen.
The themed blue bucket protests were directly linked to the
“pro-democracy” activities of USAID in Russia. American-backed
provocateurs began placing blue buckets on top of their cars to mock the
use of blue lights by officials. In response, three parties represented
in the State Duma, United Russia, A Just Russia, and the Liberal
Democratic Party, proposed a bill to crack down on the use of the blue
buckets by protesters who were intent on causing traffic problems,
sometimes resulting in vehicle accidents.
U.S. NGO support for the “blue bucket” revolution preceded by a year
the nomination by President Barack Obama of anti-Russian activist
Michael McFaul as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. McFaul began his tenure
in Moscow by opening up the U.S. embassy to all sorts of anti-Russian
political activists, provocateurs, and troublemakers.
These political provocateurs, which include People’s Freedom Party
leader political blogger Aleksey Navalny, “Left Front” Sergey Udaltsov,
chess celebrity Garry Kasparov, Russian “cover girl” Ksenia Sobchak,
“Solidarity” co-leader Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov, neo-fascist National
Bolshevik Party leader Eduard Limonov, Yabloko Party leader Sergey
Mitrokhin, and Lev Ponomarev were all well-schooled in the use of
various devices and contrivances to gain media attention for their
political causes and protests.
Themed street protests were used by Gene-Sharp-trained activists in a
number of CIA- and Soros-advanced political operations. The first such
group to successfully oust a government was OTPOR, which led protests
that ejected Slobodan Milosevic as president of Serbia. Other groups
backed by U.S.-trained activists included Kmara in Georgia, Pora in
Ukraine, KelKel in Kyrgyzstan, and Zubr in Belarus.