Nebojsa Malic Director of the Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies in Washington DC

3

Ukrainian Elections a Horrific Circus

The election in Ukraine was illegitimate. Having already lost Crimea with 2 regions having declared their independence and many in the process of currently doing so, the country is in a state of civil war and an illegal junta government in power, the staging of an election in which as many as 80% of the people did not even take part, where over 400 serious violations were registered and which were declared won on exit poll data by a laughing oligarch who immediately won the support of the West before the polls were even closed, can only be described as a "farce of historic proportions". Independent observers around the world agree that there are serious questions regarding the legitimacy of the Ukrainian elections. We talked to an expert Nebojsa Malic on the election issue and more.

This is John Robles you are listening to an interview with Nebojsa Malic the Director of the Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies in Washington DC.

Greeting between Mr. Robles and Mr. Malic

Robles: Can you give us your insights on the so-called election that just occurred in Ukraine? Why or why not, is it or is it not, legitimate in your opinion?

Malic: Well I can tell you straight off that it was not legitimate. There is no provision in the constitution allowing for the replacement of president by force as President Putin stated a couple of days ago, when he enumerated four ways in which a president can be relieved of duty and none of those four cases were met.

So, the deposition of the elected president in February of this year was not legal and therefore anything done since cannot be legitimate.

If they had by any chance tried to pass a new law or new constitution, that would have been a different story but they didn’t. So, the coup regime set up in Kiev in February, just decided to organize this presidential election, and it was just a complete farce. It was a very, very sick sad joke.

Robles: Why do you call it a farce?

Malic: They stated several times over the past two months, especially with regards to the referendum in Crimea and the referendum on the 11th in Donetsk and Lugansk, that it is ridiculous for people to vote at gun point. Well, currently half of Ukraine is at war, what is that if not voting at gun point?

Also the other half of the country is under the gun of Right Sector thugs and all sorts of private militias run by regional oligarchs. What is that? They are voting at gun point?

So, really there is no law and order, there is just simply "rule of the gun and thugs" in the areas of the country that do recognize the government in Kiev and close to a third or half of the country doesn’t. So really what sort of rule of law, what sort of procedure, what sort of democracy can they be talking about? This is preposterous!

Robles: I find it stunning, absolutely stunning, that while they are claiming that Crimea is still part of Ukraine, nobody there voted and the entire Eastern part of the country, I would say, from the initial figures I saw, maybe 1 or 2% of the people currently in the region voted and those people who voted were Ukrainian army officers and soldiers surrounding Lugansk and surrounding Slavyansk, who voted. Other than that the entire regions in the east maybe got 1.5% of vote and then all of a sudden at 6pm last night everything jumped up and now they are saying they’ve got 30 or 40 or 60% or something.

Malic: And that is just one discrepancy. I’ve seen photographs of ballots neatly stacked inside the boxes. Anybody familiar with the laws of physics knows that when you toss a piece of paper into a box, it doesn’t fall neatly in a stack.

I’ve also seen pictures posted on Twitter by Ukrainian News Agencies loyal to the oligarchs’ coup regime reportedly happy people lining up to vote, except those were pictures taken two weeks ago in Lugansk.

Robles: Right! Right.

Malic: So, if there were happy people lining up to vote, those were the people voting to secede, not people voting to support this government.

On top of this we had the electoral roll: the list of candidates that was basically oligarch A or oligarch B. It didn’t really matter who won, it would be an oligarch, and the whole thing was organized by Madeleine Albright.

So, really the whole thing was just this horrific circus, this mockery of democracy as a popular process, because see: what makes anybody think that the people who overthrew an elected government in a coup aren’t going to do that again?

They obviously don’t care for Democracy as such, because if they did, they wouldn’t have staged an armed coup to begin with, and so now they are declaring that this vote is sacred because their sponsors are behind it.

And honestly, as I noted in the private conversation the other day, two cats and a juggling dog could have come out to vote and they would have still been certified as legitimate by the OSCE because it doesn’t matter what the procedure is or whether it is legal, if it serves the interests of the coup government’s sponsors, it will be ruled legitimate no matter what actually happened. And that is precisely what has been going on!

Robles: The world has seen this! I don’t understand the outright insolent way that the West came right out and said it is legitimate. They didn’t even wait until even 10% of the ballots were in. They already announced the election just on exit poll results that were carried out at the expense of the junta itself.

Malic: That is precisely proving the point that I just made. It doesn’t matter what actually happens, they have already predetermined the conclusion and it was going to be legitimate no matter what.

This is a combination of a very specific problem in the West, it is present in the "Establishment Culture" both in Washington and many places in Europe, of this institutional blindness, a combination of arrogance and stupidity, the belief that they can actually alter reality, through changing the language and control it through careful phrasing, and that is not how the world works, but they think it is.

Robles: They really believe that the world is fooled by this?

Malic: They certainly acted as if they really believed it, so I am inclined to assume that yes, they really do believe that the world is falling for it, they are falling for it. They can’t see further away from themselves.

Robles: Unbelievable. If they are actually believing their own alternative reality that is a very scary thing.

Malic: Unfortunately, I believe that is true. They are arrogant and stupid at the same time.

Again, as you mentioned in Nuland’s intercepted conversation with the American Ambassador back in January, the US government: they were pretty clear that they don’t want Klitschko in power, they wanted Yatsenyuk as their man running the show. So, lo-and-behold Yatsenyuk becomes their man running the show, and Klitschko who was praised for 2-3 months as the leader of the Maidan, the most popular athlete ever, and so on and so forth, he vanishes, he disappears, he is nowhere to be seen. They said he needs to be the apprentice, and lo-and-behold he was the apprentice.

Robles: Sure, everything in this conversation that came out, played out exactly like they said it was.

Malic: That conversation was certainly prophetic in its content, and that is exactly how the things played out, at least in the parts that they could control.

As far as Poroshenko, mention has been made in the press in the last couple of days, especially in the West, of his alleged business ties with Russia and so on and so forth, but what has conveniently been forgotten is that he was one of the people who initially supported the whole Maidan farce and the attempts to overthrow President Yanukovich, allegedly because the deal with his chocolate holdings were endangered by the alleged Russia threats to cut off the free trade agreement with Ukraine following the accession to the EU agreement, which of course was a farce and nobody really believed that was going to happen. But anyway Poroshenko to me looks like just another oligarch who was basically handpicked because he was the least offensive of the lot.

You have people who are truly monsters like Kolomoisky who has his own private army that are going around Ukraine enacting their private game of throne fantasies. You have several other people who are just as bloody and just as ruthless, and you have Poroshenko who is playing family man, and he is trying to be all nice and decent and grandfatherly.

This is one of the typical plots… I don’t want to say "plots", by the State Department, but in reality that is what it is. When they stage manage elections and popular unrest from Serbia onwards back in 2000, they always tend to put forth a front candidate who is inoffensive and seems to be a moderate, then they place the real power behind him.

So, the front man doesn’t really have much influence and it’s the top people behind him, the Prime Ministers, the advisors and so on, they are executioners, they are the real power doing what they are being told from the outside, from Washington and Brussels.

Reminder

Robles: Somebody might say that is the exact situation in the US.

Malic: Fair enough. Some people could say that. It is one of those things that keeps being used because it keeps working! And so yes!

You have Poroshenko on one hand, but looking at his statements, he doesn’t sound like a moderate, he sounds barely less extremist than Yarosh or any of the other people involved in murdering civilians who look at them the wrong way.

I honestly don’t think this is going to make any sort of difference in the quantity and quality, so to speak, of the bloodshed in Ukraine. Just a couple of hours ago I heard about the new offensive in Donetsk, involving the airport. Obviously these people don’t intend to stop the war, they intend to escalate it.

Robles: Yeah right! And it was real funny when he was giving his acceptance speech next to Klitschko who was also giving the acceptance speech for the mayorhood of Kiev, this was also before the votes were counted.

Klitschko said something to the effect that, and I am translating from Russian (that is another point I’d like to get to in a minute, all these officials, and all their statements and everything: they are all speaking Russian but they are SO anti-Russian), so Klitschko says: "It’s always better to have dialogue than confrontation" and Poroshenko turned around and he looked at an aide or somebody that was standing next to him (maybe his bodyguard) and he was laughing out loud. You could just see how ridiculous he understood that statement to be.

As far as I know Poroshenko, he has been in almost every administration since the end of the Soviet Union and he is always switching sides, stabbing people in the back to suit the powers of the day.

Malic: Well he is an oligarch, and that is part of Ukraine’s problem! From day one when it was set up as a so-called independent country, it was basically run by a group of oligarchs.

One of the reasons Russians have managed to recover from the Yeltsin era is that after Yeltsin the government cleaned up the oligarchs and established rule of law. That never happened in Ukraine.

Robles: Right and that is something people in the West don’t understand.

Malic: Not at all. I mean, they (the West) have their own oligarchs but they are not as blatant about it. They have political classes that have had hundreds of years to perfect the technique of exploiting everybody and stealing elections and passing favors back and forth without having to resort to brute force.

The oligarchy works almost like a feudal arrangement from 300 years ago, if you rewind European and American history a couple hundred years, and you will see a similar situation in Europe and the US as well, it is just again, 200 years of history in refining this process, things appear much more acceptable.

In Ukraine that has not been the case, we’ve had 20 years of people just robbing the place. Again it would behoove people to watch "The Game of Thrones" for an explanation of oligarchs’ motivations, because they truly look like they are living out a fantasy of power and money and everything else, and backstabbing and backroom deals.

Now as far as them laughing at these phrases that they are mouthing because they would be quoted with a straight face in the western press, the fact that they are laughing about it… I am not sure what to make of that? Whether to believe that this shows that they have a shred of human decency and that they don’t actually believe their own lies, or that they have zero decency at all, because they know that it’s a lie, they are speaking it, expecting it to be believed and they are laughing about it because they don’t expect to be called on it or punished.

Robles: I think the latter. For some of our international listeners in our Washington and New York audience, if you could give your opinion whether you think US State Department, CIA, NSA, whatever… military support of the Right Sector, training and everything, has that been successful? Was this part of the plan or do you think it has gone astray and has gotten out of control?

Malic: Let me start with the oligarchs because the Right Sector and the other thug militias can only be understood in the context. Essentially an Oligarch State is one where there are two sets of laws: one for the ordinary people and one for the people in power. As I mentioned it is very much like European feudalism type of set up in which the commoners must obey every law, otherwise they will be hassled by the police or imprisoned or fined, but the oligarchs they don’t even have to obey traffic regulations.

If somebody is an oligarch, they can run red lights, they can steal, they can even murder with impunity, because they are oligarchs, there is no law for them, there is just power. Presidents come and go, the oligarchs stay and control things.

They have multiple citizenships, so they can always skip to another country if they get into a bit of trouble, and then come back to assert control.

Sometimes they fight each other and some of them might end up in jail and that creates the illusion of the rule of law. But in essence the only people that get arrested are the people on the losing side of a power struggle. For example, when Yulia Timoshenko went to jail, it was a legitimate imprisonment, she was objectively guilty of lying, cheating, stealing and so on, but again the oligarchs were protesting that because she was an oligarch and therefore she should have been able to do these things with impunity while in power.

So, that is what I am trying to illustrate to people that in a world of "Oligarchy Government" you have one set of laws for the ordinary people and another set of laws for these people in power.

And now the American Government is supporting and subsidizing places like Ukraine that practice this. It is an abomination! It is an atrocity.

Robles: That is what has happened in the US as well, especially with all the crimes committed by the Bush Administration and all the people involved in it from outing CIA agents, to writing and approving torture methods, to illegal invasions, aggressive war, etc., etc.. I think it is the same thing only it is on a more massive/major scale.

Malic: And again far more subtle than being so open because they (the US) have had a couple of hundred years to perfect the practice as I mentioned before.

Now as far as the militias in Ukraine, again Right Sector is only part of the equation, you have other private militias loyal to oligarchs, you have the national guards, you have the regular army units that have by and large either refused to fight or defected to the federalists.

Just last week a unit that had refused to attack civilians was attacked by an oligarch militia and massacred. They were people who essentially refused to commit a war crime and the private militia loyal to an oligarch attacked and killed them.

A similar thing happened in Odessa. They wanted to send a message: that anybody who disagrees with them, anybody who dare resist them, would be gruesomely murdered. The people in Odessa were a warning, they were also an atrocity (the whole burning people alive in a building was a horrific crime!), but it was also a warning to everybody else: you will either obey us or else!

Here they are saying it was clashes! Every time there is an atrocity by someone that the US government supports, that is explained as: Oh! Clashes between two communities! Or some abstraction in passive voice!

This is John Robles you were listening to an interview with Nebojsa Malic the Director of the Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies in Washington DC. Thank you very much for listening and as always I wish you the best wherever in the world you may be.

 

Last Update: 08/06/2023 03:24 +0300

 

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