Reply #9: "our guy"

[foo_bar]

Yushchenko favors European Union and NATO membership for Ukraine. Not surprising, he is backed, and strongly, by Washington. Former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has been directly involved on behalf of the Bush administration in grooming Yushchenko for his new role.

As far back as November 2001, Yushchenko was reportedly wined and dined in Washington by the Bush administration, paid for by the US Congress-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Martin Foulner in the Glasgow Herald of November 26 reported the details of the meeting. NED, it's worth noting, was set up during the Ronald Reagan administration by US Congress to "privatize" certain Central Intelligence Agency operations, and allow Washington to claim clean hands in various foreign meddling. Ukraine is part of a wider US pattern of active "regime change" in eastern Europe and Central Asia.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GA20Ag01.html

Reveling in the apparent election of a pro-Western president in Ukraine, the Bush administration on Monday urged Russia to join with the United States in helping the former Soviet republic. "Let's all join together now and see what we can do," Secretary of State Colin Powell said.
(...)
Rejecting any suggestion the Bush administration backed Yushchenko, he said U.S.-funded organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy merely helped Ukrainian citizens to participate in open, free elections.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-12/28/content_403917.htm

During his last State of the Union speech, on January 20th, 2004, President Bush announced that he would double the budget for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and that its «new tasks would focus on the promotion of free elections, free exchange, freedom of press and trade union freedom in the Middle East». For the White House, it is all about complementing its military actions in the region with an ever increasing interference with the domestic affairs of certain countries.
(...)
Most of the historic figures involved in the CIA’s covert actions have, at some point, been members of the NED’s Administrative Council or of its board of directors; among them Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros or Elliot Abrams. Currently, it is presided over by Vin Weber, former Republican congressman from the state of Minnesota, founder of the ultraconservative Empower America association and fundraiser for the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in the year 2000. Its executive director is Carl Geshman, a former Trotskyite that became the person responsible for the US Social Democrats and a member of the neo-conservative trend <1>.

http://www.voltairenet.org/article30022.html

New York (August 21, 2005) — Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko will be the guest of honor at the Founding Dinner of the Orange Circle, a new initiative that will work to advance the values of democracy and freedom that represented the essence of the Orange Revolution. The Dinner will be held at New York's Rainbow Room on September 15th, 2005.

The Orange Circle is an emerging association of eminent international leaders, including Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, who will address the Founding dinner. It includes important business leaders, including Tim Draper, the head of the $ 3 billion investment fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which has announced the creation of a Nexus fund to invest in high technologies in Ukraine. As importantly, it includes leading Ukrainian-Americans and Ukrainian-Canadians, who have committed themselves to building the longterm nongovernmental initiative.

http://www.brama.com/news/press/2005/08/050821orangecircle_founding.html

And further on we can see that Viktor Yushchenko himself sits on the advisory board!
(...)
This May, the Virginia-based private management consultancy Development Associates, Inc., was awarded $100 million by the US government “for strengthening national legislatures and other deliberative bodies worldwide.” According to the organization’s website, several million dollars from this went to Ukraine in advance of the elections.

http://www.zvestia.com/1/us-ron-paul/ron-paul-20704.html

Then US secretary of state Colin Powell immediately condemned the results, as did EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana (1). The EU, NATO and the US urged a review of the election (2), and Powell warned Ukraine that it would be internationally ostracised if Yanukovich remained (3). Apparently without irony, the EU complained that Russia had been intervening in the election.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/303/