Reply #57: happy to oblige ...

[bin.dare]

... It all started when, in 1993, Viktor Yushchenko was appointed head of the newly-formed National Bank of Ukraine. He was among the main architects of the IMF's deadly economic policy which served to impoverish The Ukraine and almost destroyed its economy.

The following are just a few snippets from recent links to get you started:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FL02Ag01.html

This writer, who was posted in Bucharest in the early 1980s and has been based here for many years and was accredited to Azerbaijan in Caucasus in the mid-1990s, feels that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and former communist regimes in Europe, mostly money grabbing mafia-style leadership, supported by the West, have been thrown up as an alternative. They have built up massive nests in the West on which they then become dependent, like Russia's billion-dollar oligarchs, who also control "free media". Under the charade of globalization and economic laissez faire, hundreds of billions of US dollars have been transferred to Western banks and institutions, which have become debts for the hapless poor masses in these countries.

The man "selected" by the West to lead Ukraine, Yushchenko, finds his support among groups who have privatized public assets to their cronies.


http://www.counterpunch.org/volatile12012004.html

What passes for a democratic revolution in Ukraine is nothing more than a U.S. staged coup d'etat, very similar to the one the Bush administration backed in Georgia last year, which toppled Eduard Shevardnadze and helped to further pave the way for U.S. ambitions in the region. (1)

The cast of characters in this epic tale of revolution, American style, are: Vladimir Putin, the supposed arch enemy of the free world and our villain; Viktor Yanukovych, the president elect in question and at the center of the controversy, who is supported by Moscow; Viktor Yushchenko, the U.S./IMF/World Bank puppet hero and The People on the streets (the supporting cast), replete with costumes made up of orange hats and scarves, their props consisting of orange banners, flags and an endless sea of tents, which line the icy streets of Kiev and illustrate their resolve to stay until they are victorious.

Behind the scenes of the revolution, operating in dark alley ways, conjuring and manipulating the desperate images of a people fighting for their freedoms, are our usual suspects: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Freedom House and last but certainly not least, George Soros' Open Society Institute, all of whom helped to fund pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko.(2) (Does anyone ever wonder about George Soros, famed 'philanthropist' and promoter of 'democracy' around the world? Soros poured fifteen million dollars of his own money into anti-war and anti-Bush groups during the presidential election, publicly proclaiming his hatred of George W. Bush and yet Soros and his organization seem to support the same agenda: exporting the U.S. idea of democracy to areas of the world strategic to U.S. interests and miraculously following the Bush Administration's chosen route for oil pipelines...)


http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO411D.html

With trade liberalization (which was part of the economic package), US grain surpluses and "food aid" were dumped on the domestic market, contributing to destabilizing one of the World's largest and most productive wheat economies, (e.g. comparable to that of the American Mid West).

By 1998, the deregulation of the grain market had resulted in a decline in the production of grain by 45 percent in relation to its 1986-90 level. The collapse in livestock production, poultry and dairy products was even more dramatic

Following his appointment, Yushchenko immediately set in motion a major IMF sponsored bankruptcy program directed against Ukrainian industry, which essentially consisted in closing down part of the country's manufacturing base. He also attempted to undermine the bilateral trade in oil and natural gas between Russia and the Ukraine on behalf of the IMF which had demanded that this trade be conducted in US dollars rather than in terms of commodity barter.


http://www.counterpunch.org/nagle12222004.html

Viktor Yushchenko began his career in the banking structures of the USSR, as an official of the Ukrainian division of the giant centralized Soviet planning apparatus known as "Gosbank." In the final years of the Soviet Union's existence, the disintegration of Gosbank spawned many scams and crooked schemes. Under the guise of allocating credits for state-approved projects, the emerging "entrepreneurs" embezzled the equivalent of billions of dollars worth of state resources. Corruption proliferated under a collapsing regime where legislative oversight of banking activity was practically non-existent. Almost overnight, a new breed of financial "oligarchs" was born. Mr. Yushchenko likes to brand others as "oligarchs," but few people personify the concept better than he does.