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The dominant left narrative is that Viktor Yanukovych was Ukraine’s
version of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a “popularly elected” (as Stephen
F. Cohen puts it) president whose decision to reject a deal with the EU
in favor of a better deal with Russia made him the target of a
conspiracy of local fascists and Western imperialism. Furthermore, if
not for protesters being killed by snipers “hired” by the Euromaidan
protest leaders, the “putsch” would have not succeeded. This is the
story put forward by RT.com and echoed by WSWS.org, Global Research, and
other websites too numerous to mention.
A deeper investigation reveals that it was his own erstwhile backers who
were decisive in his ouster. In a maneuver that evokes Mubarak’s removal
in Egypt, elements of the “pro-Russian” oligarchy decided to throw
Yanukovych to the wolves in order to deflate the mass movement and make
continued oligarchic rule possible. As Don Fabrizio put it in Giuseppi
di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now,
they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are,
things will have to change.”
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2014/03/30/yanukovychs-ouster-the-myth-and-the-reality/
---
NY Times, Jan. 4 2015
Ukraine Leader Was Defeated Even Before He Was Ousted
By ANDREW HIGGINS and ANDREW E. KRAMERJ
KIEV, Ukraine — Ashen-faced after a sleepless night of marathon
negotiations, Viktor F. Yanukovych hesitated, shaking his pen above the
text placed before him in the chandeliered hall. Then, under the
unsmiling gaze of European diplomats and his political enemies, the
beleaguered Ukrainian president scrawled his signature, sealing a deal
that he believed would keep him in power, at least for a few more months.
But even as Mr. Yanukovych sat down with his political foes at the
presidential administration building on the afternoon of Friday, Feb.
21, his last authority was fast draining away. In a flurry of frantic
calls to opposition lawmakers, police and security commanders were
making clear that they were more worried about their own safety than
protecting Mr. Yanukovych and his government.
By that evening, he was gone, evacuated from the capital by helicopter,
setting the stage for the most severe bout of East-West tensions since
the Cold War.
In Kiev, Ukrainians argued with police officers during a rally in front
of Parliament.News Analysis: The Next Battle for Ukraine JAN. 3, 2015
Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych’s ouster to what it portrays as a
violent, “neo-fascist” coup supported and even choreographed by the West
and dressed up as a popular uprising. The Kremlin has cited this
assertion, along with historical ties, as the main justification for its
annexation of Crimea in March and its subsequent support for an armed
revolt by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s industrial heartland in
the east.
Violence resumed in Ukraine on Tuesday with an attack at the
headquarters of the party of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, among other
clashes. Video by Carrie Halperin on Publish Date February 18, 2014.
Photo by Sandro Maddalena/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the
Kremlin’s line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych’s
government, questions remain about how and why it collapsed so quickly
and completely.
An investigation by The New York Times into the final hours of Mr.
Yanukovych’s rule — based on interviews with prominent players,
including former commanders of the Berkut riot police and other security
units, telephone records and other documents — shows that the president
was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by his own allies, and that
Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone else.
The allies’ desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by
the seizing by protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the
country. But just as important, the review of the final hours shows, was
the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych’s own efforts to
make peace.
At dawn on the morning of Thursday, Feb. 20, a bedraggled pro-European
protest movement controlled just a few hundred square yards, at best, of
scorched and soot-smeared pavement in central Kiev. They had gathered
there the previous November, enraged that Mr. Yanukovych, under heavy
pressure from Moscow, had abruptly turned away from a long-planned trade
deal with the European Union.
Their fortunes dimmed further on Thursday morning when a hail of gunfire
cut down scores of protesters as they pushed to break out of their
shrinking encampment and expand their reach into the heavily guarded
government district.
By Thursday evening, however, the shock created by that bloodshed, the
worst in the Ukrainian capital since World War II, had prompted a mass
defection by the president’s allies in Parliament and prodded Mr.
Yanukovych to join negotiations with a trio of opposition politicians.
That was when the phone calls from the security officers began, said one
of those opposition lawmakers, Sergey Pashinsky. Beginning in the late
morning, they became a torrent as the day progressed, each making the
same desperate plea: Help! We want to get out of Kiev and need escorts
to get through streets clogged with angry protesters.
“They all had the same message,” Mr. Pashinsky recalled.
The security officers said in interviews that they were alarmed by
language in the truce deal that called for an investigation of the
killing of protesters. They feared that a desperate Mr. Yanukovych was
ready to abandon the very people who had protected him, particularly
those in the lower ranks who had borne the brunt of the street battles.
One of the units that pulled out on Friday afternoon was a 30-man Berkut
squad from Sumska, a region east of Kiev. Its acting commander, who
asked to be identified only by his first name, Vladimir, because he
fears retribution for his past service, said that he had tried calling
his superiors at the Ukraine Interior Ministry all morning on Friday,
Feb. 21, to get instructions, but that their phones had all gone dead.
“The minister had disappeared, and nobody was taking calls,” he
recalled. He finally reached a middle-ranking official at the ministry.
Advised to leave as “all the chiefs are running away,” Vladimir
contacted Mr. Pashinsky and requested an escort out of town. “We were
all worried about being hung out to dry,” he said. He said he was not
ordered to leave but simply told that he and his men could go if they
wanted.
Aleksandr Khodakovsky, who in February commanded an elite unit of Alfa
special forces guarding the headquarters of Ukraine’s domestic
intelligence service, was also having doubts.
“We started to understand that there would be no central government,
that it was falling apart,” Mr. Khodakovsky recalled in a recent
interview in Donetsk, where he now leads a battalion of armed
pro-Russian separatists. “We understood that all the mediation of the
Europeans would lead to nothing.”
A Changing Atmosphere
Along with many other commanders, he believed that a tough response to
protesters by Mr. Yanukovych in November or December could easily have
cleared Kiev’s Independence Square, known as Maidan, the epicenter of
the pro-European protest movement.
By February, however, it was too late.
“The atmosphere was changing” in the elite police units, Mr. Khodakovsky
said. “Everybody understood the government was not going to take
decisive action. We understood that all the crimes we were going to
commit clearing the square, in the last breath of the old government,
would all be blamed on us.”
Security forces were also thrown into a panic by rumors, fanned by the
protesters themselves, about the whereabouts of hundreds of guns seized
on the night of Feb. 18 in Lviv, a bastion of pro-European fervor 300
miles west of Kiev near the Polish border. The weapons were said to be
on their way to Kiev to add to an already growing arsenal of hunting
rifles, pistols, Molotov cocktails and metal clubs.
According to the chief of police in Lviv, Dmytro D. Zagariya, around
1,200 weapons, mostly pistols and Kalashnikov rifles, were seized in
raids on five district police stations and the headquarters of the
Interior Ministry’s western command. Only 300 of these, he said, were
recovered by the authorities. He said there was no evidence that any of
the missing guns had been used in or even reached Kiev.
Western diplomats in Kiev, including the American ambassador Geoffrey R.
Pyatt, also heard about the guns grabbed in Lviv and worried that, if
brought to Kiev, they would turn what had begun as a peaceful protest
movement that enjoyed wide sympathy in the West into an armed
insurrection that would quickly lose this good will.
As the foreign ministers of Germany and Poland and a senior French
diplomat met Mr. Yanukovych to negotiate a truce on the evening of
Thursday, Feb. 20, at the presidential offices, Mr. Pyatt and several
European envoys met at the German Embassy with Andriy Parubiy, the chief
of the protesters’ security forces, and told him to keep the Lviv guns
away from Kiev.
“We told him: ‘Don’t let these guns come to Kiev. If they come, that
will change the whole situation,’ ” Mr. Pyatt recalled telling Mr.
Parubiy, who turned up for the meeting wearing a black balaclava.
In a recent interview in Kiev, Mr. Parubiy denied that the guns taken in
Lviv ever got to Kiev, but added that the prospect that they might have
provided a powerful lever to pressure both Mr. Yanukovych’s camp and
Western governments.
“I warned them that if Western governments did not take firmer action
against Yanukovych, the whole process could gain a very threatening
dimension,” he said.
Andriy Tereschenko, a Berkut commander from Donetsk who was holed up
with his men in the Cabinet Ministry, the government headquarters in
Kiev, said that 16 of his men had already been shot on Feb. 18 and that
he was terrified by the rumors of an armory of automatic weapons on its
way from Lviv.
“It was already an armed uprising, and it was going to get worse,” he
said. “We understood why the weapons were taken, to bring them to Kiev.”
Around 2 p.m. that Friday, just as European diplomats were gathering for
the signing ceremony at the nearby presidential administration building,
Mr. Tereschenko received a call from a deputy interior minister, Viktor
Dubovik, with an order to leave the city. Mr. Dubovik, he said, put him
in touch with the opposition lawmaker Mr. Pashinsky, who escorted the
Berkut commander and his 60 or so men to the edge of town, from where
they drove overnight by bus to Donetsk.
Mr. Dubovik, who the authorities say has since fled Ukraine, could not
be located for comment.
Mr. Pashinsky estimated that in all, he arranged escorts out of the city
for more than 5,000 officers from the riot police, Interior Ministry
forces and other security units, like the special operations unit, Alfa.
He said Mr. Dubovik was just one of the officials he worked with on the
mass evacuation, but added that he did not know where the order to
retreat had originated.
Giving Up on a Leader
Inna Bogolovskaya, a longtime ally of Mr. Yanukovych who broke with him
over his November decision not to sign the trade deal with the European
Union, said the retreat was merely a response to a resolution adopted
late Thursday that week by the Ukrainian Parliament that ordered all
Interior Ministry troops and police officers to return to their barracks.
Ms. Bogolovskaya said that the Thursday night vote sent an emphatic
message to Mr. Yanukovych and his last backers that Parliament,
dominated by the governing Party of Regions and previously a bastion of
loyal support, had given up on him.
“This was the moment that Yanukovych realized that he no longer had even
Parliament on his side,” she said, adding that the president had no
choice after this but to respect its resolution and order security
forces off the streets.
But Mykhalo V. Dobkin, a Party of Regions baron who had for years worked
closely with Mr. Yanukovych, said the president did not give the order
and had no knowledge of it until security forces suddenly vanished.
Mr. Dobkin, who met with Mr. Yanukovych late Friday night after he fled
Kiev for the eastern city of Kharkiv, said he spoke with a senior
presidential official whom he declined to name and was told that the
sudden departure of security forces on Friday afternoon had taken the
president and his entourage entirely by surprise.
The official, Mr. Dobkin said, had looked out of his window in the
presidential administration building on Friday afternoon and, shocked to
see the police “laying down their shields and getting on buses,” rushed
to see the president to ask what was going on. Told by Mr. Yanukovych
that he had issued no order for a withdrawal, the official, according to
Mr. Dobkin, then left the building, never to return.
Also gone by Friday afternoon was Vladimir P. Lukin, the envoy of the
Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to the truce negotiations. He had
put his initials on a text negotiated overnight but then vanished,
returning to Moscow rather than put his signature on a short-lived peace
accord in whose rapid collapse Russia subsequently found proof of
Western treachery.
By the time European diplomats who did sign the accord left the
presidential administration building after the signing ceremony in the
late afternoon of Friday, Feb. 21, hundreds of helmeted police officers
who had been a menacing presence when they arrived were piling into
buses ready to drive away.
The scene dismayed and alarmed Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw
Sikorski, who signed the truce deal as an observer. “It was astonishing.
Within 45 minutes of the signing, after some prayer, we were walking out
of the building, and all the riot police were leaving as we left the
building,” Mr. Sikorski recalled. “Not just from the presidential
compound, but from all the government buildings.”
When Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, later complained to
him that Mr. Yanukovych had been ousted in an armed coup, Mr. Sikorski
told him that “this wasn’t a coup. The government was abandoned.” Mr.
Lavrov, according to Mr. Sikorski, responded that “the police were
without the power to shoot, so they were afraid of Maidan, so they left.”
‘He Had to Leave’
With the presidential administration building and also his home
unguarded from the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 21, Mr. Yanukovych judged
that it was time for him, too, to leave Kiev, at least for a few days,
his associates said.
“When they removed the guards around the presidential administration, he
had to leave,” said Mr. Dobkin, who was serving at the time as governor
of Kharkiv, an industrial eastern region in whose capital, Kharkiv, Mr.
Yanukovych had decided to seek refuge on Friday evening.
“He called and said, ‘I’m coming, either tonight or tomorrow,’ ” Mr.
Dobkin recalled, adding that Mr. Yanukovych presented his proposed trip
east as just another presidential inspection tour and was desperate to
“make it look like he wasn’t running away.” To keep up appearances, he
asked Mr. Dobkin to “ ‘pick out a few factories for me to visit.’ ”
Mr. Dobkin tried to set something up at a Kharkiv turbine factory,
Turboatom, but the director, who would previously have jumped at a
chance to meet the president, now wanted nothing to do with Mr.
Yanukovych. The director, said Mr. Dobkin, declined even to take his call.
Met at the airport in Kharkiv after midnight by Mr. Dobkin, Mr.
Yanukovych did not seem in a panic, or even to understand the gravity of
the situation. “He thought this was a temporary difficulty,” Mr. Dobkin
recalled, describing the president as “a guy on another planet” who
believed the deal brokered by the Europeans could still provide for a
graceful exit later in the year.
He did not realize, Mr. Dobkin said, that rather than securing his
future, the deal, which provided for early elections and other
concessions, only sent a signal to Mr. Yanukovych’s allies that it was
time to change sides.
“When a leader stops being a leader, all the people around him fall
away,” Mr. Dobkin said. “That is the rule.” He added, “To betray on time
is not to betray, but to foresee.”
The violence that convulsed Kiev in the days before Mr. Yanukovych’s
departure came to an abrupt halt as soon as he left. Early on the
morning of Saturday, Feb. 22, protesters, amazed to find streets empty
of the police, took control of the presidential administration building,
Mr. Yanukovych’s residence and other previously impregnable buildings by
simply walking up to and through their front gates.
A few hours later, in a melancholy television address from Kharkiv, his
last public statement before he fled to Russia, Mr. Yanukovych insisted
that he remained president, complaining that his car had been shot at
and that he had been betrayed by turncoats.
“There are traitors,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about them. I do
not want to name any names. Let it be on their own conscience and their
responsibility.”
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from London.
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