Robert Parry: Who’s Telling the ‘Big Lie’ on Ukraine?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

136. Okay.

Your proof of a coup was a sloppily written AlterNet piece that relies mainly on affirming the consequent, i.e., because the US has been involved in regime changes in foreign countries in the past, it automatically means the US was involved in Ukraine's regime change.

Unfortunately, as it relates to Ukraine specifically, Davies subtly alters the timeline of actual events and omits key facts in order to prove his theory.

For example, Davies claims that there was a vote to remove Yanukovych in the Rada, and after the vote, Yanukovych fled Kiev and called it a coup.

In fact, Yanukovych's helicopters left Kiev in the very early morning of February 22nd. The vote to remove Yanukovych actually didn't take place until the afternoon of February 22nd, which was after Yanukovych had left and after the police had ceased obeying Yanukovych's orders. So Davies completely reverses the cause and effect.

The piece also completely ignores the evidence (demonstrated in surveillance video of Yanukovych's residence) that shows that Yanukovych had been planning to leave for at least three days prior to his ultimate departure. Moving trucks arrived on February 19th. This means that Yanukovych was already planning on leaving before a) the sniper shootings of protesters on the Maidan (February 20) and b) the brokered deal that would have left Yanukovych in power for the time being but would have sped up elections (February 21). So clearly, this was not the actions of a man feeling that he had no choice but to flee for his life.

At least on a subliminal level, Davies himself seems to acknowledge he has a flimsy argument, as evidenced here:

The main thing that distinguishes the U.S. coup in Ukraine from the majority of previous U.S. coups was the minimal role played by the Ukrainian military. Since 1953, most U.S. coups have involved using local senior military officers to deliver the final blow to remove the elected or ruling leader. The officers have then been rewarded with presidencies, dictatorships or other senior positions in new U.S.-backed regimes. The U.S. military cultivates military-to-military relationships to identify and groom future coup leaders, and President Obama's expansion of U.S. special forces operations to 134 countries around the world suggests that this process is ongoing and expanding, not contracting.

So the fact that the situation in Ukraine does not meet the M.O. of US backed coups should immediately raise some red flags as to this theory's validity. In an attempt to save face, Davies hastily argues that the US chose to use the ultranationalist groups Svoboda and Right Sector in place of the military as its coup agent. However, several practicalities make this a illogical leap. First of all, ultranationalists are not ones to cooperate with foreign powers in anything; they are by their inherent nature distrustful of outsiders. Secondly, it presupposes that the only individuals involved in the Maidan protests were Svoboda and Right Sector, when in fact the reality shows it was a wide spectrum of ideologies and people represented in the mass protests. Davies subtly hints earlier in his piece about instances past where protesters have been paid off or are actors, but when you have the movement the size of Maidan, such an argument is simply absurd.

A decent try on your part, I suppose, but some mere elementary research pokes large gaping and fatal holes in Davies' theory.