October 10, 2019, Strategic
Culture Foundation (Russia) https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/10/us-arming-ukraine-is-scandal-own/
Aaron
MATÉ
There is growing evidence that President Donald Trump briefly froze U.S.
military assistance to Ukraine for political goals. Max Blumenthal explores how
the Ukrainegate scandal overlooks the dangers of those weapons sales to Ukraine
and the corrupt interests behind it.
Under Trump, U.S.
military assistance has prolonged a bloody proxy war with Russia, killing
thousands in Ukraine and enabling far-right Ukrainian forces — all while
enriching weapons manufacturers and DC lobbyists.
Guest: Max Blumenthal,
Editor of The Grayzone and author of “The Management of Savagery.”
TRANSCRIPT
AARON MATÉ: Welcome to
Pushback, I’m Aaron Maté, here with Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone
and author of several books, including his latest, The Management of
Savagery. We’ve been talking about
several of the other facets of the
Ukrainegate scandal that have gone ignored.
In this part, Max,
let’s focus on the military assistance to Ukraine that Trump briefly froze and
the outrage about that. We’ve been talking in the previous segment about the
corruption of Joe Biden and others when it comes to Ukraine. Let’s talk about
it now in the context of this military assistance, and I have to note that Kurt
Volker, who up until just this week was the State Department envoy, the US
envoy to Ukraine, has a huge conflict of interest that is not being discussed.
So I want to read to you a paragraph from the Washington Post talking about
Kurt Volker. It says, “Volker started his job at the State Department in 2017
in an unusual part-time arrangement that allowed him to continue consulting at
BGR, a powerful lobbying firm that represents Ukraine and Raytheon. During his
tenure, Volker advocated for the US to send Ukraine Raytheon-manufactured
anti-tank Javelin missiles, a decision that made the missile firm millions of
dollars. BGR has said Volker recused himself from all Ukraine related matters
in response to criticisms about conflicts of interest.” That, from the
Washington Post this week.
So, Max, we have here
the top US envoy to Ukraine keeping his job as he’s in this post at a lobbying
firm that is making millions of dollars off the sale of missiles that he
himself is lobbying for in his position. So there’s that angle and then there’s
the fact that what is the impact of all this. Well, the impact on the ground
has been to prolong a bloody and disastrous proxy war between the US and Russia
because it’s US military assistance that has kept this thing going, basically,
similar to what the US did in Syria. And all this is not being discussed. Your
thoughts on this, Max Blumenthal.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, it is being
discussed in the sense that Trump is selling out our ally, and there’s all of
this outrage that, quote-unquote, aid is not being provided to Ukraine. The aid
being military assistance, and it’s sort of, it seems to be aid the way that
it’s provided to Israel, where loans are given to Ukraine and they’re paid back
to the American arms industry to, what, create jobs? Today it was announced by
Raytheon that they’re expanding their Tucson campus to handle new weapons
manufacturing demands, thanks to the $39 million deal just approved by the
Trump State Department to send these Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine.
Now, I reported on
Kurt Volker’s relationship with the BGR Group, which is headed by Raytheon, one
of the Raytheon’s top lobbyists in Washington, Ed Rogers, while he was also
executive director of the McCain Institute, named for the man who issued, who
authored the bill in the Senate, demanding all of this military assistance to
Ukraine and serving as Trump’s liaison to Ukraine. And I thought this was a
bizarre relationship, and I wrote about it again last year in 2018 and nobody
in Washington paid attention. The mainstream media wasn’t really concerned
about this obvious case of official corruption, and now they are because
Volker’s out, he’s kind of maybe considered a bad guy because he played a role
in shepherding Giuliani to Ukraine or helping Giuliani to dig up dirt on
Trump’s opponents. But this was a serious issue. I think that Volker was
actually seen as a check on Trump’s impulse to do détente with Russia, and
that’s why this wasn’t brought up. Because Volker did play a role in
influencing Trump to authorize, for the first time, to do something that Barack
Obama refused to do: to authorize the initial shipment of these Javelin
anti-tank missiles to the Ukrainian military to turn up the heat on Russia.
Now, if you go back to
the Republican convention in 2016, you can start to understand the origins of
this Ukrainegate scandal that we’re talking about now. It was there in
Cleveland where [senior Campaign advisor on policy and national security] J. D.
Gordon, [rejected a proposed amendment to] the Republican National Committee
platform about [sending] offensive weaponry to Ukraine, which was, a call for
“offensive weaponry” [instead of] “appropriate assistance.” [“appropriate
assistance” was the final language used]. And this was immediately seized on by
the Democrats, who were starting to ramp up their Russiagate narrative and push
the collusion theory that Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo with Putin to
remove a call for offensive weapons to Ukraine in exchange for Putin
interfering in the election against Hillary Clinton and hacking her emails, or
whatever. Seems, it seemed, like, patently ridiculous to me, but, you know, the
Huffington Post went with a headline at the time, “The Big Winner at the
Republican National Convention: Vladimir Putin.” And so it’s always…it’s a win
for Putin when one of the major parties in the US takes a turn towards détente
and peace. Barack Obama had refused to authorize those very same offensive
weapons because his National Security Council and his foreign policy team
believed in advancing the Minsk II accords, at least to some extent, which
would have de-escalated the proxy war in the east of Ukraine. Of course, all
those people and the Ukrainians, they’re just bullet stoppers to us, we don’t
care about them. And so the pressure mounts on Trump to authorize these
offensive weapons, do something to prove that you’re not a Russian puppet! And
Trump explicitly says, “I am NOT a Russian puppet. I authorized anti-tank
busters to Ukraine!” He actually has come out and said it. It was a symbolic
arms shipment for Trump to show that he wasn’t a Russian puppet.
For the Ukrainians,
for the people in the east of Ukraine who are on the pro-Russian side, it means
something very different, because they’ve been engaged in a trench war since
2014-2015. People in the frontline communities there have been dying in the
sporadic artillery attacks, and there hasn’t been a tank battle since 2015, so
the point of sending these Javelins, it doesn’t provide any defensive…it
provides no defensive quality for Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. All it does
is continue escalating this proxy war.
And so what we’re
talking about now is not something that is in the interests of progressive
people. We’re not talking about suspending human…, you know, aid for
humanitarian programs, the way Trump has done to the Palestinians. Talking
about suspending aid that actually directly interferes with something that the
Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been elected to do, which is to
make peace with Russia. There is a constituency for peace throughout Ukraine on
the pro-Russian side and on the nationalist side, and he was elected to do what
he’s doing now, which is called the Steinmeier Formula, named for the foreign
minister of Germany, where elections will be held in pro-Russian areas in the
Donbass in exchange for a withdrawal of Russian military support. And that is
just, that just seems to me to be a good thing. The “quote unquote”
international community is behind it. You know who’s against it? The neo-Nazi
elements in Ukrainian society who are out in the streets protesting it and
hardliners in Washington, including people who are close to Joe Biden, who’ve
been wanting to constantly turn up the heat against Russia and use Ukrainians
as bullet stoppers. And so I think it’s time to look into how this deal
developed and what the effect is on the ground.
And one last point.
Who put together the plan that McCain advanced in the Senate? It was the
Atlantic Council and the Brookings Institution, two centrist, militaristic think
tanks in Washington. And who funds both of those think tanks? Raytheon. Who is
the defense secretary right now, who has signed off on this deal with $39
million of Javelins to Ukraine? The former lobbyist for Raytheon, Mark Esper.
Who was funding John McCain? Raytheon. Who was supporting the firm of the
former Ukra…ah, US liaison to Ukraine, Kurt Volker? Raytheon. So basically this
deal is also the product of official corruption in Washington.
AARON MATÉ: Max, I’m going to add
one more name here, someone who’s playing also a very prominent role in this,
and that is Adam Schiff, the leader of the impeachment inquiry. As you reported
on, I’m going to quote from you here, that the arms industry has
rewarded Schiff handsomely as he has pushed Russiagate, which has pushed
Democrats into adopting the same kind of militarist posture that Ukrainegate is
doing now, and you write that, “Schiff’s largest donor in a previous campaign
cycle at $12,700 was Northrop Grumman, the defense giant. Raytheon, the
manufacturer of the Javelin anti-tank missile system, was close behind it with
$10,000 in contributions. In all, arms giants accounted for over one-sixth of
Schiff’s total donations.”
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, and the
Atlantic Council just paid to send one of Schiff’s top staffers to Ukraine on
some mysterious trip in September. But, yeah, Schiff has never met a war, a
Washington war, he didn’t like. He’s even supported the US-Saudi war on Yemen,
and he is one of the favorite donors…a favorite, uh, you know, recipients of
arms industry donations. I mean, you just look at how much money this
previously unheard-of member of Congress in California gets; I mean, he’s just raking
a millions of dollars from corporations in the arms industry.
In 2013 Adam Schiff
actually was treated to a $25,000, sorry, $2,500-a-head fundraiser by
Ukrainian-born, California-based arms dealer named Igor Pasternak, and
Pasternak has really benefited from the proxy war in eastern Ukraine. He got a
lucrative contract, a lucrative contract to supply the Ukrainian state border
guard with surveillance systems, and then he got another deal to replace the
Ukrainian military’s old AK-47s with the new version of the M16. And the
funniest thing is, I think PolitiFact has done some fact check on whether
Schiff has a relationship with a Ukrainian arms dealer named Pasternak, and
they declare that it’s mostly false by focusing on the fact that Pasternak has US
nationality and that he was only born in Ukraine, but he’s from Kazakhstan, and
they kind of nitpick. But it’s completely true that Schiff is deeply involved
with the arms industry and they’re paying him for a good reason. This is
someone who has pushed a narrative. I think it’s a…this is a ricochet effect of
it. I think, you know, Schiff has his own vain ambitions for being in the
limelight and pushing Russiagate, but there’s a ricochet effect which is
benefit…it’s benefitting his donors for him to push this Cold War narrative.
AARON MATÉ: And, you know, I don’t
claim to say that it’s intentional, but I have to note that as all of this
outcry is going on in Washington about Trump briefly freezing the military
assistance to Ukraine — because again under Congressional pressure he did
unfreeze it and now it’s been approved as we saw with new Javelins sold just
this week — but as that was going on, as you mentioned, this Ukrainian peace
process is going forward. Just this week Zelensky, agreeing to hold elections
in the Donbass, this region where Ukrainian forces are backing Russian-backed
forces, which is a huge step forward. And it’s in this outcry over Trump and
this claim that he’s endangering Ukraine, what is actually happening on the
ground in Ukraine is being ignored. And as we wrap, Max, I’m wondering if you
can comment on just how the scandals that Democrats have embraced, how aligning
themselves with the national security state throughout Trump’s presidency,
instead of resisting him for all of his dangerous policies to the country and
to the world, but resisting him from the point of view of the imperatives of
the national security state, where they don’t like his talk about having better
relations with Russia, for example, about what that has done to just the
overall progressive/liberal cause in general.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, I saw Common
Dreams, one of the websites that was really one of the major sources of
critical analysis and reporting during the invasion of Iraq, retweeting David
Frum yesterday, and it really reflects the atmosphere where the kind of
progressive movement has been, un…almost unwittingly domesticated and neutered
by the national security state into this kind of anti-Trump resistance where
anything that harms Trump is…and anything that opportunistically hurts him is
acceptable, even if it advances a new Cold War, which no progressive should
support. And so here we are again, freaking out about the suspension of $400
million in military aid at a time when the Ukraine is going through a historic
shift, moving towards peace.
We should be talking
about how this affects Zelensky. You know, and it also upset me the way Trump
treated Zelensky, that he kind of just treats him like this…this little
colonial puppet. It upset me the way that Joe Biden treated Viktor Shokin,
where the American vice president can just simply come in and fire the attorney
general of another country and then go to the Council on Foreign Relations and
brag about how he got rid of the “son-of-a-bitch.” It just shows our whole
colonial relationship with Ukraine. This country has been turned into bullet
stoppers by Washington. It’s been through two color revolutions, the Maidan
coup has destroyed its gross domestic product, its export sector has been wiped
out because its historic trading relationship with Russia is gone, corruption
is sky-high, the people who looted all of the IMF loans and put them into
foreign bank accounts are in power, and Ukraine has seen a migration crisis
that’s almost on par or maybe worse than Venezuela’s, but we never hear about
it because it’s of our doing.
So, we should actually
start looking at this from an anti-war point of view, and we should also
consider the fact that Ukraine’s interior ministry is controlled by someone,
Arsen Avakov, who has been the benefactor of the world’s largest collection of
neo-Nazis and helped integrate a neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Battalion, into the
country’s National Guard. So that they now receive or have received US military
assistance and Canadian military assistance. This is serious, like, you know,
the progressives and anti-Trump people who are freaking out about the Proud
Boys marching through Portland. Why aren’t they talking about the fact that we
keep sending hun…tens of millions of dollars of offensive weaponry into a
military that has a literal neo-Nazi battalion integrated into its ranks?
The 2018 NDAA blocked
— thanks to some intervention by Democrats in the House — supposedly blocks
assistance to the Azov Battalion, but it’s impossible to know how that will
take place. There… it’s… we’ve reported at The Grayzone, as Asa Winstanley
reported at Electronic Intifada, that the Azov Battalion is receiving Israeli
weapons, and actually the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel attacked us for it. But
they confirmed it at the same time. And they are taking US weapons into the
field. So we should actually be talking about arming neo-Nazis with US taxpayer
dollars and we should also talk about the fact that, as you and Ben Norton
discussed, a would-be US domestic terrorist who wanted to kill Beto O’Rourke,
and many others sought to go to Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion. We
should talk about how the Rise Above Movement, a white nationalist group in
Orange County, actually did go to Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion, and
how Ukraine is becoming a global center of white nationalist activity, as the
US is sending these advanced weapons there. But that discussion is only taking
place within some sectors of alternative media that still maintain an anti-war
point of view. It’s not taking place on Democracy Now!, it’s not taking place
that I’ve seen at The Intercept, and I just don’t know how an institution like
Common Dreams comes to retweeting one of the architects of the Iraq war, David
Frum, just because he’s against Trump. But
that’s really a sign of the times.
AARON MATÉ: You know, on the media
front, I can only think of one exception, which is an article in Ha’aretz,
which is headlined “Rights
Groups Demand Israel Stop Arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine,” speaking to that
controversy that you mentioned before. We’re going to leave it there, though.
Max Blumenthal, final comments as we wrap.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Go to The
Grayzone.com for more great reporting like this.
AARON MATÉ: Sounds good. Max
Blumenthal, senior editor of The Grayzone, author of several books, his latest
being The Management of Savagery, thanks very much.
MAX BLUMENTHAL: Thanks a lot, Aaron.
Editor’s Note, October
9 2019: This transcript has been edited to correct errors about J.D. Gordon’s
role on the Trump campaign and about the RNC platform on Ukraine. Gordon served
as a senior Campaign advisor on policy and national security. And the RNC
platform was not altered — an amendment that called for sending offensive
weaponry was simply rejected.
The views of
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Culture Foundation.
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