Ukraine SITREP May 25th, 22:52 UTC/Zulu: Coming full circle with some cautious hope?

What was the main demand of the Maidanites?  Oh yes, to expel the a fat corrupt leader.  Now, several months later it sure looks to me that they traded on fat and corrupt leader for another one.  The big difference being that Yahukovich at least did not use force against his own people.  Poroshenko has no such problems.

Ukie oligarchs v2.0

The other difference - of sorts - is, I suppose, that the western corporate media called Yanukovich an oligarch.  Not so Poroshenko.  He is no oligarch.  He is a tycoon.   Same difference, of course, but one designates a bad guy, while the other is spoken with a sense of admiration for the resourcefulness of the latter.

Was there  ballot rigging and/or other irregularities?  Yes, probably.  Does it matter?  No, not at all.  That big money would win the election was inevitable.  That is the case in all so-called democracies, including the US, why should it be different in the Ukraine?

Timoshenko got only 12.8%.  That is actually pretty good news since she clearly has had mental issues every since she was freed from Yanukovich's dungeons.

Here are the other preliminary results according to RT:

All other candidates gathered less than 10 percent of votes each, with anti-Russian populist Oleg Lyashko, the head of the Radical Party, running behind with 8 percent, former defense minister Anatoly Gritsenko taking 6.3 percent and expelled Party of Regions MP Sergey Tigipko – 4.7 percent of votes. The candidate picked by the Party of Regions of the ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, Mikhail Dobkin, gathered just 2.1 percent. Some 1.1 percent voted for Ukrainian Communist Party leader, Pyotr Simonenko, despite his recent announcement that he had withdrawn from the elections.  Ultra-right radical nationalists appeared to have completely failed in the elections, with Svoboda (Freedom) Party head Oleg Tyagnibok securing 1.3 percent of votes and Right Sector leader Dmitry Yarosh less than one percent. 

The bad news is that there are 8% of Ukrainians capable of voting for a lunatic like Lyashko.  The good news is that the Party of Regions, the Communist Party, the Freedom Party and the Right sector are all dead in the water with terrible results.

For Moscow this is also a case of coming full circle.  Why?  For all the western propaganda Yanukovich was never pro-Russia or a friend of Putin.  Neither will Poroshenko.  Yanukovich was corrupt, so is Poroshenko, both of them will go with the higher bidder.  Yanukovich did not have what it takes to impose his authority over the Maidanites and neo-Nazis, while whether Poroshenko can do better is an open question, at least to me.

So considering the alternatives, I think that even if the election of Poroshenko was a farce in terms of democracy, it is certainly not the worst result.  At least Poroshenko is not a raving lunatic and, in the context of the current situation, this is already a lot.

This is the reason why Moscow, which clearly knew that Poroshenko would purchase this election, said that Russia was willing to work with the new President: because there is some hope that Poroshenko could take a more pragmatic approach.  Whether this hope is realistic is another issue, but what counts at this point in time is simply that Poroshenko is not Timoshenko.  That is good enough, at least at this point in time.

Big money won.  That is certain.  The big question now is whether Poroshenko has what it takes to crack down on the crazies and effectively crush them.  I am not so sure, but I do believe that at least with Poroshenko in power there is some hope, no matter how small, that the AngloZionist will *finally* sit down and seriously negotiate with Russia and the southeast of the Ukraine.

According to the RT article I mentioned above, Poroshenko has declared that "we will have a united and unitary, not federative state.” He also also that a "decisive step will be aimed at ending the war, ending chaos, and bringing peace to a united and free Ukraine. I am certain that our decisive actions will bring fairly quick results. We cannot discuss the seriousness of security in our region without the participation of Russia. We will find the format and definitely will meet Putin." I personally think that these are two mutually exclusive propositions, but my hope is that the first is empty electoral rhetoric while the second is Poroshenko's real objective.  We shall see.

In the meantime, the real big story this week was not in the Ukraine, but in Shanghai were Russia the China has formalized what is clearly a strategic alliance even if they never used that term.  It is deeply ironical that the AngloZionist policy of trying to prevent Russia from becoming a superpower by bringing the Ukraine under the protectorate of the EU and NATO has so greatly contributed into creating the Russia-China alliance, something for more formidable than any rapprochement between Russia and the Ukraine.

I will discuss this tectonic shift in world politics in an upcoming and separate post.

Cheers to all,

The Saker