So just before year end, I wrote about Ukraine (and other places of “unrest”) and see where they are today…..
So ok, the street movement was clearly very well organised and its strings pulled by many. We even had an anonymous posting on Internet of a phone conversation in which a US Under-Secretary of State sums it up with a “F*** the EU”!! Fun wasn’t it? Good phone-snooping skills too! Could we have some more of that? Like a chat between Putin and Yanoukovitch?
Amazingly, the street won this time (at least for now), the President is on the run and everybody swiftly follows the wind of “change”… Politicians, administration bosses, oligarchs? They always were with the poeple of Ukraine, weren’t they….
Anyway, the road ahead will be quite a challenge for all and very interesting to follow. What happened so far? The ex-or-still-President is hiding somewhere, likely plotting some not-so-nice moves yet to be played out, the Parliament is getting a bit carried away and acts before thinking and Russia is scaring the crap out of the world with that inimitable “soviet style” of international politics.
Hopefully, they’re just going to ensure Crimea stays “theirs”; which is kind of normal, as there is no way they can let that one go… More invasive within the rest of Ukraine? Hmmm, unlikely in an overly blatant way, however expect some rough times for Ukraine and Ukrainians, between less or no gas (in any case far more expensive than what they got it for so far), a freeze of cross-border business through some over-zealous controls virtually blocking everything and quite some on-the-ground actions to destabilize whoever has some power that they dislike of.
Not much noise from the oligarchs though. They are all likely out of the country, scrambling to ensure they get as much of their assets as they can beyond the reach of Ukraine, Russia, the EU etc… which has become quite difficult these days.
Let’s see also what happens with their ex-Prime minister whose release from prison was one of the first decisions taken by the “new power”, giving a bit away who was behind some of this, as well as financing it. After being paraded around in a wheelchair, making a “moving speech”, she promptly left the country in a private jet to get proper medical treatment….
I did write “watch the political lines, and above all, smell the money” a couple of months ago…. let’s see where it will go from here!
Simon Q.