Mikhail Khodorkovsky: America's Darling in Russia...and Ukraine!

Russian ex-oil tycoon, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was incarcerated in Russia for a decade before he was amnestied by Vladimir Putin in December, was in Kiev's Maidan Square recently, giving aid and comfort to the new government with two rather dubious pronouncements.

First, he backed the Kiev government's version of snipergate--that Russia was behind it.

Second, he tried to innoculate the new government against the bad/anxious press engendered by its high profile embrace of fascists, neo-Nazis, and ultranationalists.

Per RT:

Khodorkovsky claimed that force was used against the protesters “with the agreement of the Russian authorities.”

The former tycoon – who spent 10 years in jail for tax evasion, embezzlement, and money laundering and left for Europe upon release in December – also dismissed allegations that neo-Nazi groups have been taking an active part in protests, calling the accusations “Russian propaganda.”

“There are no fascists or Nazis here,” Khodorkovsky claimed.

Mission unaccomplished, in my admittedly personal opinion.

The important thing about Mkhail Khodorkovsky is that he is America's man in Russia. If there is a pro-Western political upheaval in Russia and Putin finally falls on his ass, Khodorkovsky will probably be at the center of the new power structure.

Khodorkovsky gets sympathetic press in the West, for his stoicism in prison and his pronouncements in favor of Western values. I also expect that he gets good press because he spread his money around generously and wisely to tend his political garden in the United States, and because he is a key American asset en ovo for New Russia.

After his release, Khodorkovsky has safely re-established himself and whatever wealth he managed to shield from Putin in Switzerland. Despite protestations he would abstain from Russian politics, consider the Maidan speech his coming out party.

The Globe & Mail was there and delivered the requisite fluffing, highlighting Khodorkovsky's "simple dark anorak and jeans" and quoted him as saying, “I’ve seen the plywood planks they used to stand up to the bullets. It made me want to cry, it’s so awful,” he said, his voice shaking with emotion.

The ever-reliable AP is pitching in as well:

"Ukraine must become a European state," the former tycoon told the students. For that to happen, Khodorkovsky said there must be foreign investment, eradication of corruption and a modern-day Marshall Plan of international assistance.

He also called for establishing a congress of Ukrainian and Russian intellectuals to boost ties.

On Sunday, Khodorkovsky almost wept as he assured a large crowd in Kiev's center not to believe that all Russians support their government's actions in Crimea.

Bloomberg would also like a word:

“Legal states exist only where and when there is a separation of powers, an independent judiciary and real changes in power as a result of elections,” Khodorkovsky said. “It’s completely clear that there’s nothing of the sort in Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovych or in Russia under Vladimir Putin.”

 “Khodorkovsky is a galvanizing person for everyone who holds a grudge against Vladimir Putin,” Erixon said. “His fight against the Kremlin from inside prison and before is something that all those fighting Putin can look to as an example.”

...

Following his release from prison, Khodorkovsky said he is not interested in politics and will devote himself to helping Russia develop civil society. Khodorkovsky plans to apply for permanent residency in Switzerland, Agence France-Presse reported today.

“Prior to being locked up, I was obsessed with business,” Khodorkovsky said. “But there’s something more important. And that something is what I myself am searching for. And i think that something was found by the people who went out onto Maidan, and by the people who stood under the bullets.”

Reuters also delivered a brief report titled

Russia complicit in violence against Kiev protesters- Khodorkovsky

Yeah, Khodorkovsky is back.

To my mind, Khodorkovsky's re-emergence and this eagerly-reported barrage of criticism against Putin and Russia represents another escalation by the United States.  Whether the Obama administration simply wants to vent its spleen and gain some propaganda points inside and outside Russia by vilifying Putin, or whether President Obama wants Putin's scalp on his belt and is going to try and foment an existential crisis out of the Ukraine mess, remains to be seen.

In my previous career blogging at Halcyon Days, where I singlehandedly saved the United States from the folly of the Iraq War (just kidding!), I wrote a piece about Khodorkovsky on the occasion of his initial arrest. Since I believe Khodorkovsky will be a part of whatever mischief the US has planned for Vladimir Putin, the observations I made in 2003 are still valid and I think it's worth reposting.



America's Secret Stake in the Yukos Affair



November 5, 2003

Who is Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

Russia's richest man, principal owner of Russia's biggest oil company, Yukos, currently under arrest by Putin for some obscure financial hanky panky.

Who cares?

At first I didn't.  I thought of Khodorkovsky merely as a distant figure rich in oil, consonants, and syllables.

I was wrong.

A lot of people in America care deeply about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and I should, too.

The State Department cares.  On October 30, in the State Department briefing, a spokesman expressed concern that this was a case of "selective prosecution" targeting Khodorkovsky, who has bankrolled some of Putin's opponents.

One would think that the State Department, given the Padilla case, the perpetual detentions in Guantanamo, and the string of US concentration camps across Iraq packed with people with bags over their heads denied due process, access to lawyers, and even basic human needs, should not be pitching rocks out of its glass house at a friendly sovereign state and ally in the war on terror conducting a criminal investigation of one of its own citizens.

It is of course possible that the Bush administration is bound by a sacred oath to come to the aid of any member of the international petroleum brotherhood in need.

I can imagine the scene in the Oval Office.  Condi Rice rushes in and gasps: "Mr. President.  An oil executive is in peril!".  Our George rises resolutely from his desk, smacks his fist decisively into his palm, and declares, "Something must be done!  Get me the State Department!".

But other people care, too.

Readers of the International Herald Tribune's op-ed page were treated to an impassioned stemwinder depicting the Yukos case as a titanic confrontation between Soviet-era dinosaurs and the gallant entrepeneurial crusaders for capitalism in New Russia.  (see Russia's future and the fate of an oligarch, Leon Aron, IHT 11/1-2/03).

The article does contain some interesting nuggets like the factoid that Yukos gave $45 million to charity in 2002.

Faith in the disinterested generosity of oil executives with their stockholders' money being what it is, it is not surprising that the shenanigans of another energy giant--Enron--come to mind.  Ken Lay's binge of influence buying included a multitude of charitable contributions--not just to charities, but to deserving politicians as well.

Sure enough, the game is given away in the last paragraphs, where the author tries to wish away Khodorkovsky's legal problems with a plea for "...establishment of a statute of limitations on charges arising from the privatizations of the 1990's" and "New laws on lobbying, campaign finance and charitable contributions [that] will permit Russian business to advance openly its interests in Russian politics".

Translation:  Yukos' path to wealth and power was apparently paved with dirty rubles.  The corporation is now caught inextricably in the net of Russian laws, and Putin has Khodorkovsky by the balls.

The author of this piece, Leon Aron, is the director of Russian studies at neocon ground zero, the American Enterprise Institute.

So we know that the neocons care, and not just in a generic "no billionaire left behind" way about Khodorkovsky's fate.  They care enough to try and lobby for the right wing and the US government to inject themselves in a murky criminal case in a foreign country.

Richard Perle cares.  He weighed in with one of his hair-tearing tirades, declaring, "If the G-8 [the private club for the world's richest and most powerful countries] has any standards at all, Russia would no longer qualify"(Russian Events Leave White House Wary Maura Reynolds, LA Times, Nov. 1, 2003).

Although the comparison probably doesn't do the two men justice, the neocons probably saw Khodorkovsky as a Russian Berlusconi: a pro-American, right wing fixer who would throw his immense financial weight into politics to cripple and confound America's enemies in the Russian Republic.

But there was probably a darker, more dangerous game at work.  One that provoked Putin, the most astute and decisive leaders in world politics, to send security forces storming onto Khodorkovsky's private jet.

Khodorkovsky is not just an oil magnate.  He is an oil magnate in Russia, the only great power in the world not dependent on imported oil. 

In fact, Russia is awash in surplus oil and will soon decide whether to export 25 million tons per year of it to Japan--or to China.

Control of oil is the linchpin of the neocon geopolitical strategy.  We are in Iraq to control its oil, and to be able to deny China and any other competing power dependent on that region access to that oil.

How can we counter Russia's strategic superiority in oil resources?  How do we prevent the geopolitical balance in Europe and Asia from tipping toward Russia and its precious crude?

The answer to the Russian threat is to take the oil industry out of the hands of the government--just as we are preparing to do in Iraq.

Take away the oil.  Privatize it, internationalize it, and neutralize it. 

And what better way to do that than back the fortunes of a oil billionaire eager to protect and promote his wealth, power, and interests through a challenge to the political supremacy of Putin?

In September of this year, Khodorkovsky was about to conclude a merger that would sell 25% of Yukos to ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco for $22 billion.  As the Guardian reported, "...a deal with a US company would give Mr Khodorkovsky US political leverage as well as access to more western cash."  (Yukos looks overseas, Guardian Sept. 29, 2003).

We need explore or ponder no further.

Think of it.  An independent oil empire in Siberia, financed with US cash, controlling Russia's oil surplus and exports, hostile to the Russian state, aggressive in domestic politics to the point of subversion, and backed by the Bush administration.

Khodorkovsky was our Trojan horse.

So Putin has taken Khodorkovsky down.  It is another big loss for the neocons and their vision of sustained, unilateral US dominance.

It is also a huge defeat for Bush, as is shown by the disproportionate dismay voiced at this criminal case in faraway Russia.

Not only because Putin has sent our overworked and underqualified NSA drudge Condi Rice back to her Soviet polysci textbooks to try to come up with a strategy to deal with a resurgent, self-sufficient new Russian empire.

Because Putin decided that Bush was now a sufficiently marginalized international factor that the consequences of US dismay and displeasure could be comfortably and confidently ignored.

So chalk up that Yukos affair, together with the UN debacle, the failure of the Madrid donor's conference, and our long, lonely walk with Iraq into bloody oblivion as another victim of Bush's mismanagement of our nation's affairs and interests.

Who cares about Mikhail Khodorkovsky?

I guess we all should.

copyright 2003 Peter Lee

Is President Obama Trying to Break Vladimir Putin’s Political Back in Ukraine?

[For readers who have not done so already, I urge them to take 10 minutes and 49 seconds of their time to listen to the Paet/Ashton a.k.a. “snipergate” phone call.  It is not only a useful corrective to the laboriously constructed and misleading pushback now slowly working its way through the Western press, including the dubious accusation by the Ukrainian government that the snipers were Russian (which, perhaps inadvertently, supports the call’s contention that Yanyukovich was not responsible and, therefore, his ouster was improper); it also give a clear picture of the split between the Maidan activists and the rather unattractive cabal of pro-Western technocrats, oligarchs, and thugs who piggybacked on the Maidan demonstrations and vaulted into power with the help of the EU and the United States.  In particular, Ashton’s palpable impatience with the whole sniper issue and her single-minded focus on cobbling together the IMF package is worth noting.  The Maidan activist quoted by Paet is Olga Bogomolets, the “Mother Teresa of the Maidan” in the Daily Beast’s hyperbolic phrasing.  Subsequent to the release of the tape she has made a couple of equivocal statements that have been seized upon as rebuttals but, when more closely examined, fall somewhat short.  Bogomolets is perhaps unwilling to give aid and comfort to the Russian narrative on snipergate, especially while Russian is violating Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea.  She is also a major political factor and has even been mentioned as presidential timber.  Indications are Bogomolets' preferred candidate, according to Paet--Petro Poroshenko, a.k.a. the “Chocolate King”, seventh richest man in Ukraine, and apparently a “clean” oligarch—will win the May 25 presidential election and try to steer the new government in a direction more to the liking of the Maidan activists.]

According to media reports, President Obama seems to be going all in on getting the Russians to back down over Crimea.

The White House readout of a recent telephone call between President Obama and China’s Xi Jinping recorded that the US president said that “preserving the sovereignty and territorial integrity” of Ukraine was his “overriding objective” [emphasis added].  

It is somewhat eyebrow raising that President Obama seems to have turned Crimea into his own personal crusade, especially since a large segment of world and informed opinion is ready to kiss off Crimea as Putin’s to take.

Perhaps President Obama is using Nixon’s “madman” theory i.e. communicate to the Russians that the president might do something crazy bad if they don’t negotiate.

Another possibility is that President Obama is genuinely eager to push Putin to the wall, confront him, humiliate him, and defeat him, and shatter Russian pretensions in Eurasia.

Maybe Obama believes this is his Kennedy moment, his Cuban missile crisis, his opportunity to face down the Russians, rebuke the geopolitical handwringers, and demonstrate the supremacy of American power.

Indeed, before the Crimea adventure it was Putin, not Obama, who looked weak in Ukraine. 

Persuasive reports indicate that Putin let Yanyukovich flounder, then urged him to sign the February 21 EU-brokered transition agreement that would have paved the way for an earlier presidential election, and then was completely wrongfooted by the sudden installation of a new regime totally free of Russian influence.

And Putin’s move into Crimea was largely defensive, in my opinion, recognizing that the new regime in Kiev, pro-US, anti-Russian, and with a strong Ukraine-chauvinist component, would probably try to consolidate its power and popularity by evicting the Russians from their naval base at Sebastopol.

The same elements that point to Russian determination over Crimea—the weakening of Russian power and Putin’s personal prestige if the Russians are humiliated—might also be incentives for the Obama administration to escalate the crisis.

After all, the direct costs to the United States of a catastrophic confrontation in the Ukraine are relatively minor, and I have a feeling that President Obama’s advisors are telling him that Russia is a paper tiger, and Putin’s power will crumble if the US pushes back.  Indeed, the idea that Russia is teetering toward political, economic, and social collapse and needs only a strong shove to push it into the abyss i.e. rebirth as a meek and tractable member of the global liberal-democratic camp seems to be an article of faith among US foreign policy poobahs.

And President Obama did make the rather interesting decision to put Victoria Nuland—a confrontational regime-changenik whose husband, Robert Kagan, is a hard-core neo-con—in charge of the Ukraine brief.

In my personal opinion, as his presidency inches towards its terminus, President Obama has decided to wipe that “You won the Nobel Peace Prize, wimp” sneer off the world’s face.

Maybe the president has decided to even scores in his last two years, and doesn’t want to see his antagonists like Assad, Putin, and Maduro smugly seeing him off with a condescending pat on the rump come Inauguration Day 2017.  Maybe his advisors are telling him that he can avoid lame duck humiliation only by being more aggressive in his foreign policy, by getting out front with more confrontational policies that force equivocal allies to line up behind the United States.

In any case, the US has been markedly more aggressive in its approach its biggest foreign policy botch of Obama’s second term, Syria.  In response to the chemical weapons red line humiliation, the United States seems to be more interested in imploding Syria by supporting insurrectionists than it is in pushing forward the increasingly ridiculous Geneva process.  

The United States has also become more pro-active in attempting to manage the cat-herding dynamic of empowered but less capable allies taking on China that it set in motion with the “pivot to Asia”.

And there’s Venezuela, where the United States is now openly supporting a Ukraine-style process by which it demands that the government bestow legitimacy and political traction on the protesters confronting it in the streets (and thereby void the election outcome that the United States found displeasing without the risk and inconvenience of a new election).

And in Ukraine, it looks to me that the United States and Victoria Nuland may have been instrumental in blowing up a transition process that would have conceded the lead to Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in the establishment of a new government.  The new Ukranian government might be deficient in key areas of legitimacy, finances, access to the good offices of Russia for trade, financial assistance, and favorable gas pricing, and terminally estranged from much  of its Russian-speaking minority, but as an effort in imperial crotch-hefting it served notice on the EU as well as Russia that the United States was more interested in calling the shots than behaving like a peer interlocutor of European bureaucrats and Russian authoritarians.  In passing, I might as well point out that the point of the F*ck the EU speech was that Victoria Nuland had no interest in seeing Angela Merkel’s preferred opposition leader, Vitali Klitschko, enter the government at the expense of her beloved “Yats”, Arsenyi Yatsenyuk.  And of course, after the EU-brokered agreement collapsed in a hail of bullets, Yats is in and “Klitsch” is out.

I am hoping that the truth behind President Obama’s confrontational posturing is a little more mundane: that Russia does not intend to annex Crimea, President Obama knows it, but wants the undeserved credit for resolutely entering the den of the Russian bear and giving his testicles a mighty twist.

According to the much-maligned but often interesting and informative RT (full disclosure: I was interviewed on an RT show a couple times), the speaker of Crimea’s Supreme Council stated that, even if the outcome of the March 16 referendum is pro-independence, Crimea would prefer to stay autonomous (the second choice on the referendum is to return to an early 1990s constitution that gave Crimea an even higher degree of autonomy in Ukraine than it enjoyed, well, until the current Russian shenanigans).

And the Europeans clearly have no interest in enlisting in a serious sanctions crusade against Russia, let alone a hot war.

So perhaps the West will content itself with half a loaf in Ukraine (actually, the 90% that isn’t Crimea) and Russia will exercise de facto suzerainty over Crimea while it ostensibly remains part of Ukraine.

And the United States, claiming victory over Russia in Ukraine, will be emboldened to make further mischief elsewhere.

Why the Paet/Ashton Phone Call Matters

As readers may know—a necessary caveat because the story has not received wall-to-wall play as, for instance, the resignation of Liz Wray from RT has attracted—the audio of an intercepted phone call between the Foreign Minister of Estonia, one Urmas Paet, and Baron Ashton, the EU poobah in charge of foreign relations and, by extension, the Ukraine mess, made its way onto the Internet.

Paet is reporting on what he saw and heard in Ukraine near the height of the crisis, shortly after the sniper attack of February 21 and the precipitous collapse of the Yanyukovich government.

The contents of the phone call are pretty damning.  

I will turn to the notes on Paet's comments in the tape as posted by Moon of Alabama:

·  here is no trust of the people in the new government (2:35)

·  all of them in the new government have a dirty past (2:50)

·  the trust level (towards the new government) is absolutely low (3:20)

·  enormous pressure against (party of the region) members of parliament (3:40)

·  "uninvited visitors" enter in the night on party members (3:50)

·  journalists who were with me saw during the day that one member of parliament was just beaten in front of the parliament (4:00)

·  people will not leave the street before *real* reforms start, it is not enough that there is just change of government (4:20)

·  the same Olga (from a civil society group) told me that people killed by snipers on both sides, among policemen and people on the street, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides, she showed me some photos and said she has a medical doctor and that it is the same handwriting and the same type of bullets and it is disturbing that the new coalition now don't want to investigate (8:25)

·  There is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovich but it was somebody from the new coalition. (8:55)

·  it discredited itself from the very beginning this new coalition (9:20)

“The same Olga” is Olga Bogomolets, apparently a very nice, very idealist leader of the peaceful Maidan protesters, who was in charge of first aid and medical issues in the square.  Not just an anonymous do-gooder, she was a symbol of the protest hagiographized by The Daily Beast as “The Mother Teresa of the Maidan”.  At one point, the West and the new government were keen to lure her into the new regime as Health Minister, in order to claim some of that idealistic Maidan glow for the rather unappetizing collection of pro-IMF technocrats, refurbished oligarchs, and ultra-nationalist thugs currently calling the shots.  To date Bogomolets has declined, presumably for the reasons described above.

After the tape was released, the Daily Telegraph tracked down Bogomolets, who gave this rather parsed denial:

"Myself I saw only protesters. I do not know the type of wounds suffered by military people," "I think you can only say something like this on the basis of fact. It's not correct and its not good to do this. It should be based on fact."

She added that the new government in Kiev had assured her that a criminal investigation had begun although she had not direct contact with it so far.

"I was a doctor helping to save people on the square. There were 15 people killed on the first day by snipers. They were shot directly to the heart, brain and arteries. There were more than 40 the next day, 12 of them died in my arms," she concluded. 

In the Paet/Ashton tape, Paet told Ashton that Olga told him she had seen photos (apparently of shot policemen) and “as a doctor” it was the “same handwriting” and same type of bullets.  I would infer that by “handwriting” Paets meant “signature” i.e. the same pattern—accurate shots to vital parts of the body—characterized the wounded and dead on both sides.

So, by limiting herself in her reply to the Telegraph to what she had actually witnessed, Bogomolets was leaving out the issue of what she had seen in photographs and videos of the February 21 bloodshed, which exist in huge numbers, including HD video of the shootings and close-ups of the victims.

In other words, Bogomolets is hedging a bit here in retreating to a rather lawyerly “I can only vouch for what I personally witnessed”.

But she certainly wants an investigation, an investigation that the new government is apparently dragging its feet on.

The intercepted tape provides significant support for the thesis that the snipers were provocateurs.

As to why provocateurs might come in handy, I refer you to Victoria Nuland’s warning to pre-Yanyukovich oligarchs that their assets in the West would be at risk “if violence was used against protesters”.

After the shooting, Yanyukovich’s support in the parliament, presumably including the oligarch-backed deputies, evaporated, Yanyukovich fled, and the new government moved in and tried to put an EU-brokered transition agreement (which would have kept Yanyukovich in power until a new election) behind it.

Moral issues aside, one might say, so the new government shot its way into power, possession is nine-tenths of the law, suck on that, Vlad, etc.

There’s a little more to it, thanks to the Russian power play in Crimea.

Russia hopes to cast the shadow of illegitimacy over the Kiev regime, thereby legitimizing its own actions to protect ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in general.

Russia not only hopes to legitimize its actions, in my view, it wishes to legalize them.

And that brings us back to Kosovo, the Albanian enclave that was separated from pro-Russian Serbia.  Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008, after Russia and its allies had dragged their feet on the new, foreign-drafted constitution that was intended to give a veneer of legality to Kosovo’s de facto and, after a decent interval, de jure independence.

All this happened while Kosovo was essentially a UN protectorate.

According to the West, since Yugoslavia had “dissolved”, all sovereign bets were off and there was no need to respect Serbia’s claims of sovereignty over Kosovo.  For bonus points, the Office for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the same OSCE now being bruited about as observers in Ukraine, observed the Kosovo elections to the parliament that unilaterally declared independence.

So Kosovo declared independence under rather dodgy circumstances in order to sidestep Russian attempts to influence the process on behalf of the Kosovar Serbs and brushing aside the UN mandate in the process.  The United States, the EU, and their allies promptly recognized the new government despite the apparent legal holes in the case, thereby considerably rankling the Russians.

In the matter of Ukraine, therefore, the Russian government is giving great weight to what it regards as the criminality inherent in the seizure of power in Kiev by the new leadership, as indicated by the Paets/Ashton tape.  

If the new government isn’t legitimate, then Russia has leeway to adopt the Kosovo formula—a legal reorganization of new republics out of a dissolved state—for its Crimea shenanigans.

And they are saying that the Crimean parliament has as much right to determine the region’s future with Russian support as Kosovo’s parliament did with the support of the West.

Unsurprisingly, the US government and prestige media, particularly in the United States, have shown little appetite for delving into the rather explosive accusation that the new Kiev regime climbed into power on a ladder of corpses they themselves created.

The Western powers, to their considerable discredit, are quite keen to sweep the revelations under the rug and prop up the oligarch-heavy, IMF-friendly current government as a legitimate expression of the democratic yearnings of the Ukrainian people, as somewhat metaphysically if not politically expressed by the Maidan demonstrators.  The gymnastics of Western diplomats and journalists to present the current Kiev outfit as anti-oligarch populists, in particular, I think has Putin rolling his eyes in some combination of exasperation and admiration.

At the same time, the Russians are ostentatiously refusing to any legitimacy-enhancing contacts with the Kiev regime even when Kiev representatives are brought along to a meeting, as Secretary of State Kerry did in Paris.

It may give heartburn to the neo-liberal quadrant, but the Russians are closer to the truth here.

Dissatisfaction of the Maidan activists with the new government is palpable, and it is no coincidence that, when the Crimea crisis emerged, government representatives visited Maidan and told the activists to please go home now, since the key issue now was national unity in the face of the Russian threat and not their picky problems about corruption and governance.

Putin, who I expect had heard the intercepted phone call prior to its release, repeatedly alluded in his press conference to the nobility of the Maidan demonstrators and sympathized with their clear distaste for the neo-oligarchical government (now with genuine oligarchs running the eastern provinces) as well as Yanyukovich (the relish with which Putin threw Yanyukovich under the bus was noteworthy.  Nothing irritates an imperial boss more than an inept proxy).

And I would not be surprised if accusations that the mysterious outburst of sniper fire (which instead of strengthening the purported perpetrator, Yanyukovich, actually catapulted the neo-oligarchical opposition into power) was a black job executed by extremist neo-nationalists gain traction among the genuinely reformist Maidan activists.

Activists such as Obomolets perhaps do not want to give Russia public aid and comfort by endorsing the sniper narrative, at least as long as Russia is threatening Ukrainian sovereignty.  But don’t expect the activist mood to improve if the new government, in addition to entrenching oligarchs instead of removing them, concludes an excruciating austerity agreement with the IMF.

Both the West and Russia have ample experience in delaying embarrassing investigations, and then producing long-after-the-fact whitewashes of their skullduggery—and the new Kiev regime has the added advantage of having ultranationalist thugs on tap to intimidate witnesses and nosy bureaucrats--so I don’t have any particular hope that justice will break out and the full story of “snipergate” will come to light.

But by the same token, I don’t expect the Russians to let up on the allegations, since they strike at the very heart of the new regime’s legitimacy.  The accusations—and demands that Ukraine return to the February 21 transition arrangement-- probably won’t go away, at least on the Russian side, until the Russians gain satisfactory international recognition of the status of Crimea, whatever that turns out to be.