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jakeXT

(10,575 posts)
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 04:00 AM Mar 2015

Ukraine leader fires oligarch Kolomoisky as regional chief

Source: Reuters

(Reuters) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has fired billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky as governor of a key region in the east after a raid by armed men on the Kiev offices of a state oil firm, his website said on Wednesday.

The 52-year-old has been at the center of a political storm since men, armed and masked, briefly entered the offices of UkrTransNafta last Thursday night after its director, an ally of Kolomoisky, was replaced.

As governor of Dnipropetrovsk, Kolomoisky, a banking, energy and media tycoon with a fortune put at $1.8 billion by Forbes last year, has been a valuable ally to the central government by financing volunteer battalions there to defend against pro-Russian separatists.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/25/us-ukraine-crisis-oligarch-idUSKBN0ML0CG20150325

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newthinking

(3,982 posts)
4. Good luck with that (the current government are also wealthy)
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 06:12 AM
Mar 2015

This is just an argument between power brokers.

Don't mind the narrative. All that changed in Ukraine was the right wing minority parties took power with the help of the west. They are just as corrupt and longtime politicians as well.

But they are extremists and authoritarians: And like our own neocons they think they can use whatever resources and whatever force, in whatever way , to get their ends and maintain power, and plow through the consequences.

In the case of Ukraine it is very tenuous, because the only way these minority factions can maintain power is by hunting down the opposition and keeping the population in fear. They control the media there and we let them because it allows us to keep the public from understanding just how fraught and compromised, and undemocratic, the situation really is.

I believe that they cannot allow an east Ukraine that is peaceful and not under their thumb, because they surely would then lose power in anything close to an honest election.

jakeXT

(10,575 posts)
5. Is US money for weapons coming in .... ?
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 07:24 AM
Mar 2015

Calling on the President to provide Ukraine with military assistance to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity.


YEAS 348
NAYS 48
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2015/roll131.xml

Fred Sanders

(23,946 posts)
7. The money is for the Oligarths of Ukraine to fight another civil war among themselves?
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 10:22 AM
Mar 2015

The Western media has once again pulled another Iraqi-like information fraud on the distracted and information avoiding American masses, those masses so easily moved one way or another, as Netanyahu said..and was right on.

bemildred

(90,061 posts)
6. More like a dispute among the ruling "elites" over control of the spoils, the prime cuts.
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 08:16 AM
Mar 2015

It is true that there are people in the US & EU gov'ts, foreign policy wonks, who think they are using these oligarchs, but they are confused.

 

Demeter

(85,373 posts)
3. I expect this action is too little, and too late
Wed Mar 25, 2015, 05:24 AM
Mar 2015

My thoughts are with the people in Ukraine. May they survive the battle of the Oligarchs, both the local ones, and the American ones.

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