The New Dark Age

6 May 2014 — Voice of Russia

8 people died and 16 were injured in the eastern Ukrainian city of Slavyansk on May 6. The casualties came as the result of Kiev’s military operation in the region. Meanwhile, residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in eastern Ukraine have decided to boycott the upcoming presidential election slated for May 25. That’s according to Oleg Tsarev, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, OR Verkhovna Rada. Earlier, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions voted to hold a referendum on autonomy. The Voice of Russia talked to Foreign policy expert Nebojsa Malic, based in Washington DC.

Over 3 million people may cast their ballots in the referendum scheduled for May 11. More than 1,200 polling stations will be open for those who want to express their will. The referendum will be funded by public organizations and individuals.

According to the election commission officials, there have been no applications from international observers to monitor the vote.

If the majority of the population votes in favor of autonomy, the regions may start forming an independent federation, Novorossiya, which stands for New Russia.

Mass rallies of autonomy supporters have started in eastern Ukraine in March. In response to the protests, Kiev’s interim government launched a military operation to quell the unrest.

Read more: Odessa: Kiev sends its Nazi units to ‘stop the fighting’

Some 2,500 Ukrainian citizens have already asked the Russian Civic Chamber for asylum. Many of them say the situation in the country is close to “a humanitarian disaster”.

On Tuesday,Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called on member states of the Council of Europe to strongly condemn actions of Ukrainian nationalists. He wondered how the West can ignore the fact that Ukraine’s army is fighting side by side with neo-Nazis against their own people in the southeast REGIONS of the country.

Last week, the Ukrainian port city of Odessa saw the carnage of pro-autonomy activists. Who is behind the deadly clashes and fire at the House of Trade Unions?

All the evidence that I have seen points to the so-called right sector, the neo-Nazi activists that arrived to Odessa specifically days prior and announced that they would be fighting the pro-Russian demonstrators and there are even indications that one of the right-sector leaders Andriy Parubiy was in town and coordinated the attacks. Again I’ve seen a lot of evidence in the past couple of days and all of it points to the right sector being responsible.

What do right-sector activists want and who is feeding them?

Ideologically these people follow the 1940s Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera who was assisting Hitler’s forces in trying to establish what they considered an independent Ukraine and they were given wings by secession of governments since 1991 in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a lot of these people at the end of the war ended up refugees in the West, in the US, in the UK, in Canada and have been coordinating the refugees from there and some of them have repatriated after 1991 and continued on. These people were enlisted by the organizers of the Maidan riots in November and were behind the February 22nd coup in Kiev that installed the current regime in power. So, they are essentially the armed forces of the regime in Kiev because the proper Ukrainian military has by and large refused to shoot upon its own people following the orders of the self-appointed president and prime minister.

Read more: Washington responsible for fascist massacre in Odessa – Global Research Center

It looks like a civil war in Ukraine. Is it what they wanted? Why?

There are two things at place here. One, their objective is to seize control of the entire country of Ukraine and impose on it a sort of national identity that they imagine as genuinely Ukrainian. They are not very successful at this because they are driven by hatred of the post-Soviet tactics. But the other thing is they are being used by the external sponsors to try to intimidate and fight any internal resistance because the goal of these external sponsors is to provoke Russian intervention and be able to say that Russians are invading and oppressing upon Ukrainians and “we have to come and save them”, which is the replica of what the West has done in Bosnia, and Libya, and in several other places in the past 20 years, or to suppress any pro-Russian sentiment and pull Ukraine into NATO. That seems to be failing so they are falling back on option B which is to provoke war with Russia and pretend to be the saviors. That also will not work but I don’t know if they are aware of it yet.

Following in the footsteps of the Crimea, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions decided to hold a referendum on autonomy. How will the situation in Ukraine change if the majority of voters say “yes” to secession?

Do you think that they are not interested in having elections take place? What that one of the goals because it looks like they are probably successful in that? I don’t know if the elections will take place on May 25th.

I think they will organize the elections, they will declare them legitimate and regardless of whether they actually take place or valid at all, the whole notion of having elections on the 25th was a shame to begin with in a situation where the coup government has taken over and essentially put the country under rule of the right sector. But they will hold the vote and they will declare it legitimate because it is all part of the sham. They need to represent themselves as a legitimate government.

Who do you think is going to win?

It honestly doesn’t matter. Whoever is designated a winner of the vote will have to do the bidding of coup sponsors. It doesn’t matter which person is chosen, but it will be a tool, he will not actually be a person conducting their own sovereign policy.

Who are the coup sponsors?

We are hearing all kinds of statements from Washigton suggesting that they invested 5 billion dollars in so-called democracy promotion, so it is pretty clear that it is the US government. I think the Germans are also involved through Klichko. I am not sure to what extent the Germans were behind this. I would say the arrows of blame point to Washington.