The call is on Youtube and was reported by various outlets, there’s nothing Iranian about it. PressTV is the only English post I found on Google News, which in itself is sad. And of course one thing is to speak privately (doctor to Paet, Paet to Ashton) and another to speak to a journalist, especially after the government has changed and the people you might have carelessly “grassed out” are now in power and specifically in charge of security.
But Yanukovich clearly couldn’t do anything about it. In fact, he couldn’t even bring serious help from his Putin pal.
But you don’t! That’s the thing: you want the pro-Russia stooges out, but you don’t necessarily want already-discredited leaders in the picture. There were lots of grumbles when Tymoshenko was released, and she couldn’t be appointed in government because she’s just not presentable anymore. The main forces in the new governments are people who had very public disagreements with her (despite belonging to the same party, they thrived only once she was jailed), some neutral elements, the occasional oligarchs, and a bunch of Svoboda and Pravyi Sektor strongmen. The Orange Revolution is not to be named.
Did Kerry tour Turkey to lay flowers or otherwise empathise with protesters? Did they propose financial-aid packages to some government-in-waiting? Of course not. They made a couple of press releases and left it at that. Same (or even less) in Bahrain. Because behind token gestures, there is no real US policy for regime change in Turkey and Saudi Arabia and never will be, as long as US servicemen are welcome.
I never said otherwise. I’m also well aware that time passes, and new generations grow restless. However, a movement that could be perceived as US-backed would still struggle to find sympathisers among people born before 1989. This is not the case in Eastern Europe (in fact, it’s been the exact opposite at least until 2003).
EDIT to respond again: I said “people born before 1989” because all over the '80s Iran was in the middle of a very clear conflict with US-backed Iraq, and the Middle East in general saw a lot of US bombs falling all over for very dubious reasons. If you lived through that, chances are that you wouldn’t like the US very much. Things have been different in the '90s, thanks to the end of the Cold War; between Gulf War I and the Iraq invasion, US intervention in the region has mostly been benign and only tangentially involving Iran (in fact, taking out Saddam was a relief for Iranians).
On the issue of this movement being US-backed, I invite you to re-read through the transcript of Nuland’s call. “I think we’re in play”, “we want to midwife this thing”, “we want to keep the moderate democrats together”, “let [Klitschko] stay out and do his political homework”… come on. Even the rocks knew that the government-in-waiting was talking to US/EU people well before Yanukovich resigned, about rescue packages and so on. They would have been stupid not to! I honestly can’t understand why you cannot admit that this is just the last attempt to bring Ukraine in the NATO orbit. It’s not that “the US chose this time to launch a revolution”, it’s that they saw an opening and just increased the pressure. Again, it made sense, it was successful, I just don’t see the problem in admitting you’ve done good work (well, mostly good, they seem to have underestimated the Crimean stuff). You don’t see why they couldn’t help Tymoshenko and Yuschenko back then – they did! They offered full NATO membership and all sorts of bells and whistles! They just underestimated the power of Yanukovich and Putin to actually fight back in a (mostly) transparent way, exploiting Yuschenko’s and Tymoshenko’s self-destructive instincts and maintaining a hold over the general population. Y and T also didn’t have the courage to tell Putin to go stuff himself, and looking at what’s happening in Crimea, I’d say they had their good reasons.
Btw, enough with the stuff about Iranian press and such – I got the news first from italian media and then tried to locate English reports through Google News and at the time PressTV was the only item coming up. Of course, as time passed, more reports came up. Some italian media with good links in Eastern Europe are now independently confirming that other sources have suggested the same as the doctor, but they all want to stay anonymous for the same reason the doctor likely recanted: security in Kiev is now in the hands of those same people who might have been behind the shooting, so self-preservation is obviously paramount. It remains that the EU envoy and Ukraine authorities are doing exactly nothing to disprove the claims ever since.
