Eurasia note #79 - Biden On Payroll Of Ukraine’s Oligarchs

Deep state compromised; escalation of war likely their only option

• Kolomoyskyi’s Burisma gas firm paid VP Biden $5 million to stop an investigation

• ‘Credible’ FBI informant has audio recording of the negotiations – Joe’s on tape

• After hiding the evidence, FBI has no option but to double down

• Ukraine is not a matter of NATO security or even Russia: it’s a web of intrigue

• U.S. wallows deeper in the mire as it defends and covers for its Ukrainian assets

• China may have no better window of opportunity if it is to retake Taiwan

• Dnieper’s receding waters bare skeletons of German soldiers who invaded USSR

• Hitler tried desperately to hold onto the region’s rich resources of metal and coal

• The biggest manganese plant is a symbol of Ukraine’s troubles, then and now

• Ihor Kolomoyskyi was forced to hand back the plant, after a corrupt privatisation

• He got his revenge when his actor won the presidency in 2019

• Turns out Kolomoyskyi is not just Zelenskiy’s patron – he’s Joe Biden’s, too

(2,500 words or about 11 minutes of your company).

The Dnieper Dam during WW2

Tbilisi, Jun 13, 2023

The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine, and the falling levels of the Dnieper, have revealed the skeletons of those who fought during WW2, including one skull still wearing a German helmet.

It is a reminder of the Nazi attempt to conquer the Soviet Union 80 years ago.

In particular it recalls the fight for Nikopol, to the north of Kakhovka, in late 1943, when German forces were trying to hold onto the manganese ore mines, some of the largest in the world, and nearby deposits of iron ore.

It is a reminder not just of the last war in the region. It features in Ukraine’s recent history and the reasons why the country — long before Russia’s invasion — was already one of the poorest in Europe despite such mineral and agricultural wealth.

The Nikopol Ferroalloy Plant (NFP) opened in 1958 and is one of the largest global producers of manganese alloys.

NFP was privatised in 2003. Half was bought by Ukraine’s Interpipe group for $80 million — a fraction of its true worth. Just over one quarter was bought by Privat Group, led by Ihor Kolomoyskyi, along with Hennadiy Boholyubov and Oleksiy Martynov.

The scandal led to the privatisation being annulled, as was the case with Lugansk Locomotive Works, Luhanskteplovoz, and Ukraine’s largest steelmaker, Kryvorizhstal, now ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih.

Kolomoyskyi is the controversial oligarch and patron of president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. He was fired as governor of Dnipro region by president Petro Poroshenko in 2015.

The next year the government nationalized Kolomoyskyi’s PrivatBank, after an investigation revealed massive fraud over more than a decade. Those privatisations were required by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for lending money — billions of which disappeared from the Ukrainian treasury into Privat Bank. [1]

His revenge was the election in 2019 of Zelenskiy who found fame, as a comedian playing president, on Kolomoskyi’s television station. He won 73 per cent of the vote on a platform of making peace with Russia; a pledge he promptly abandoned.

The by-then Israeli Kolomoyskyi (he was reportedly stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship) was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in 2021 for corruption under his watch as governor of the Dnipro region. [2]

Kolomoyskyi is also the patron it seems of president Joe Biden. Kolomoyskyi, who built his fortune during the lawless years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has a controlling interest in Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company that employed Hunter Biden for $50,000 a month.

It was to stop an investigation into Burisma that then vice-president Biden forced the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

It was to stop president Donald Trump asking questions about the firing that U.S. intelligence recorded his telephone call with president Zelenskiy and then tried to impeach Trump.

This week Sen. Charles Grassley revealed that Burisma paid then VP Biden to help fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin — and that audio recordings prove it.

A document, previously hidden by the FBI, details claims by a longstanding and “highly credible” FBI informant that Burisma paid Joe Biden $5 million in 2015 and 2016 in order to help fire Shokin who was investigating Burisma.

“The FBI made Congress review a redacted unclassified document in a classified facility. That goes to show you the disrespect the FBI has for Congress,” Mr. Grassley said. 

“The 1023 [FD-1023 is a document the FBI uses to memorialize meetings or information gathered from confidential sources] produced to that House Committee redacted reference that the foreign national who allegedly bribed Joe and Hunter Biden allegedly has audio recordings of his conversations with them — 17 total recordings,” he said. [3]

Thriller killer

If indeed the FBI has that material, then it supports the assessment that Ukraine is not simply a matter of NATO security or combatting Russian influence but that it is a spider’s web of intrigue involving intelligence agencies, corporations, bioweapons research, human trafficking for sex and organs, the looting of the Ukraine and the United States through corruption and military spending, corrupt privatisations mandated by the IMF and, without question, money laundering.

Everything is upside down. As Polly St George wrote: corruption is the new anti-corruption. So VP Joe Biden was made point man for anti-corruption in Ukraine and the rest is history.

The cover-up, they say, is often worse than the crime. In order to hide the above, the U.S. deep state was forced to embed its intelligence agencies. Ukraine, in short, was a CIA centre of operations that at times looked like a shadow government.

Russiagate was run out of Ukraine, as Glenn Beck laid out in one of his famous chalkboard presentations: “Ukraine, The Democrats’ Russia.” Alexandra Chalupa was point woman for the alleged Trump-Russia connection in 2016, even before the Steele Dossier had been invented by Britain’s SIS (MI6). [4]

Censorship of the Western media was run out of Ukraine, where Nina Jancowicz, abortive head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board, advised Ukraine’s foreign ministry, the UK Foreign Office and NGOs like the Wilson Center, on “disinformation” — while manufacturing it.

She is linked to the website Myrotvorets that hosts the Ukrainian kill list, which today marked late Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi as “liquidated.”

Deadly pathogen research was prepared in Ukrainian biolabs, funded by the U.S. military and run through a Biden-related company, Metabiota.

The reason the U.S. has a dotard for a president is part of the show: how could a dement and a crackhead concoct such a scheme? They are the cover for the intel agencies who answer to the owner-investors. The Zelenskiy show laughed at us in the same way. It was called “Servant of the People.”

It is just as well the great writers of spy thrillers are dead. They could not have competed with this. See Ukraine Labs Part Of Dark Network (Moneycircus, Mar 14, 2022)

Battle of the Dnieper

The river then, as now, was central to the war.

In August 1941, as the Soviets retreated, they dismantled as much as they could to rebuild factories further east. In the wake of the German army came the Hermann Göring Werke, industrial engineers who repaired plants and got the furnaces running again.

The paradox of rebuilding a country during wartime is explained by the value of those plants to the German war machine. Today The New York Times writes: ‘The World’s Largest Construction Site’: The Race Is On to Rebuild Ukraine (Feb. 16, 2023). Apparently the slogan comes from the Ukraine Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Blow-by-blow accounts of military history don’t usually interest the author but in this case Ukrainians and Russians are contesting the same territory, villages and cities as the Germans and Soviets. [5]

The dam and the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station which collapsed last week, was one of six built on the Dnieper to supply water and electricity for heavy industry. One locus of fighting in 1943 was the Dnieper Dam in Zaporizhzhia, the first that had been built, between 1927 and 1932.

History not being what you’ve been told, General Electric manufactured the electric-generating turbines. The power generating capacity was the largest in Europe. The U.S. government provided architects and engineers to build the dam — 760 meters (2500 feet) long and 60 meters (200 feet) tall.

Water finds its level, of course, and the waters from the Kakhovka dam are receding. [6]

Rumours of a war

President Vladimir Putin now uses the word war. He no longer limits its name to a special military operation. He first used the word, “voina” in Russian, last December but does so more frequently now.

“No matter what we say, they will always look to apportion the blame in Russia, but this is not right: we did not unleash this war, I repeat, in 2014: the Kyiv regime unleashed war in the Donbas,” Putin said last week.

Moar war

Conflict is likely to escalate. Not just because people have warlike intent but because they sense opportunities to regain historic territories or cauterise festering wounds. That is as true for Poland and Hungary as it is for China.