American survey exposes growing grim mood in Ukraine

The survey was conducted in areas not under Russian control and based on a comprehensive sample size of 19 000 respondents. The survey is being ignored by the mainstream media.

Post-Maidan Ukraine is clearly heading for disaster, after Nadia Savchenko, a former Ukrainian hero, was arrested in Ukraine on suspicion of terrorism charges. She had dared to suggest that the massacre was a false flag.

As scholar Ivan Katchanovski noted: “The massacre was a false flag operation, which was rationally planned and carried out with a goal of the overthrow of the government and seizure of power. […] Concealed shooters and spotters were located in at least 20 Maidan-controlled buildings or areas.”

Chilling confessions by some of these snipers were not reported in the English-language media. News interviews with three men who claim they were snipers at Maidan Square in Kiev in February 2014 were reported in the Italian newspaper Il Giornale as well as on Italian Mediaset Matrix TV, on Channel 5, the most popular in Italy.

“Everyone started shooting two or three shots at a time. It went on for fifteen, twenty minutes. We had no choice. We were ordered to shoot both on the police and the demonstrators, without any difference,” one of the snipers in the report said.

The mainstream media and Western governments have long alleged that democratically-elected ex-president Viktor Yankovich masterminded the massacre of more than 80 people, but would a sitting president really order a massacre to stay in office?

In the Italian report the three snipers all confirmed that they had been hired in the Georgian capital by the military advisor of the Soros “colour revolution” beneficiary Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia. His advisor, Mamuka Mamulashvili gave the snipers guns, passports and a $5 000 fee to secured the allegiance of these mercenaries.

One of the mercenaries is quoted as saying: “I also told him (Mamulashvili): ‘Things are getting complicated, we have to start shooting….But who should we shoot?’. He replied that who and where did not matter – we only had to shoot somewhere in order to sow chaos.”

The three snipers also said they never received payment and were abandoned by their Georgian paymasters, and contended that coming forward was an act of conscience. “At that time I did not realise, I was not ready, then I understood. We’ve been used. Used and stuck,” said one called Alexander.

The Italian reports sadly confirmed what was famously leaked in a 2014 phone call between the European Union’s foreign policy chief at the time and Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet.

As the Ukrainian economy predictably stagnates, the fight against corruption also shows little progress in the survey, while the pro-Russian east has remained defiant.

Ukraine’s situation remains grim and the economy remains stagnant and there are the ubiquitous signs that public patience is running out as revealed by the survey by the Centre of Insights in Survey Research, titled The Fourth In-depth Look at Ukrainian Local Governance.

“The ideological goals of the Maidan Revolution are increasingly exhausted, and seem to be unattainable,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a leading Moscow-based foreign policy journal explained to CS Monitor earlier. “The West is unhappy with Ukraine for its failure to implement promised reforms. Russia is not backing down. Ukrainians are miserable for any number of good reasons. The situation is total deadlock.”

Another of Ukraine’s worrisome problems, highlighted by 76 percent of respondents in a Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) poll, was the war in eastern Ukraine. Kiev’s inability to deliver constitutional changes that would give special status and greater autonomy to the two independent-minded republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, has not been resolved.

“If we can’t get constitutional changes done, then nothing will alter the relationship between Kiev and the Luhansk-Donetsk republics,” says Vladimir Panchenko, an expert with the International Center of Political Studies in Kiev. “There is nothing happening right now that could influence positive change in our situation.”

The earlier comprehensive KIIS survey showed in 2016 already that 68 percent of Ukrainians thought the state of the economy was bad, 76 percent believed the country was headed “in the wrong direction,” and just 14 percent trusted the leadership of President Poroshenko.

The red flag was that support for joining the European Union – the signature goal of the Maidan Revolution – has fallen to less than half, 46 percent, while the idea of joining NATO is at 44 percent of respondents with the revolutionary spirit of most Ukrainians waning.

“The population is disillusioned. They do not trust their own authorities, and there seems to be no alternative on the horizon they can believe in,” says Vadim Karasyov, director of the independent Institute of Global Strategies in Kiev.

Moreover “Ukraine fatigue” is growing in the West, especially events like the referendum in the Netherlands to reject economic association with Ukraine.