Did You Know That Poroshenko Offered Russia the Donbass, But Putin Refused It?

Moscow didn't want Donbass.

When you guys share and repost and restack my stuff, it really helps. Don’t stop doing this, please. This one is worth spreading and I need your help as always. Let’s keep pushing and spreading the awful truth. Thanks.

**

The big news back in February was the return of the Donbass oligarch, Medvedchuk to the political scene. Out of nowhere, he started giving interviews on state-media news resources like RIA and RBC. I recently did an interview with The Gaggle and the topic came up and I realized that actually I hadn’t been keeping my audience up to date on the Medvedchuk situation, even though it is really interesting and bolsters all my arguments about what was really happening in Ukraine.

It is important to understand who and what he is.

As a reminder, Medvedchuk is one of the prime culprits who helped lure Russian forces into a trap with his false intel and his empty promises. Medvedchuk was an extremely important political grey cardinal in Ukraine, a close partner of Poroshenko, Putin is his daughter’s godfather, and he is a creature of the Kremlin. Medvedchuk was tasked with creating a pro-Russia political network within Ukraine. There are other important oligarchs and key players in all this, but at a minimum, you need to know and understand who this one is.

And here is what Medvedchuk revealed about what went down in Donbass back in the day:

Former President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko asked the head of the political council of the Opposition Platform - For Life party and ex-deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Viktor Medvedchuk to tell Russian President Vladimir Putin to "take" Donbass. Medvedchuk stated this on the air of the Belarusian TV channel STV.

The host of the program said that “there is information in the media” about the conversation, during which Poroshenko “openly” told Putin to “take the Donbass”. “I can tell you that Poroshenko repeatedly said in a conversation with me: tell him, let him take it,” Medvedchuk replied.

According to him, in those years when such a conversation took place, Putin in an interview called the Donbass a part of Ukraine, and Poroshenko tried to get rid of this region. “Because he [Poroshenko] understood that he did not need Donbass. <...> When President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin said that the Donbass is Ukraine, Poroshenko tried, as they say, to die from him [to get rid of (Ukrainian)],” Medvedchuk explained.

Well, well, well.

I sometimes forget how much I take the worldview of dissident patriots for granted and how much some people still resist trying to understand their position. Yes, Moscow betrayed Donbass with Minsk I and II. They did it to preserve the bottom lines of their favored oligarchs. Russia is a state attached to an oligarchy, not an oligarchy attached to a state. The warnings and accusations of a “knife in the back of Novorussia” by Russia’s dissident patriots were well-founded and confirmed over and over again.

And it is time we started listening to these voices.

Also, let me just ask you preemptively before you start denying reality and reflexively burying your head in the sand: if this is just more 5D Judo, what is it's purpose? Or, if Medvedchuk is lying, why is he being allowed to lie? If he is undermining Russia’s leadership by tacitly admitting that they are traitors (which we all already knew anyways) why did they swap Azov terrorists for this guy? There is no way to explain away this frank admission by Medvedchuk that Donbass could have been returned to Donbass many years ago, but that Moscow refused to consider it. Do you think he is lying? Why. Feel free to try to worm your way out of this in the comments section below though.

Now, I have spoken at length before about how Moscow had no interest in Ukraine for the last three decades and actively helped suppress pro-Russian sentiments there:

But, for some reason, I thought that Moscow’s oligarchs would want to gobble up Donbass at least, which is why they held off on fighting Kiev or standing up to NATO right up until the very last moment when Medvedchuk was arrested and the SMO was launched because of that.

Now, I realize that I was too optimistic by far, and Moscow was even more craven and compromised than I was willing to admit.

Again, none of this is that strange if you keep in mind that they wanted to shove Donbass kicking and screaming back into Ukraine. This should be obvious to anyone who knows what is actually written in Minsk II. But, apparently, people still don’t understand this or simply want to believe that Minsk II was about Russia saving Donbass or something. These people are functional illiterates and mouth-breathers with microphones lying to the people who are still dumb enough to listen to them.

**

More and more, we are gaining access to tell-all accounts of pro-Russians who used to live in Donbass or parts of Ukraine returning to Russia to spill the beans on what Medvedchuk and the Russian Deep State was up this whole time in Ukraine. The picture that is being revealed is worse than anything that even I expected.

I have one particular interview I want to share with you, filmed by a solid Russian patriot project called Tsar’s Cross whose chief I have interviewed by in the past and who I hope to interview again.

They are now interviewing the aforementioned abandoned patriots and this particular interview is of great interest. Thank you to the friend who provided the full English translation using a high-end audio to text machine translator so that I wouldn’t have to transcribe it. It is a long transcript worth reading in full, but you can just focus on the parts I bolded if you prefer.

Sasha of Tsar’s Cross: [00:00:01] Unfortunately, while the uncertainties of failure are still being resolved, some rather gloomy figures are emerging who are trying to assert themselves in the political space, who have already shown their complete incompetence before. We are now talking about Viktor Medvedchuk. As far as we know, at one time in Kiev you were able to communicate or even have some kind of interaction with this man. I am interested in your opinion. What do you think of him and what? What political goals do you think he sets for himself today?

Igor Druz: [00:00:33] Well, the interaction is too loud. Although, indeed, I had contacts with Medvedchuk. I met with him several times, and I also met with his chief of staff. Unfortunately, all my hopes for cooperation did not come true. In general I was told that this man represents leadership of Russia and therefore not only I but in general all heads of public organizations which are oriented on Russia, on Orthodoxy, they all tried to establish relations with him. By the way, at his own request because his people contacted all the leaders and they all responded. I at that time led the movement People's Council of Ukraine. It's an Orthodox patriotic organization, which among other things organized a lot of actions against the so-called European course of Ukraine, against the nascent Nazism and, of course, for Russia and for our faith. We took to the streets a fairly large number of people, sometimes several thousand. We went out in large processions. Unfortunately, our actions were ignored by the media, not only the media in Ukraine, but also the media in Russia. That is the most amazing thing, at first glance it turned out that the actions of some, sorry, women of low social responsibility such as Femen, who cut down the crosses. All the Russian and Ukrainian media covered them. Our actions, when the huge cross marches came out of Lavra, went all around Kiev. We approached the European Union representation in Kiev, and nobody covered them almost at all.

Druz: [00:02:26] Of course, we wanted to somehow break this isolation, get some resources, support from the Russian leadership. Right now, the Ukrainian media is ranting, including your humble servant, that we were supposedly agents of the Kremlin, and in particular, so was I. This is ridiculous to even say. If I really were an agent of the Kremlin and received resources from there, I assure you that the situation in Ukraine would be very different. As a matter of fact, the majority of the citizens of Ukraine were loyal to Russia at least, or just absolutely pro-Russian. And to lose on this field. It just took a lot of effort, but persons like Mr. Medvedchuk did their best, including, unfortunately, Mr. Medvedchuk. I must say that I do not know a single Orthodox patriotic organization that has received any real support from him. I don't know, maybe there were some. But even if there were such, it must have been some kind of machinations. Because all the actions conducted by Orthodox patriotic organizations in favor of Russia were conducted on pure enthusiasm, at best with the help of some pro-Russian businessmen, but not with the help of Mr. Medvedchuk. I must say what struck me immediately when I first met him, when I went to this headquarters at the request of Medvedchuk's entourage.

Sasha: [00:03:58] What year was that?

Druz: [00:03:59] It was either '12 or '13 2013. I went in there, I was met by the chief of staff of Ukrainian Choice. The manager of Medvedchuk's organization, Victor Cherniy. I walked in there normally dressed and so on. Still comparatively young. And so Mr. Cherny says to me, “But you don't think, Igor Mihajlovich, that we are some kind of pro-Russian organization. Of course we are for Ukraine, it is the Ukrainian choice, not the Russian choice. Another thing is that we want Ukraine to be equally oriented to the East and to the West”. Well, that is, he stated the program of the Ukrainian nationalist. I, of course, was unpleasantly, very much, unpleasantly surprised. But on the other hand, I hoped that I will meet with Medvedchuk and will give some explanations, maybe will give some help, because we needed cameras, video cameras that would have filmed our actions, quite large actions that we held almost every month. A breakthrough to the Russian media, to Russian TV channels. We tried to establish relations with them, but only literally a few actions were ever covered by the Russian media. We didn't get any of that. The only thing we got was PR for Mr. Medvedchuk personally, because on his website it was noted that I and other leaders had already joined, signed an agreement ahead of the Ukrainian elections. Well, and I did several interviews for the YouTube channel of Ukrainian Choice. That's all the interaction at a time when simply elementary information resources were needed. We did things in defense of Russia. Of course, we fought primarily for Holy Russia, We are Orthodox Christians, but the unity of Holy Russia, it is spelled out in our doctrine. Of course, we were Russians and we are Russians, we are Russians […]

Druz: [00:06:13] But we didn't get any support from Medvedchuk. Although I know absolutely for sure that the resources of this organization were huge. In general, the whole Ukraine was covered with billboards with slogans of Ukrainian choice. But these slogans were absolutely, in my opinion, stupid. They said something like “you rule the country, you are some kind of democracy”. Well, in general, it said nothing at all. It wasn’t even for Russia, nor for the faith. Although with Medvedchuk, we have people all the time speculating on the issues of how Orthodox he is. By the way, if you think about it, this Viktor Cherny, whom he appointed as his chief of staff, he was an open neo-pagan. [NOTE: here I think he means Chabad, which is often referred to as neo-pagan by the Orthodox. They are not neo-pagan, they worship Yahweh and Kabbalah]. This is just to say what Orthodoxy meant to Mr. Medvedchuk. Well, any somewhat churchgoing person would not appoint a sectarian, especially since it is a sect, well, an absolutely crude, totalitarian, neo-pagan sect to the role of his close assistant, to the chief of staff of his movement. But it was done. The Nazis of Ukraine received a huge $1,000,000,000 support from Western countries. And as for the pro-Russian forces, they received nothing. I'm not just talking about any resources, although the money would have come in handy, but not to pay some statist for our actions. People came without any money anyway. That was our advantage. Well, at least help to organize them. To organize buses, organize food, and so on. There was nothing, just absolutely nothing. Though on billboards Mr. Medvedchuk has spent so much that I do not know, it could could have funded the activity entirely of pro-Russian parties. It has come to the end, naturally, with a failure, an extreme failure. Here is the result of (Medvedchuk’s work) that we see clearly today.

Sasha: [00:08:27] Igor Mikhailovich, what was Medvedchuk's role in the signing of the Minsk agreements?

Druz: [00:08:33] Well, the thing is, this role of his was even more detrimental than the role he played before Maidan. Before Maidan, he played the role of running a simulacrum of pro-Russian forces. Some security forces inside Russia might have thought, looking at Medvedchuk, that the Russian leadership in Ukraine was doing something to support the Russian forces and so on. On the other hand, it played the role of a bogeyman for Ukrainians, for Ukrainian nationalists, to be more precise. That is, it played such a role as if to prove that yes, the Kremlin interferes in Ukraine. And it really turned out demonstratively, that there was such a person, that he had such an organization, which periodically makes pro-Russian statements and openly flaunts its connections with the Russian leadership. So this role was that of a scarecrow, and on the other hand, an imitation of a Pro-Russian network. But the most pernicious developments, of course, began after Maidan. I have to say that there were some miscalculations from me as well, and so on. But as for the Minsk agreements, I immediately said that it is extremely detrimental to Russia extremely detrimental to the population of Donbass, and to Russia, and in the end. And for the population of Ukraine, even for the deceived people. Because these mistake will have to be cleaned with blood. I've been talking about this since the beginning of these Minsk agreements and saying that the situation after Maidan is such that all of Ukraine can be legally liberated normally, just as Crimea was taken, practically bloodlessly, liberated to the applause of the population. It was also necessary to liberate all of Ukraine. As for the Minsk agreements, it is now mathematically proven that they were extremely detrimental, that the Ukrainian side was not going to implement them, that the West was not going to implement them.

Druz: [00:10:46] Merkel admitted it. Poroshenko admitted to it. And what is Medvedchuk's role? Medvedchuk's role is that he was one of the main lobbyists for these Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements allowed the Ukrainian army to be rearmed, allowed the entire population to be pumped full of propaganda, zombified. The Minsk agreements allowed them to inflate this war that happened, that if before we could resolve it almost bloodlessly, now we see for ourselves what a terrible massacre has started in Ukraine. But still Medvedchuk in his interviews praises these Minsk agreements, saying that it would be good to implement them, how good it would be to implement them even if we now know no one was ever going to implement them from either the Ukrainian or the Western side. It was originally a preparation for a massacre, a preparation for killing Russians, and he now tells us that they were the right agreements, but the Party of War ended up winning in Ukraine. But if it was the Party of Peace, it would have been better, and so on. Medvedchuk made no secret then and said all the time that he was one of the lobbyists for the Minsk agreements. Indeed, his role was large, and his ties with Poroshenko were strong. He never hid those connections. But who is Poroshenko? We all know very well. He is the executioner who openly said that the children of Donbass should sit in basements. He himself has openly stated this on television. Let's imagine what orders he secretly gave to kill people, including children. This is Medvedchuk's close partner.

Sasha: [00:12:41] Yuri Mikhailovich, and what role in general did Medvedchuk play directly during the Maidan?

Druz: [00:12:48] Well, during the Maidan, I didn't follow that exactly. He was against the Maidan in principle at first, but he was only speaking then. Well, you could have organized a real anti-Maidan for the money, even that spent on putting up crazy billboards all over Ukraine. For them you could have organized 10 anti-Maidans. But there was none of this. There was one Anti-Maidan in Mariinsky Park. I don't know what Medvedchuk's role was, but the Party of Regions worked there more. And this Anti-maidan was, unfortunately, completely mediocrely done and failed. It was an official event where they just gathered people with banners in the Komsomol style. And that was the end of it. Of course, there were sincere people there too. We can not say that all of them were just hired extras. They were not. But in general the event was a flop, and for the money and the resources, which Medvedchuk had, it was possible to organize a very serious resistance. But did they want to organize it? I very much doubt it. It turned out that after Maidan, when many pro-Russian people in Ukraine started to be physically eliminated, Medvedchuk (was well-aware of what was going on). There is information about his big business deals together with Poroshenko. I must say that at that time, for my pro-Russian public positions I was not killed, but a number of my acquaintances were physically liquidated. Shortly after Maidan, including, for example, Deputy Kalashnikov, including, for example, Buzina, And the famous journalist Sergei Rublev, my good acquaintance was captured on Maidan, tortured brutally, several hours, including ripping out an elderly man's nails with tongs, and they only let him go because they feared public outcry, because people saw that Banderaites had captured him and this could get into the media. That's why they eventually let him go. And in this situation, the Ukrainian Choice (Medvedchuk) continued to sit quietly in the center of Kiev. Nobody touched him, nobody touched him, because he was obviously playing his role in this play, and it was very necessary for the regime that emerged after the Maidan. There is information that it was Medvedchuk who lobbied for the recognition of the results of the so-called Poroshenko elections, which are a circus spectacle even by the standards of Ukraine. All this was done with his active participation. That is, he was a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. In fact, he helped legalize the results of the coup d'etat.

Sasha: [00:15:59] Just recently, Pavel Gubarev published interesting information on Medvedchuk's revelation that the very format of the Minsk agreements was Putin's personal initiative. He stated this, and just recently there was an article in RBC with another Medvedchuk confession that in 2014, Poroshenko turned to Medvedchuk as a third party as an intermediary in order for Putin to actually take over Donbass. But again, our president allegedly refused this and insisted on the format of the Minsk agreements.

Druz: [00:16:38] It's hard to judge whether this is true. If it is true, it certainly puts the Russian leadership in a very unattractive light. But at the same time I must say that Medvedchuk's role has to be clearly studied in this case too, because all the time he was sending signals that it was necessary to negotiate, make agreements, as it is fashionable to say now, which helped him keep his business, personal security and so on. And he essentially played the role of a stepping-stone to the rocket that put this regime into orbit, that made it really solid, ironclad, and then they just threw him away as unnecessary in the end. What was he expecting? Obviously, he thought he could go on and on, but the situation radicalized out of control. I want to explain that at first the pro-Russian forces in Ukraine were those who spoke about the need for complete integration of Russia and Ukraine, then the pro-Russian forces were those who said that we must actively be friends, that we must be friends at home, cooperate economically, culturally, politically. Then, the vector has already shifted towards Russophobia, and the pro-Russian forces said simply that we must not fight with Russia. This is considered pro-Russian, it has come to the point that these forces are considered the equivalent of the Black Hundreds (Russian nationalists). And so this force that Medvedchuk represented has already been swept away. Now his place, in fact, has been taken over by Arestovich, who simply says “Well, don't tear down the churches of the Moscow Patriarchate there.” This is now considered to be pro-Russian, you know? And then there will be some force that will say that every time you say the word Russia, it is not necessary to add an expletive, and it will be considered the pro-Russian position.

Druz: [00:18:41] That is, the vector keeps shifting. At one stage it was the Ukrainian Communists, and the Party of the Regions, who buried the Russian idea, they spread the lie that we could somehow reach an agreement in parliament with these rootless cosmopolitans, and with the Nazis led by these cosmopolitans and so on. Then other forces. And Medvedchuk, unfortunately, also played a detrimental role in this betrayal. I have nothing personal against these people, to these politicians, to these regionalists, who leaked it all. It just hurts me to consider that many people had to lose their lives because of what they did. At best, many people have lost their homes, lost their property, had to go far away and so on. Including me, I had to leave. But I didn't suffer much, unlike those who were killed under the bombs because of these agreements. And now the situation is the same. Here again, Roman Abramovich, he is also making agreements from our side. Well, what kind of treaties are these - are they to make a prelude to a new massacre even more terrible, to lead to some kind of nuclear strike eventually? Or what? Actually, of course, the issue with Ukraine should be solved only by its complete liberation. I just don't see any other way out.

Sasha: [00:20:18] We know that he was taken prisoner. Medvedchuk was exchanged for terrorists from Azov, for mercenaries who came to kill Russians thanks to Roman Abramovich. And now we have seen that Medvedchuk has begun to actively enter the political space, the public space, to put his articles, his opinions out. In your opinion, what are his goals today? What is he pursuing, what is he counting on?

Druz: [00:20:52] I think it would be more interesting to think about who is behind this project and which of his handlers has goals. Here I think that he does have serious patrons in the Russian leadership, because without it, first of all, no one would give him a platform on such state media as RIA Novosti. And secondly, he would never have made the statement himself if he had not been given the permission to do so from above. It is hard to say what goals are being pursued here. Some people think that maybe he is trying to become a governor on the liberated territories, but in fact his authority is not just low, but below zero. And some believe that he may be returned to Ukraine under some kind of power change. I see this as a very naive view. It's just not possible at all. And I must say that he is speculating that his political force won some number of votes in parliament. Well, now it won't. That is it has gained at a certain moment and that not thanks to its effective information political work, but in spite of it, that the people in Ukraine, pro-Russian, already not having any possibility to vote for someone pro-Russian, voted for Medvedchuk and for his friend Vadim Rabinovich. Vadim Rabinovich, by the way, was appointed after the Maidan as the chief Russian of Ukraine, and he began to put forward Soviet slogans. Well, now he has fled to Israel. Now there is practically nothing left of this political opposition force.

Druz: [00:22:50] There's also almost nothing left of this social base. So it's hard for me to say what role Medvedchuk was nominated for at all. But one thing I can say is that he plays a role in demoralizing the Russian people because his name has become synonymous, again, I repeat, with destroying the entire Russian spring and the entire Russian cause in Ukraine. So he plays, of course, a large demoralizing role. People see that such a man, who is guilty of many severe blunders, and as a result he is again given a horse, he is given a rostrum and so on. He tries to teach us about life and what to do. Well, what kind of party of peace can there be in Ukraine now, if there are no elections, if there is nothing, if a dictatorship is established there, and a dictatorship of external forces. The actor who plays the role before, he played the role of such a pro-Russian cosmopolitan, Zelensky performed in front of Putin. Now he plays the role of a Ukrainian nationalist. He is assigned different roles, then he plays the piano. Here it is naive to think that this actor can be ousted through elections. Of course it is impossible. So there are now statements that some peace party will come on the scene, right? (Medvedchuk) has even been stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship. All of his assets have been arrested, his faction in the Verkhovna Rada has been defeated and so on. His closest associates, including Boyko, have disowned him. I do not quite understand who can be united in Ukraine behind Medvedchuk's name and why he is being nominated. It's not clear to me. But as a factor in the demoralization of the Russian movement both in Ukraine and in Russia, his nomination plays its role.

Quite the interview.

But, if I may take a stab at answering the same final question about why Medvedchuk is being brought back and given a media platform, it is because a) he is close to Putin, an old friend, a made man b) Moscow desperately wants new negotiations and to surrender gracefully with some face intact to Kiev and c) they need someone or several people who will play the role of third party negotiators and because no one actually wants such a shit job, so, they have to trot our a rogue’s gallery of losers who are being punished given a chance to show their gratitude to the Kremlin. That would be my read on the situation.

In a sane state, Medvedchuk would have been punished, of course.

But, the RF rewards traitors and incompetents and welcomes them home with open arms. A far cry from the policies of the USSR when Stalin, just to be safe, sent millions of Red Soldiers who were taken prisoner in the early months of WWII by the Germans (thanks to Stalin’s incompetence) to the gulags after they were handed over. Whether you agree with the policy or not, you have to agree that the difference in attitude between then and now couldn’t be more stark. Even though Medvedchuk has been dogged by accusations of selling out information on pro-Russians which got them killed, even though his intel and his network contributed to the disaster SMO, even though he embezzled hundreds of millions and eventually lost all he built (or didn’t build) in Ukraine, even though he publicly declares himself pro-Ukrainian and thereby a traitor … well, you get the point. The Kremlin doesn’t follow any principles other than taking care of their own. They don’t even seem concerned that the peasants might take Medvedchuk’s rescue and his return to politics badly.

In fact, they have a level of contempt for the masses that puts mine to shame and reminds me that I can do better, turn my nose up higher, spit down harder.

And they’re right to do so, really. What can any of us do when the media, all media, even the media platforms, all of it, is controlled by the Tribe. Worse, any attempt to self-organize brings the eye of the spook state down upon us eventually. Take it we will, although maybe the bravest among us won’t take it in silence, at least. The only difference among the damned is that some of us have the dignity to acknowledge that we are being ritually humiliated and others trick themselves into thinking that they are not, because their ego or their religion doesn’t allow them to be honest.

Both the interviewer and the interviewees that they invite on their show are devout Orthodox. I met Sasha at a White Church in central Moscow. That means that they hold out hope that God might step in and lend Russia a helping hand. The only problem with this thesis, in my eyes, is that God isn’t Russian, and if his recent track record is any indication, he seems to prefer a different nation above all others. But that is a topic for another time.