Is the EU pushing Ukraine to start another conflict with Russia?

How the EU broke Ukraine (IN MASSIVE DEBT) (with help from Russia)

Four years after the EU’s push for closer ties with Ukraine provoked Russia and helped start a revolution, the country is ravaged by war and nearly broke.

So as EU leaders gather in Brussels Friday to celebrate the Eastern Partnership, their foreign policy initiative to strengthen relations with countries in the former Soviet bloc, the central question is: Can the EU pick up the pieces?

In a bid to show continued support for Ukraine ahead of Friday’s summit, the European Investment Bank on Thursday announced an additional €37 million in financing to help prop up the country’s agriculture sector. Total financial assistance to Ukraine from the EU is now roughly €12 billion — including, in 2014, the largest financial package ever given to a non-EU country.

A new study commissioned by the European Parliament declared the Eastern Partnership to be an overall success, but also noted that 94 percent of the aid to Ukraine has been in the form of loans, saddling the country with debt that will hinder its recovery in the long term. Over the next five years, the country will have to repay €38 billion, yet there are just €5 billion in reserves in the National Bank.

The political agreement with the EU has brought “Kiev closer to the EU and other Western institutions than ever before,” the report’s authors wrote, citing a new visa-free travel regime. “In the wake of the Euromaidan Revolution and subsequent Russian challenges to Ukraine’s sovereignty, the era of geopolitical choice for Kiev is over. Still, these dramatic events have made EU and NATO membership more distant than ever.”

EU’s signature foreign policy initiative when launched in Prague in 2009.

EU officials generally reject claims that they bear responsibility for the political crisis that erupted in Ukraine in the fall of 2013, when they pushed hard on then President Viktor Yanukovych to sign political and economic accords with the bloc. At the same time, Moscow pressured him not to sign and threatened economic reprisal if he did.

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-eu-broke-ukraine-with-help-from-russia/

>>4029097

Ukraine's debt saga….The Russia-Ukraine dispute involves a politically and militarily fraught conflict wrapped in a garden-variety contract dispute governed by English law

UKRAINE’S economy, racked by war, is in free fall. In the second quarter of this year its GDP shrunk at an annualised rate of 15%, after shrinking by 18% in the first. Its public debt is probably worth 100% of its GDP. Small wonder, then, that Ukraine wants to cut some of the debt it owes. After months of bitter negotiations, Ukraine and its creditors may reach a deal this week. On what issues do Ukraine and its creditors disagree, and what is likely to happen?

Debt negotiations have been drawn out. For months, no one—not even Ukraine’s finance minister, Natalie Jaresko—was entirely sure who owned Ukraine’s debt. It is now known to include Franklin Templeton, a big asset manager, which owns about $9 billion of Ukraine’s bonds, and BTG Pactual, a Brazilian firm. From the start everyone has recognised that Ukraine needed some debt relief. The big question was the form that such relief might take. For months the creditors argued that Ukraine’s problems would be solved by “maturity extensions”—that is, pushing out the date when bonds needed to be repaid.

The IMF has kept Ukraine alive with a series of loans, worth about $7 billion in total since last year. The IMF provided the money under the assumption that the government in Kiev will write off $15.3 billion of debt and interest by 2018, and that it will have reduced its public-debt-to-GDP ratio to about 70% of GDP by 2020.

There is a bizarre clause in that particular bond, which allows its holder to force Ukraine to default at any time after its public debt load has passed 60% of GDP. That creditor, unfortunately, is Russia. 

https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2015/08/20/ukraines-debt-saga

Following Ukraine’s non-repayment of the maturing bond in December, Russia, represented by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, initiated proceedings to recover the debt. The case is being heard in London’s High Court as the bond was issued under English law.

Ukraine’s ‘you invaded us’ debt non-payment defence

The Russia-Ukraine dispute involves a politically and militarily fraught conflict wrapped in a garden-variety contract dispute governed by English law

https://www.ft.com/content/976b426c-2424-11e6-aa98-db1e01fabc0c

>>4029111

Is the EU pushing the Ukraine into another conflict with Russia?

How the EU broke Ukraine (IN MASSIVE DEBT) (with help from Russia)

Four years after the EU’s push for closer ties with Ukraine provoked Russia and helped start a revolution, the country is ravaged by war and nearly broke.

So as EU leaders gather in Brussels Friday to celebrate the Eastern Partnership, their foreign policy initiative to strengthen relations with countries in the former Soviet bloc, the central question is: Can the EU pick up the pieces?

In a bid to show continued support for Ukraine ahead of Friday’s summit, the European Investment Bank on Thursday announced an additional €37 million in financing to help prop up the country’s agriculture sector. Total financial assistance to Ukraine from the EU is now roughly €12 billion — including, in 2014, the largest financial package ever given to a non-EU country.

https://www.politico.eu/article/the-eu-broke-ukraine-with-help-from-russia/

It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war!

John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a "pariah state".

When the Ukrainian president was replaced by an Obama US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia's most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.

Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan.

But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict

It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war

John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a "pariah state".

When the Ukrainian president was replaced by an Obama US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia's most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.

Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan. But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict

George Soros' Open Society has also been meddling in the Ukraine

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/keep-spirit-maidan-alive

>>4029097

It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war

John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a "pariah state".

When the Ukrainian president was replaced by an Obama US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia's most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.

Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan. But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/30/russia-ukraine-war-kiev-conflict

George Soros' Open Society has also been meddling in the Ukraine

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/keep-spirit-maidan-alive