Natalia Vitrenko
Doctor of Economics / Chairman of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine
Audio (Russian/русский)
All the slides in PDF format: Download
Ladies and gentlemen, dear Helga Zepp-LaRouche,
This conference is a unique informational platform for scientists and specialists, from various countries and continents, to exchange ideas in this very difficult, pre-war situation. We have an opportunity to chart a pathway to saving the world, and to reorganize the world in order to ensure sovereignty and political stability, economic growth, and a better quality of life for the people of all countries.
For us, as citizens of Ukraine, these questions are especially acute. Ukraine today is permeated with blood, from a civil war. Ukraine is experiencing colossal human and economic losses, and is in the clutches of a neo-Nazi dictatorship, which is being used in attempts to detonate a (nuclear!) World War Three.
Our country is endowed with an excellent climate, 20 percent of the planet’s black earth soil areas, a unique strategic location, and a highly skilled and educated labor force. For 22 years, Ukraine has obediently and scrupulously fulfilled the conditionalities, attached to IMF and World Bank reforms, and for eight years has been abiding by the trade rules of the World Trade Organization. This year, Ukraine signed an Association Agreement with the European Union. And now our country is careening into an abyss, toward disintegration and self-destruction.
As of 2013, the GDP of Ukraine stood at only 65 percent of its 1990 level. During 2014, the decline has continued: in the 1st quarter, it fell by 1 percent; in the 2nd quarter by 4.7 percent. The projected year-end decline in GDP is 10 percent. Ukraine’s gross foreign debt is increasing rapidly. For 2014 as a whole, it will have risen by 102.2 percent. In the first eight months of 2014, industrial production fell by 7.8 percent. Ukraine’s national currency, the hryvnia, was devalued by more than 60 percent, with 90 percent inflation in that period. The civil war has compounded the economic crisis. Military spending is devouring the lion’s share of budgeted government spending. Wages, pensions, and entitlements remain frozen, while prices and utilities rates have risen by 40 percent so far this year. The standard of living has fallen by 30 percent. Seventy-eight percent of the population of Ukraine is living below the poverty level.
Instead of what was promised, namely European values, the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom to demonstrate peacefully, the right to life, security, and dignity, and the right of the people to express their will through voting, a neo-Nazi dictatorship is being consolidated in Ukraine. School textbooks, media broadcasts, and the behavior of our institutions of government, all make heroes out of the collaborators of Hitler, from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Corruption has been reconfigured in a new, “European” format.
Unfortunately, what is happening in Ukraine is not an anomaly, a accident which has occurred in a thriving world community. Rather, it is the lawful, planned result of the current world order, established by the USA after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The USA laid the basis for this new world system back in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, by establishing the U.S. dollar as the world currency (still backed by gold at the time). The dollarization of the world economy has brought enormous profit to the American oligarchy. Since August 1971, the United States, having built up its post-war economy many times more than the recovery of the USSR, Europe or other continents), brazenly cancelled the dollar’s backing by gold. Who could object to them? By then, the USA had already set up such institutions of globalization as the IMF, NATO, the World Bank and the WTO (or the GATT, at that time), to protect its own interests. Mercilessly looting the whole world, destroying national economies, and condemning billions of people to a half-starved existence, or to death, from hunger, drugs, epidemics, and armed conflicts, the United States looked after its own welfare. The populations of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have been victims of this policy of pursuing U.S. national interests.
The existing world system is met with a steady and universal growth of dissatisfaction in various countries, which view this current world order as unjust and unacceptable — this order, prescribed by the IMF and the WTO, under conditions of total dollarization, economic sanctions, instigated-to-order coups d’état, color revolutions, and armed conflicts for ensuring U.S. hegemony. New global leaders are emerging. New integration associations of countries, like the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Customs Union, and the Eurasian Union, are asserting their economic and political interests.
On October 8 of this year, the Financial Times published an emerging markets analysis that showed world economic prospects as threatening to U.S. leadership. Looking at GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity, the old Group of Seven leading nations, headed by the USA, is being eclipsed by a new seven: Brazil, Russia, India, China, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey, with a combined GDP of $37.8 trillion, as against $34.5 trillion for the G7. China itself has already surpassed the United States. Its GDP based on purchasing power parity is $17.6 trillion, as against $17.4 trillion for the USA.
For the United States, the loss of its world leadership position and the destruction of the worldwide dollar pyramid is a real threat. And it threatens not only their continued world dominance, but even the very existence of the United States as a nation. The USA has an astronomical foreign debt of $17 trillion and a yawning budget deficit of $1.7 trillion. For the United States, the radical pathway to salvation is World War III. And this is supposed to happen on the European continent. They are counting on Ukraine, for purposes of igniting this war.
Ever since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the USA has been heavily cultivating Ukraine. It was clearly in their interests, that neo-Nazi parties and movement experienced a boom in our country, beginning in the 1990s. The following neo-Nazi organizations came on the scene: the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO), in 1990s; the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (SNPU), in 1991, which was renamed in 2004 as the Svoboda All-Ukraine Association. Svoboda has held seats in the local legislatures in Halychyna (western Ukraine) since 2010 and in the national Parliament since 2012. Then there’s the Stepan Bandera Trident organization, founded in 1993, which in December 2013 was the basis for the creation of Right Sector. There are many others. Throughout their existence, they have received generous financing and informational support from the West.
In violation of the Charter and Judgment of the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which required national courts to put collaborators of Hitler’s Nazis on trial;
contrary to the resolutions of the United Nations, which condemn racism and Nazism, and which oblige the state to ban any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred and to make such advocacy a punishable criminal act. Such prohibitions, emphasizes a UN Resolution of Nov. 26, 2012, in no way violate the right to freedom of opinion and expression;
contrary to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which all forbid any discrimination whatsoever, based on gender, race, skin color, language, religion, political or other beliefs, national or social origin, status as a property-owner or not, or any other basis;
and contrary to the Constitution of Ukraine, Article 37 of which forbids the creation and activity of political parties and public organizations, whose programmatic goals or actions are aimed at inciting interethnic, racial, or religious enmity, or infringement of human rights and freedoms, —
those in power in Ukraine (already under President Yushchenko and President Yanukovych, and even more so today), have used laws and regulations to turn a Nazi ideology into the ideology of Ukraine today. The latest instance is the President Poroshenko’s decree, dated October 14, 2014, which established October 14 as a holiday, Defender of the Fatherland Day. On October 14, 1942, the so-called Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was founded, which went on to collaborate with Hitler and which had blood on its hands: suffice it to recall the Volhynia massacres of Summer 1943, when they butchered 120,000 ethnic Poles in Volhynia. The birthday of the organization that did that has now become a national holiday in Ukraine.
Neo-Nazis formed the ideological core of the Euromaidan. During their Nazi marches, they blatantly displayed Nazi symbols (the swastika, the numbers 14 and 88, the Celtic cross, and certain flags), as well as portraits of their ideological idols — the collaborationists and agents of the Abwehr — Konovalets, Bandera, and Shukhevych. At the Euromaidan in Kiev, they constantly chanted “Muscovites onto the knives!” (meaning, “Stab the Russians”), “Hang the Communists,” “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” “Glory to the Nation – Death to the Enemies” (and they consider not only Russians to be their enemies, but everyone who fails to profess their ideology), “Glory to Ukraine – to the Heroes Glory,” and “Ukraine above All.” Here in German, I think, people remember what “Deutschland ueber alles” meant. We have published a book titled International Law against the Rehabilitation of Ukrainian Collaborationists, which includes photographs of [last winter’s] Euromaidan demonstrations in Kiev. I showed these pictures at my press conference at the European Parliament, on February 26, 2014. I am truly grateful (and I think that all anti-fascists in Ukraine are grateful) to the Schiller Institute, and to our true friends in France, Germany, and Italy, who at that time, in February-March 2014, organized our trip through several European countries, meetings with members of national parliaments and regional parliaments, and of the European Parliament. We showed all these things at that time. But Brussels, Washington, and London chose not to see this. They saw only a “peaceful Euromaidan.”
It was peaceful, however, only for one week: from November 23-30, 2014. The Euromaidan in Kiev ceased to be peaceful, already on December 1, 2013. That is when the Berkut special forces were forbidden to use any weapons, while the guerrillas from the Maidan made ample use of clubs, cobblestones from the street, flares, Molotov cocktails, ice-axes, and chains. After they pillaged police weapons depots and military bases in Halychyna, they also had automatic weapons. They seized 19 government buildings in the center of the capital city.
Washington and Brussels, however, though they saw the neo-Nazi guerrillas rampaging in Kiev, stubbornly forbid the authorities to use force.
How does this posture of the West square with the events of August 9, 2014, when the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in the USA, shot an unarmed 18-year-old African-American named Michael Brown, touching off peaceful demonstrations by his indignant fellow citizens, which the police met first with tear gas and then with rubber bullets? After that, the National Guard was sent in and they imposed a state of emergency and a curfew.
A segment of the population of Ukraine supported the Euromaidan, but millions, tens of millions of people rejected it. Those who rejected did not Ukraine to be turned into an enemy of Russia. They opposed signing the Association Agreement with the EU, which would deliberately break and strong economic, cultural, informational, scientific, and even simply family ties with the Russians. A poll done in February 2014 by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation clearly showed that only 16.8 percent of Ukrainians completely supported the actions of the demonstrators. The participants in the Maidan were largely from Halychyna: 55 percent of the protesters had come from small towns and villages in western Ukraine. And after that, people have the gall to say that the Maidan in Kiev showed the choice our people had made!
On February 20, 2014 the neo-Nazi guerrillas already had firearms. On February 21, three foreign ministers (from Germany, France, and Poland) forced Yanukovych in effect to recognize the coup d’état and to agree to the Maidan’s terms. The memorandum involved obligations for each of the sides. But the Maidan representatives had not the least intention of fulfilling their obligations, nor did anyone make them do so. The illegal armed units were neither disarmed nor disbanded.
The neo-Nazi ideology became the ideology of the new state. This is an ideology under which one ethnic group dictates to all others. It is an ideology of reprisals against Russians (and any partisans of Russia): an ideology of reprisals against dissidents. The new authorities proclaimed, “One nation – one language – one church – one state.”
Under these conditions, representatives of the Russian world (and that means not only citizens of the Russian Federation and not only ethnic Russians, but also those Ukrainians, the so-called “Little Russians,” who identify with the Russian world and Eastern Slav civilization), definitely sounded the alarm. Crimea exploded, and the March 16 referendum was practically unanimous in favor of returning to Russia. The Donbas rose up. This region is inhabited by 6.5 million people, most of them of a Russian cultural orientation, and closely tied to Russia. The May 11 referendum showed that 75 percent of the population of the Donetsk and Lugansk Regions did not want to be in a neo-Nazi, anti-Russian Ukraine.
But the Kiev regime decided to punish the Donbas, trampling on the values, the will, and the interests of its population.
Before April 2014, we did not imagine that the government would use, against civilians and the insurgents, such sophisticated methods of annihilation as Grad and Uragan rocket-launchers, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, Tochka-U (also called SS-21) tactical missiles, and other types of selective-effect heavy offensive weaponry. As a result of combat involving the Ukrainian Army and various volunteer battalions, even the seriously understated UN estimates are that 3600 people had been killed and 8700 wounded in the Donbas by the beginning of this month, October 2014. By comparison, 3360 soldiers and officers from Ukraine were killed over the 10-year duration of the Soviet War in Afghanistan! And now, 3600 during half a year of the Kiev regime’s war against the Donbass. But this figure does not reflect reality. Military experts estimate the casualties to be over 40,000 dead on all sides – Ukrainian military and law enforcement, the insurgents, and civilians. The fratricidal war in the Donbas also set the stage for a stream of refugees, around 1 million of whom have taken refuge in Russia, and around 300 thousand in other regions of Ukraine.
But Ukraine’s problems today are not limited to the Donbas. Broadcasting by all Russian TV channels has been turned off, and an ever increasing number of films and TV series from Russia are being banned. The phenomenon called “garbage lustration” is growing rapidly: this refers to street actions, in which, without any investigation or trial, elected representatives and other officials are beaten up and then thrown into garbage dumpsters. Slanders are spread against people the regime doesn’t like. People are disappearing. I’ll give you two examples:
1) In July 2014 in the city of Melitopol (not in the Donbas, but in Zaporozhye Region), six people broke into the home of Sergei Dolgov, editor-in-chief of a newspaper called I Want to Go to the USSR!, and carried him off. And he disappeared. In the months since then, nobody has been able to find him;
2) Also in July 2014, our colleague Yelena Mazur, who was a Member of Parliament when we were, decided to organize a picket line of women against the war, outside the Supreme Rada (Parliament). The demonstration was broken up and the women were beater. The police seized the female activists, including People’s Deputy of Ukraine Yelena Mazur, and beat her so badly that she landed in the hospital with a concussion.
Slanders and persecution affect not only members of political parties or public activists and bloggers, but also people who are merely active in online social networking. Militant toughs beat up peaceful demonstrators, and then law enforcement arrests them — the demonstrators. This happened in August in Kherson, and in September in Odessa and Kharkov.
Against this backdrop, the public consciousness is getting saturated with increased militarism, bestial Russophobia, and hatred of any dissident views. These tendencies typify the rhetoric of Parliamentary candidates in the elections taking place on October 26, 2014.Iryna Farion of the Svoboda Party, for example, in a Sept. 30 speech to fighters of the Sich Battalion, declared that Ukraine should become “the cutting edge of World War Three,” emphasizing that this cutting edge must be victorious. Lyndon LaRouche was right, when he warned that the Nazis in Ukraine were being readied for use as the detonator of World War III.
Under these conditions of civil war, rampaging militants, intimidation and blackmail, strict censorship, and militaristic, anti-Russian psychosis, there is little doubt about the outcome of the October 26 elections. This will be a war parliament, which on U.S. orders or if faced with the threat of mass social uprisings in Ukraine, may very well impose martial law and declare war on Russia.
Considering Europe’s role as a passive player in the aggressive policy of the USA, there is no doubt that a declaration of war by Ukraine against Russia would pull the NATO countries, led by the United States, into the maelstrom. It is without question, that mankind would suffer hideous losses from nuclear attacks.
Human reason is obligated to put forward an alternative to this diabolical scenario. That alternative should be a fundamentally new, scientifically organized, inspired, and viable world order. Of course this involves an array of difficult problems, from creating just supranational financial and credit organizations to replace the IMF and World Bank, and new trade organizations instead of the WTO, to disbanding NATO, eliminating the monopoly of the dollar, and radical reform of how the UN and its Security Council function.
These global issues cannot be addressed, without growth of the economic, energy, and financial clout of the developing sector. That, in turn, requires implementing major international investment projects. The Chinese New Silk Road project is of special interest. Creating the New Silk Road is a strategy for the radical transformation of the Eurasian continent. This project can be a powerful impetus to scientific research, the development and implementation of innovative technologies for building high-speed railways, the creation of related modern infrastructure, expanded cooperation in trade, tourism, and culture, and fruitful coordination among Eurasian countries on ensuring public safety. Without question, implementation of this project will strengthen the world’s new leading countries and move toward a fundamental change of world monetary policy, through dedollarization and a transition to using national currencies in trade among them.
The New Silk Road project is also extremely promising for Ukraine. The ancient state of Kievan Rus controlled the route “from the Varangians to the Greeks,” which connected the northern Russian lands, through Kiev, with Tsargrad (Constantinople). Likewise today, Kiev ought to be interested in developing its transport arteries, which would enable Ukraine to make effective use of its geopolitical advantages, becoming a European transit country.
Participation in the Chinese project ought to prod Ukraine in the direction of developing science-intensive, high-technology manufactures, which would shape a different, highly developed Ukrainian economy of the future. This could put a stop to any further deterioration of our country’s scientific, technological, and intellectual strengths, and become an effective way to combat mass unemployment, poverty, and the degradation and flight of the work force.
It would be a shame to miss this chance for Ukraine. It will be a shame, if Ukraine becomes an obstacle for the entire world to move ahead with constructive, new projects to save the world, and if the forces of war, evil, and the oligarchy’s insatiable greed prevail over the forces of good, reason, and creativity.
This chance for the salvation of Ukraine will be available only if the public consciousness is protected against Nazi ideology and propaganda, and the political life of our country cleansed of neo-Nazi parties and movements. This cannot be done by Ukraine alone. It is not an internal matter, just for Ukraine. This can only be accomplished through the joint efforts of Russia and Europe. The norms and principles of international law not only allow that to be done; they demand that it be done, invoking the memory of the 50 million dead of the Second World War.
The only thing needed, is the political will.
In conclusion, I would like to show you photos and video documentation. This is what happened in Ukraine five days ago, on October 14, 2014:
Video clips: Clip 1, Clip 2
All the slides in PDF format: Download
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