by Andrew McCarthy at National Review
Then-vice president Joe Biden arrives for a meeting with Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko in Kyiv, Ukraine, November 21, 2014. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
It was the spring of 2014, and Kyiv was in tumult. For all its talk about democracy, the Obama administration had enthusiastically supported the mass protests in western Ukraine that, on February 21, had ousted the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Progressives have memory-holed much of this history. The Obama State Department and its European counterparts had an embarrassingly notorious hands-on role in the Maidan revolution and the new Ukrainian government that emerged in its aftermath. Predictably, this meddling in another nation’s domestic politics, to the point of toppling the elected government, was exploited by Vladimir Putin to rationalize Russia’s responsive aggression in eastern Ukraine — the annexation of Crimea and the border war that exploded into today’s full-out war when Moscow launched its February 2022 invasion.
Though more Euroskeptic than his political rivals in Kyiv, Yanukovych had leaned toward entering Ukraine into a political association and trade agreement with the European Union. As I detailed in Ball of Collusion, this prompted a furious reaction from the Kremlin, which was always in a natural position to leverage its neighbor’s dependence on Russian goodwill for energy supplies, safe commerce, and domestic tranquility. Putin thus threatened that if Yanukovych made his bed with the West, he would block Ukraine’s imports, slash its exports, cut off its energy lines, bleed its economy, and drive it into collapse. Yanukovych succumbed, ditching the European deal in favor of an alternative Russian pact. This accommodation, to fend off the bear on the border, triggered the internal strife that led inexorably to Yanukovych’s abdication and flight to safety in Moscow.
The post-Soviet history of Eastern Europe teaches that chaos is good for the profiteers.
Already one of the developed world’s most corrupt countries, Ukraine was in utter chaos when President Obama made his vice president, Joe Biden, an infamous hack with the pretensions of a geopolitical strategist, his point man for American policy there. Not exactly a boon for America, but it was a windfall for the Biden family business of cashing in on “the big guy’s” political influence.
In these badlands, standing up a new government —…