Former congressman Ron Paul
Former US congressman Ron Paul says Republican Senator John McCain should have stayed home instead of making several visits to Ukraine and encouraging protesters to oust the government.
“Senator John McCain made several visits to Kiev and even addressed the crowd to encourage them,” Paul wrote in an article published on his website on Sunday.
“What if John McCain had stayed home and worried about his constituents in Arizona instead of non-constituents 6,000 miles away,” he asked.
The former congressman shed light on the foreign intervention which brought Ukraine to “its current, seemingly hopeless situation,” comparing it with an imaginary situation in which Russian President Vladimir Putin “came to Washington to encourage protesters to overthrow the Obama administration.”
He further wrote if Ukraine was left to its own, with no foreign intervention, “the problem may well have solved itself in due time rather than escalated into a full-out civil war.”
However, the interventionists in the US and EU won out again, he wrote.
“As we soon found out from a leaked telephone call, the US ambassador in Kiev and Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, were making detailed plans for a new government in Kiev after the legal government was overthrown with their assistance,” Paul said.
The former presidential candidate said last year’s incidents that overthrew the legally-elected government of Ukraine “was not only supported by US and EU governments — much of it was actually planned by them.”
Earlier this month, US President Barack Obama said in an interview with CNN that Washington brokered a power transition deal in Ukraine.
“We had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine” since Putin “made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine,” Obama said.
Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in the east have witnessed deadly clashes between pro-Russian forces and the Ukrainian army since Kiev launched military operations to silence pro-Moscow protests in mid-April 2014.
Violence escalated later in May after the two flashpoint regions held local referendums in which their residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation.