Archive for the ‘Washington DC’ Category
Spotlight on Ukraine: Eighteen Claims That Circulate, and What the Evidence Shows
We wish to thank a good friend and comrade, Duncan Chapel, for writing the document which follows.
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Spotlight on lies about Ukraine – 18 Claims that circulate and what the evidence shows
Readers are invited to join the discussion – the myths which are demolished here have circulated in all parts of the globe – some are specific to Ireland -which we have highlighted in previous blog articles on this site – see references at the end of this article.
The policy of Irish Left With Ukraine (ILWU) is highlighted by the slogan
Ukraine, Palestine, Occupation Is A Crime
TL;DR: Part 9 of the ‘With Washington and Moscow’ series. Not an analytical piece: a tool for conversations that happen at short notice in group chats, meetings, and pub debates. Each entry is self-contained. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, it is described as such. Seventeen claims are answered. The 2014 coup claim has to explain why the coup produced an OSCE-observed election in which Svoboda fell from 10.45 to 1.16 per cent. The civil war claim runs into Igor Girkin, the FSB colonel who seized Sloviansk and later said he pulled the trigger of this war, a hostile witness the Kremlin has since jailed. The “not one inch eastward” pledge was real and verbal, and Russia then signed the 1997 Founding Act accepting that every state chooses its own security arrangements. The Johnson-at-Istanbul story rests on one Arakhamia sentence while omitting the next one, and on a visit that came ten days after the talks ended. The proxy claim collapses against Kursk, the refinery strikes and the Chevron tankers. Also covered: language law, Minsk, the UN Nazism resolution, Russia’s imperialist character, the polling shift to 69 per cent for negotiations alongside 80 per cent refusing territorial concessions, and Baltic and Georgian agency in NATO accession.
Many of these claims circulate simultaneously through Russian state media and MAGA-aligned outlets — a convergence examined in Part 10 of this series. This document addresses the factual substance regardless of the source.
1. ‘The CIA staged a coup in 2014 and installed a far-right government in Ukraine’
A coup is the sudden, illegal seizure of power. If the CIA staged a coup, the people who came to power should surely be its agents or tools. Ukraine held a presidential election on 25 May 2014, observed by the OSCE. A mainstream liberal-conservative, Petro Poroshenko, won 54.7% of the vote in the first round. The far right was routed electorally: Svoboda’s vote was decimated, from 10.45% in the 2012 parliamentary elections to 1.16%. Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector received 0.7%. A coup, then, that produced a democratic election — and a democratic election that the far right lost by a factor of ten.
Read the rest of this entry »The fall of Peter Mandelson and the many questions the British government must now answer
The Keir Starmer Labour government in Britain is in serious trouble despite having a huge parliamentary majority of around 170 seats.
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The fall of Peter Mandelson and the many questions the British government must answer
No accident waiting to happen can ever have delivered on its promise so spectacularly as Lord Mandelson, with the continuous revelations of his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The decision by the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, to appoint Mandelson as ambassador in Washington DC always appeared a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But no reward could ever have repaid such risk.
There is a grim fascination in seeing a prominent public figure’s reputation incinerated in real time. Mandelson’s entreating emails to a convicted abuser and trafficker of minors were still quite recently sufficient of an embarrassment before he was then photographed urinating in public.
The new normal is to appear on front pages in his underpants. Next will come questions about the meaning of emails that appear to show him betraying the most cardinal principles of public office, for monetary gain, from a criminal.
Mandelson had clearly started 2026 with the intention of rehabilitating himself and re-entering public life: a Sunday morning BBC interview, columns in the Spectator, an interview in the Times. Journalists’ requests for comment were replied to. No longer.
What was striking across these appearances – given Mandelson’s talents – was his maladroitness. Not to have apologised to the victims of trafficking when pressed in that initial high-profile interview, only to realise his error and concede the following day did not bear the hallmark of a master of public relations.
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Tomás Ó Flatharta 
