{"id":145102,"date":"2015-03-26T20:48:28","date_gmt":"2015-03-26T20:48:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=145102"},"modified":"2015-05-09T18:36:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-09T18:36:41","slug":"the-160-billion-cost-why-ukraines-viktor-yanukovych-spurned-eus-offer-on-20-nov-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/the-160-billion-cost-why-ukraines-viktor-yanukovych-spurned-eus-offer-on-20-nov-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"The $160 Billion Cost: Why Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych Spurned EU’s Offer, on 20 Nov. 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBurying the lede\u201d is a way that \u2018news\u2019 professionals hide or “bury” things while \u2018reporting\u2019 on them; and the biggest example of this in modern times occurred when Germany\u2019s Spiegel<\/i> (Mirror<\/i>) magazine headlined its cover-story on 24 November 2014,\u00a0“Summit of Failure: How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine.\u201d On the magazine’s front cover, it was instead bannered as\u00a0“Kalte Krieger \u2013 Geschichte einer Machtprobe: Wie Merkel und Putin Europa\u00a0an den Rand des Abgrunds brachten\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0which translates as:\u00a0“Cold Warrior \u2013 History of a Showdown:\u00a0How Merkel and Putin brought Europe to the Edge of the Abyss.\u201d This was a very lengthy report, 7,000 words, but the historically blockbuster revelation in it, which the global press has ignored, and\/or themselves buried by similarly mentioning it without headlining it or leading with it (nor even linking to it), was this (which would have been a fair headline for that news report, since it\u2019s 99% of that news-report\u2019s real value): \u201cEU\u2019s Offer to Ukraine Would Have Cost Ukraine $160B.\u201d\u00a0(I hope that the headline that I used above is even better, however.)<\/span><\/p>\n

And, so: now you know why, on 20 November 2013, Yanukovych turned that offer down \u2013 and the rest was history (the \u201cMaidan\u201d demonstrations, and all the rest, producing the Ukrainian civil war, and the new and much hotter version of the old Cold War, including all of those economic sanctions against Russia, and the resulting boom in nuclear weapons on both sides, and the thousands of corpses in the eastern Donbass region of what used to be Ukraine).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This blockbuster revelation was in merely a brief, 231-word passage within the 7,000-word article, and nothing further was said about it than these mere 231 words.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here it is (as given in\u00a0Spiegel\u2019s online English edition of the article\u2019s second half<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and the article\u2019s first half was\u00a0here<\/span><\/a>, but it contains nothing of this blockbuster revelation):<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Kiev, Presidential Palace<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Nov. 19, 2013<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

At Barroso’s behest, F\u00c3\u00bcle traveled to Kiev once again to meet with Yanukovych\u00a0— and the Ukrainian president got straight to the point. In talks with Putin,\u00a0Yanukovych told F\u00c3\u00bcle, the Russian president explained just how deeply the\u00a0Russian and Ukrainian economies are interconnected. “I was really surprised\u00a0to learn about it,” Yanukovych said. \u2026 \u201cThere are the costs that our experts have calculated,” Yanukovych replied.\u00a0“What experts?” F\u00c3\u00bcle demanded to know. The Ukrainian president described to\u00a0his bewildered guest the size of the losses allegedly threatening Ukraine\u00a0should it sign the agreement with the EU.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Later, the number $160 billion found its way into the press, more than 50 times\u00a0greater than the $3 billion calculated by the German advisory group. The total\u00a0came from a study conducted by the Institute for Economics and Forecasting\u00a0at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and it was a number that\u00a0Yanukovych would refer to from then on.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

“Stefan, if we sign, will you help us?” Yanukovych asked. F\u00c3\u00bcle was speechless.\u00a0“Sorry, we aren’t the IMF. Where do these numbers come from?” he finally\u00a0demanded. “I am hearing them for the first time.” “They are secret numbers,”\u00a0Yanukovych replied. “Can you imagine what would happen if our people were\u00a0to learn of these numbers, were they to find out what convergence with the EU\u00a0would cost our country?\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013<\/span><\/p>\n

Though that was a poorly-written passage (in a poorly written article), it does clearly state why Yanukovych couldn\u2019t possibly have accepted the offer. The passage makes no connection between, on the one hand, \u201cthe Russian president explained just how deeply the\u00a0Russian and Ukrainian economies are interconnected. ‘I was really surprised\u00a0to learn about it,’ Yanukovych said,\u201d<\/i>\u00a0and, on the other,\u00a0\u201c\u2018There are the costs that our experts have calculated,\u2019 Yanukovych replied.<\/i>\u201d Did Putin\u2019s statement cause Yanukovych to request this new analysis from Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences? We just don\u2019t know. The reporters didn\u2019t say. Maybe they didn\u2019t even wonder about that. All that the article tells us is: the latter scientific institution calculated that if the EU\u2019s offer were to be accepted, the cost to Ukraine would be $160B.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why, then, was this blockbuster news-item buried, so that virtually no one noticed it? Perhaps the key passage to provide a hint to explain this burying (which hint appears in the article\u2019s first half) was \u201cBerlin continued to focus its efforts on Tymoshenko<\/i>\u00a0[whom the Ukrainian government had imprisoned on a corruption conviction, but Merkel \u2013 like Obama \u2013 was insisting that she be freed from prison], it failed to recognize\u00a0the\u00a0real danger: The Russian Federation’s power play.<\/i>\u201d The only actual \u201cpower play\u201d that the article describes from Russia was \u201cthe Russian president explained just how deeply the\u00a0Russian and Ukrainian economies are interconnected. ‘I was really surprised\u00a0to learn about it,’ Yanukovych said.<\/i>\u201d Apparently, Putin\u2019s \u201cdanger,\u201d his merely \u201cexplaining\u201d that, was, to the writers of the Spiegel<\/i> \u2018news\u2019 report, a \u201cpower play.\u201d The anti-Russian slant is blatant there.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: This article\u2019s writers, evidently, needed to find a way to present a negative view of Russia, and especially of Putin. Therefore, focusing their story and presentation around this particular blockbuster revelation (which went in the contrary direction) was out of the question for them \u2013 and especially for their employer.<\/span><\/p>\n

So: now you know why Yanukovych, the very next day after his learning about the $160B price tag of the EU\u2019s offer, turned it down, and also why this revelation is still news, more than a year later \u2013 just as it was news to me until I happened upon it only today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wikipedia\u2019s \u201cTimeline of the Euromaidan\u201d<\/span><\/a> starts on 21 November 2013, which ignores all the planning and other historical background of those demonstrations.<\/span><\/p>\n

———-<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of\u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0of\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse RINF Alternative News \u201cBurying the lede\u201d is a way that \u2018news\u2019 professionals hide or “bury” things while \u2018reporting\u2019 on them; and the biggest example of this in modern times occurred when Germany\u2019s Spiegel (Mirror) magazine headlined its cover-story on 24 November 2014,\u00a0“Summit of Failure: How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine.\u201d On the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":142792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,1622],"tags":[96,896,535,859,59,524,523,76,40,897],"class_list":{"0":"post-145102","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-featured","9":"tag-cover-up","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-global-news","12":"tag-merkel","13":"tag-military","14":"tag-russia","15":"tag-ukraine","16":"tag-warfare","17":"tag-white-house","18":"tag-yanukovych"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/142792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}