Free Market Democracy Promotion
There’s one more critical piece to the Euromaidan puzzle: the role of Western governments.
For decades, Washington and allied governments have pursued their strategic and economic interests
under the cover of promoting democracy and liberal values abroad. Sometimes that’s meant funneling money to violent reactionaries like the Nicaraguan contras, and sometimes it’s meant supporting benign pro-democracy movements like those in Ukraine.
“External actors have always played an important role in shaping and supporting civil society in Ukraine,” Ukrainian scholar Iryna Solonenko
wrote in 2015, pointing to the EU and the United States, through agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID), whose Kyiv headquarters were in the
same compound as the US embassy. “One can argue that without this external support, which has been the major source of funding for Ukrainian civil society since independence, Ukrainian civil society would not have become what it now is.”
This was
the case in the 2004–5 Orange Revolution, where foreign NGOs changed little about Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism, but achieved the crucial goal of nudging Ukraine’s foreign policy westward. As the liberal Center for American Progress
put it that year:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of influence would prefer different language to describe their activities — democratic assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. — but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine.
US officials,
unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president, pointing to Yanukovych’s European outreach,
wrote that “the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.” In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the
Financial Times reported “played a big role in getting the protest up and running,” led by a pro-EU
opposition figure. Journalist Mark Ames discovered the organization had received
hundreds of thousands of dollars from US democracy promotion initiatives.
While it may be a long time before we know its full extent, Washington took an even more direct role once the turmoil started. Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy
met with Svoboda’s fascist leader, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as they announced
their support to the protesters, while US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland
handed out sandwiches to them. To understand the provocative nature of such moves, you only need to remember the establishment outrage over the mere idea Moscow had used
troll farms to voice support for Black Lives Matter protests.
Later, a leaked
phone call showed Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine maneuvering to shape the post-Maidan government. “fudge the EU,” Nuland told him, over its less aggressive intervention into the country. “Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience,” she said, referring to opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who backed the devastating neoliberal policies demanded by the West. You can probably guess who became
prime minister in the post-Maidan interim government.
It’s an overstatement to say, as some critics have charged, that Washington orchestrated the Maidan uprising. But there’s no doubt US officials backed and exploited it for their own ends.
