Economist editor claims Putin told Yanukovych to “dip hands in blood”

(Business New Europe – bne.eu – January 24, 2014) Celebrate Economist editor Edward Lucas made one of his more outrageous claims in a paper written for the Central European Policy Institute, alleging that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not only ultimately responsible for the two shooting deaths in Kyiv this week, but somehow ordered’ Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to kill people so that he could not renege on the December deal with Russia.

“Putin wanted Yanukovych to “dip his hands in blood”. Only by forcing an irreversible breach with Europe and America could the Kremlin be sure that its Ukrainian satrap would behave,” Lucas wrote in the paper entitled Ukraine scenarios and Central Europe release this week. [http://www.cepolicy.org/publications/ukraine-scenarios-and-central-europe]

The source of this piece of information is a top level European diplomat’ but Lucas admits that he has only one source and so has not gone public until now.

And he should have kept it to himself. It is the first rule of journalism: you have to have two sources, especially when it comes to accusing presidents of countries of inciting others to commit murder.

And there is a second problem to this claim: since when did the Kremlin start telling diplomats secrets like this, regardless of how senior they are? Perhaps this is a piece of intelligence gathered by the western spy agencies who eavesdropped on the Sochi meeting between Putin and Yanukovych where the deal was cut last year and hence creditable, in which case Lucas should say so. Or perhaps this is a bit of random speculation over a cup of tea in a caf near Whitehall?

This is an extreme claim to make and certainly given its extremely ropy foundations the claim is built on, should not be published in a respectable publications like CEP’s. To suggest that somehow Yanukovych is a mere puppet of the Russian regime that can be ordered to kill people at the whim of the Russian president because it is politically expedient fits the narrative of “Putin is the devil” that Lucas be instrumental in building up.

However, as usually the piece is cleverly written so that Lucas never explicitly makes this claim. The trick is to make the links in people minds without saying anything that is not flat out wrong.

“[Yanukovych] may have been convinced by the Putin offer in Sochi, but he surely does not want to end up like Aleksander Lukashenko in Belarus: humiliated by his country’s economic dependency on Russia,” writes Lucas. “I now think I was wrong. Yanukovych has dipped his hands in blood. He has made it all but impossible for the EU or America to forgive and forget. He has now only one option left: the Kremlin one. The question for Ukraine and the rest of Europe is where that leads.”

Wrong about what? That Yanukovych doesn’t want to be a Lukashenko? That he wouldn’t follow Putin’s ukaz to kill people? Lucas doesn’t make it clear, and this is kind of the key point in his argument.

However, there is no need to invent this sort of conspiracy theory. The situation in Ukraine with the deaths is what it says on tin: Yanukovych is facing determined protests but is totally unwilling to compromise or give up any of his power. He is a thug (and not very bright) twice convicted of GBH in Soviet times and he has no compunction about shooting people if they threaten his fiefdom.

Of course Putin will be happy about the deaths. Lucas is completely right about the fact that Yanukovych has now comprehensively burnt his bridges with the EU and all of his talk about “the Association Agreement is still on the table” is totally discredited.

But all this is because Yanukovych is an idiot and has nothing to do with Russia. Indeed, the bloodshed was entirely predictable after the violence broke out on January 19. As bne said in an op ed then next day, the street fighting was a tipping point and would result in deaths unless action was very swiftly taken.