‘West meddling in Ukraine no new tale’

Washington and its Western allies have for long been interfering in the internal affairs of Ukraine and it is not a new story, says a political commentator.

Manuel Ochsenreiter, the chief editor of Zuerst in Berlin, told Press TV in an interview on Thursday that the United States and “also the European Union have been meddling in Ukraine for many years.”

“It didn’t start last year with the protests. The West was sending NGOs, so-called soft power, into Ukraine to meddle there to prepare what we saw in the Maidan,” the commentator added, referring to the central square in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, where protests erupted against the government of Victor Yanukovych, the then president of Ukraine, last year.

Ukraine’s eastern regions, where people mainly speak Russian, have been the scene of fatal clashes between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russia forces over the past few months.
 
In March, residents of Crimea, eastern Ukraine, voted in a referendum for the region to join the Russian Federation. People of Donetsk and Luhansk followed the move and held a similar referendum in May.

The political analyst also told Press TV that the people in Ukraine have not been “confident with the new order, which brought a lot of ultra-liberal criminal oligarchs and also fanatics coming from all over Europe into power in Kiev.”

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko has instructed his administration to consider temporarily closing the border in the east of the country to stop what he called Moscow’s “continued intervention” in the internal affairs of the country.

HSN/SS