Ukraine’s War: A Prelude to World War III, Says Former Ukraine Ambassador to U.S.
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research
December 30, 2014
“This [U.S-Russian conflict that’s being carried out in Ukraine] is a prelude to World War III. A lot of people know this.” So says Yuri Shcherbak, who was Ukraine’s Ambassador in Washington during 1994-1998.
Dr. Shcherbak was one of Ukraine’s few progressives ever to become an official of the Ukrainian Government. He now is speaking out publicly for the first time to express his concern about the movement toward a nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, and about Ukraine’s dangerous current role in helping to bring that about.
In 1998, he authored a book The Strategic Role of Ukraine, published by Harvard University Press; so, this is a subject that he knows a lot about.
On Monday, December 29th, he spoke on Ukraine’s Channel 5 television, to warn his country about the direction of their newly installed Government, one which had come to power in a violent coup on February 22nd and has spent its time since then bombing the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the democratically elected Ukrainian President who was overthrown in the coup that brought this new Government to power.
Dr. Shcherbak is especially concerned about the issue because of his intensive knowledge of “the strategic role of Ukraine,” and also because of his having served in Washington as Ukraine’s Ambassador. Dr. Shcherbak also speaks here as being a rare person in his country’s recent political history: an anti-communist who also is anti-fascist.
In fact, unlike virtually all major current Ukrainian politicians, Dr. Shcherbak was never a communist, and he was also opposed to the nazism that is represented especially by Ukraine’s Right Sector Party, and by Ukraine’s Svoboda (or ‘Freedom’) Party that had called itself “The Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine” until the U.S. CIA advised them to change their name to “Svoboda.” (Ukraine’s political culture has still not gotten much beyond the two Ukrainian political polar viewpoints: that Hitler-was-good-and-Stalin-was-bad, versus Stalin-was-good-and-Hitler-was-bad; and almost all of the exceptions to that polarity, the supporters of democracy and opponents of anysort of totalitarianism, are in the region that is currently being bombed. The CIA has always supported the pro-Hitler Ukrainians.)
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