Billionaire investor/activist George Soros has a giant footprint in Ukraine. Similar to his operations in dozens of other nations, he has, over the past couple of decades, poured tens of millions of dollars into Ukrainian non-governmental organizations (NGOs), ostensibly to assist them in transforming their country into a more “open” and “democratic” society.

Many of the participants in Kiev’s “EuroMaidan” demonstrations were members of Soros-funded NGOs and/or were trained by the same NGOs in the many workshops and conferences sponsored by Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation (IRF), and his various Open Society institutes and foundations. The IRF, founded and funded by Soros, boasts that it has given “more than any other donor organization” to “democratic transformation” of Ukraine.

The International Renaissance Foundation’s Annual Report for 2012, the latest available, states that, “IRF provided UAH 63 million in funding to civil society organizations — more than any other donor organization working in this field in Ukraine.” The “UAH” reference used above refers to the Ukraine Hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency, which is worth about 0.11 $US, or 11 cents in U.S. currency. That translates into roughly $6.7 million that IRF provided to Ukrainian groups in 2012; not a huge sum, by comparison to many other political and social campaigns, but more than merely “significant.” In the cash-starved Ukraine, Soros’s dollars go a long way toward seducing and co-opting all legitimate political opposition into the Soros-approved “progressive” camp.

According to the IRF’s own website, this one Soros conduit has funneled over $100 million into Ukrainian NGOs over the years:

Over the period from 1990 to 2010 the International Renaissance Foundation provided more than $100 million in support to numerous Ukrainian non-government organizations (NGOs), community groups, academic and cultural institutions, publishing houses, etc.

The IRF website and annual reports make clear that the Soros funds are targeted at promoting Ukrainian “partnership” with, and “integration” into, the EU. Soros has provided many millions more through his other “philanthropic” spigots. However, Soros’ influence in Ukraine extends far beyond the traceable funding he provides to activist Ukrainian NGOs, academics and think tanks. Equally, if not more, important is the influence he exerts on global opinion through his massive propaganda network (including Project Syndicate and other Soros megaphones) and his direct personal contacts with presidents, prime ministers, parliamentarians, central bankers, media executives, and Wall Street titans.

In a February 26 column he penned for Project Syndicate that was carried by hundreds of newspapers and websites, Soros argued that the EU and the IMF must initiate a new Marshall Plan for Ukraine, meaning, of course, transfers of money from EU and U.S. taxpayers to the politicians, organizations, and institutions approved by the globalist/socialist/corporatist operatives running the EU and IMF. Perhaps the key point in Soros’ essay, entitled, “Sustaining Ukraine’s Breakthrough,” is this: “Ukraine will need outside assistance that only the EU can provide: management expertise.”

George Soros is all about management by “experts,” i.e., central planning, the hallmark of every socialist, fascist, or communist regime. In fact, he is one of the planet’s premier advocates of global central planning and control. Hence, he is a longtime fervent supporter of the United Nations, the IMF/World Bank, the WTO, global population control through the WHO and UNFPA, and virtually every other internationalist endeavor to subvert national sovereignty and advance the building of an omnipotent world government.

His fetish with internationalism includes, especially, further enlarging and empowering the EU, which has been the prime subject of concern in books and essays by Soros, as well as many of his speeches and media interviews. Soros is a full-blown proponent of total political and economic “integration” of the EU, meaning a complete annihilation of any residual independence of the EU member states and the transfer of all substantive legislative, executive, and judicial powers to EU politicians and administrators in Brussels.

Over the past several years Soros has been particularly emphatic in pushing for a central EU Treasury, or European Fiscal Authority (EFA), which he says is “the missing ingredient that is needed to make the euro a full-fledged currency with a genuine lender of last resort.” The European Central Bank (ECB), says Soros, has insufficient powers to do what is needed, even though he admits it has illegally usurped powers — which he applauds.

When European Central Bank President Mario Draghi (a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman and managing director) announced on August 1, 2012 that the ECB would “do whatever it takes to preserve the euro as a stable currency,” German Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann objected, pointing out that the ECB’s powers are limited by statute. Nevertheless, Draghi forged ahead, promising that the ECB would make unlimited purchases of government bonds of indebted EU members — provided they put their countries under the control of executors from “the Troika” — the EU Commission, ECB and IMF. This is the same Troika that devastated the citizens of Cyprus last year, raiding their bank accounts to pay off the bonds that socialist politicians and Goldman Sachs had saddled them with. But Soros, whose many “human rights” fronts extol the “rule of law,” "accountability," and “transparency,” says that the lawless and unaccountable Troika does not have enough power! It must be complemented by an EFA, says he, which should exercise power over all fiscal matters.

The IMF’s Managing Director Christine Lagarde and EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso (a “former” Maoist Communist) have already lined up a multi-billion package for Ukraine. However, many Ukrainians, all across the political spectrum, are leery of coming under the Troika’s control, and rightfully so. They do not want to trade the corruption and oppression of Yanukovych’s pro-Kremlin regime for another dictated by the EU and IMF. As we pointed out recently, even the poll commissioned by the U.S. State Department found that only 37 percent of Ukrainians favored joining the EU.

Economist Michael Roberts describes himself on his blogsite as “a Marxist economist.” Nevertheless, Roberts is on the mark in his February 27 column in stating: “The people of Ukraine are left with Hobson’s choice: either go with KGB-led crony capitalism from Russia or go with equally corrupt pro-European ‘democrats’.” He is also correct in asserting that Ukraine’s foreign debt will soon double, if it takes IMF loans, and that the Ukrainian people will burdened with crushing debt for a generation. He writes:

Ukraine could still stage a financial meltdown and a banking collapse. More likely, the new government will be helped over the next few months with bridging loans until the IMF deal is struck. Then the hardship for the people will really begin in earnest. Ukraine’s foreign debt is about to double as it takes on new debt from the IMF and the cost of existing dollar and euro debt jumps as the hyrvnia is devalued. This burden will be on shoulders of Ukrainians for a generation.

Only it could double several times over, and it could burden Ukrainians for much longer than a generation; it could fasten them with debt bondage in perpetuity. Bosnian writer Andrej Nikolaidis warns Ukrainians that massive debt and grinding poverty under Troika-managed regime are to be expected. “It hardly comes as a surprise to us in former Yugoslavia,” writes Nikolaidis. “At the beginning of its dissolution, the Yugoslav foreign debt was £9.5bn; today, after all the ‘help’ we got from the troika, it's more than £107bn.” He continues:

Bosnia today is a poor and divided country, even more so than it was back in 1992. Former soldiers, hungry and sick, are gathering and protesting. "While we were bleeding, they were stealing," says one… Some Bosnians saw their future under the Bosnian and EU flag, others under the Croatian and EU flag, and others still under the flag of The Great Serbia. Lots of flags, but only one poverty for all.

But why must Ukraine formally join either the EU or the Kremlin-sponsored Customs Union? Are those the only options? Is it not possible for Ukraine to adopt a neutral position of independence and peaceful trade with both sides? Would not such a position be best for all concerned? From the available polling, it seems that may be the view of a plurality, if not a majority, of Ukrainians.

Ukraine’s huge network of natural gas pipelines not only supplies much-needed Russian-produced gas to EU countries, but also is the source of vital revenues to Russia from that energy delivery system. The peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and the EU benefit from a stable, peaceful, neutral Ukraine; forcing Ukrainians into choosing one or the other camp benefits no one — except the power-mad rulers of Russia and the EU, and their globalist confreres.

Why then, should Americans take direction from George Soros, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, John McCain and other internationalist voices who insist it is Ukraine that must “choose” … but the only choice considered acceptable and legitimate to the globalist choir is for Ukraine to join the EU? Soros and his huge stable of “public intellectuals” at Project Syndicate have been flooding the global media with propaganda to that purpose. As we’ve reported previously, Project Syndicate is a project of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation that has sprouted into a network of nearly 500 newspapers in more than 150 countries with worldwide circulation of over 70 million copies. According to the syndicate’s web site, it is the largest syndication of independent commentators in the world.

However, his great wealth, foundations, media presence, and network of activist NGOs notwithstanding, George Soros’ power and influence — in Ukraine and elsewhere — stem not so much from these oft-cited trappings of power, but from the fact that he is a player, an Insider, in the top rank of globalists who are pushing and shoving “global governance” upon the entire planet. This was formally recognized in November 2010 when Soros received the “Globalist of the Year Award” from the Canadian International Council (CIC).

Soros' real heft derives from the fact that he is a member of the globalist power elite. First and foremost, he is a member of (and leader in and major financial supporter of) the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the premier globalist brain trust that has become the de facto governing force within the executive branch of the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve System, as well as Democrat and Republican parties, for most of the past century. His Soros Fund Management is a President’s Circle Corporate Member of the CFR and Soros himself served as a director of the CFR for a decade (1995-2004). In addition, he has been a key participant in many CFR events, including serving as presider at the CFR’s 2000 conference, “Latin America: Sustaining Economic & Political Reform,” a major sendoff promoting the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

Further, he has been an activist participant with, and sometime funder of, important globalist organizations such as the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the World Policy Conference, the World Economic Forum, the International Crisis Group, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Bilderberg Group, the U.S. State Department, the Gorbachev Foundation, the United Nations, and The Good Club (an exclusive billionaire club — whose members include Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg, and Oprah Winfrey — with the singular purpose of pushing global population control). Per the UN, Soros has served on a number of boards and advisory groups promoting a global “Tobin Tax” on financial transactions, global controls on CO 2 to stop “Climate Change,” dramatically expanding the powers and funding of the International Monetary Fund, and massive global wealth redistribution through the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.

Many of Soros’ critics on both the Left and the Right ignore these facts and treat Soros as if he is a singular earthshaking force all on his own. Focusing solely on his grant distributions, political donations, NGO networks, etc., they greatly exaggerate his importance, which can act as a diversion to distract liberty-minded advocates from focusing on the bigger picture. Taken in isolation, without his tie-ins to the CFR-globalist network of power, Soros’ global impact would be, not insignificant, but marginal. It is precisely because he is one of many super-wealthy globalists (albeit, he is far more visible and vocal than most) acting in concert that his impact is so remarkable.

Especially noteworthy in relation to Ukraine is his key involvement in the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee (AUAC). The Ukrainian Weekly of December 10, 1995, reported:

The American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee met in New York on November 17-18 [1995] and reiterated its strong conviction that a resilient Ukraine is in the interest of European stability and thus also American security.

Among other things, the AUAC called upon the U.S. Congress, USAID, the IMF, the World Bank, and the EU to shower the Ukrainian government (then run by “former” Communist Leonid Kuchma). It also encouraged the Ukrainian government to hasten “privatization” by selling “blocks of equity to private investors.” Kuchma followed their advice and, as in the former Soviet Union, his false “privatization” scheme transferred enormous state assets into the hands of select Communist Party members, creating instant billionaire oligarchs, who have dominated Ukraine ever since. Sitting on the UAUC with Soros were one-world CFR heavyweights Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Frank Carlucci, and Richard Burt. The same one-worlders are pushing the same agenda today, two decades later.

Oligarchs R Us

One of the billionaire oligarchs who benefitted from the Ukraine’s crony privatization program is Victor Pinchuk, with whom Soros has been very active. Soros’s foundations and The Victor Pinchuk Foundation collaborate on funding many NGOs and projects, in Ukraine and elsewhere. And Soros is a participant in Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy (YES) conferences, annual extravaganzas held in the Crimea at Livadia Palace, a summer retreat of Russian czars on the Black Sea. The YES confabs feature current and former presidents, prime ministers, potentates, financiers, corporate execs and celebrities.

Besides Soros, U.S. participants have included Bill Clinton, William Daley (Obama’s White House chief of staff), Robert Zoellick (Bush’s trade representative, then president of the World Bank), Newt Gingrich, and Condoleezza Rice, to name a few — Democrats and Republicans, CFR globalists all.

Pinchuk, a pal and funder of both Bill and Hillary Clinton, not only has generously supported Bill’s Clinton Global Initiative, but also has poured more than $13 million into the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. Another close tie is Douglas E. Schoen (CFR), a longtime Clinton operative and political consultant, whom, according to the New York Times, Mr. Pinchuk hired as an adviser in 2000 — and to whom the oligarch has been paying a tidy retainer of $40,000 per month ever since.

One of the important ventures that Soros and Pinchuk are financing is the Ukrainian Crisis Media Center (CMC), a collaboration of Ukrainian public relations corporations and journalists that is headquartered in Kiev’s Hotel Ukraine. Ostensibly, it was created to counter the propaganda onslaught of Putin’s Russian media cartel. Much of the “independent news” we receive from Ukraine is produced by the CMC and stamped with the Pinchuk/Soros-approved brand of propaganda. That includes cheering on or papering over the fact that the “new” government in Kiev is simply the latest rotation of musical chairs, and it has ended with Pinchuk’s fellow oligarchs (virtually all of which are “former” communists) and their parliamentary blocs and political parties occupying the most important chairs (as we reported here).

Pinchuk is a member of the Board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics and sits on the International Advisory Council of the Brookings Institution, both of which Soros has long been associated with. Another very important Soros-Pinchuk tie is their mutual connection to the famous (or infamous, as you prefer) Rothschild banking dynasty.

In 2011, George C. Karlweis, adviser to Baron Edmond de Rothschild and his Banque Privee, revealed that it was Rothschild who provided Soros with the startup money — and, undoubtedly much (illegal) insider trading intelligence — for Soros' fabulously successful Quantum Fund.

The full extent of Pinchuk’s connections to the Rothschild’s global private empire would require a similar revelation from an insider. That could be Jean-Pierre Saltiel, who sits on the board of Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy, as well as the oligarch’s global steel and metallurgy conglomerate, Interpipe, Inc. He is also a longtime adviser to the Rothschilds and the past president of Rothschild Conseil International, one of the fabled family’s major bank holding companies. Interestingly (but not so surprising), Rothschild agent Saltiel also sits on the board of PIK Group, Russia’s largest residential real estate developer, founded by Russian oligarchs Yuri Zhukov and Kirill Pisarev (and still run by Pisarev).

Like Soros and the Rothschilds, Ukrainian oligarch Pinchuk works with and partners with a number of Russian oligarchs. And his YES summits regularly feature Putin-allied Russian oligarchs, as well as Putin-appointed Russian politicians and apparatchiks. Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private bank, for example, is a YES sponsor. And Alfa Bank chairman, Mikhail Fridman, a Putin ally and one of Russia’s richest billionaires, sits on the CFR’s International Advisory Board and provided the funds to create the CFR’s “Russia and Russian-American Relations Lecture” program. Similarly, Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch, a former Putin-Yanukovych supporter and ally, is now a member of the new government. He is also, along with Fridman and Soros, a YES sponsor and a business partner with Russian, EU and U.S. Insiders. What these and dozens of other similar examples indicate is that there is much more to all of the Sturm und Drang over the Ukraine-Russia-EU “crisis” than meets the eye.

Soros gave a strong clue as to what the scripted outcome of the scenario would likely be. His solution would see Russia as a “partner,” and Angela Merkel (the "former" Communist from East Germany who now runs the unified Germany) would be the broker.

“Germany should take the lead,” Soros said, in his February 26 Project Syndicate column cited above. “Chancellor Angela Merkel must reach out to President Vladimir Putin to ensure that Russia is a partner, not an opponent, in the Ukrainian renaissance.”

Putin as Prod for "Convergence"

Merkel appears to be doing just the opposite, threatening Putin with sanctions, including freezing of Russian bank accounts and restrictions on travel in the EU, unless Putin “deescalates” the situation and comes to the bargaining table. But, in reality, she is “reaching out” to Putin, and he, after providing what is deemed an appropriate level of drama, will likely come to the table and deescalate. Contrary to Russia’s current bellicose posturing, it is in the Kremlin’s interests to offload Ukraine onto the taxpayers of the EU and the United States, and it fits perfectly with their long-term strategy of “convergence” with the EU and the United States.

Anatoliy Golitsyn, arguably the most important KGB defector to escape to the West, exposed the top-secret Soviet convergence strategy in his books New Lies for Old and The Perestroika Deception. (See here, here, and here.) Mikhail Gorbachev was making oblique reference to the ongoing reality of the convergence process when he described the EU as “the new European Soviet.” As in the transmutation described in Orwell’s Animal Farm, when it became almost impossible to tell the pigs from the men, it is now becoming all but impossible to detect any substantive differences between the ruling elites of Russia, China, the EU, and the United States. And, as the EU and the United States adopt more socialist policies and police-state measures, there is less and less distinction between our societies and the one ruled over by Putin and his Kremlin cronies. Soros, Pinchuk, Putin, Rockefeller, Rothschild, Fridman, Zhukov, Pisaerev, Akhmetov, and their ilk see themselves as the Caesars or Pharaohs in their long-schemed-for “new world order,” a term that Soros used several times in a television interview (see here) to describe his vision for the future.

Employing the indispensible insight and analysis provided by Golitsyn and the detailed information in his books, it is difficult to view the orchestrated chaos that has been unfolding in Ukraine without recognizing unmistakable evidence that it is being directed along a pre-planned path toward EU-U.S.-Ukraine-Russian convergence. Putin’s role is to rattle the sabers menacingly enough to frighten reluctant Ukraine to join the EU, while also convincing American and EU taxpayers to be forthcoming with the foreign aid and IMF funding that will “rescue” Ukraine and avert a war. And, after things settle down, we will look around to find Putin and his oligarchs carrying on business as usual with the new Ukraine government and its oligarchs, as well as with the Obama administration and “our” oligarchs, including, of course, George Soros.

We have seen this play many times before. In their book, The Wise Men, a hagiographic portrait of six CFR luminaries, authors Walter Isaacson (CFR) and Evan Thomas record a conversation in which top CFR insider and Marshall Plan architect John J. McCloy explained how he and fellow internationalists sold the scheme to Americans by pretending it was needed to fight Soviet Communism. Isaacson and Thomas quote McCloy:

"People sat up and listened when the Soviet threat was mentioned," he later said. It taught him a valuable lesson: One way to assure that a viewpoint gets noticed is to cast it in terms of resisting the spread of Communism."

And McCloy was far from the only one. Dean Acheson, another of the CFR “Wise Men,” did likewise. "Acheson," Isaacson and Thomas note, "concluded that the anti-Communist rhetoric was necessary to win support for the British package."

Now, the point is not that there was no Soviet Communist threat at the time; the threat was definitely real. The point is that McCloy, Acheson, and their CFR cohorts had no intention of fighting communism and they knew that the Marshall Plan was certainly no anti-Communist program. In fact, it transferred billions of dollars from American taxpayers into the coffers of Europe’s socialist parties and politicians, and especially into the movements to create the European Coal and Steel Community, the nascent seed of the European Union.

Far from being anti-Communists, McCloy, Acheson, Averill Harriman, Charles Bohlen, Robert Lovett, and other CFR engineers of the Marshall Plan were ardent anti-anti-Communists who orchestrated vicious campaigns against genuine anti-Communists such as Chiang Kai-shek, Gen. George S. Patton, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Sen. Robert Taft, and Robert Welch. And, all the while McCloy and company were promoting and deploying the Marshall Plan — ostensibly to combat Communism — they were also continuing the longstanding policies of previous CFR-dominated administrations of providing enormous financial and technological aid to the Soviet Union, as this publication and the detailed books of Prof. Antony Sutton (The Best Enemy Money Can Buy, National Suicide, and his three-volume Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development) thoroughly exposed. But, no matter, the CFR “Wise Men” knew that the vast majority of Americans were anti-Communist and if they wanted to sell their program to Americans they’d have to fraudulently package it as an anti-Communist one.

It is not mere coincidence that George Soros and other globalists are invoking the Marshall Plan and Cold War rhetoric today, and citing Putin’s revived Soviet-style militarism, to sell their latest EU-IMF convergence gambit. It has worked for them many times in the past. So, for weeks we have been treated to the incredibly odd spectacle of George Soros, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ivo Daalder, et al, and the denizens of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and PBS vying for the honor of claiming Joe McCarthy’s mantle.

Will we fall for it again? Americans would be wise to call a halt to this orchestrated rush to push Ukraine into the arms of Manuel Barroso, Mario Draghi, and Christine Lagarde — and to stick us, and the Ukrainian people, with the bill.

Photo of George Soros: AP Images

Related articles:

Ukraine Behind the Headlines: Disinformation, Manipulation, Propaganda

Ukraine: New Interim Government; Too Many Familiar Faces

Ukraine Turmoil Escalates Into Foreign-backed Armed Uprising

George Soros Funded by the House of Rothschild

George Soros Touts China as Leader of New World Order

George Soros Distorts Religious Teachings

Mass Unrest in Ukraine Amid Supposed Tug of War Between EU, Russia

Eurasian Union One Step Closer to Reality

Concert of Democracies: Same Old Globalism

Convergence: Globalists Push Russia-EU Merger (video of Norman Dodd)