The many gullible (or just crudely and ignorantly anti-Russia) journalists and politicians who sided with the Kiev putsch of February 2014 really ought to be more interested in the latest news from Ukraine.

The supposedly heroic new President of the supposedly free and uncorrupt and generally wonderful new Ukraine, the oligarch who doesn’t like being called an oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, has announced a ban on lots of journalists (and indeed other individuals).

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/16/ukraine-president-bans-journalists-from-country?CMP=ema_546

These people are accused of promoting ‘terrorist activities’ ( a charge very similar to catch-all offences under the Blairite Terrorism Act which are still, shamefully on our own statute book) or of being a ‘threat to national interests’.

The decree is barmy and self-defeating, and in a way laughable. But can you imagine the enormous fuss that would be made if Vladimir Putin were to do the same? Compare, then, and contrast the minimal coverage it has received, because it issues from Ukraine.

Will the vast crowds be back on Kiev’s Maidan to protest against this? Will Victoria Nuland and Guido Westerwelle and John McCain and the rest of them be there with them, clutching bags of biscuits and smiling their support? Will all those civil society groups, dedicated to bringing freedom of speech and press to the borderlands, be outraged and working their little socks off to get the ban overturned, setting up the tents and soup-kitchens to house and feed the massing army of protest? Don’t be too sure.

I am reminded by this of the ridiculous claims made by apologists for the putsch that the Maidan was in fact an unstoppable movement for freedom and against corruption, rather than a manipulated mob helping to overthrow a government which had annoyed the ‘West’ . If this were really so, the crowds would have been almost perpetually back on the Maidan ever since. Somehow, they haven’t been. Nor will this shoddy action bring them there.

And so we know all we need to know about the ‘February Revolution’, its true nature and objectives.