Volodymyr Stretovych, head of Ukraine's parliamentary committee on fighting organized crime and corruption, reported having precise documentation of the bribes paid to every member of election commissions to falsify the results of the 21-Nov-2004 vote:

The Verkhovna Rada committee on fighting organized crime and corruption will hand the receipts over to the Office of Public Prosecutor.  Considering the scale of the criminal schemes, he said: "It is necessary to bring to justice close to one hundred thousand people while there is the total of 196 thousand inmates in Ukraine at present.  The [justice system] will have to be selective in this matter but nobody will slip its attention." "It is obvious that 'Yanukovych's elite' has forgotten one simple truth that all things secret sooner or later become public so everything will be settled," said Volodymyr Stretovych. Orange Media, 22-Dec-2004 at at orange.media.kiev.ua/?q=node/45

One effect of this single instance of the Kremlin intervening in Ukraine's internal affairs, then, has been the creation of a hundred thousand criminals who now have reason to fear the rule of law that is promised by Viktor Yushchenko.  The Kremlin implicitly offers this hundred thousand immunity from prosecution as an inducement to not only themselves vote for Viktor Yanukovych, but more importantly to continue falsifying the vote in Yanukovych's favor.  The briber finds economy in having to pay for only the first crime, and gets subsequent crimes free.  Over the years, the entire society to a greater or lesser degree becomes criminalized, and joins unanimously in fearing the law.

The briber is able to intensify loyalty by means of explicit blackmail based on the initial bribe.  Or, in the extreme case, a briber who is besieged by the law can out his list of the bribed in the hope of creating an army of the besieged which will be too vast for the law to deal with, and perhaps so strong as to overwhelm the law.  Thus, the question of how the parliamentary committee came upon documentation of the exact bribes paid to all election committe members might be answered by the briber himself having leaked this information.

The bribed play the role of pawns who are sacrificed en masse without qualm.  That the sacrificed in this case come predominantly from Eastern Ukraine gives the lie to the claim that Yanukovych acts in the interests of Easterners.  Bribing people to commit crimes in support of one's political ambitions would be contrary to their interests even if the briber did not later hand their names over to corruption investigators.

Of course you know these principles of compromat control, as you are the world expert in applying them.  I write only to inform you that the world that watches you knows them too.

In all this is possible to discern a Kremlin failure to appreciate what weaponry is needed to achieve Russian hegemony.  It is not hydrogen bombs, nuclear submarines, stealth bombers, cruise missiles, or ICBMs.  It is truth.  Truth is the weapon that the Russian arsenal is bare of.  Much of what the Kremlin does is predicated on some lie � usually some baldfaced, transparent lie.  The result is that Russia is distrusted and despised, and its aresenal of hardware avails it nothing.




Lubomyr Prytulak