Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“For Western officials and their news media conduits who have carefully crafted the myth that Ukraine is a vibrant democracy, the past few weeks have been extremely challenging. First came the revelation that members of the country’s draft boards had engaged in a pervasive degree of corruption. Prospective conscripts were paying $5,000 bribes to avoid military service. The political stench was so bad that an embarrassed President Volodymyr Zelensky felt compelled to fire the heads of all the draft boards. On the heels of the bribery scandal, come news reports about the Ukrainian government’s use of assassination squads to eliminate political and ideological opponents. There were longstanding rumors, but reports of such abuses had rarely appeared in the establishment corporate press in the West. Information was largely confined to far less prominent alternative news outlets. That de facto blackout has now lifted at least partially.” (09/11/23)