Today, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk resigned, accusing the president’s party of plunging the war-scarred and recession-ravaged country into an “artificially created crisis”.
In response, US vice-president Joseph Biden’s office congratulated the Ukrainian government for a job well done.
In a surreal story difficult for even The Onion to make up, please consider Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseniy Yatseniuk Resigns.
Ukraine’s prime minister tendered his resignation late on Sunday afternoon, accusing the president’s party of plunging the war-scarred and recession-ravaged country into an “artificially created” crisis.
“The country’s political crisis was unleashed artificially . . . the desire to change one person blinded politicians and paralysed their will for real change,” Mr Yatseniuk said on Sunday, adding that his formal resignation letter would be submitted to parliament on Tuesday.
In a statement, US vice-president Joseph Biden’s office said that, in a phone conversation with Mr Yatseniuk on Sunday, he: “congratulated the government of Ukraine on its accomplishments over the past two years, in particular on the strides it has made on difficult but necessary economic reforms, the signature of the European Union association agreement, and the work it has done to increase energy independence”.
In a Financial Times interview earlier this year, Mr Yatseniuk complained of being “stabbed in the back” after he faced relentless criticism from presidential MPs over unpopular austerity measures that were parts of a $40bn international lifeline from the International Monetary Fund and other global institutions. Efforts to shift blame for the raising of utility tariffs, for example, on to his political grouping had dented his popularity, fuelled political infighting and derailed the IMF-led programme.
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Everyone is the mother of victory; No one is the father of defeat. Do we claim COP21 as a success, and risk watching it being used by fossil fuel failures to carry on burning humanity, and so become complicit in defeat? Do we claim COP21 was a failure, and risk being the naysayers who didn’t recognise the work needed to bring fossil fuels (instead of humanity) to an end? This Loki-esque question about our motives, about our fears for how we might appear, may seem beside the point if the fundamental question is “Was the COP a success or a failure?”And there are screeds of excellent articles assessing the outcome of the Paris COP Agreement, the Agreement that is now the world’s governments’ roadmap for addressing climate change.
