US Envoy Admits: No Evidence of Russian Involvement in Odessa
The Obama Administration is usually all set to back any hare-brained allegations Ukraine’s interim government comes up with, but when interim PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk claimed Russia was secretly behind Friday’s massacre of pro-Russian protesters in Odessa, that seems to have been too much.
So while Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt centered his CNN comments on insinuations that “someone” has a vested interest in seeing the situation grow more chaotic nationwide, he eventually conceded that there was no evidence of any Russian involvement in Odessa.
Pyatt went on to urge investigation into who was responsible for the incident, suggesting local police may have been complicit in the fire which killed at least 38 protesters in the city.
The admission that Russia wasn’t behind the killing of pro-Russia protesters seems self-evident, but is actually a huge step for the US, which has been loathe to admit that any of the protesters in Ukraine who aren’t on board with the pro-western interim government have any grievances of their own, and have long suggested they are, to a man, secret Russian spies.