Peeling the oranges

Kirill Pankratov wrote an article on the Orange revolution in Ukraine - "Peeling the oranges". His views on life are very similar to mine. Here a quote:

Isn't it ironic: after the "steady erosion of democracy" in Russia and the
"new, democratic chapter of Ukraine's history" the political structure and
economic policies of Russia and Ukraine look more similar than ever!

The book written by Matthew Brzezinski, “Casino Moscow”. He devotes an entire chapter to Timoshenko under the heading, “Eleven-Billion-Dollar Woman.” Brzezinski, who writes: “The US government has proof of money transfers which she personally made to Lasarenko when he was prime minister.” This suggests that the US administration can put pressure on Timoshenko, should she fail to faithfully follow Washington’s orders.
Selected quotations from the book:
“The file on her was maddeningly thin, consisting of a few rumpled Ukrainian press clippings of dubious veracity and a number, underlined twice and adorned with large question marks. The number was $11,000,000,000, the gross revenue of Timoshenko’s virtually unknown Ukrainian company. … Not even Coca-Cola earned that much from its combined international sales.”

“Along the way, she struck up an alliance with Dnepropetrovsk’s regional governor, a wily former collective-farm boss by the name of Pavlo Lazarenko. (This was the very same Lazarenko who would end up in a San Francisco jail, charged with large-scale money laundering and receiving seventy-two million dollars directly from Timoshenko ….” “Lazarenko granted Timoshenko the provincial energy concession, making her de facto boss of hundreds of state enterprises, which functioned or shut down operations at her whim.”
“Timoshenko’s big break, however, came on the day of my mugging, when Lazarenko was appointed prime minister of Ukraine. One of his first moves in office was to wrest half a dozen lucrative energy concessions from several big private groups and give Timoshenko a nationawide monopoly on the import and distribution of Russian natural gas. “
“Thus UESU was born, and Timoshenko gained control over nearly 20 percent of Ukraine’s gross national product, an enviable position that probably no other private company in the world could boast.”