{"id":248679,"date":"2022-01-23T09:01:27","date_gmt":"2022-01-23T09:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=248679"},"modified":"2022-02-28T17:32:21","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T17:32:21","slug":"confusion-over-uk-claim-that-putin-plans-coup-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=248679","title":{"rendered":"Confusion over UK claim that Putin plans coup in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marchers in traditional costumes mark Ukraine\u2019s \u2018day of unity\u2019 in Kyiv on Saturday.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Emma Graham-Harrison, Luke Harding and Andrew Roth \u2013 The Guardian Jan 23, 2022<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The Foreign Office has said that it had exposed evidence of a plot to install a pro-Moscow government in Ukraine, and Boris Johnson<\/a> promised to \u201cramp up pressure on Russia\u201d, as his own domestic political troubles deepened.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s rare reference to intelligence-gathering went into almost no detail about a conspiracy that, if accurate, could mean a serious escalation in the threat to Ukraine<\/a>. Politicians there were sceptical that the government could be replaced without a full-blown invasion of the capital, Kyiv.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Office also said it had information on former Ukrainian politicians who had links with Russian intelligence services, and listed five men. \u201cSome of these have contact with Russian intelligence officers currently involved in the planning for an attack,\u201d the statement added.<\/p>\n

However four of the five men live in exile in Moscow, making their ties to Russia\u2019s leadership less a matter of subterfuge than public record.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Office\u2019s claims were thrown into further confusion when the man it named as a \u201cpotential candidate\u201d as Moscow\u2019s presidential pick told the Observer he would make an unlikely candidate to head a puppet government for Moscow.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve made my evening. The British Foreign Office seems confused,\u201d said former Ukrainian MP Yevhen Murayev, laughing. \u201cIt isn\u2019t very logical. I\u2019m banned from Russia. Not only that but money from my father\u2019s firm there has been confiscated.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Foreign Office statement was followed by an intervention from No 10 that Johnson \u201chas pushed for a gear change on the Ukraine situation\u201d, after a period when his government appeared to take a back seat on international diplomacy around this issue, while battling heavy political challenges over lockdown-busting parties.<\/p>\n

While US president Joe Biden<\/a> and a host of European leaders have made a series of interventions on Ukraine over the past week, the prime minster has largely avoided the recent flurry of diplomacy aimed at averting war. Last week, as high-level talks took place across Europe, the UK\u2019s defence and foreign secretaries, Ben Wallace and Liz Truss, were both in Australia.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been striking that in this week of acute tension in Europe, the prime minister seems to have been absent from top-level Ukraine diplomacy, and the foreign secretary has managed to be in the wrong hemisphere,\u201d said Peter Ricketts, former national security adviser and former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office.<\/p>\n

In Ukraine, Vasyl Filipchuk, a former spokesperson for Ukraine\u2019s foreign ministry, who now runs a thinktank, described the British allegations of a plot as \u201cridiculous\u201d. Even a rigged election would not bring the pro-Russian actors power, and trying to install them by force would mean a very long and very bloody fight, he claimed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis scenario would only work with a fully fledged invasion taking over Kyiv,\u201d he said. \u201cThe city would be decimated, its land burned and a million people would flee. We have 100,000 people in the capital with arms, who will fight<\/a> \u2026 There may be a plan but it\u2019s bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prominent TV journalist Yevgeny Kiselyov, who moved to Ukraine in 2008, said that mainstream opposition figures who opposed Ukraine\u2019s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, would never talk to Russian spy agencies, however unhappy they were with the present government in Kyiv.<\/p>\n

Russian intelligence had a history of telling the Kremlin what it wanted to hear, rather than objective reality, he added.<\/p>\n

The Foreign Office statement seemed plausible but did not contain any obvious new intelligence, analysts and regional experts in the UK said, given that Moscow has been massing troops near the border and makes no secret of its unhappiness with the country\u2019s current government.<\/p>\n

A Foreign Office spokesperson declined to respond to questions about whether the British government had any details of timing or the method that Russia intended to use to change the leadership in Kyiv.<\/p>\n

The scarcity of details about the plot, and the sudden diplomatic push after a period on the international sidelines, risked leaving Johnson open to charges that he is exploiting a volatile international crisis to shore up his own position at home.<\/p>\n

Continues \u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The alleged participants have reacted with derision to UK claims that Moscow was preparing to stage a coup to install a pro-Russian regime in Ukraine. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":248683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[58,91,116],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Current_Affairs","category-russia","category-ukraine"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248679"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248682,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248679\/revisions\/248682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/248683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}