‘Kiev interim players expected quick power grab, desperately need money’

Rhetoric coming from the self-imposed government in Ukraine is heavily influenced by the lack of any funds in the budget, political commentator Aleksandr Nekrasov told RT, adding they were not prepared for any resistance against their power grab.

RT:The self-imposed leaders in Ukraine have ordered the mobilization of the country’s armed forces in response to Moscow’s possible deployment of forces in Ukraine. Is it likely that they will send the military to the eastern and indeed southern part of Crimea?

Aleksandr Nekrasov: I don’t think so. Ever since they have seized power in Kiev, they were getting desperate by the day because they have suddenly realized that they are not getting that money which they hoped to get at once, having lost the money coming from Russia. And this desperation showed the fact that they have repeated all those warnings about Russian invasion, Russian aggression and so on and so forth and now we see them desperate enough to make all sorts of provocative statements and basically implying that the danger of war is rising.

Now the reason why they are doing this is that they need the money, desperately, and the west is not hurrying to give them that money. So we will hear all sorts of things coming from Kiev from the new interim players. And I think they – and the West itself badly misjudged – the reaction of Russia to the events there in Ukraine. And I think it has badly misjudged the reaction of people in Crimea and in the east of the country as well.

RT:But the question is would the Ukrainian military follow the orders of the interim government in Kiev?

AN: It is very difficult to predict what is going to happen in one sense but really I think the interim government is terribly frightened if it fails to get the money quickly, and if it fails to start paying salaries to government workers and pensions and so on, they might face the protest themselves in the Maidan central square with people demanding them to go now. And that I think is their biggest worry at the moment. I also think they need the money to start the so-called campaign before those presidential elections in May. That I think is the main reason they are desperately asking for a quick loan.

RT:You have talked about how the people in West underestimated the reaction from the East and South of the country. We have seen huge numbers of people taking to streets, just how much support then does Yanukovich have now?

AN: About Yanukovich it is difficult to say how much support he personally has because I do not really think that all those people, who want to say that they don’t want to support the people in Kiev and that they would be rather together with Russia, I don’t think they see Yanukovich as a powerful figure. I don’t think they want to side with him.

But I think it is very important for the East to now generate some powerful, sort of charismatic leaders to lead the people, because this lack of leadership at the moment is obvious. But on the other hand the good thing is that the new interim regime in Kiev is probably losing support very quickly, at least there are signs of that.

And I think the reason why the people in Kiev in charge now and the Western leaders are talking so much about possible Russian aggression is that I think that they misjudged the initial plan. They thought they could overthrow the government, overthrow the president, quickly take power and quickly impose the authority all over Ukraine including eastern parts and we saw them trying to get there, it did not work.