The Department of Making Shit Up Welcomes New Rising Star Daniel Bilak

Uncle Volodya says, “Once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now. “

Ladies and gentlemen, attention please;
come in close so everyone can see:
I got a tale to tell,
a listen don’t cost a dime –
And if you believe that we’re gonna get along just fine.
Now I’ve been travelin’ all around,
I heard trouble’s come to your town;
well I’ve got a little somethin’
guaranteed to ease your mind:
It’s called Snake Oil, y’all
It’s been around for a long, long time

Steve Earle, from “Snake Oil“.

Setting a sombre mood right from the get-go, Daniel Bilak leads off with Edmund Burke’s cri du cœur – “all that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.” Please, EU; stop playing Putin’s game, and sanction that prick back to the stone age. Help Ukraine succeed by destroying the economy of its former largest trading partner, so that Ukraine – a country with screaming territorial disputes which have resulted in Ukraine using its military to bludgeon the civilian populace into submission – can become a smiling and happy member of the rich EU even though the newly-minted EU Association agreement does not even offer membership, and although membership is not considered in the case of supplicant nations with ongoing territorial disputes.

That’s quite a pipe dream, Daniel. Pardon me – is that a crack pipe? Just curious; I’m not judging.

Before we start unpacking it, which is our stock in trade, allow me to counter with a quote from a less well-known philosopher; Ally Carter, author of “Heist Society“.  “It is an occupational hazard that anyone who has spent [his] life learning how to lie eventually becomes bad at telling the truth.”

I’m not sure how Mr. Bilak is at telling the truth, because we don’t get to see any of that in this piece.  However, I can vouch with complete confidence for his suitability to lead a weekend retreat in  lying; he is a veritable wizard of whoppers. Let’s take a look at some of them.

We can make a start with what I’ve already written above. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. That so? Mr. Bilak is using this quote to imply that if the EU will not get serious about sanctions, probably striking a hammer-blow that will set off a cascading tremor in the world economy and result in a shooting war over gas, it is fiddling while Putin toasts Ukraine like a particularly succulent marshmallow. Mr. Bilak argues that more sanctions – in addition to those Mickey-Mouse laughingstocks already applied under conditions which fairly ooze mendacity and deceit – would be just the ticket. If the west would only put its shoulder to the wheel and cooperatively crush Russia’s economy so that the Russian people became desperate from the pressure, Putin would put his tail between his legs and ki-yi all the way back to the Kremlin. Ummm…what national leader would actually respond that way? Certainly not Putin, and anyone who believes that is quite liable to believe anything they are told, including newborn babies are found under cabbage leaves and money can’t buy happiness. But if the west would only do something, Ukraine’s troubles would be on their way to over. Au contraire; they would be just beginning, as any European war with Russia which started in Ukraine would certainly be fought the length and breadth of Ukraine, leaving it a smoking wreck. And who are these “good men” who are allegedly doing nothing – which is used here as a euphemism for “not doing what Kiev and its string-pullers want”? The west? Are you shitting me? The west are the good guys in this?

Let me refresh your memory, Dan.

It was the west, with its media road show and fog machine, that hyped the Maidan as a huge groundswell of popular opinion, a “people’s uprising”, even though it attracted far smaller crowds than the Orange Revolution. It was the west who whipped the protests into violence, shouting loudly that Yanukovych must get his police off the streets and let the peaceful protesters have their way even as they were heaving bricks and gasoline bombs and seizing control of public buildings. Here’s what EU Foreign Policy Chief Ashton had to say about the heroic crowd on the Maidan: “I was among you on Maidan in the evening and was impressed by the determination of Ukrainians demonstrating for the European perspective of their country“. Here’s what she said about Yanukovych’s brutality toward protesters: “Dialogue with political forces and society and the use of arguments is always better than the argument of force.” Things changed a little bit once the EU and USA maneuvered Poroshenko into the driver’s seat, and those in the east who did not want to recognize his dominion over them were not protesters; no, Lady Ashton and her doppelgänger in physical ugliness, U.S, Secretary of State John Kerry agreed that they were “pro-Russian separatists”, while Ukraine – which had already moved against them in full military strength in direct contravention of the Ukrainian constitution and international law – had “shown remarkable restraint”. Fuck dialogue and the use of arguments: force rocks!! Around the same time, the Estonian Foreign Minister confided to Ashton suspicions that the snipers who had indiscriminately shot both protesters and police from rooftops around Maidan had acted on the behest of the Ukrainian opposition, to sort of spur things along to mindless rioting. Ashton’s response will go down in history: “I think we do want to investigate. I mean, I didn’t pick that up, that’s interesting. Gosh.” Investigation of the matter since? Zip. Zero. Nothing. Dropped like a hot stone. Apparently upon further examination, it was all the way across town from “interesting”.

Mr. Bilak apparently agrees with the might-makes-right approach; he reserved especial  disappointment for Germany’s Angela Merkel, for her statement that “Ukraine should start immediate bilateral negotiations with the terrorists rampaging through the Donbas.”

Said terrorist body consisting, according to Mr. Bilak, of “marauding, fragmented bands of 10,000 Chechen fighters and Russian mercenaries, Donbas criminals, drug addicts, and other marginals”. What a long, rough way we have come from the nobility of  “Ukrainians demonstrating for the European perspective of their country”. It must be disappointing for a professional military force made up of genetically-acceptable Ukrainians to get its ass kicked by drug addicts, criminals and marginals. Although perhaps he is not exactly sure of the composition of the opposing force, since he offers no evidence whatsoever to support his allegations, and all evidence offered thus far of state-sponsored Russian participation has been discredited. No use holding talks, anyway, says Bilak, with terrorists who are too busy shooting up the towns they hold to negotiate. The deliberate obfuscation and ignorance of this statement is breathtaking; there is no evidence that any property damage at all accrues to the federalists, while it is the indiscriminate shelling by the Ukrainian army which has reduced towns like Slaviyansk to rubble.

But beneath the all-seeing Eye Of Bilak, the situation for the bloodthirsty saboteurs of Ukraine’s destiny is simple; when the glorious forces of the Unified Ukraine prevail, the Ukrainians among the defenders will be tried as terrorists, while the Russians fleeing for the safety of their evil empire will be shot by Russian border guards.

But it didn’t have to be this way. Putin could stop the entire conflict in its tracks, just by waving his evil talon. This would “cut off the flow of funds, tanks, weapons and mercenaries from Russia and to secure his side of the Ukrainian-Russian border.”

But he won’t do that unless the EU stops dicking around and applies some serious sanctions.

As if that were not enough rubbish, the garbage truck and the road completely part company at this point. According to Mr. Bilak, “On Monday, Ukraine claimed a Russian fighter jet or one of Russia’s new rockets shot down a Ukrainian air force plane from inside Russian territory (based on the fact that no side on Ukraine’s territory has weaponry that could reach that height).”

Sure you want to stick with that story, Daniel? Because the downing yesterday of MH-17 was responded to by Samantha Power at the UN with a storm of frothy and rabid invective which included the contention that according to the official United States position, the Ukrainian “pro-Russian separatists” have vehicle-mounted air defence missile systems practically falling out their ass – among them the SA-11 Buk. The aircraft shot down on Monday was an AN-26, at an altitude of 21,000 ft. MH-17 was following an airlane at 33,000 ft; 12,000 ft higher than the AN-26, although the international community is sure it was shot down by the “pro-Russia separatists” using Russian-supplied weaponry. Ukraine has the Buk as well, of course, but Ukraine also said at one time that the rebels did not have any. The plane crashed far enough from the Russian border that it would have been out of range of a Buk fired from Russia at the moment it was hit. So…what happened? There is absolutely no doubt that Ukraine has a weapon which could reach that altitude, the aircraft would have been out of range from Russia, and you just got done saying the “pro-Russia separatists” didn’t have a weapon which could reach that high. That only leaves one contender.

We’ll let you off that one, Daniel, because you plainly know as much about gaseous compounds on Venus as you do about air defense systems. And that ignorance is just as plainly not confined simply to air defense systems, as he goes on in the next paragraph to blabber that Russian tanks and artillery poured over the border this past weekend vand advanced three kilometers into Ukraine. That sounds like an invasion to me. Got any pictures? Nope. Any evidence at all? Nope. Just alarmist twaddle to stir up the red-meat crowd.

Who the hell is Daniel Bilak, you may be wondering. As was I. According to the one-line bio at the bottom of this tapestry of mendacious blather, he is “an advisor to the Governor of Donetsk Oblast”. The absentee governor, that’d be, who was appointed by Kiev to run the restive region and has since fled after being driven out. But that’s not the end of the Daniel Bilak story; no, indeed. He’s also the managing partner at CMS Cameron McKenna LLC in Kiev, and has extensive experience advising clients on legal risk in international oil and gas development, among other things. Between 1995 and 2006 he was a senior United Nations Development Program governance expert, and has also been General Counsel for Emtec, a Canadian high-tech. Except for his rudimentary schooling, he was educated in Canada at McGill University, Montreal. He is an internationalist who is about as Ukrainian as a hockey stick. I don’t know where he learned to make up shit like that, but I devoutly hope it was not Montreal.

Here’s a tip, Dan, for free. Stick to lying about how many women you’ve slept with and how big the fish you catch are. Men at least will be willing to let those pass without comment, because everybody lies about those.