All tagged ukraine phone call

Ukraine is good for the West; but is the West good for Ukraine?

A Bird’s Eye View: Ukraine
In-Depth Series by Back to Facts

Part I: Energy Crossroads, Gas Storage Titan

By Tatiana Prophet

Ukraine is a vital crossroads for natural gas, from Asia and Russia to Europe. Ukraine has always been a crossroads, with access to the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus Strait at Istanbul. It has one of the largest gas transit networks in the world. It also has tremendous storage capacity, as large as all of Europe and more available due to a relatively small domestic demand. The gas networks are used heavily in the winter.

Further, international storage fee contracts are traded in U.S. dollars, making Ukraine almost as important as a Middle Eastern country for its role in the energy sector. And gas storage futures are a big business on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Key to Trump-Ukraine call: Untangling the alliances

By Tatiana Prophet
editor@back2facts.com
Updated 9/26/2019 6:27 pm
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Hunter Biden joined the Burisma board in April 2016. It was actually April 2014. Back to Facts regrets the error.

The phone call with new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is meaningless – until you sort through what’s actually going on in Ukraine.

Ukraine has had its ample share of political violence, scandal and even poisoning (see the famous poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution of 2004). With an ideal climate for farming, Ukraine was long the breadbasket of Europe. As such it has been periodically overshadowed and menaced by Imperial Russia and Soviet Russia. To read articles out of context, it appears the political retributions have no end in this country. No wonder they elected an outsider recently, TV personality Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Here is a brief summary of the situation with Joe Biden, best told by the former vice president himself. On January 23, 2018, Biden appeared at an event held by the Council on Foreign Relations.