Free Republic

President Joe Biden nominated Geoffrey Pyatt – a participant in a controversial leaked phone call with State Department official Victoria Nuland about Ukraine – to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources.The nomination of Pyatt, who currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Greece, was announced on April 22nd and, if confirmed, would make him the president’s leading official on energy security.Pyatt previously served in the Obama administration from 2013 to 2016 as its Ambassador to Ukraine, and during his tenure, was embroiled in a leaked phone call controversy with then-Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian...

The firm headed by Hillary Clinton’s former chief strategist, Mark Penn, is helping run incumbent President Victor Yushchenko’s campaign. Meanwhile Paul Manafort, whose firm worked on Republican John McCain’s losing effort, and Tad Devine, a top strategist on the Democratic presidential campaigns of Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, are consulting for Victor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian frontrunner in the polls.

Disgraced former President Victor Yanukovych called for urgent action to resolve the ongoing separatist violence in eastern Ukraine in a statement from Rostov-on-Don on April 21. Yanukovych requested the “immediate removal of all Ukrainian Armed Forces from the east of Ukraine, sent there as a detachment of the so-called ‘national guard,’ dressed in military uniforms and armed with automatic weapons and grenades.” Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine on February 22 after being accused of ordering riot police to fire on activists demanding his removal from power, called for “the immediate commencement of peaceful dialogue with the leaders of the eastern regions.”