WASHINGTON — Former Texas Rep. Ron Paul suggests in a column that the United States, through its support of the Ukrainian government, shares the blame in last week’s downing of a Malaysian Airlines jet over the eastern Ukraine.
The column, carried Sunday on the website of the Ron Paul Institute, was provocative from the outset. Its title was “What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17.”
The column accused the media and the Western politicians of seeking “maximum propaganda value” from the disaster, in blaming Russia and its strong-armed leader Vladimir Putin. The media is not reporting, he insisted, that the crisis in the Ukraine began when the United States supported protestors in the overthrow of an elected president, calling it “regime change.”
Normally the Texas Straight Talk column deals with libertarian issues such as Paul’s longstanding criticism of the Federal Reserve. But Sunday’s piece on the Ukraine, ostensibly about why the United States should stay out of the affairs of others, may prove problematic for his son, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.
Rand Paul shares some of the libertarian views of his father, and has been weighing a presidential run in 2016. A column by his father seeming to sympathize with Putin raises eyebrows and could be used against him at a later date. Sen. Paul’s office had no immediate response to the column.
The elder Paul wrote Sunday that the media failed to report that the post-coup Ukrainian government has killed at least 250 people in the breakaway Lugansk region since June, including 20 of them one day after the plane crash.
