1999: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Kyiv's foreign policy: continuing success

Although at times it seemed as if little besides the presidential campaign was happening in the country, Ukraine did have a political life beyond the elections in 1999.

In the foreign policy realm especially, Ukraine realized several achievements while President Leonid Kuchma gained stature as a leading political figure in Central and Eastern Europe. The country continued to develop its multi-vectored policy of expanding relations with Europe, while continuing to build relations with Moscow and its strategic partnership with the United States. It was lauded for its peace plan for the Kosovo conflict and its mediation of the Transdniester situation.

However, it also continued to receive criticism for increasing corruption, a lack of political will to move forward on reforms, and for its failure to close the Chornobyl nuclear facility.

On the home front, apart from the elections, the year in politics was marked by the death of the leading pro-democracy figure and the split of his party into two bickering political organizations, as well as the detention of a former prime minister, held in a U.S. immigration facility after unsuccessfully requesting political asylum here.

As 1998 ended, Oleksander Tkachenko, the controversial, Russia-oriented chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, turned Ukrainian heads again when he decided to foray into foreign policy during a visit to Moscow, where he reiterated a proposal first announced earlier in the year that Ukraine should consider joining Russia and Belarus in a Slavic brotherhood. He called such a union "a necessity" for Ukraine's economic development.

Mr. Tkachenko also said he had convinced Gennadii Selezniov, chairman of the Russian State Duma, to push for long-delayed ratification of the Ukraine-Russia treaty on friendship, cooperation and partnership.

Indeed, Mr. Tkachenko's visit seemed to break the logjam that had stalled the approval process, because on December 25, 1998, the treaty was finally ratified after laying dormant for a year and a half.

The treaty was signed only after the prime ministers of the two countries had tackled the sensitive issue of the Black Sea Fleet and signed a document that outlined in further detail provisions for the division of space and facilities.

The ratification by the State Duma was a major step towards the enactment of the treaty, but it only attained full Russian approval when the upper house finally passed it on February 17.

Mr. Tkachenko continued to push for his tripartite Slavic union throughout the first part of the year. On January 28, during a speech before the Belarusian Parliament in Miensk, Mr. Tkachenko reiterated his proposal for a joint economic and customs system, and single currency. His ideas got little support at home, however. Even Borys Oliinyk, a leading member of the Communist Party, which generally supports reunion with Moscow, commented that such a move would be ill-advised.

Mr. Tkachenko could claim one major victory in his fight to bring Ukraine back into the Moscow fold when he led a successful battle in the Verkhovna Rada on March 3 to make Ukraine a member of the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly Commonwealth of Independent States.

After rancorous debate and a major scuffle between Ukraine's parliamentary leadership and center-right forces opposed to such a move, the body approved the resolution by four votes. The success came after four previous votes failed to attain a majority.

A month later, on April 1, Mr. Tkachenko led the delegation of the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly's newest member to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he again called for an economic and currency union with Russia and Belarus, and added that a single defense system wouldn't be bad either.

The weekend, which included a parallel meeting of the CIS heads of state, signaled a reinvigoration of the largely Moscow-controlled, multi-state structure, which had drifted with no apparent mission or evident desire by the member-countries to actively work within its framework. President Kuchma had said a month earlier that the organization "barely exists." But, after the summit and with the appointment of a new executive secretary, Yurii Yarov, the Ukrainian president changed his stance and declared at the Moscow summit's conclusion that the "CIS does exist."

Mr. Tkachenko's trumpeting of a Slavic state grew louder on June 10-11, when he orchestrated and presided over a full-blown inter-parliamentary conference on the matter titled: "Belarus, Russia, Ukraine: Experiences and Problems of Integration." An overwhelmingly leftist political gathering of politicians of the three countries, the conference heard calls from leading parliamentary figures for reunion.

But all it could muster in terms of concrete results was two documents calling for closer cooperation in various areas.

Much controversy surrounded Mr. Tkachenko's last-minute decision to move the meeting from the city of Chernihiv to Kyiv and the Verkhovna Rada Building. The chairman's opponents noted that the conference was nothing more than a political tactic by Mr. Tkachenko, who had declared his presidential candidacy two weeks prior, to raise his profile among Ukrainian voters nostalgic for the past.

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus continued the call for Slavic unity during a visit to Kyiv on March 21. While appearing at a joint conference with President Kuchma, the Belarusian strongman said, "Sooner or later we will be united." The Ukrainian president did not comment on the remark, but also did not disagree when Mr. Lukashenka stated that talks had begun on the matter.

Mr. Kuchma, who met often with world leaders in his first years in office, continued to do so on an even wider scale in 1999. Some critics said the president used the meetings as a campaign tool to raise his image among Ukrainians as an international statesman. But he also had several notable accomplishments this year.

In Lviv on May 14-15, the president gathered nine Central European leaders for a summit that focused as much on how to avoid alienating those European countries that have not yet been allowed to enter Europe's predominant political and economic structures, as it did on the major international event of the year: the Kosovo crisis.

The heads of state - during what was for the most part a relaxed and informal setting in a city that hadn't looked so good in years, according to residents - discussed how the European integration process will affect citizens and how to keep European borders open so as not to once again geopolitically divide Eastern and Central Europe.

Another foreign policy success, perhaps more symbolic than tangible, occurred in Yalta on September 9-10, when 22 countries, including 14 heads of state or government, attended a summit on the Baltic-Black Sea region. Mr. Kuchma dubbed the event Yalta II, symbolically tying it to the historic Yalta Conference of 1945, during which Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin redrew the geopolitical map of Europe in an agreement that gave rise to the Iron Curtain.

Mr. Kuchma alluded to the threat of a new dissection of Europe if integration does not proceed on a wider basis and called the potential new division a "paper curtain."

Beyond these extended gatherings of world leaders, the president continued to receive presidents and prime ministers in Kyiv as well. But he traveled less than he has in the past, due to the limits put on him by the election season.

Mr. Kuchma did manage to get to Davos, Switzerland, on January 28-30 for the annual World Economic Forum, where he held a series of discussions with other leaders, chiefly to gather support for continued financial aid from international financial organizations for the beleaguered Ukrainian economy.

In Kyiv the president hosted several international leaders in individual visits. First came Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who convinced Mr. Kuchma during a 24-hour visit on January 27-28 that Ukraine should begin the destruction of its anti-personnel mine stockpiles, on which Ukraine had been stalling.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed, arriving in Kyiv on March 21 for a seven-hour stay while on his way to Moscow. The two leaders signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen ties between the two nations and to invigorate an exchange of capital investment.

On July 8-9 German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder made his first official visit to Ukraine and ran into a Ukrainian president not ready to heed the German leader's proposal that Ukraine stop construction of two nuclear reactors near the cities of Rivne and Khmelnytskyi in favor of alternate energy sources. Mr. Kuchma told Mr. Schroeder, who was facing pressure from environmentalists in his political coalition not to support nuclear energy development, that it was too late to change plans.

The Ukrainian president, who held talks with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in Moscow during the CIS summit, also met with two Russian prime ministers. First Sergei Stepashin visited Kyiv on July 16 to discuss the 25 percent decline in trade between the two countries, and Ukraine's increasing indebtedness to Russia for oil and gas. The two sides could not agree on the exact size of the debt, however, because Ukraine insisted that it was not responsible for money owed by private Ukrainian firms, but did agree on a general guideline for repayment.

While in Kyiv Mr. Stepashin also took part in a mediation conference organized by Mr. Kuchma concerning problems in the breakaway Transdniester region of Moldova. The Ukrainian president succeeded in bringing Moldovan President Petru Lucincshi and the self-styled Transdniester leader Igor Smirnov to the negotiating table and getting them to sign a joint declaration in which they agreed to work to reunite under a single state. Differences remained on what form the reunion should take, however. Russia and Ukraine agreed to act as "guarantors of the peace."

After Prime Minister Stepashin abruptly left office in August, his replacement, Vladimir Putin, continued talks on the subject of the energy debt with Ukrainian Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko in Moscow. In September Ukraine agreed to repay - what the two sides finally determined to be a $1 billion debt - in commodities.

With the elections over, Mr. Kuchma packed his bags and began anew his travels to world capitals. On December 6 he arrived in Moscow for talks with the ailing President Yeltsin. A day later he made a stop in Paris to meet with French President Jacques Chirac, before flying to Washington on December 8 for a general session of the Kuchma-Gore Commission and meetings with the International Monetary Fund and U.S. President Bill Clinton.

U.S.-Ukraine relations remained strong in 1999, although the degree of warmth rose and fell depending on the heat applied by Washington for Ukraine to get moving on stalled reforms.

On January 17 a high-ranking U.S. delegation warned that unless Kyiv could show Washington that it had taken substantial steps down the road of economic reform and that it had made progress in resolving complaints of U.S. businessmen in the country, Ukraine would face a reduction in U.S foreign aid.

The bilateral economic assistance appropriation act required that Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright make appropriate certification before the House Appropriations Committee by February 18 for Ukraine to receive the full measure of the $195 million earmark granted in the 1999 U.S. foreign assistance budget.

Ukraine passed the test when Ms. Albright told Congress that Ukraine had made "sufficient progress." Without the positive report Ukraine could have lost $72 million.

Ukraine-U.S. cooperation continued at the highest levels of government, chiefly through the U.S.-Ukraine Binational Commission, better known as the Kuchma-Gore Commission. The group met half a dozen times throughout 1999, usually at the committee level, of which there are four. The first 1999 meeting, held in Kyiv on January 20-22, involved the Trade and Investment Committee. The U.S. delegation head, Jan Kalicki of the Department of Commerce, said the two sides had covered three topics: an action plan for trade and development; creation of a second plan to cover standards and certification, particularly in covering telecommunications and medical equipment; and issues surrounding the certification process by Secretary of State Albright, which at the time had not yet been resolved.

Similar meetings of the various committees associated with the Kuchma-Gore Commission took place regularly all year long, culminating in the December 8-9 general session chaired by Vice President Gore and President Kuchma.

U.S. assistance continued to come to Ukraine in a variety of forms, through grants and programs administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, by means of the Freedom Support Act as well as the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, known commonly as the Nunn-Lugar program.

The U.S. and Ukraine agreed to extend the Nunn-Lugar program until 2006 during a six-hour visit to Kyiv by U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen on July 31. The program provides Ukraine funds and expertise to reorganize its military and dismantle its nuclear arsenal, which in the future will include the elimination of the last of the SS-24 ICBMs and their missile silos, as well as Bear and Black Jack strategic bombers and air-launched cruise missiles.

On August 25 U.S. officials delivered $16.5 million in medical supplies and medicines to Kharkiv hospitals and clinics, the first financial investment for the Kharkiv Initiative, a project advanced by the U.S in compensation for Ukraine's agreement to withhold the sale of turbines to Iran for the development of a Russian-built nuclear reactor. The turbines were to be manufactured by Turboatom, a Kharkiv factory. The agreement between Ukraine and the U.S. was signed in the spring of 1998. Until the medical supplies were delivered, the Kharkiv Initiative mostly consisted of seminars and retraining for Ukrainian businesses, and limited exchanges of Ukrainian and U.S. businesspeople.

Other U.S.-financed development programs continued to grow in Ukraine in 1999. The Western NIS Enterprise Fund, a not-for-profit investment fund, capitalized with $150 million of U.S. taxpayer dollars in 1995, had invested some $68 million in 20 Ukrainian and Moldovan companies by September 1999.

Another U.S. government-funded operation, the Internet Access and Training Program, established several Internet access centers for alumni of U.S.-sponsored technical assistance programs. The goal of the program, which is funded through 2001, is to keep the alumni connected to their U.S. counterparts and to develop a continuing education program.

The Community Partnerships Program, a USAID-funded program that ties U.S. cities to Ukrainian counterparts to improve municipal government practices, also continued to thrive in Ukraine. In 1999, CPP, which is directed by the US.-Ukraine Foundation, saw its program grow to 18 U.S.-Ukrainian municipal partnerships.

The U.S. also supported Ukraine in its effort to become Y2K compliant. Although Kyiv did not seriously begin attacking the millennium bug problem until February - much later than most developed countries - by November a special government task force reported that the country's energy, communications and transportation systems would not collapse on January 1 because of computer failures. A team of Y2K experts from several U.S. energy producers reviewed and assisted in the compliance inspections. Nonetheless, the U.S. government decided that it is better to be safe than sorry and agreed to pay U.S. government employees travel expenses if they desired to leave Ukraine before the New Year.

The U.S. strategic partnership reached its heights quite literally when on October 10 a Ukrainian Zenit rocket lifted a Hughes Company-built communications satellite into orbit from an ocean-based launch platform. The successful launch was the tangible result of the Sea Launch project, a consortium of the U.S.-based Boeing Corporation, Ukraine's PivdenMash rocket factory and PivdenMash Design Bureau, the Norwegian company Kvaerner and the Russian firm Energia. The launch was the first ever from a mobile launch pad set in the ocean.

The two countries found it more difficult to cooperate in the NATO-led air assault on rump Yugoslavia in the Kosovo crisis.

A day after NATO began aerial bombing of Belgrade, the Serbian capital, and its environs, the Verkhovna Rada passed a resolution condemning the act as "aggression against a sovereign state" and urged the Cabinet of Ministers to break all ties with NATO and rescind Ukraine's status as a non-nuclear state. In the next month the Verkhovna Rada would attempt unsuccessfully to pass the resolution six additional times.

The Ukrainian government, which repeatedly expressed its concerns about military intervention in Yugoslavia, called on NATO to wait for a United Nations Security Council authorization.

Almost immediately after the assault started, the Ukrainian government began working on a peace initiative that it hoped to broker. Days after the bombing began, Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Minister Borys Tarasyuk, along with Minister of Defense Oleksander Kuzmuk, flew to Belgrade to offer their services as go-betweens in peace negotiations. Although Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic met with the two Ukrainian officials, he did not address their offer. Minister Tarasyuk then traveled to the European capitals of Bonn, Paris and London, where he met with the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Great Britain, respectively, regarding the Kosovo situation and Ukraine's peace proposal.

The details of the plan, announced by President Kuchma on April 14, included a simultaneous ceasefire by both sides, followed by a withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo and a return of Kosovo Albanian refugees under the direction of either the U.N. or the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He said that Ukrainian troops would take part in a peacekeeping effort, but only under the aegis of the two organizations.

The announcement came a day after the president had met in Kyiv with a delegation of European Union officials led by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and Chairman of the European Commission Hans Van den Broek.

Although criticized for its similarity to a plan put forward by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, it received high marks from several international leaders, including U.S. President Clinton.

While congratulating President Kuchma for his initiative, the U.S. president invited him to a private meeting while he was in Washington for the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of NATO, held on April 23, a celebration that turned into a conference on Kosovo.

On the eve of the summit, Foreign Affairs Minister Tarasyuk announced that Ukraine was willing to act as a neutral holding point for three U.S. servicemen captured by Serbian forces, and that Ukraine was willing to host a peace conference in Kyiv.

Ukrainian troops began preparing to take part in peacekeeping efforts after the Verkhovna Rada gave the nod on April 16. By the end of August some of the 800 troops that were to take part had arrived in Pristina, the Kosovo capital.

Ukraine's efforts in Kosovo and the Transdniester region, as well as the two successful international summits in Lviv and Yalta paid Ukraine dividends on the diplomatic front, when the country received a two-year non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council after a majority vote of the organization's General Assembly on October 14.

Ukraine had applied for the seat in 1986, after having held it in 1984-1985. Minister of Foreign Affairs Tarasyuk led the final thrust to Ukraine's success in 1999 with the help of ex-Foreign Affairs Minister Hennadii Udovenko, whose influence as a former president of the General Assembly aided the lobbying effort immensely. Ukraine finally won the seat in a competition with Slovakia in the Eastern European region after four rounds on voting.

Ukraine had less success in attaining the financial support of the international community for its effort to close the Chornobyl nuclear facility, which it had promised to do by the end of the year.

In 1999 the delays centered on Ukraine's continuing demand that the world help Ukraine finance the completion of two reactors, one each at its Khmelnytskyi and Rivne facilities. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development delayed a final decision on funding the two projects until Kyiv complied with a list of 74 demands, which included revamping the energy sector and providing evidence that the two reactors would be profitable.

The G-7 most industralized countries agreed in Denver in 1997 to help Ukraine decommission the Chornobyl facility. Although only one of the four reactors remained on line in 1999, Ukraine continued to maintain that without the completed Rivne and Khmelnytskyi reactors, Chornobyl would not close.

"The Chornobyl power plant will continue to operate until the G-7 countries meet their commitments to Ukraine," said President Kuchma.

Ukraine received additional aid on July 23 when the European Union promised $210 million more in assistance for the repair of the sarcophagus of the damaged No. 4 reactor, but Ukrainian officials maintained it was still not nearly enough.

Work finally began, however, to rebuild the crumbling concrete cover. With more than $600 million of the $758 million needed to stabilize and rebuild the shelter gathered, actual repairs began in mid-year to stabilize and strengthen the main beams that support the roof of the shelter. There are 22 planned stages to the Shelter Implementation Plan, which began in July 1998 with the onset of engineering and design studies.

Just as the year was drawing to a close, the third reactor block of Chornobyl, which had been shut down for nearly a month for repairs, was reopened, which caused another outcry in the international anti-nuclear community. Within days, after fire in a non-essential pressure line, the reactor was closed again.

In domestic politics, the country continued to fight the effects of an economy on the slide, while corruption remained as evident as ever.

The United Nations Human Development Report release on July 12 put Ukraine 91st in a rating of 174 countries on life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. Ukraine improved from the 102nd position, where it placed in 1998, but remained far below its 54th place standing in 1995. The U.N. reported Ukraine's life expectancy at 68 years of age, while its infant mortality rate stood at 18 per 1,000. The rate in the U.S. stands at six deaths per 1,000 newborns.

At the beginning of the year statistics released by the Ukrainian government showed that Ukraine's population had decreased by 205,000 to 50.09 million. The country's population has fallen steadily since 1993, when it peaked at 52 million.

Miners in the Donbas coal region and ethnic Tatars in the Crimea have been among those the hardest hit by the country's economic malaise. On June 17 the Moscow-based Segodnia newspaper reported that since the new year more than 700 suicides had been recorded in the coal-mining Donbas region, most due to depression brought on by bleak prospects for the future, which the newspaper attributed to the Ukrainian government's overhaul of the mining system in accord with IMF demands. It stated that many towns were bereft of males, who had left for Russia in search of work.

The situation became worse still on May 24 when a methane explosion rocked a Donetsk mine, killing 39 and injuring 48 others. It was another in a series of blasts that have racked the industry in recent years. Most experts considered the Zasiadko mine among the safer ones in the Donbas region, although a government expert said that it often exceeded limits on methane gas and coal dust concentrations. It was also one of the few mines that still maintained its huge output of coal and where workers received their salaries regularly.

Some 35,000 Crimean Tatars, many of whom believe they have been ignored by the Ukrainian government, made their plight known, when they gathered in the Crimean capital of Symferopol on May 17-18 to demand inclusion in Ukraine's political and economic processes, as well as simpler citizenship procedures. Since 1992 the Tatars have slowly returned to the Crimea from Uzbekistan, where they were forcibly relocated in 1944 on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

Many Tatars had threatened violence in the days leading up to the demonstration if their demands were not met. President Kuchma and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Tkachenko defused the situation when they met with demonstration leaders in the Crimean capital and agreed to an advisory board within the presidential administration to hear and resolve Crimean legal issues.

Approximately 271,000 Tatars have returned to the Crimea, where promised aid for schools, housing and sewers dried up after inflation hit in the early and mid-90s. Less than half have taken citizenship, citing insurmountable bureaucratic hurdles.

Violence and corruption, inevitably found in weak economies, continued to plague Ukraine in the last year of the millennium. Besides the grenade attack on Progressive Socialist presidential candidate Natalia Vitrenko in October (see preceding section on elections), another bomb blast shook the city center of Kyiv on June 15, destroying the main level of the Sport Hotel. The bomb, which contained nearly two kilograms of explosives, injured nine people. Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs, which made no arrests in the matter, said it believed the incident was related to an organized crime business dispute.

A report on corruption in the world compiled by Transparency International and released in mid-October identified Ukraine among the 14 most corrupt countries. The country fared worse than such notoriously corrupt states as Columbia, South Korea and India, although it did manage to place better than Russia.

Though it has announced several anti-corruption programs during the first term of President Kuchma, Ukraine has had little to show for its efforts, even though leaders of the anti-corruption effort said otherwise at an international conference on corruption. During the conference, hosted by Vice-President Gore and held in Washington in mid-February, director of Ukrainian National Bureau of Investigation, Vasyl Durdynets, stated that although the social transformations taking place make the fight against corruption difficult, some progress had been made.

He cited figures showing a large increase in the number of corruption cases filed during the past year and the astonishing number of Ministry of Internal Affairs official - some 20,000 - dismissed.

But Inna Pidluska, a representative of the Ukrainian Center for Independent Research, told the seminar that despite all the laws and extensive number of agencies created to fight corruption and organized crime, outdated laws and a totalitarian mindset make the effort difficult. In addition, she explained, an expansive and unreformed bureaucracy, and unclear laws and regulations remain fertile ground for bribery.

As the conferees continued to talk in Washington, Pavlo Lazarenko, the ex-prime minister and leader of the Hromada Party, who had come to personify corruption in Ukraine, landed in New York to ask for political asylum.

Mr. Lazarenko had been arrested in Basel, Switzerland, on December 3, 1998, after authorities detained him for attempting to enter the country with a Panamanian passport, and was subsequently charged with 21 counts of money laundering before being freed on $3 million bond.

On February 17 the Verkhovna Rada voted to strip Mr. Lazarenko of his immunity from criminal prosecution, which all national deputies carry. The vote cleared the way for him to face prosecution on domestic charges of embezzlement and concealing foreign income. Two days before the vote, however, Mr. Lazarenko fled Ukraine for Greece, where he issued a statement that he was seeking medical attention for a heart ailment. He then proceeded to the United States, where he was detained by immigration officials for attempting to enter the country without a valid visa.

On February 24 he met with immigration officials and requested asylum in the U.S. on the grounds that he had a credible fear of returning to Ukraine, where he said he would be politically persecuted for his opposition to the Kuchma government.

Ukrainian officials asked the U.S. to hand Mr. Lazarenko over to them on February 21, but because the two countries do not have an extradition treaty the request was never heeded.

Just more than a week later Swiss authorities postponed a hearing date that had been scheduled in the Lazarenko case because of developments in the U.S.

On March 4, Mr. Lazarenko's attorney, James Mayock, told The Weekly that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service had determined that his client had a "credible fear" of political persecution if he returned home and that further hearings would determine whether he would be granted asylum.

The Ukrainian politician received permission to have his case moved to San Francisco on March 12 to be closer to his family. During the summer, the U.S. press reported that Mr. Lazarenko had purchased an 18-acre estate in the San Francisco area worth some $7 million, once owned by the comedian and actor Eddie Murphy, which had a separate helicopter landing pad and five swimming pools.

In mid-April Swiss authorities issued a formal warrant for the arrest of Mr. Lazarenko and began extradition proceedings with the U.S.

Throughout the summer and autumn, the Lazarenko case seemingly stood still. Hearings scheduled for mid-June and the end of October were delayed, as U.S. officials worked with Swiss authorities on the terms of an extradition warrant, which the U.S. said superseded Mr. Lazarenko's asylum request. However, on June 18, the U.S. arrested Petro Kirichenko, an associate of Mr. Lazarenko, at his home in northern California in connection with the Swiss case.

Meanwhile, on September 3, Mr. Lazarenko issued a letter from the detention facility in the Bay area where he was being held to the Verkhovna Rada. He stated that if national deputies agreed to remove wording that gives consent for his arrest in the resolution that it approved denying him criminal immunity, he was ready to return to Ukraine "for the sake of establishing the truth." The Parliament has yet to act on the request.

A week later Swiss officials announced that they had frozen 20 bank accounts allegedly connected to Mr. Lazarenko.

On December 1, with no movement on Mr. Lazarenko's legal standing in the U.S. and the extradition request by the Swiss still in progress, Tamara Lazarenko, the wife of the beleaguered national deputy, returned to Kyiv. She said she had come back to take care of Mr. Lazarenko's sick mother and to live there once again. However, she quickly discovered that she would have to find other living accommodations because the Procurator General's Office had confiscated her Kyiv apartment.

The prime minister who replaced Mr. Lazarenko in office, Mr. Pustovoitenko, continued in 1999 to bring a degree of stability to the office, which had changed hands yearly since President Kuchma was first elected. He celebrated his second year in the post in September, but not before overcoming a determined effort by the Communist majority in the Verkhovna Rada to oust him.

Communist leader Petro Symonenko began the attack against the prime minister on July 16 when he declared before a general session of the Verkhovna Rada that "the Cabinet [of Ministers] continues to build a criminal-predatory society with immoral and cruel rules of the game imposed by international financial circles." The Communists, however, failed to garner the 226 votes needed to dismiss the prime minister and his Cabinet.

After Mr. Kuchma's second inauguration on November 30, the president announced that he had nominated Mr. Pustovoitenko to lead a new Ukrainian government. On December 14, however, the Verkhovna Rada failed to approve the nomination. Three days later Mr. Kuchma nominated Viktor Yuschenko, chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, for the post.

Ukraine's record on human rights, used by Mr. Lazarenko in making his asylum request, continued to be criticized by international organizations and governments in 1999. Determinations made regarding the presidential elections aside, Ukraine's commitment to human rights was questioned by the U.S. State Department, the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly and Amnesty International in separate reports.

A February 26 U.S. State Department report found "significant restrictions" in freedom of association and limitations on non-native religious groups; "some" limits on freedom of movement; and other problems such as restrictive laws governing political parties, violence against women and children, trafficking and discrimination against women. It criticized the corruption in the country and the heavy-handed tactics of law-enforcement agencies against politicians, journalists and businessmen.

The Council of Europe also made less than laudatory statements on human rights in Ukraine, particularly in regards to its refusal to ban the death penalty, which Ukraine had promised to do by late 1998 as a condition for taking membership in PACE. A PACE delegation that visited Kyiv on May 20 said that if Ukraine did not change its law on capital punishment it would face censure in January 2000 and eventual ouster.

Amnesty International also called on Kyiv to abolish the death penalty in a statement it released on June 24. But Ukrainian national deputies, while continuing to emphasize that Ukraine had implemented a moratorium on the death penalty a year ago, said no public support existed for a ban, and that the chances for such a law passing were nil in an election year.

But the report that most seemed to irk President Kuchma was one in which he was listed among the top 10 "enemies of the press." The president criticized the report, released on May 3, for inaccuracies and said he would file a suit in international court against the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which issued it. The CPJ listed Mr. Kuchma in sixth position for "running roughshod over expressions of opposition" and "his tacit acceptance of violence against the press," which has resulted in bombings, assaults on journalists and "a climate of fear and self-censorship."

Even with all the problems that Ukraine continued to face in 1999, without a doubt the largest political and social tragedy of the year was the death of Vyacheslav Chornovil. The long-time leader of Rukh, who stood at the forefront of the movement for democracy and statehood for nearly 35 years, died in a tragic car accident on March 26 outside Kyiv. The incident brought cries of political assassination from right-center democratic forces, but no one has yet to substantiate the allegations. Minister of Internal Affairs Yurii Kravchenko said within days of the death that law enforcement officials were investigating the case as a tragic accident.

The funeral for Mr. Chornovil, held on March 29 and attended by some 50,000 people, was widely considered the largest outpouring of grief for any Ukrainian public figure ever. After a public viewing at the Teachers Building and a funeral service at St. Volodymyr's Sobor, Mr. Chornovil's body was interred at the historic Baikove Cemetery, alongside many of Ukraine's other historic figures.

"History will show that without him today's independent Ukraine would not have been possible," said Mykhailo Horyn, a former fellow dissident and a current political leader.

Mr. Chornovil's death occurred just as the party he led for six years was undergoing the biggest crisis of its 10-year existence. It began on February 17 when the Rukh faction in the Verkhovna Rada voted to depose Mr. Chornovil as its leader, alleging that his authoritarian ways and abuse of party procedures and statutes were hurting the organization. Three days later came a proposal from Rukh's Central Leadership, controlled largely by that faction. Then, on February 28, a quickly called extraordinary Congress of Rukh formalized Mr. Chornovil's removal as the head of both the faction and the party, and elected National Deputy Yurii Kostenko to replace him.

Mr. Chornovil, however, called his own party congress on May 7, which gave him a vote of confidence and affirmed that he should continue to lead the Rukh Party. The end result was two Rukh parties, both claiming that only theirs was the legitimate one.

As the two parties bitterly bickered over who was at fault and whose was the real Rukh, a situation that made Mr. Chornovil's funeral sadder still, the Ministry of Justice attempted to sort out the affair. Less than a month after the split it ruled that it would recognize only the Rukh Party that stayed with Mr. Chornovil, now headed by Hennadii Udovenko. The Kostenko-led Rukh lost an appeal filed with the Kyiv Oblast Court, which rejected Mr. Kostenko's claim that his Constitutional right to act as the leader of the Rukh Party had been abrogated by the Ministry of Justice ruling. It determined that he had no legal standing to file such an appeal. Ukraine's Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling on June 30.

The Rukh Party split - occuring half a year before it commemorated 10 years as the vanguard of Ukrainian democracy - made for uneasy celebrations on September 8-10. Reflecting both the disappointment of Ukrainians and the continued bitterness and uncertainty within the two parties' political organizations after the split, the observances were generally muted and the rhetoric more inflammatory than congratulatory.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 26, 1999, No. 52, Vol. LXVII

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