2001: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

On the domestic front: paralyzed by scandal

On the domestic front in Ukraine, the only story for at least the first three months of 2001 was the mystery surrounding the case of the missing and presumably murdered Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze (see separate section on the Gongadze case), who was the founder of the Internet newspaper Ukrainska Pravda. It dominated most domestic politics in Ukraine, perhaps with the exception of fiscal matters, and for a time paralyzed official Kyiv for all practical purposes.

The Gongadze affair and a parallel scandal concerning a series of digital recordings allegedly made in President Leonid Kuchma's office by Maj. Mykola Melnychenko, a presidential bodyguard, which seemed to implicated the head of state and his top officials in the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze, threatened to force them from office.

In the end it resulted in the dismissal of several highly placed law enforcement officials, including Leonid Derkach, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine, and his subordinate, Volodymyr Shepel, who headed the presidential security detail, both of whom were fired on February 10. Mr. Derkach was seen by political experts to be a sacrificial lamb thrown to the anti-Kuchma forces to satiate them, which did not happen. He was considered one of the key players in the Gongadze investigation who either badly bumbled the investigation or poorly covered up official involvement. Mr. Shepel was the head of the detail to which Mr. Melnychenko belonged.

Volodymyr Radchenko, who earlier had held the position of head of the Security Service of Ukraine, was immediately named to replace Mr. Derkach.

Another key law enforcement official, Minister of Internal Affairs Yurii Kravchenko, the longest serving minister in the Kuchma administration and a close confidante of the president, hung on for just over a month longer before receiving his walking papers on March 26. President Kuchma had quashed rumors of the dismissal that had flown about for nine days before finally telling reporters that he had accepted Mr. Kravchenko's resignation.

"Mr. Kravchenko several times had expressed his desire to resign," explained Mr. Kuchma, who added that his top cop would eventually get another post in the government. Coincidentally or not, the demonstrations and protests over the Gongadze affair began to dissipate with the removal of Mr. Kravchenko.

Yurii Smirnov, a subordinate, replaced Mr. Kravchenko, and the new minister soon had his own problems in the Gongadze matter after he told reporters on May 16 that the Gongadze case had been solved and the murderers identified. Unfortunately, as he explained, the killers were also dead.

Several days later, after taking much heat for his comments, Mr. Smirnov backpedaled and said that he had not been making an official statement but merely putting forward a personal opinion, which was not grounded in fact.

A third leading law enforcement official, the powerful Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko, survived in his post on February 22 after the Verkhovna Rada, in five separate votes, failed to achieve the majority needed to oust him.

The Gongadze affair and the tape scandal peaked on March 9 when a series of violent mass demonstrations rocked Kyiv on the anniversary of the birthday of the country's national bard, Taras Shevchenko. The violence, in which militia twice clashed with protesters calling for the resignation of President Kuchma, first in the morning at Shevchenko Park, where the president had been scheduled to lay flowers to the monument there, and then later that afternoon before the Presidential Administration Building. The two confrontations, which included a Molotov cocktail attack against militia officers answered with tear gas, left 35 militia officers and 60 demonstrators hospitalized. That evening law enforcement officials conducted sweeps of the offices of opposition political organizations and of trains leaving the city and arrested 200, mostly young people, including the leader of the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization (UNA-UNSO) political organization.

The March 9 incidents were the culmination of three months of almost weekly demonstrations, which included the pitching of two tent cities, one on Independence Square and the other astride it. Law enforcement officials destroyed both days after they were constructed. At one point young members of a heretofore-unknown political group swept down on one camp, pulling up tent stakes and knocking down Ukrainian flags. Many witnesses said the attackers were students from the Internal Affairs Ministry academy in Kyiv tasked with the job.

As the anti-Kuchma movement grew, several support organizations developed. Generally they were composed of the same members and the same political organizations. Both the Ukraine Without Kuchma organization and the Forum for National Salvation were led by representatives of the Socialist Party of Oleksander Moroz, and included the Sobor Party, the Batkivschyna Party, UNA-UNSO and the Schyt Batkivschyny political organization.

The anti-Kuchma forces were adept at gathering up to 10,000 or so demonstrators in Kyiv for mass protests, but they failed to ignite a nationwide movement and never found the support to seriously threaten the presidency of Mr. Kuchma after March 9.

With the Gongadze affair still in the political undercurrent, although off the front pages of the news, the Labor Ukraine Party, which is politically close to the president and includes the president's son-in-law in its leadership, hired Kroll Associates, a private U.S. detective firm, to investigate the crime as well as the Melnychenko tapes. The detective agency announced on September 25 that it could find no evidence to suggest a link between President Kuchma and the Internet journalist.

"There is no conclusive evidence to show that President Kuchma ordered or was otherwise involved in the murder of Heorhii Gongadze," stated the 50-page report. It also found that Mr. Melnychenko could not have acted alone in producing the tapes.

The Procurator General's Office released the results of its own investigation into the complicity of Mr. Kuchma, his Chief of Staff Volodymyr Lytvyn and ex-Minister of Internal Affairs Kravchenko, and found all three beyond reproach in the matter. Assistant Procurator General Oleksii Bahanets said in a letter to the dead journalist's mother, Lesia, that his agency had reviewed the Melnychenko tape recordings and determined that the allegations were false.

A good example of how everything on the political scene in the first half of the year was viewed through the prism of the Gongadze affair was the series of events surrounding Yulia Tymoshenko, the controversial business tycoon-turned-politician who had been closely associated with Pavlo Lazarenko before he fled to the United States, where he was arrested and now awaits trial on money laundering charges.

Ms. Tymoshenko held the post of first vice prime minister in the government of Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko before being dismissed by President Kuchma on January 19 in connection with criminal charges of smuggling, forgery and tax evasion, which the Procurator General's Office had leveled against her. While President Kuchma said that his prime minister had concurred in the decision, Mr. Yuschenko never publicly accepted the arrest and took five days to sign the order.

The firing came after an investigation was begun on January 5 into Ms. Tymoshenko's activities while she was chairman of United Energy Systems, a gas and oil consortium that was closely associated with Mr. Lazarenko. Ms. Tymoshenko, who as vice prime minister had done much to reform the energy sector and to increase tax revenues, was a controversial choice for the post and was never looked upon kindly by the president in her 13 months in office.

Ms. Tymoshenko became closely involved in the effort to remove Mr. Kuchma from office and was a leading founder of the Forum for National Salvation, actions that only increased the president's distrust of her as the second in command of the government.

She was arrested and jailed on February 13 on charges that she offered Mr. Lazarenko more than $80 million in bribes while he was prime minister, allegations that Oleksander Turchynov, her political colleague in the Batkivschyna Party she leads, categorically denied. Her husband, who headed United Energy Systems after Ms. Tymoshenko entered politics, had been arrested in September on charges of financial improprieties.

Ms. Tymoshenko vowed to take her case to the Supreme Court to protest what she considered an illegal arrest, based on her assertion that she was taken from her sick bed to prison.

She was released on March 27 after six weeks of incarceration when a local judge ruled that prosecutors had given insufficient substantiation for the need to keep her in jail. While prosecutors appealed the decision, they reassigned Ms. Tymoshenko to house arrest.

Ms. Tymoshenko immediately entered a hospital to be treated for an ulcer, of which she had complained in jail. She received more good news on April 2 when Ukraine's Supreme Court ordered her released from all detention and/or guard. The highest criminal court in Ukraine ruled that the decision to incarcerate Ms. Tymoshenko was unconstitutional because it had been made in a secretive and illegal manner. The final ruling came after the prosecutor's office had successfully appealed the initial ruling, which had resulted in a guard being place outside Ms. Tymoshenko's hospital room.

Eventually all charges against Ms. Tymoshenko were dropped for insufficient evidence. By the end of the year she had redirected her political efforts into a Tymoshenko political bloc and was preparing for March 2002 parliamentary elections.

Mr. Yuschenko, who had never fully accepted Ms. Tymoshenko's dismissal, followed his first vice prime minister out of office just over three months later, on April 26.

The storm cloud over Mr. Yuschenko initially gathered earlier in the year when Labor Ukraine leader Serhii Tyhypko began to press the prime minister to reorganize his Cabinet of Ministers into a coalition government, which Mr. Yuschenko resisted.

The prime minister, who had great success in implementing long-delayed economic reforms, making the government more transparent and in stimulating economic growth, had made enemies by stepping on the toes of many a business oligarch as he reorganized the energy sector and brought it out of the shadows. He was also criticized for moving ahead with political decisions without sufficient consensus and with failing to cooperate with the Parliament.

On April 19 the Parliament left his government hanging by a thread after it voted to support a resolution initiated by the Communist faction criticizing its performance in 2000. The lawmakers scheduled a motion of no confidence for April 26, an action that became a fait accompli after President Kuchma failed to back his prime minister 100 percent, and instead said that Mr. Yuschenko's problem was that he had not learned to work with the Verkhovna Rada and would have to do so quickly or lose his job. The prime minister did not discover the compromise that would have saved his government and was removed on April 26 as an unlikely coalition of Communists and pro-business parties led by Labor Ukraine joined to oust him in a 263-69 vote - the first time a head of government in Ukraine had been ousted in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.

As he left the Verkhovna Rada building, a regular citizen again after leading the government for 16 months, Mr. Yuschenko was greeted by some 15,000 supporters chanting, "Yuschenko, Yuschenko!" He told the crowd that he was not embarrassed with what he had accomplished during his time in office.

"A year ago I had said we would move strongly on a program of national well-being. I said that I would not be embarrassed when the end came and to face the nation. Today that time has come," explained Mr. Yuschenko, whose government oversaw a 6 percent growth in the economy during 2000, the first ever in independent Ukraine.

Mr. Yuschenko agreed to stay on as head of a caretaker government while a replacement who could be approved by the Verkhovna Rada was sought. It took a month of extensive consultations with political and parliamentary leaders and the vetting of several candidates before President Kuchma announced on May 21 that he had nominated Anatolii Kinakh, the leader of the League of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, who had briefly been first vice prime minister in the last days of the government of Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko.

The Verkhovna Rada easily approved Mr. Kinakh on May 29, but his confirmation was overshadowed by an executive order issued by President Kuchma the same day, which instituted a system of state secretaries in the Cabinet of Ministers.

In what the presidential administration called administrative reform, Mr. Kuchma ordered that a position be established a notch below the top in all the ministries, including the office of prime minister. These presidential appointees named to five-year terms would be responsible for the day-to-day administration of the office. President Kuchma called it a much-needed structural change within the executive branch to give some administrative stability to the government.

"Governments will come and go, but stability will remain," explained Mr. Kuchma. Critics of the move said that now the president's men would control all the departments of the government, which would leave the ministers and the prime minister ineffective political puppets.

Prime Minister Kinakh maintained most of the policies instituted by his predecessor, even though he slowed the process of reforms, and the hot Ukrainian economy continued to sizzle even as the world economy cooled. By mid-year the economy was growing at about 10 percent and would end the year showing a 9 percent growth in GDP. Just as important, inflation remained negligible, reaching only about 5 percent for the year.

Foreign investment also showed some strength in 2001, in the first six months recording a 1.6-fold increase over the same period of the previous year, bringing it to a total of $4.3 million, which still remained paltry when compared to Poland, which had nearly $80 million in foreign investment by the same time.

Leading the list of foreign investors in Ukraine were the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain and Russia.

Ukraine's agricultural sector, which responded positively to a presidential decree on structural reform within the sector at the end of 2000, led the movement of Ukraine's economy upward. The sector had its best year in more than a decade as well as its biggest grain harvest, which reached 38 million tons.

Farmers were given another boost when the long-awaited Land Code was approved on October 25 after a tumultuous political battle on the Verkhovna Rada floor that even turned physical when Communists battled those supporting the new land code before the final vote.

After successfully blocking a first attempt at a vote on October 18, the Communists did all in their power to repeat the success on October 25, but this time the parliamentary leadership was determined to bring the issue to a close.

First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk told the session that "We will vote on this bill today, one way or another," which would later be grounds for the leftist forces to appeal to the Constitutional Court to review the legality of the procedures used.

The Communists, however, were inclined to use whatever means necessary to block the vote, and they did, including stealing voting ballots and urns prior to a written vote, which was declared after a floor vote was blocked when someone disconnected the voting system. A vote was finally tallied using an unorthodox "signature vote" during which national deputies signed their names under a "yea" or "nay" category.

The historic Land Code, which was approved with 232 votes supporting it, legalized the private ownership of land with all generally associated rights of investiture and established January 1, 2005, as the moment when the sale of land would become legal.

The law, however, would not allow for the sale of more than 100 hectares until 2010. Until that time foreigners would be barred from taking part in land transactions.

Most experts agreed that the Parliament would need to pass another 30 to 35 laws in support of the new code to make it effective, including laws on mortgage transactions and the creation of a land bank.

This Verkhovna Rada of 2001 may well be remembered as the "Rada of Codes," because it managed to rework and approve several other legal codes, including the Criminal Code and Civil Code.

The new set of laws on criminal offenses was approved by the Verkhovna Rada in April and signed into law by President Kuchma on May 21. Most notably, it encoded a life term as the severest punishment that could be meted out for a criminal infraction and abolished the death penalty. It also introduced "public work" as an acceptable form of punishment for some criminal offenses. Libel and slander became non-criminal offenses with the new code.

The Parliament approved the final two books of the six-book Civil Code on November 29, the same day it was passing a commercial code for the country.

Another notable event on the legal front, which brought down another Soviet legal tradition, occurred on November 20 when the Constitutional Court struck down a system of domestic residency registration as a violation of an individual's right of free movement.

The old law, one of the last legacies of the Soviet system still in place in contemporary Ukraine, required individuals to receive approval from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to move their place of residence. The "propyska" system, which was leniently enforced in independent Ukraine, had given Soviet authorities the ability to control where a person worked, where he was educated and how he lived. It proved particularly effective in controlling the lives of persons perceived as dangerous to the well-being of the state. The ruling rejected a Cabinet of Ministers resolution from October 10, 1994, which had continued to give the system its authority in the new Ukrainian state.

The Supreme Court ruling was the second action by a branch of government in 2001 taken to end the system. On June 20 President Kuchma had instructed the government to prepare a set of proposals for abolishing the system by October 1.

The International Monetary Fund, which had withheld several credit tranches of the Extended Fund Facility agreement to Ukraine over a perceived lack of movement on reforms, looked positively on the latest moves. It also favorably assessed the dynamic economic indicators of the first half of 2001 and decided on September 20 that Ukraine should receive another EFF tranche, this one in the amount of $375 million. The World Bank, following the IMF's lead, approved a disbursement of $250 million from a separate credit arrangement it had with Ukraine.

The renewal of the EFF with the IMF was part of a requirement put forth by the Paris Club of creditors to consider a restructuring of Ukraine's $580 million debt. The first part of the restructuring occurred on December 6, when Germany agreed to reschedule loan payments on $245 million owed by Kyiv to Berlin.

The World Bank also announced the successful completion of its financial sector adjustment program, which indicated the successful completion of an initial stage of banking reform. That did not mean, however, that Ukraine's banking system was in good shape. On the contrary, the World Bank issued a report on October 23 that recommended stiffer regulation of Ukraine's banks and financial institutions to strengthen the industry and reduce the number of non-competitive banks, as well as a process of consolidation that would allow it to begin to better influence the development of Ukraine's economy.

Alan Roe, a World Bank official who was editor of the project, said that Ukraine should put forth more stringent requirements that would cause the least competitive banks to fail and allow the leanest ones to grow. He said that initially the National Bank of Ukraine needed to raise the minimum capital requirement it required of the country's commercial lenders. He called on the NBU to more stringently uphold what at times have been lax financial requirements.

Mr. Roe said that the problem in Ukraine's financial sector was largerly due to the many cash-based transactions that continued to dominate the system. He also said that banks needed to develop more objective and stringent credit criteria. He blamed the high rate of loan defaults for the high interest rates Ukraine's commercial banks demand from their customers.

Counting of a different kind also came to the forefront in Ukraine as the year ended, and the country began its first-ever census as an independent state on December 5. It was the first census in 11 years, as the previous one was conducted in 1989, when the country was still under Soviet domination. The 1989 census reported a population of 51.45 million. State Committee of Statistics officials warned that the 2001 census could show an even smaller population than the current official figure of 48.9 million.

"In censuses that have been taken in other CIS states, there is an error on population estimates of about 5 percent," said Oleksander Osaulenko, the head of the State Committee on Statistics, which oversaw the census.

During the official head count, which lasted until December 14, 250,000 census-takers visited each household in the country to gather a variety of demographic information, including place of residency, age, number of children, education, place of employment and language.

It was the last item that brought controversy to what should have been a mundane affair. On December 5 National Deputy Pavlo Movchan, president of the Prosvita Ukrainian Language Society, accused the organizers of the national census of a pro-Russian tilt in the wording of the questions on language, which he said were constructed to evoke a response of "Russian" at some point.

"The way the questions on language are structured, any way you look at it, the result can only be that Russian is spoken by all," explained Mr. Movchan.

The day before, the Russia Bloc, a little known political organization, distributed flyers and brochures in many of Ukraine's major cities, calling on people to accent their Russian ethnicity and/or Russian language usage - an action that Mr. Movchan called anti-constitutional.

The politics of language, always a sensitive issue here, may have been responsible for the fall of one of Ukraine's most powerful politicians, as well. On December 13 the Verkhovna Rada removed First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk from his post in a surprise vote, with both wings of the political spectrum joining to successfully dislodge the powerful leader of the Social Democratic Party (United).

Afterwards, there was little disagreement that the prominent business mogul was deposed as retribution for several political moves he had helped organize, including the removal of Oleksander Tkachenko as the leader of the Parliament in the early part of 2000, which the left had not forgotten, and the sacking of Prime Minister Yuschenko, which the right could not forgive. While leftist forces also mentioned Mr. Medvedchuk's successful strong-armed push for a new Land Code as further reason for his removal, the right listed his sponsorship of a bill strengthening minority (read: Russian) language rights as another mark against him.

Many believed the language bill was meant to draw support from the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine to Mr. Medvedchuk's SDPU as the election season began.

The March 2002 elections to Parliament increasingly came to the forefront of Ukrainian politics as 2001 drew to an end. A battle between the president and the Verkhovna Rada over what form the elections would take - majoritarian, proportional or some combination of the two - continued for most of the year, with the president winning a victory of sorts when the lawmakers acquiesced to a 50-50 mixed system after the president vetoed other suggestions four times.

In the system, which is the same as the one currently in place, 50 percent of the 450 seats in the Parliament will be filled by national deputies elected from 225 representational districts, while the other 225 seats will be filled by political parties, based on the percentage of the vote they gain in the March 31 elections, to be split-up by those parties that gather at least 4 percent of the popular vote.

A battle also occurred over how long the campaign season should officially last, with the president successfully holding out for a shorter 90-day season, while the lawmakers wanted 180 days, the length of the campaign prior to the 1998 vote.

The signing of the new elections law during the first week of November roughly coincided with the beginning of many a campaign, not only because of the obvious symbolism, but because many politicians had already geared their efforts to a 180-day run and were not willing to change strategies and schedules.

The Committee of Ukrainian Voters, which announced in September that it would monitor the political campaigns and the elections as it has in the past years, said that its fieldworkers had already recorded campaign violations.

Among those noted were such improprieties as illegal gift-giving in the form of products and services to voters, and the use of pressure tactics by factory managers and farm directors upon workers to join one or another party.

Much preparation for the elections was taking place within political parties even before the fall. On June 9, as lawmakers prepared for summer recess, the two Rukh parties - the National Rukh of Ukraine and the Ukrainian National Rukh - which had split in 1998 just days prior to the death of longtime leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, announced they would reunite after the elections and would form an election bloc for the run-off.

A little more than a month later, on July 15, ex-Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko told reporters while sitting atop the highest peak in Ukraine, Mount Hoverlia in the Carpathian Mountains, that he would head an election bloc consisting of the two Rukhs, the Reform and Order Party and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. The bloc was formally registered in August. Before the end of the year, the Liberal Party also had joined the coalition, as had half a dozen more minor parties.

Several days later, leaders of several pro-presidential political parties, commonly regarded as the power bases of several of Ukraine's business oligarchs, announced they would unite for the elections in what eventually was called the For a United Ukraine bloc. The group included Serhii Tyhypko of the Labor Ukraine Party; Mykola Azarov, the current head of the Tax Administration and leader of the Regions of Ukraine Party; Mykhailo Hladii, former vice prime minister and chairman of the Agricultural Party; and ex-Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko, currently the minister of transportation, who leads the National Democratic Party.

The formation of these two powerful election blocs followed the creation of the most controversial one, headed by Yulia Tymoshenko and the group of political figures and parties that had unsuccessfully agitated in the first part of the year for the removal of President Kuchma in connection with his alleged abuses of office with regard to the Gongadze affair.

Ms. Tymoshenko announced the formation of the Forum for National Salvation bloc on July 10, which compromised her Batkivschyna party along with Anatolii Matvienko's Sobor Party and Lev Lukianenko's Republican Party. In December, the Conservative Republican Party of Stefan Khmara officially hooked up with the bloc, as did several more minor political organizations. By November the election bloc had changed its name to the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc to better take advantage of her popularity and name recognition among certain segments of society.

Opinion polls issued in early October by two respected polling organizations, Democratic Initiatives and the Center for Social Monitoring/Ukrainian Institute for Social Research, found that up to five parties and three election blocs had the potential to gather the 4 percent vote needed to win party seats in the Verkhovna Rada. The Communist Party led all vote-getters with 19 percent and 21 percent, respectively, in the two polls when only political parties were considered, but when parties and blocs were thrown together the Communists' popularity shrank to 17.2 percent. Mr. Yuschenko's election coalition came in a strong second at 16.5 percent.

Other parties and blocs that had a sufficient amount of support with the public to gain seats in the next Parliament included the For a United Ukraine bloc and the Socialist bloc, while political parties weighing in were the Social Democratic Party (United), the Green Party and the Batkivschyna Party.

While the Gongadze affair and the tape scandal made up a good portion of the bad news that Ukrainians had to endure in 2001, there were other unforeseen tragedies that marked the calendar, these more in line with the disasters that occur in every country, every year in one way or another. And just like everywhere else there were also commemorations, celebrations and anniversaries to balance things out.

First the difficult moments.

One tragedy reminded Ukrainians that persecution of journalists was not limited to the Gongadze affair. Just as the case of the missing Internet journalist began to fade from the front pages of newspapers, another Ukrainian news correspondent, this one a director of a local television station in the eastern Donetsk region, grabbed headlines. Two unidentified assailants, who used baseball bats to club him to death, murdered Ihor Aleksandrov on the morning of July 3 at the entrance to his place of work.

Mr. Aleksandrov was a controversial reporter and many suspect that he was killed because of a television program aired by his station in which two militia officers spoke of corruption within the ranks of the local state militia.

International media-watch organizations, such as Reporters without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, along with Verkhovna Rada lawmakers, demanded a speedy and transparent investigation. In early December the local procurator announced that a person, whom he did not name, had been arrested for the slaying. The procurator's office explained that the murderer, an alcoholic sociopath who had accepted a contract for murder, had mistakenly identified Mr. Aleksandrov as his target.

Mr. Aleksandrov became the 12th journalist to die in Ukraine under mysterious circumstances in 10 years. The other 11, including Mr. Gongadze, were memorialized with a monument erected before the offices of the UNIAN news agency on May 21. Two days later it had disappeared from its concrete base and no trace of it has been discovered since.

One of the most difficult moments for Ukraine occurred in the days after October 4, when a TU-154 commercial jetliner on a flight from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk fell from the sky into the Black Sea off the coast of Georgia (see foreign policy section). What made the incident all the more painful and frightening for all was that it occurred only weeks after the terrorist attack on the United States which led to conjecture that it may have been similarly perpetrated.

That same day, however, as Ukraine's Air Defense Forces were holding live-fire exercises on the Crimean shore, the U.S. State Department issued a statement in which it reported that one of its space satellites had observed a missile flying from the direction of the Crimea and exploding near the airliner.

At first Ukraine categorically refused to accept blame, but evidence mounted that one of its test missiles had indeed gone astray and flew 250 kilometers off course when its radar had locked on to the ill-fated plane. On October 24 President Kuchma went on national television to announce that Ukraine would accept all responsibility for the incident and to apologize to the Russians and Israelis affected by the tragedy.

Mr. Kuchma accepted the resignation of his trusted Minister of Defense Oleksander Kuzmuk in connection with the debacle and replaced him with the head of the General Staff of Ukraine's Armed Forces, Gen. Volodymyr Shkidchenko.

Another explosion, a type that occurs too often in the mining regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, sent 34 miners to their deaths on August 19 when a concentration of methane gas in the Zasiadko mine in Donetsk spontaneously ignited. For the Zasiadko mine, one of the country's most productive, it was not the first time miners had died. Fifty men had succumbed in May 1999 when a similar explosion rocked the area.

The latest blast occurred nearly a mile below the surface, a depth at which conditions are extremely difficult to control. It caused President Kuchma to state: "We don't need the coal if it carries that kind of price."

Subsequently President Kuchma signed an executive order banning mining at a depth below 1,000 meters.

While the eastern part of the country had bad mines to contend with, the western part had to deal with a natural disaster, again. On March 5 the Zakarpattia region experienced renewed flooding after torrential rains and melting snow from the Carpathian Mountains again engorged the Tysa River, destroying its dams and overflowing its banks.

It was the second time in two years the river was responsible for major flooding in the area. This time it took 1,200 buildings with it and flooded another 30,000, while affecting 240 population centers in two days of anguish for the region's inhabitants. Nearly 15,000 people were evacuated or left homeless.

Among the many commemorations Ukrainians witnessed in 2001, one was for a tragedy that reached a resolution of sorts. On April 26 Ukraine commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster just over five months after the nuclear power complex had finally been de-activated and mothballed.

While the closure of the station removed much international and domestic pressure, many feared that it would also remove the earnestness felt by the West in attending to the needs of Ukraine in dealing with the continuing problems associated with the disaster. Many in the Ukrainian government believed the matter of clean-up operations around the plant, and removal and reprocessing of the used and unused nuclear fuel rods, as well as the more acute problems felt by the dispossessed Chornobyl workers thus far had been inadequately addressed by the world community.

While President Kuchma voiced his displeasure with the pace of the efforts to resolve Chornobyl-related problems during a visit to the site on April 9, experts and representatives of Western government reiterated during an international conference in Kyiv on the eve of the anniversary date that they would not forget either Ukraine or Chornobyl.

"The resettled population needs long-term economic support. International help is still needed," said European Commission General Secretary Andre von Hauerben.

A poignant event that allowed a different sort of closure for those involved in another sad chapter in Soviet Ukrainian history was the 25th anniversary of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, celebrated in Kyiv on November 9. In the 1970s and 1980s its members were persecuted by the Soviet Union for their key role in exposing Soviet human rights irregularities, while being heralded by much of the rest of the globe for their principled stance.

Of the 41 people who belonged to the organization, 39 spent a grand total of 550 years in the concentration camps of the Soviet gulag or in psychiatric wards. Four others died in the camps, while one individual committed suicide rather than face the torture the camps meted out.

Fourteen former members were on hand for the commemorations, including one of its youngest members, Vasyl Ovsienko, who underscored the importance of the group to the eventual demise of the Soviet Union.

"Without the Helsinki Group there would have been no independent Ukraine. U.S. military, economic and political pressure came in response to light shed by the Helsinki Group. We helped to destroy the Soviet Union," explained Mr. Ovsienko.

Ukrainians commemorated another key date of yet a third tragic event in Ukrainian history on September 29 at Babyn Yar in Kyiv, where 60 years earlier German Nazi soldiers had murdered some 30,000 civilians, among them Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Poles and Ukrainians, during several days of mass slayings.

President Kuchma along with Jewish community leaders and Ukrainian government officials were present at the event, during which several parallels were drawn between German terror and the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11.

"The tragedy of Babyn Yar has become an eternal page in the dark annals of genocide - an extreme form of terrorism brought to a state level," explained Mr. Kuchma, who also unveiled a new memorial, this one dedicated to the children who perished in the ravine.

Among the commemorations there were celebrations as well, not the least of which was the long-awaited five-day visit of Pope John Paul II to Ukraine on June 23-27 - the first time the successor to St. Peter and the head of the Vatican came on an official call to this country. The pope, who spoke mostly Ukrainian during his stay in Kyiv and Lviv, was greeted by millions of people, and not only Ukrainians, but also Russians, Belarusians, Poles and Kazaks (see section on Churches).

The papal visit drew controversy when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate, which represents the Kyiv branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, vocally protested the visit. Muted celebrations of the papal visit during the Kyiv portion of the visit were attributed to pressure put on the Ukrainian government by that Church.

The UOC - Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church held their own celebrations, after the pope left, to commemorate the 950th anniversary of one of the oldest and holiest shrines in Orthodoxy, the Monastery of the Caves, or Pecherska Lavra. Representatives of most of the Churches of world Orthodoxy descended on Kyiv for the August 28 celebrations of the religious center, which is held by the UOC-MP. Two other Ukrainian Orthodox confessions were not invited, however. The ROC did not extend invitations to either the UOC-Kyiv Patriarchate or the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

The visit by Pope John Paul II opened a summer of celebrations in Kyiv and Ukraine, which culminated on August 24 when the country celebrated 10 years of independence with a parade along the capital's main thoroughfare attended by tens of thousands of Ukrainians, along with President Kuchma and three international guests, Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia, Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland and Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia.

The celebrations included an array of events from the cultural to the political held over the course of August, including the Third World Forum of Ukrainians. The large gathering took place August 18-24 and brought 1,500 delegates and visitors together to frankly and openly discuss Ukraine's past, present and, most importantly, its future. (see related stories on the 10th anniversary of Ukraine's independence and the Ukrainian diaspora).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 6, 2002, No. 1, Vol. LXX

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