COMMENTARY: A few pointers on Ukraine's upcoming election (07/11/04)

COMMENTARY: A few pointers on Ukraine's upcoming election

by Roman Kupchinsky

If any early observation can be made about the start of the presidential campaign in Ukraine, it is that this promises to be one large entertaining brawl in which everyone will have a go at it.

The voters in Ukraine - unlike their class brothers in most democratic countries who, by and large, do not care to participate and sit at home doing whatever people do when they are not voting - will put on their gloves and come out swinging.

The preliminaries leading to the title event were held earlier in the small town of Mukachiv and the large city of Donetsk and were won by former convicts and thugs, supporters of their patron, Viktor Yanukovych.

The upcoming presidential elections in Ukraine have been called a "critical juncture" in the life of this country. This is a severe understatement. If an Oscar ceremony were to be held for "Most Dramatic Elections of the Year," Ukraine would stand a fine chance to win.

There is no denying that Ukraine, which seems to have been a playground for crooked politicians, criminals and manipulative oligarchs during the 10-year reign of Leonid Kuchma, is on the verge of making an important choice. The winner will not only determine Ukraine's domestic policies but its role internationally.

The country most concerned with the Ukrainian elections is Russia. The upcoming vote has elicited more genuine interest among Russian policy-makers than the recent election of President Vladimir Putin to a second term. In his case there was never any doubt as to the outcome, but in the rough and tough rumble between Viktor Yushchenko and Mr. Yanukovych, anything can happen and the Russian leadership does not want to be caught off guard.

It is no secret that the vast majority of the Russian elite has placed its bets (some say these are quite substantial), on Mr. Yanukovych. The reasons for this are concrete and have little to do with the Nazi-style propaganda being aired on Russian television about Mr. Yushchenko's alleged "nationalism." The boogeyman of Ukrainian nationalism is meant, above al,l to scare a segment of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian electorate, which at times seems more susceptible to such idiotic arguments than anyone else.

The concrete reason has to do with energy. Russian energy related capital has had a very close relationship with Leonid Kuchma and his assorted governments. Very often the results of this nexus have been harmful to Ukrainian national interests but highly profitable for the players involved.

Today Russia's Lukoil controls most of Ukraine's oil refining capacity, while Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, controls the pipelines from Central Asia that supply natural gas to Ukraine. The Pivdennyi oil terminal outside of Odesa is for all intents and purposes being controlled by an obscure and shady company registered in the British Virgin Islands, Collide Ltd, which is alleged to be owned by a number of high rollers in Moscow. The often dubious activities of the British Petroleum-Tyumen Oil Company (BP-TNK) in Ukraine are handled by its affiliate, BP-TNK Ukraine. The Russian electrical energy monopoly, Unified Energy Systems, led by Anataly Chubais, who not too long ago proclaimed a goal of "liberal imperialism," has been maneuvering to get its hands on the Ukrainian electrical grid.

The Russians have not always had a honeymoon with Mr. Kuchma and his energy managers. Naftohaz Ukraine, the Ukrainian state oil and gas monopoly, and the main cash cow for Mr. Kuchma over the years, has never been an easy target for Russian manipulation. It is only in the last two years that Presidents Kuchma and Putin have agreed to end the constant bickering over Ukrainians stealing gas from the pipeline and have institutionalized the seamier aspects of the relationship by agreeing to share and share alike in some of the less transparent schemes they themselves devised.

The likelihood of these schemes continuing under Mr. Yushchenko is minimal, and Mr. Putin and his team know this. The prospect of well-established, highly profitable and highly opaque arrangements being ended by a new Ukrainian president are disturbing for many people in the shady Russian energy business and in the Kremlin.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the Russian president or his foreign minister do not call for "free and open" elections in Ukraine. For them, this is the most dreaded scenario. They want to see Mr. Yanukovych elected - democratically or otherwise.

With Mr. Yanukovych as president the Ukrainian oil and gas pipelines to Europe, that bring in the money that keeps Russia afloat, will continue to move closer to being controlled by Russia.

The Russian elite knows full well that a Mr. Yushchenko victory will not result in the closure of pipelines to Europe, but this is not the point. In the eyes of the people who control Mr. Putin, these pipelines have a strategic value for Russia and the goal is to place them under Russian control. Mr. Yushchenko will not allow this to happen as Mr. Putin well knows. Hence the "nationalist" charges.

The logic is simple: if you refuse to hand over your country's assets to the Kremlin you are a raving nationalist. By extension, Mr. Yanukovych is an "internationalist."

There are, of course, other aspects of Ukrainian-Russian relations that will be affected by this fall's elections. The question of Ukraine-NATO relations is one; the matter of the Single Economic Space is another. But the overriding factor is energy and all that is tied to it.

The other major country that stands to win or lose in the Ukrainian elections is the United States.

Washington, like Moscow, was at first opposed to Ukrainian independence. Once it realized that it could not prevent this from taking place, it began seeing Ukraine as a state.

It was clear even then, in the early 1990s, that nobody wanted to see Ukraine in NATO or in the European Union, but nobody wanted Russia to dominate it either. This left Ukraine with only one option: to be a buffer state.

When Ukrainians were told earlier this year to bugger-off by the EU's capo di capo Romano Prodi, who pointed out to them that there is no room left for them in the EU, the Putin team rubbed its hands with glee. Washington finally saw the anger in Ukraine and mumbled its incoherent apologies through a series of visits to Kyiv by has-been emissaries.

Generally speaking, U.S. policy toward Ukraine has undergone so many modifications and massages over the years that today few in Washington have any vision of what importance, if any, Ukraine has for the United States with the exception that President Kuchma was first a supplier of forbidden radars to Saddam and now of troops to the occupation forces in Iraq. Hopefully, these troops have not been tasked with finding the elusive radars.

Since Ukraine's independence, U.S.-Ukraine relations have never been clearly defined. Policy-makers have by and large remained fixated on Russia (Ukraine got only a few less-than-positive mentions in former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott's memoirs "Russia Hand") and left Ukraine to the Europeans; this, as many people saw in Bosnia and Kosovo, is to invite disaster.

Despite its preoccupation with other matters, the United States is still the only democratic country that could, theoretically, have some leverage on events in Ukraine. There is still a residual instinct in Washington that Ukraine should not be swallowed up by Russia. But how this can be done is anyone's guess.

Some U.S. diplomats have stated that if the Ukrainian elections are not free then the new president (presumably Mr. Yanukovych, the victor in un-free elections) would be isolated and welcome only in Moscow and Miensk. This is not much of a threat, considering that President Putin is waiting to embrace his candidate of choice and does not really wish to see the new Ukrainian president hobnobbing with George W. Bush (or even worse, John F. Kerry) and Tony Blair.

There are some in the U.S. government who argue that Mr. Yushchenko is a weak and ineffective manager. This perception comes from his past visits as prime minister to Washington, where he did not make the best impression. He and his team were big on promises, but failed to deliver. He seemed unprepared to answer questions and, when he did, the answers did not always make sense.

But, in comparison with President Kuchma or his ex-con prime minister, even the harshest critics agree that Mr. Yushchenko is heads above them in his honesty and dedication to democracy and economic reform.

Thus, the United States has adopted an instinctive policy to push for democratic elections in Ukraine by warning Ukrainians to play by the rules. Mr. Kuchma amiably agreed to this demand in June during the NATO meeting in Istanbul and, posing as a Ukrainian Thomas Jefferson, promised to hold the freest elections ever held anywhere. But many people have learned by now that any promise made by Mr. Kuchma should immediately elicit warning signals.

It might be more realistic for Washington to warn the Russians to keep their cash out of Mr. Yanukovych's election piggy bank, but any criticism of Russia today is a sore and unpopular topic in Washington and best left alone.

The question that nobody wants to answer is: what if President Kuchma, Viktor Medvedchuk and their goon squads disregard Washington's pleas and fix the election? Cruise missiles will not descend on Kharkiv or Lviv, nor will the U.S. recall its ambassador.

It will be seen privately as yet another "setback" and various spokesmen for U.S. government organizations will no doubt answer questions about the Ukrainian elections by saying something akin to "We highly value the role that Ukrainian troops play in the democratization of Iraq."

Champagne will no doubt flow in the Kremlin to celebrate the TKO of democracy in Ukraine. The bottles are being chilled right now.

Roman Kupchinsky is a journalist living in Prague. He may be contacted at [email protected].

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