Ukraine's defense minister is out (09/26/04)

Ukraine's defense minister is out

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - President Leonid Kuchma announced on September 22 during a visit to a rocket fuel-reprocessing factory that he had accepted the resignation of Minister of Defense Yevhen Marchuk.

"Today I said that I have accepted Marchuk's resignation in connection with what is happening here," Mr. Kuchma said after meeting with officials of the plant, located in Pavlohrad, just outside of Dnipropetrovsk.

Mr. Kuchma explained that the move came as a result of the defense minister's failure to take control of massive weapons storage problems in the country, including poor administration of the reprocessing of solid rocket fuel from Ukraine's now defunct nuclear arsenal.

He noted that the issues surrounding the Pavlohrad plant were part of a larger problem of ammunition disposal in the country, which included the explosions that rocked the city of Melitopil on May 6 when an ammunition depot exploded, resulting in the death of five people and injury to four others.

"You must realize that we have a huge amount of ammunition stores and that poses a huge threat to the country," explained Mr. Kuchma in Pavlohrad.

Mr. Kuchma had initially warned his defense minister, only the second civilian to hold the reins of the military since Ukraine obtained statehood 13 years ago, that he had to get a better grip on what was occurring in the armed forces after the incident in Melitopil.

The president had repeated the warning after a visit to a military base of the Ukrainian naval forces in Balaklava in July, noting at the time that his orders to decommission the base and turn the area around it into a tourist attraction in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Crimean War were not being carried out.

Mr. Marchuk lately had also been questioned regarding the legality of authorizing the use of eight Ukrainian helicopters by the Turkish government to fight forest fires in the country that had gotten out of control. One of the helicopters crashed on September 3 after a cable became entangled in its rear propeller; three Ukrainian servicemen were killed.

On September 20 the Procurator General's Office had announced that it was investigating the legality of the way the helicopters were borrowed by Turkey, which was done by contract with a Canadian firm, Artic Group Ltd., using the aviation company RosAvia as the go-between. RosAvia has been accused several times by Western capitals in the transport of illegal arms across international borders.

On the day Mr. Kuchma announced that he had fired Mr. Marchuk, the defense minister spent the morning reporting on his activities and defending his actions in the Turkish fiasco to the Verkhovna Rada.

The minister seemed to take his firing in stride. He told Holos Ukrainy after he was notified that he had been dismissed that, "For me this is not a major problem."

National Deputy Heorhii Kriuchkov, chairman of the parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense, said that he did not exclude the possibility that Mr. Marchuk's dismissal could have serious afteraffects for the Kuchma administration, inasmuch as the defense secretary has a vast store of knowledge on the inner workings of the state leadership, having served during the past 13 years not only as defense minister but also as national security chief and head of the state security apparatus.

Mr. Kriuchkov added that he also could not exclude the possibility that the firing was related to the political election season.

Mr. Kriuchkov noted wryly that he found it interesting that the president announced he had accepted the resignation of his defense minister when Mr. Marchuk had not offered up as much.

"The announcement said the minister submitted his resignation, which should mean that he wrote the memo in his own name. But I spoke with him [Mr. Marchuk] today and for him this was unexpected," explained Mr. Kriuchkov.

| Home Page |