People of Ukraine watch closely as government takes its first steps (02/20/05)

People of Ukraine watch closely as government takes its first steps

by Tatiana Matviichuk
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - The people of Ukraine, together with the country's news media, are watching with great interest the first working days of their new government, which has pledged to fight corruption and reorganize its structure in order to better effect the Yushchenko administration's vision of a new Ukraine.

Some of the new Cabinet ministers started to work in an open and transparent manner from the very beginning, demonstrating their intent to work toward the implementation of President Viktor Yushchenko's program and the fulfillment of the people's hopes.

Yurii Lutsenko, a Socialist known as one of the most active "DJs of the maidan" due to his very visible role on Independence Square during the Orange Revolution, is the new internal affairs minister. Observers say this ministry's militia is perhaps the most corrupt government entity. That is why, during his first meeting with employees of the ministry, Mr. Lutsenko promised to start the battle against corruption with a general "housecleaning" of his staff.

He underscored that the Internal Affairs Ministry's militia would no longer be involved with bribery and influence peddling, and that criminal cases would no longer be closed on someone's directive. He added that anyone who violates the law would be punished in accordance with the law.

"For two first months there is one task: to clean up the leading positions in the Internal Affairs Ministry. Without such steps we will not win the trust of society and we will not be able to defend the law," Minister Lutsenko stated.

The new internal affairs minister is the only civilian in his ministry; all his subordinates are members of the military. "This man is a rare example of honesty," said President Yushchenko as he introduced Mr. Lutsenko to police chiefs on February 7. "I'm sure that in a year we will have a Ukrainian militia that has the people's trust, and won't take bribes, and won't cooperate with criminal groups."

In one of his first acts, Mr. Lutsenko dismissed two of his deputies: the head of the Traffic Police Department, Maj. Gen. Hennadii Heorhienko, and the commander of Internal Affairs Ministry troops, Lt. Gen. Serhii Popkov. The latter deputy unofficially ordered the mobilization of troops against the people gathered on Independence Square on November 28, 2004. It was only thanks to the political interference and support of the Security Service of Ukraine that the situation was defused and the Orange Revolution continued without bloodshed. Lt. Gen. Popkov later said the mobilization had been merely a training alert.

Mr. Lutsenko, 41, an engineer by training, is a member of the Socialist Party of Ukraine headed by Oleksander Moroz. He previously served as vice-minister of science and technology (1997-1998) and as assistant to the prime minister (1998-1999). In 2000-2001 he was the "field commander" of the protest action known as Ukraine without Kuchma. At the beginning of the Orange Revolution he led the establishment and management of the tent city erected on the maidan.

Speaking at a ceremony to introduce Oleksander Turchynov, 40, as the country's new security chief, President Yushchenko said the Security Service of Ukraine should leave politics to politicians. The powerful Security Service (known as the SBU) has long been considered another corrupt body, with its officers accused of working for the business elite and being involved in illegal weapons sales. The president said that he purposely chose a civilian rather than a career Security Service officer to head the group.

Mr. Yushchenko noted that Mr. Turchynov, a former economic advisor to the prime minister (1992-1993) and more recently a national deputy who belonged to the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, "didn't do anything to discredit himself during the former government" and is "able to solve problems." Mr. Turchynov himself promised that under his leadership the SBU would "fulfill with dignity all the tasks that the agency is assigned."

Mr. Turchynov holds a doctoral degree in economics and was vice-president of the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. He has conducted research at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine into the shadow economy.

During his first press conference as minister of the economy, Serhii Teriokhin remarked that he would reorganize the internal structure of the ministry and do away with several ineffective departments, reducing about a third of the ministry staff. He is a member of the Our Ukraine coalition and a good friend of Viktor Pynzenyk, Ukraine's new minister of finance.

A graduate of Taras Shevchenko University, where he majored in international economics and the English language, Mr. Teriokhin, 41, studied at such institutions abroad as the Aspen Institute in and Harvard University. In 1992-1993 he was vice-minister of the economy. He was elected to the Parliament in 1994, and worked on the parliamentary Finance and Banking Committee.

Mr. Teriokhin said that during his first four working days he got the feeling that the Ministry of the Economy, the biggest ministry within the Cabinet structure, "is involved in many things - except economic prediction and economics." Besides its numerous departments, sections and subsections, the ministry has charge of "many cottages, hotels, auto bases and many other interesting things," he observed. Mr. Teriokhin also noted that he could not understand why the Ministry of the Economy has so many cars.

There are more than enough expensive foreign cars at many ministries. The new minister of transport and communications, Yevhen Chervonenko, announced that he was putting the most expensive Mercedes in the world, a Maybach, up for sale. The vehicle, which had been bought with state funds, belonged to Intertrans, headed by the son of deceased ex-minister Heorhii Kirpa. There are 13 Maybachs in Ukraine; each costs between 400,000 and 600,000 euros ($520,000 to $780,000 U.S.).

Mr. Chervonenko, 45, a member of the Our Ukraine coalition, was one of the most active participants of the Orange Revolution and was responsible for Mr. Yushchenko's security when he was a presidential candidate. Mr. Chervonenko presented a program for the first 100 days of the Transport Ministry even before his appointment. The first point on the program: to investigate the recent activity of the chief officials in the ministry, which has a multi-billion-hryvnia budget and its own army.

According to Mr. Chervonenko, the system of freight transport must be competitive as Ukraine seeks to enter the World Trade Organization and integrate into the European transport system.

In the past, Mr. Chervonenko, who hails from Dnipropetrovsk, was a successful businessman and head of the state economic reserve agency. He is co-president of the Confederation of Jewish Communities and Societies of Ukraine. He was elected in 2002 to the Verkhovna Rada, where he served as secretary of the Committee on Construction, Transportation, Housing, Utilities and Communications. In the 1980s he was a professional auto racer.

Newly appointed Foreign Affairs Minister Borys Tarasyuk told journalists that all of Ukraine's foreign policy steps should be "not pro-Western, not pro-Eastern, but only pro-Ukrainian."

Mr. Tarasyuk, 56, previously served as foreign minister from April 1998 to September 2000. He is well-known for his confidence and his promotion of Ukraine's membership in the European Union and NATO, and is head of the Institute of Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. His pro-Euro-Atlantic orientation at the time of the Kuchma administration was the reason for his dismissal in 2000. As he left the Foreign Affairs Ministry he vowed that he would not come back as long as President Leonid Kuchma was in office. Since June 2002 Mr. Tarasyuk, a member of the Our Ukraine coalition, has headed the Verkhovna Rada Committee on European Integration.

President Yushchenko has made Ukraine's eventual membership in the EU a top priority, noting that he hopes to start membership talks by 2007. According to Mr. Tarasyuk, if Ukraine makes progress on Mr. Yushchenko's program to introduce European standards by the end of the year, "the EU might change its policy regarding Ukraine and consider the possibility of Ukraine's membership in the institution."

Mr. Tarasyuk also said that Ukraine hopes to "renew the trust" in relations between Ukraine and the United States. He was quoted by the Associated Press as observing that "For more than four years our relations were almost at a standstill"; partial blame for that situation, he said, goes to a shift in U.S. foreign policy priorities at the time.

Speaking about Ukraine's eastern neighbor, the foreign minister said: "I don't see an alternative other than good neighborly, constructive and partnership relations with Russia."

Mr. Tarasyuk first began working at the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Ukraine in 1975. He served as Ukraine's ambassador to Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg (Benelux), and as Ukraine's envoy to NATO.

Anatolii Hrytsenko, 47, who once studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy, was appointed as defense minister. He has already confirmed his decision to reduce the period of required military service to one year. The question of withdrawing Ukraine's 1,650-member military contingent from Iraq is next on his agenda. For now, he said, plans are being prepared for the troops' withdrawal.

Mr. Hrytsenko graduated from Kyiv's top military aviation engineering school in 1979 and in 1993 from the foreign languages institute of the U.S. Defense Department. He also studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the Ukrainian Armed Forces Academy. From January 1996 to September 1997 Mr. Hrytsenko headed the department of military security and construction at the national scientific research center of defense technologies and military security of Ukraine. Then, through December 1999, he headed the analytical service at the National Security and Defense Council.

He has been the president of the Razumkov Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Studies since December 1999. During the presidential election Mr. Hrytsenko was the head of information/analytical support for the Yushchenko campaign.

The new justice minister, Roman Zvarych, was born in the United States and graduated from Columbia University. In 1983-1991 he was a professor at Columbia. Mr. Zvarych arrived in Ukraine in 1991 and two years later gave up his U.S. citizenship. He became a citizen of Ukraine in 1995. He was one of the leading members of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was founded in Ukraine in 1992.

Before being elected as a national deputy of the Our Ukraine coalition, Mr. Zvarych was director of the analytical and information service Demos of the Democratic Reforms Center and a member of the presidium of the central body of the National Rukh of Ukraine. In Parliament he was a member of the committees on legal reform and foreign affairs. During the presidential election he was a trusted advisor to Mr. Yushchenko.

At a press conference on February 11, Minister Zvarych, 51, spoke out against adoption of a lustration law, which has been proposed by a number of Our Ukraine national deputies. He noted that lustration violates human rights and the Constitution of Ukraine. Two variants of the proposed lustration law are currently registered in Parliament: one proposes lustration, or vetting, for individuals who participated in the falsification of the recent presidential election or cooperated with the intelligence services of foreign countries; the other variant proposes lustration for all individuals who held high-ranking positions in the Communist Party or the Communist youth organizations during Soviet times. According to the draft law, the Justice Ministry would be responsible for preparing the official list of lustrated persons. In the event the proposed bill is adopted by Parliament, Mr. Zvarych indicated that he would appeal to President Yushchenko to veto it.

In his first days on the job Mr. Zvarych underscored that he will tackle corruption and graft. "The Justice Ministry will not stand for even the smallest indication of corruption in the institutions of authority," he told the Reuters news service. "The priority is to cleanse the administration of corruption ... What I will say is that as long as I am in government there will be plenty of commotion in the bodies of state authority." Mr. Zvarych added that one of his first tasks will be to prepare a code of conduct for civil servants.

Oleksander Baranivskyi, the new minister of agrarian policy, has assured the public that the government intends to assist, to the maximum possible extent, the promotion of locally produced food products on external markets. "We will be pursuing an aggressive export policy. We will be assisting agricultural producers to a maximal degree, in order that they have a possibility to promote their goods abroad," he said.

Since May 2002 the 49-year-old Mr. Baranivskyi has been a member of the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU); he also served as first secretary of the party's Zhytomyr Regional Committee. In the Verkhovna Rada he is a subcommittee chairman on the Budget Committee.

After his meeting with representatives of the poultry-breeding industry on February 10, the agrarian policy minister told reporters he supports the idea of quotas on imports of meat into Ukraine. "There is plenty of meat today coming to Ukraine illegally or through free economic zones. It hits the Ukrainian producer very hard," Mr. Baranivskyi said. However, the minister added, the issue should be approached with a great care.

According to Agrarian Policy Ministry data, imports of meat increased significantly in 2004 - from 123,000 tons in 2003 to 360,000 tons. In mid-2004 the ministry had made an attempt to introduce quotas on meat imports, but the issue remained unresolved.

The new finance minister of Ukraine, 50-year-old Viktor Pynzenyk, is known as highly qualified professional. He is a member of the parliamentary Committee on Finance and Banking, and is coordinator of the Our Ukraine faction in the Verkhovna Rada.

From October 1992 to April 1994 Mr. Pynzenyk was minister of the economy and prior to that was vice prime minister of the economy (1992-1993). He chaired the president's economic reform council and later the national statistics council. As a national deputy in the Verkhovna Rada he headed the Reforms and Order Party's faction, Reforms-Center. In 1994-2001 he was a presidential advisor on economic policy issues.

During his news conference Minister Pynzenyk informed the press about the first stage of serious administrative reform. He said that each ministry will now be restructured in accordance with its functions. Mr. Pynzenyk also said he considers it necessary to transfer the State Tax Administration under the authority of the Finance Ministry. "The finance minister cannot be responsible for the budget without having authority for tax collection," he argued.

Look for more information on Ukraine's new ministers in next week's issue.

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