NOTES FROM UKRAINE: Taras Kuzio's blog (10/01/06)

NOTES FROM UKRAINE

Taras Kuzio's blog

Following are recent blogs on current issues in Ukraine written by Dr. Taras Kuzio for the BBC's Ukrainian-language service. The weekly blogs can be read in Ukrainian, and contributions to the discussion can be made, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ukrainian/forum/.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a Senior Trans-Atlantic Fellow, German Marshal Fund of the USA, and an adjunct professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Elliott School of International Relations, George Washington University.

September 7

Are Ukrainian politics to be taken that seriously?

My two weeks in Ukraine in late June proved to be eventful. During the first week, Kyiv was awash with rumors that there would be a grand coalition of Our Ukraine and the Party of Regions. The atmosphere was bleak in Kyiv with rumors of a pending grand coalition being offset only by Ukraine's early successes in the World Cup.

The creation of the Orange coalition uplifted my spirits during a week when Ukraine had been removed from the World Cup. We even watched World Cup games with young, enthusiastic members of the Presidential Secretariat who were brimming with optimism now that an Orange coalition had finally come together. The Orange coalition finally seemed to be a certainty when I left Ukraine.

During my visit to Kyiv I inevitably visited the Baraban (Drum) bar, one of those which is impossible to find. Located behind the maidan, it became an important place for Western and Ukrainian journalists to fortify themselves from the cold before returning to the Orange Revolution.

I bumped into Orange Circle President Adrian Karatnycky, who got into a loud debate defending President Viktor Yushchenko and Donetsk oligarch Renat Akhmetov from criticism by the Financial Times journalist who covers Ukraine and an NGO leader. Adrian was on his way to an energy conference on Ukraine to be held in Warsaw he had organized. I asked if this was the event rumored to be financed by Akhmetov? He replied in a roundabout way that it was.

Any leader or manager in Yushchenko's predicament would seek the advice of his staff and advisers, as well as heed opinion polls. But, this common practice has never been a policy followed by President Yushchenko. Over lunch in Kyiv, a Presidential Secretariat staffer told me how Yushchenko does not feel the need to listen to advisers. This is because, the staffer told me, "he feels he has suffered enough for Ukraine."

My "deep throat" told me that Yushchenko would never propose Viktor Yanukovych as prime minister, preferring to go instead for a new election. Well, I thought, maybe Yushchenko has political will after all. If somebody inside the Presidential Secretariat gets such a prediction wrong, one wonders how experts on the outside like myself are supposed to predict Ukrainian events? In reality, no one even remotely predicted the return of Yanukovych, the only prime minister to ever serve two terms, both as prime minister and in prison. Ukraine may well enter the Guinness Book of Records with 15 prime ministers since independence.

The return of Yanukovych came as a shock not only to Ukrainians but to many of us in the West - and not only those with a diaspora connection to Ukraine. Depression and disbelief at the turn of events dispirited our summer. It was not just the August holiday season that led to a drop in e-mail traffic. People were literally in shock by the unexpected turn of events. My Presidential Secretariat contact who had regularly sent me e-mails on the state of negotiations stopped replying to my e-mails.

In early August I updated information on a British website about Ukraine - something that I had been doing for them for the last 15 years. The last time the Ukraine section had been updated was in November 2005 and it was then written brimming with optimism that the Orange camp would win the March elections, and then create a majority coalition and government. My update took far longer than usual because of the summer 2006 crisis and proved to be a depressing toil. Much of it had to be re-written. The optimism was gone.

At first I thought maybe I was being too critical in my writings about the latest developments. After all, there had to be a silver lining in some of this. But, my views proved to reflect the prevailing mood. A former Ukrainian soldier, now a pensioner, asked me over dinner in Toronto, "What did you expect, Taras? The president is not a leader, and he is a coward." Such views were not confined to the diaspora. A non-diasporan academic introduced a new word to my vocabulary. Yushchenko, he explained to a group of us over a long dinner during the Ukrainian festival in Toronto, is a "wuss," or a weak softie.

These are strong words, but they're surprisingly common these days.

September 14

Prime Minister Yanukovych is flying to Brussels this week in an attempt to convince NATO and the EU of Ukraine's continued sincerity in its desire to join both organizations. After all, Ukraine is not Russia, the title of Leonid Kuchma's 2004 book.

A prime concern for those who follow Ukrainian politics is to what extent Ukraine's foreign policy will change following the return of the "Blues" to government? Will Ukraine continue to pursue a course of integration with the West (WTO, NATO and the EU) or will it stagnate and more backwards to the Kuchma era's multi-vectorism?

During Leonid Kuchma's second term I wrote an article which tried to explain multi-vectorism titled "Ukraine's Foreign Policy: Neither Pro-Western or Pro-Russian, But Pro-Kuchma." I followed this with an academic article titled "Ukraine's Foreign Policy: Neither East nor West." Both titles encapsulate the eclectic meaning of multi-vectorism.

My concern, and that of U.S. policy-makers whom I meet, is that Ukrainian foreign policy has indeed returned to "multi-vectorism" which translates as "pro-Donetsk" (just as it used to be "pro-Kuchma"). Ukraine is still a long way off from having a foreign policy that pursues state, rather than personal, interests.

The problem Prime Minister Yanukovych has is that he is unlikely to convince anybody in Brussels of Ukraine's sincerity in seeking NATO and EU membership. NATO was ready to invite Ukraine into its Membership Action Plan (MAP) if it had a government in place committed to reform. In U.S. and NATO eyes, this translated into an Orange - not a Yanukovych - government. Ukraine, therefore, will not receive a MAP at NATO's Riga summit in two months' time, and its relationship with NATO will return to that of the Kuchma era when it had a cooperative relationship. Ukraine has blown its best chance of getting on the NATO membership path.

What of the EU? Here, as someone from traditionally EU-skeptical Britain, I can be more critical of the EU. In fact, I always thought that Britain and Ukraine were very similar, with both being wary of deep integration into the EU and CIS, respectively.

The return of the "Blues" to government will change little in the EU-Ukraine relationship, as the EU has never risen to the challenge of Orange Ukraine. The EU is so mired in its own crisis that it has no time for Ukraine. Countries like Albania, Macedonia and Turkey have been given vague future offers of EU membership - something that has never been offered to Ukraine.

The only reason for offering membership to the former Yugoslavia is the fear of a return to the conflicts of the 1990s. As I have asked at scholarly seminars, including at an EU think-tank in 2003, to the shock of those present, does this then mean that Ukraine mistakenly did not have a civil war?

Diplomatic niceties will be made in Brussels during Yanukovych's visit, but these will be devoid of substance. This will be because NATO does not know what do with Ukraine, while the EU does not know what to do with itself.

September 21

Yes, it's that time of year again. No, not Christmas, which, at least in Britain means little of anything spiritual but lots of drinking and shopping. No, it's a far sadder occasion, the annual anniversary of the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze.

Without Gongadze's ultimate sacrifice, Yushchenko would not be president of Ukraine. And, without the subsequent Kuchmagate scandal, there would have been no Orange Revolution that began exactly four years after Oleksander Moroz announced the existence of the Mykola Melnychenko tapes in Parliament. The revolution began on November 22 and the scandal hit the fan on the 28th.

Maybe then, there is no one better than Verkhovna Rada Chairman Moroz to lead the anniversary commemorations? Sadly, no. To many of us, Moroz is no longer the honest, clean political leader that we had all bought into until his stunning defection from the Orange camp on July 3.

While visiting my wife's family in Nottingham, we watched Ukraine's Channel 5 in disbelief as it reported that Moroz had defected to the Party of the Regions. How could it be, we asked each other, that the honest Moroz could do such a thing? We were stunned. A stiff drink (or two) was called for.

Maybe, we thought, President Yushchenko understood now that he had to act forcefully. My father-in-law asked aloud, "Do you think there will be a second maidan?" I replied, "I doubt it."

Moroz has done nothing to pursue the Gongadze investigation and has even suggested to a British journalist who wrote a book on Gongadze's murder and who is currently in Washington that the Melnychenko tapes should be destroyed. Moroz and Yevhen Marchuk both deny assisting Melnychenko because they are afraid that his taping could be defined in Ukrainian law as "illegal" and they, therefore, would be accomplices to an "illegal" act. This would change only if the "organizers" are convicted, as then the taping would be seen as an attempt to thwart "illegal" activities.

As always, I opened Ukrayinska Pravda with my morning coffee and on the anniversary read that, "Yushchenko again promises to complete the Gongadze case to the end." I nearly fell off my chair. Had not Yushchenko told none other than the maidan, his first press conference after being elected and the Council of Europe a month after coming to power that his "honor" was at stake over the Gongadze murder? He promised "to resolve the Gongadze affair within two months." The council reminded Yushchenko of these words last week.

Let's be quite candid here: I do not think that Yushchenko has any political will to complete this investigation. Naming a Kyiv street after Gongadze and putting three low-ranking policemen on trial does not count as showing political will. Kyivans asked the same question on this year's anniversary also did not believe that there would be progress in completing this investigation.

A Socialist Party deputy said the week of the anniversary that no senior officials would be charged because they received immunity during roundtable negotiations in the Orange Revolution. My personal view is that it would probably be better if President Yushchenko simply ignored the anniversary, rather than make false promises that are unlikely to be met.

My sadness at Yushchenko's lack of will on the Gongadze affair was made worse by two coincidences. The first happened the week before, when I bumped by accident into Melnychenko at Washington's Dulles airport. I was flying to a conference in Europe and Melnychenko back to Kyiv. I hoped him a safe and successful trip, while privately thinking that little would come of it.

The second came a week later, as I was reading Andrew Wilson's "Ukraine's Orange Revolution" with the aim of writing a book review that would also cover two other Orange books, one by an old British Ukrainian friend, Askold Krushelnycky. Wilson's book, which was completed in mid-2005, was optimistic about senior Kuchma-era officials being charged with alleged election fraud and abuse of office. But, by the time I read the book a year after it was written and during the Gongadze anniversary, those same Kuchma-era officials are all now back in government. I was reminded of my opinion article published a week earlier that only the U.S. has ever sentenced senior Ukrainian officials - not Ukraine.

During the 2004 elections I remember reading Ukrainian polls that reported only two politicians were regarded as honest. These were Yushchenko and Moroz. I wonder what those polls would say today?

The sad fact about the Gongadze anniversary is that it puts Ukraine's "democratic breakthrough" in comparative perspective and Ukraine's elites come out looking worse. Peru also had a tape scandal around the same time and President Alberto Fujimoro, who was implicated, had to flee to Japan, where he still lives. Just this week, protesters caused havoc in Budapest after the president admitted to lying about the budget deficit. Wow, what would Hungarians have done if he had been accused of ordering violence against his media and political opponents?!

I once proposed to a Ukrainian diplomat that if the authorities did not want to charge the retired Kuchma then maybe he could instead be dispatched to Miensk, where he could head a CIS committee dealing with important strategic questions, such as weight measurements or road improvements in Eurasia. Sadly, this offer was never taken up.

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