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At U.N., Putin shifts world attention from Ukraine with Syrian campaign

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KYIV – Russian President Vladimir Putin emerged from the United Nations on September 28-29, having successfully shifted the world’s attention away from the Russian-backed military occupation of the Donbas and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, Kyiv experts said. That’s despite the fact that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the U.N. of the thousands dead due to “the treacherous Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and aggression in Donbas” and called for “the need to counteract ongoing Russian aggression.”

Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin left the General Assembly hall in protest. The entire Ukrainian delegation, led by Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.N. Yuriy Sergeyev, responded in kind when Mr. Putin took to the podium. Mr. Poroshenko underscored that the Donbas war had created 1.5 million displaced persons domestically and has cost his government $5 million per day. (Extensive excerpts of Mr. Poroshenko’s address can be read on page 7.)

In his address to the U.N. General Assembly on September 28, U.S. President Barack Obama referred to “Russia’s annexation of Crimea and further aggression in eastern Ukraine” and emphasized, “we cannot stand by when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of a nation is flagrantly violated.” Mr. Obama also noted, “we continue to press for this crisis to be resolved in a way that allows a sovereign and democratic Ukraine to determine its future and control its territory.”

While in New York for the opening of the 70th session of the U.N. General Assembly, Mr. Poroshenko met with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who said the illegal elections planned by the Russian-backed forces for October 18 and November 1 will undermine the Minsk accords.

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Poroshenko, Putin to address United Nations this weekend

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KYIV – It’s no coincidence that the warring in Donbas has calmed this month, with relatively few casualties and injuries, Kyiv experts said. The Russian government was satisfied with the decision of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s Parliament, to approve on August 31 the first reading of constitutional amendments establishing a specific order in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet there’s another factor to the reduced fighting, experts said. Russian President Vladimir Putin will be addressing the United Nations this weekend for the first time in 10 years and he wants to present himself as a peacemaker and open the door for more negotiations, experts said. “Putin really wants this meeting” of the United Nations (U.N.), said Volodymyr Fesenko, the director of the Penta Center for Applied Political Reseach in Kyiv.

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Corruption alleged at top government rungs

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KYIV – When it comes to reforms, Ukrainians are more concerned about corruption than any other issue, according to a poll conducted in late July by Kyiv’s Razumkov Center and the Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Fund. When asked to choose five spheres of reform as most important, about 65 percent of the 2,011 respondents cited anti-corruption reform, about 58 percent cited legal reforms and about 40 percent selected pension and social security reform. Yet the very leaders of Ukrainian politics and business remain as engrossed in corruption as ever, if the accusations they’re flinging at each other on a weekly basis are to be believed. The latest such attack came on September 15 from Vice Prime Minister Valerii Voshchevskyi when alleging to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s Parliament, that the president exclusively controls the energy ministry. “The rivalry between the two heads of the executive government is so obvious that they are not only disrupting the energy sphere, but all of Ukraine,” said Mr. Voshchevskyi, a member of Oleh Liashko’s Radical Party who submitted his resignation on September 1.

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Debt restructuring solves Ukraine’s short-term problems

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KYIV – It’s been two weeks since the Ukrainian government confirmed that it succeeded in convincing private lenders to restructure $15 billion of debt owed them. As often is the case, the politicians resolved their immediate problems. Yet the debate continues on whether the deal benefits the Ukrainian economy in the long run. The main success of the debt restructuring was that it postponed the first debt payments to 2019 from as early as this month, when $500 million was due to the private lenders, economists said. This enabled the government to avoid a possible default, as well as continue building its international reserves, which are critical for supporting the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is elated with this agreement because it means its Ukraine program will be fully financed, while Ukraine is elated because it won’t have to pay anything for the next four years.

Ukraine

Deadly violence erupts after vote to amend Constitution

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KYIV – Ukraine endured on August 31 its most serious domestic political conflict since the Euro-Maidan when violent protests erupted on August 31 over the decision of the Verkhovna Rada to approve the first reading of constitutional amendments to shift certain state authority to local governments. The vote prompted simple bombs and explosives to fly towards Parliament from the crowd of hundreds of protesters, the majority being Svoboda party nationalists. The attacks were capped off by a military grenade that killed three National Guardsmen (one immediately) and hospitalized more than 90, news reports said. The conflict drove a wedge in Ukraine’s pro-Western forces, pitting the business-oriented, establishment parties against the populist, nationalist forces, who insisted the amendments betray national interests. Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party announced the next day it was abandoning the ruling coalition in the Verkhovna Rada.

Ukraine

Ukraine celebrates independence despite ongoing turmoil in east

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KYIV – The Ukrainian government commemorated the start of its 25th year of independence from Moscow on August 24 by hosting a march of the nation’s top soldiers along Kyiv’s main boulevard, Khreshchatyk, and awarding Anti-Terrorist Operation commanders honorary battle flags. Though it dropped the display of armaments and hardware as was the case in the previous year’s Khreschatyk parade, the Ukrainian government emphasized the military theme, which remains relevant as Russian-backed terrorists continue to engage in daily attacks on Ukrainian military and civilian targets. “It was you who made an attack deep into Ukraine impossible for the enemy, who – besides the Anschluss of Crimea and Sevastopol – tried, attempted and planned to annex at a minimum eight other Ukrainian regions in the framework of the so-called Novorossiya project,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said in a pre-Independence Day speech on August 22 to soldiers at the Chuhuyiv Airfield in the Kharkiv region. “It was you who freed from the occupants a large part of Ukrainian Donbas and contained the fighters in the southeastern districts of these two regions [Donetsk and Luhansk]. It’s you who, in tightly closing off the fighting lines, are holding the defense against the aggressor with an impenetrable fortress.

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More evidence surfaces on Russian Internet trolls

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KYIV – Among the key Russian tactics in the infowars on Ukraine has been the government’s army of Internet trolls, or those recruited to monitor websites and post comments or articles in favor of the Putin regime and discrediting its enemies, often with aggressive rhetoric. More evidence has been surfacing of late confirming the Russian government’s extensive use of trolls. In late June, Liudmyla Savchuk revealed to the telegraph.co.uk news site that she had worked as a St. Petersburg-based troll, whose job it was to spread lies and hate about Ukraine and the war in Donbas. “That was always about the Kyiv ‘junta,’ how the poor people of Donbas are being bombed, how women and children are being shot, how NATO is to blame and Blackwater has mercenaries there,” Marat Burkkhard, another St.

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Russian-backed attacks escalate as widened sanctions take effect

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KYIV – The war being waged by the Russian Federation against the Ukrainian state reached a new phase on August 10 when Russian-backed terrorists intensified their attacks on towns in the Donetsk region where Ukrainian military forces are based. That same day, the latest round of expanded economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. government against private individuals and companies, both Russian and Ukrainian, went into effect. Political players and experts didn’t draw a link between the two events. The widespread view was that the Russians remain interested in fueling the war as part of a strategy to inflict as much damage on Ukraine as possible, and on all possible fronts. Russia and Ukraine exchanged their own economic sanctions in the days following the U.S. measures.

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Verkhovna Rada approves amendment on ‘specific procedures’ for the Donbas

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KYIV – The Verkhovna Rada voted on July 16 to approve constitutional amendments submitted by the president, including an amendment creating what is now called “specific procedures” for local self-governance on the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts occupied by Russian-backed terrorists. Although legislation creating specific procedures had been twice earlier approved by Parliament (these were previously referred to as “special status”), an amendment is also needed to the Constitution of Ukraine, consisting of a single sentence that refers to the corresponding legislation, said Oleksandr Palii, a Kyiv political expert and author. In his remarks endorsing the amendment on specific procedures, President Petro Poroshenko assured Parliament that it wouldn’t lead to federalization, or creating an autonomous entity within Ukraine like Crimea. Though insisting he was not being pressured, the president confirmed that the legal mechanism to establish the specific procedures was being demanded by the European Union and the United States. “We simply don’t have the right to create with our own hands a situation that will leave Ukraine on its own against its aggressor,” he said.

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Mukacheve gunfight raises questions about Pravyi Sektor

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KYIV – Normally, the Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector), among the nation’s biggest paramilitary groups, is doing battle with Russian-backed terrorists in Ukraine’s easternmost Donbas region. Last weekend, however, its soldiers engaged in a gunfight with local police outside the town of Mukacheve, just 18.5 miles from the border with Hungary in the Zakarpattia Oblast. When the smoke cleared, two people were killed and 14 injured in what Pravyi Sektor characterized as a battle against corruption unabated by the current government. Yet the Ukrainian political establishment, including politicians and commentators, dismissed that claim, stating that the activity of paramilitary groups has begun to extend beyond the bounds of the Donbas war into regional conflicts for control of revenue streams in the illegal trade of goods, or contraband. The July 11 gunfight with local police ignited after Pravyi Sektor fighters confronted local business baron Mykhailo Lanio in what could have been an attempt at bribery, blackmail or some forced attempt to gain a share in the local contraband trade, said Andriy Lyubka, a political commentator for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL).