Will Pukach’s Arrest Solve Gongadze Case?

KIEV, Ukraine -- Roman Kupchinsky says Yushchenko apparently needs a spectacular show to regain his lost popularity and the arrest of Pukach could be the answer to his prayers on Hoverla Mountain in the Carpathian Mountains.

Leonid Kuchma (L) and parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, Kuchma's former chief of staff, in 2003. Kuchma allegedly is heard in recorded conversations with Lytvyn and other top aides discussing the need to silence journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
The Ukrainian justice system has many ways of pulling the wool over your eyes. At first glance, everything seems to be in perfect order. Prosecutors, according to the law, refrain from discussing the details of ongoing cases, which are later dropped due to a mysterious lack of evidence. Judges remain clean and untouchable, until they are selectively exposed for taking graft, and no high-profile cases are ever brought to trial.

In many ways it is a carbon copy of the Russian justice system, a system manipulated by those in power to protect those who promulgate the rampant corruption that has overwhelmed Russia.

Is the Ukrainian justice system willing to prosecute Oleksiy Pukach, the former head of the Interior Ministry’s investigation department, who was recently apprehended by the State Security Service (SBU) in an obscure village in Zhytomyr Oblast? He is alleged to be the murderer of Internet journalist Georgiy Gongadze in 2000. Will the prosecutor’s office have the will to learn from Pukach who ordered the murder of Gongadze and tell Ukrainians the truth? Will President Victor Yushchenko allow them to do so?

The bitter truth is hard to swallow.

For years, the current president of Ukraine has promised to solve the Gongadze murder and, for various undisclosed reasons, has not been able to fulfill his multiple promises. Now that the January 2010 election campaign has begun, Pukach was suddenly arrested and has allegedly told the prosecutor’s office who ordered the killing and where Gongadze’s severed head is hidden. But, as always, the prosecutor’s office sticks to legal procedures and refuses to disclose who Pukach named. Everything appears to be consistent with the law of the land. Yet… and there always seems to be a yet.

Ukrainians have learned the hard way not to trust their leaders or their criminal justice system. Many continue to believe that it was former President Leonid Kuchma who ordered, or suggested, that Gongadze “be removed.” Yushchenko is still widely suspected of giving Kuchma immunity from prosecution in exchange for allowing the third run-off vote in the contested 2004 elections. The alleged pledge to Kuchma might not be operable today. Some suspect that Yushchenko is finally willing to throw the old, discredited former president, to whom he once pledged total loyalty, to the dogs.

While I have no love for Kuchma and his gang, I am beginning to have less love for Yushchenko and his gang.

Yushchenko is not known to keep his word on many issues. So why should he change his moral standards now?

Today, Yushchenko apparently needs a spectacular show to regain his lost popularity and the arrest of Pukach could be the answer to his prayers on Hoverla Mountain in the Carpathian Mountains, where he recently announced his bid to run for re-election.

But it is not only Yushchenko who is interested in the final outcome of the Pukach affair. Rada speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, whose voice was allegedly recorded on the Mykola Melnychenko tapes as urging Kuchma to deal forcibly with Gongadze, is also scared of what Pukach might reveal.

Lytvyn has also announced his presidential bid. Any revelations by Pukach that he was an active co-conspirator in the Gongadze murder would destroy his chances forever and make him liable to criminal charges.

The SBU appears to be a willing tool in the hands of Yushchenko. And while many rank and file SBU officers are decent men and women, the leadership is beholden to the president of the country. The deputy head of the SBU, Yushchenko appointee, Valery Khoroskovsky, appears to understand intelligence and criminal investigation as much as a wolf understands astronomy.

This blend of political intrigue, self interest and convenient image building could be another disastrous last straw attempt by Yushchenko to remain in power. It can also extract a heavy price on Ukraine’s credibility around the world.

(Roman Kupchinsky is a partner in AZEast Group, a political risk consultancy based in the United States.)

Source: Kyiv Post

Approval Ratings In Ukraine, Russia Highlight Differences

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Eighty-five percent of Ukrainians in May told Gallup they disapprove of the job performance of their country's leadership, up from 75% in 2008 and 73% in 2007. The 4% of Ukrainians who approve is not only the lowest rating Gallup has ever measured in former Soviet countries, but also the lowest in the world.

Worldwide low 4% of Ukrainians approve of their country’s leadership.
Ukrainians' high disapproval likely reflects frustration with the bitter political infighting between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. The conflict between the former allies has essentially paralyzed policymaking for the past year and a half. Individually, Ukrainians give both leaders low marks.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of Ukraine?

Yushchenko's 7% approval rating is less than half of the 17% he garnered in 2008. (Gallup did not ask Ukrainians to rate Tymoshenko in 2008.) The prime minister's current 20% approval is nearly three times higher than the president's rating, which could be relevant to their chances when they run against each other in Ukraine's presidential election in five months. Analysts suggest that low approval could give outside candidates an advantage in January.

Power Partnership in Russia

Russians' approval of the performance of their leadership over the last several years stands in stark contrast to that of their neighbors in Ukraine. Since the 2008 presidential election, majorities of Russians have approved of the leadership of their country. Approval declined slightly to 56% in June of this year from 63% in May 2008; both measures are substantially higher than the 39% approval rating in May 2007.

Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of Russia?

Russians' approval ratings of their prime minister and president again contrast the situation in Ukraine -- one acrimonious and the other a "tandem." More than two-thirds of Russians approve of President Dmitry Medvedev (68%) and more than three in four approve of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (77%).

One year into Medvedev's presidency, that more Russians approve of Putin than approve of his protégé, underscores Putin's continuing popularity. Nineteen percent of Russians have no opinion of Medvedev's leadership, which is more than the 12% who have no opinion of Putin's.

Bottom Line

Gallup Polls suggest many Ukrainians likely welcomed the advice U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's gave during his visit to the country last week. Biden urged leaders to put aside their "political posturing" in the difficult economic times and "heed the lessons of history -- effective, accountable government is the only way to provide a stable, predictable, and transparent environment that attracts investment, which is the economic engine of development."

In Russia, where the global economic downturn has hit residents hard, approval ratings have stayed relatively buoyant. At this point, the Medvedev-Putin partnership appears to be providing Russians a united front and a sense of political stability in tough times.

Survey Methods

Results are based on face-to-face interviews with at least 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older, conducted in July 2007, May 2008, and May 2009 in Ukraine and with at least 2,000 adults in Russia in May 2007, May 2008, and June 2009. For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error was ±4 percentage points in Ukraine and ±3 percentage points in Russia.

Samples in Russia and Ukraine are nationally representative, with urban oversample. The margin of error reflects the influence of data weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

Source: Gallup

Human Rights Activist Recalls Beating At Hands Of Gongadze Suspect

KIEV, Ukraine -- Also a victim allegedly of Oleksiy Pukach, Oleksiy Podolsky doesn’t believe Ukraine’s leaders want to solve the Georgiy Gongadze case.

Podolsky, whose criticism of ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s human rights record angered the former administration, said the assault on him by Oleksiy Pukach was remarkably similar to the one on Georgiy Gongadze – except that Podolsky lived.
Oleksiy Podolsky cannot forget the perverse joy that Oleksiy Pukach took in strangling him nine years ago, just three months before the Sept. 16, 2000, kidnapping and murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze.

“Unlike the other officers who were beating me, it seemed like Pukach was not just carrying out orders, but getting delight in doing so. He took off his belt and tightened it around my neck. I saw pleasure on his face. That was the same he [allegedly] did with Gongadze.”

Pukach, a key suspect in the Gongadze case, was arrested on July 21 in rural Zhytomyr Oblast. The former Interior Ministry general’s detention ended nearly six years on the run for the man who allegedly organized Gongadze’s kidnapping and strangled him with his own hands. Three of his ex-subordinates, all police officers at the time, have been convicted and sentenced to 12-13 years in prison for their role in the murder. The three convicted are Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych.

The big question now is whether Pukach will identify those who ordered the murder of Gongadze, whose investigative journalism had angered ex-President Leonid Kuchma and former high-ranking members of his administration.

Podolsky, whose human rights activists had also run afoul of the Kuchma administration, does not think that Pukach’s arrest will solve the case. He sides with those who dismiss Pukach’s arrest as a re-election campaign stunt by President Victor Yushchenko.

“Pukach’s arrest was a clever stroke of the coming election campaign. Those who helped him to hide once, gave him up today.” Podolsky said. “I do not believe he could have been hiding for six years under his own name and nobody could find him. It’s nonsense! There was just no political will to show him earlier because all of our politicians were born amid the surroundings of Kuchma, including Yushchenko.”

Podolsky thinks the political will to solve the Gongadze case may have died with former Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, Pukach’s boss. Kravchenko died of two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, 2005, the day he was supposed to give testimony to investigators in the Gongadze case.

The official ruling that Kravchenko committed suicide has always been in dispute.

“If they were interested in letting people know the truth, they would not have let Kravchenko die in the first days of Yushchenko’s presidency,” Podolsky said. “They quickly let Kravchenko’s body be cremated, just not to let [independent forensic] medical experts prove it was not a suicide,” Podolsky said. “Pukach is just a pre-election [chess] move.”

Exposing the truth about who ordered Gongadze’s murder would also reopen the events described on the Mykola Melnychenko tapes. Those voluminous tapes were recorded by Melnychenko, Kuchma’s former bodyguard. They purportedly show Kuchma having a conversation with his top assistants – including current parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn (then presidential chief of staff) and Kravchenko, among others – about the need to silence Gongadze.

But the Gongadze murder was only one of many high-level crimes allegedly captured by the tapes. The 700-plus hours of recordings purportedly covered events in 1999 and 2000. If true, they show that Kuchma ran the nation like a mafia boss by plotting to harass political enemies, ordering the rigging of the 1999 presidential election in his favor and discussing corruption of other officials.

Kuchma has denied the allegations. A succession of prosecutors, meanwhile, has stalled for nine years on authenticating the Melnychenko tapes, much less confirming or refuting the events described on them through credible, aggr-essive and competent investigations. But many others note that events described on the Melnychenko tapes mirrored actual events, including Gongadze’s murder, lending credibility to their authenticity.

Podolsky is among those who suspect that Yushchenko privately offered Kuchma immunity in the Gongadze case and possibly involving other events, perhaps in exchange for allowing the 2004 Orange Revolution to end peacefully with the Dec. 26, 2004, election of Yushchenko as president.

“When the Prosecutor General’s Office does not want to surrender Melnychenko’s tapes for international independent expert examination, it proves Yushchenko’s guarantees to Kuchma,” Podolsky said. “If it is proved that the tapes are authentic, we’ll establish evidence of the crimes against Gongadze and Podolsky” and many others, including privatization scandals and election fraud, he said.

Like Gongadze did with his investigative reporting, Podolsky evidently ran afoul of the Kuchma administration with his human rights activity.

As he does now, Podolsky in 2000 had been working as a political scientist at Ukrainian Initiative political fund and We, a Kyiv-based human rights organization that had been criticizing Kuchma’s regime in articles and booklets.

On June 9, 2000, Podolsky was kidnapped the same way and by the same car as Gongadze was three months later.

“I was walking down Lviv Square in Kyiv. At 10:30 p.m. there stopped a Hyundai Sonata. Inside were Pukach and two officers from the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department – Major Oleh Marynyak and Colonel Mykola Naumets – [convicted on May 8, 2007, by the Kyiv City Appellate Court].” Podolsky said. “When I got into the car, I was immediately hit. They took away my wallet, my passport and my glasses so that I could not see where we were going.”

What later happened to Gongadze, Podolsky charged, was almost exactly what Pukach and his team had done to him.

Podolsky said his kidnappers took him 130 kilometers from Kyiv to the woods of Petrivka village in Chernihiv Oblast. They beat him and threatened to kill if he continued writing articles against the Kuchma regime.

The police ordered him to dig his own grave.

“Marynyak showed me a spade and a gasoline can to burn my body. He told I would be digging my own grave if I would do anything against Kuchma and the Interior Ministry.” Podolsky said. “But when he was taking a can out of the car, I heard it was empty. That is when I understood it was all a theatrical performance going on. Unfortunately, with Gongadze it was not.”

Even though Podolsky still is involved in human rights work for the same organization, he no longer is afraid of being kidnapped or killed for his work. He is simply not a threat to anyone in power, he said.

“The Melnychenko tapes prove that Kuchma ordered then Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko” to murder Gongadze, Podolsky said. “On the tapes we may also hear Kravchenko’s report on the Podolsky beating.”

Pukach may still be tried with Podolsky’s kidnapping now.

Podolsky said his kidnapping – and its resemblance to Gongadze’s murder -- has made it more difficult for him to get jobs. “First I was taken in by employers and the next day they changed their minds. It means they are afraid themselves. It means it is not safe to express political views in Ukraine,” he said.

Over the years, journalists outside of Ukraine have taken a much greater interest in Podolsky’s story than journalists inside the nation.

“They do not invite me because they know what I will say and whom I will blame, such as Kuchma and the late Kravchenko. That is a sign there is no freedom of press in Ukraine. They just do not want to hear me,” Podolsky said. “But while Ukrainian media were keeping quiet, many of my colleagues from My (We) human rights organization had been warned or killed. First Serhiy Odarych, the mayor of Cherkasy, was warned, then he was shot in the back. Luckily he lived. Then Oleksandr Yakymenko, my friend and deputy of the local Donetsk board, the head of the representative office of “My,” was killed. The flat of the other “My” representative, Serhiy Kudryashov, set on fire. Nobody cared. There is no political will to care in Ukraine.”

Source: Kyiv Post

Mohammad Zahoor Buys Kyiv Post For An Estimated $1.1 Million

KIEV, Ukraine -- Mohammad Zahoor, a United Kingdom citizen who owns the ISTIL Group, has purchased the Kyiv Post in a deal valued by Dragon Capital investment bank at roughly $1.1 million.

Kyiv Post’s new owner, Mohammad Zahoor.
Zahoor bought the newspaper, Ukraine’s top English-language news publication since 1995, from its founder and only owner, American Jed Sunden. Sunden announced the sale at a noon meeting on July 29 to Kyiv Post staff members. Zahoor was not present.

However, in announcing the acquisition, Zahoor pledged to continue and strengthen Kyiv Post traditions of independent and investigative journalism.

“We believe that the best years of the Kyiv Post lie ahead, and we have great plans for the brand’s development, in print, on the Internet and with other media as well,” Zahoor said. “We are committed to upholding the Kyiv Post’s high standards of independent journalism, and will continue to allow the editors the freedom that they previously enjoyed. We recognize that the Kyiv Post was one of the few truly independent voices in Ukrainian media since its inception, which is why it enjoys almost unparalleled trust among its readership.”

While neither sided disclosed the purchase price, Dragon Capital estimated the deal at $1.1 million, “based on our 2009 financial projections for KP Media and current multiples at which publishing companies are traded,” according to its July 30 investment report.

Dragon Capital helped Sunden’s KP Media, the Kyiv Post’s former owner, sell 20 percent of the company’s shares in 2006, raising $11 million.

ISTIL Group is active in real estate, media, telecommunications, film production and television production, among other businesses in Ukraine and elsewhere. ISTIL stands for International Steel & Tube Industries, Ltd. The company has offices in Kyiv and was founded by Zahoor in 1991.

A native of Pakistan, Zahoor is a multi-millionaire who earned his fortune in steel production and trading in Donetsk. He sold the steel business more than a year ago – at the peak of the market, analysts say -- and has been investing into other areas, building up an impressive and diversified portfolio of assets.

Representatives of Zahoor and Sunden had been negotiating the sale intensively for the last two months and Sunden said he entertained other bids.

The sale includes both the newspaper and the Kyiv Post website, whose audience has been growing dramatically since a mid-September upgrade. The newspaper currently employs 22 people in news, advertising, marketing, distribution and accounting. But Zahoor expressed interest in hiring additional staff members to expand and improve the newspaper.

While the print version of the newspaper is published every Friday, the website is now continuously updated with staff reports and stories from Reuters, Associated Press, Interfax and other news services.

The deal brings to an end a 14-year era of Kyiv Post ownership by Sunden. The newspaper started with humble origins only four years into Ukraine’s independence, with $8,000 and six employees. But its reputation as a beacon of independent journalism and its financial success grew quickly.

In announcing the sale, Sunden said that money wasn’t the only factor in selling to ISTIL Group. Sunden said that he believes that the Kyiv Post will be “in good hands” under Zahoor’s ownership.

The Kyiv Post was the first publication in Sunden’s KP Media company, which has grown to include numerous other publications and websites. Other KP Media properties include the Russian-language Korrespondent magazine (launched in 2002) and website, BigMir (launced in 2000), Afisha and Kyiv Business Directory.

But, as Dragon Capital noted in its July 30 report, the last year has been difficult for KP Media.

“The economic decline, accompanied by a sharp contraction of the domestic advertising market, forced KP Media to close all new publications it had launched after its 2006 private placement, including the metro daily 15 Minutes, Ukrainian-language women’s magazines Pani and Vona and weekly news magazine Novynar.”

Dragon Capital expects that “KP Media will likely use the sale proceeds to replenish its working capital and reduce debt burden. Given the difficult situation on the market and in the company, we do not rule out KP Media will be forced to divest its other print media, such as entertainment weekly Afisha and some joint print projects. We expect that after KP Media cleans up its print media portfolio, the only exception being its very successful Korrespondent weekly magazine, it will continue to develop its Internet business.”

Zahoor said he has “the highest respect for the people at KP Media, and wish them the best of success in the future.”

Source: Kyiv Post

10 World’s Greatest Power Takeovers

MOSCOW, Russia -- In 1917, a crowd of resolute revolutionaries overthrew the Russian government and went on to establish the world’s first Marxist state.


Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, known by his revolutionary "nom de guerre", Lenin, inspired a small cadre of Communist intellectuals to agitate amongst the workers and soldiers of Petrograd, today's St. Petersburg. In this photo, his close associate Leon Trotsky stands at the right of the podium.
The Bolshevik October Revolution

In the chaotic days leading up to that October, the Bolsheviks (from the Russian “bolshinstvo” – “majority”) were just one of many groups agitating to bring down the regime. They were led by Vladimir Ulyanov, better known by his alias, Lenin. When the First World War broke out, they found eager supporters among the troops, who had been sent by the Tsar to fight losing battles in the freezing winter. Soon, many frustrated workers had also had enough. On October 25, a blank shot from the “Aurora” cruiser in Petrograd, today’s St. Petersburg, signaled the start of the revolt. The seizure by the Bolsheviks of the Tsar’s residence, the Winter Palace, became the revolution’s defining moment. To gain control of the entire country, Lenin and his backers went on to fight a bitter four-year war with the “Whites”, a loose coalition of those who opposed them. The Soviet Union was eventually proclaimed in 1922.

The Soviet August Coup

Three summer days that shook the USSR. For some time, the Communist Party hardliners had felt challenged by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms. In August 1991, with Gorbachev on holiday in the Crimea, they decided to act. The coup came a day before the planned signing of a new union treaty that would recast the USSR as a more loosely-bound connection of sovereign states. With Gorbachev held under house arrest, a group of top officials, headed by his own vice president, ordered tanks into the streets of Moscow. The Russian parliamentarians, led by Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected leader of the USSR’s Russian Republic, rallied popular support against the coup. In an iconic move, Yeltsin mounted a tank, as soldiers refused to disperse the protesters. An exhausted Gorbachev returned to Moscow to find that power had swung over to Yeltsin. In December, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus secretly signed accords dismantling the USSR. Faced with the inevitable, Gorbachev resigned on December 25, 1991.

The Orange Revolution

In autumn 2004, thousands of Ukrainians poured into Kiev’s Independence Square. Amid claims that the November presidential poll was rigged, they demanded victory for their man – Viktor Yushchenko. The battle was closely fought between the pro-Western Yushchenko and the sitting Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich, who didn’t hide his pro-Russian stance. Yanukovich was initially declared victorious. Convinced that the election was stolen from the rightful winner, Yushchenko’s supporters took to the streets. It was dubbed the Orange Revolution, with the protesters all wearing something orange – the color of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party. Yanukovich was forced to back down and lost the December re-run of the poll. But while Yushchenko’s euphoric backers celebrated in Kiev and Ukraine’s West, rallies ripped through the Russian-speaking, industrialized East – Yanukovich’s stronghold. Some media and analysts claimed that, far from being a spontaneous drive for democracy, the Revolution was a coup financed by the West. Since taking office, Yushchenko has kept to his promised course of steering Ukraine towards the EU and NATO.

The Rose Revolution

It was dubbed to Rose Revolution. In November 2003, crowds took to the streets of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi to challenge the results of a parliamentary election that they believed was flawed. They demanded the resignation of Eduard Shevardnadze, a man who had ruled Georgia for more than 20 years, as its Soviet-era Communist Party chief and its longest-serving post-independence president. Many protesters carried long-stemmed roses as a symbol of their peaceful intentions. The wave of rallies reached its peak on the day the new parliament, seen as illegitimate by the demonstrators, held its opening session. One of the opposition leaders, the US-educated ambitious firebrand Mikheil Saakashvili, led his supporters to the parliament building. They pushed their way through the thick wooden doors and interrupted a speech being given by Eduard Shevarnadze. The moment Shevardnadze’s bodyguards bundled him out by a back door, power changed hands in Georgia. The elite military units refused to support the government. Shevarnadze resigned and Mikheil Saakashvili was elected president in January 2004.

The Velvet Revolution

On November 17, 1989 riot police crushed a peaceful student demonstration in Prague. It sparked six weeks of protests that would topple the Communist government in Czechoslovakia. The bloodless revolt became known as the Velvet Revolution. By then, things had long been ripe for change. Mikhail Gorbachev had launched his policies of “glasnost” (openness) and “perestroika” (economic restructuring), loosening the USSR’s grip on the Warsaw Pact states. The Soviet-style regimes in Central and Eastern Europe began to wobble. In the run-up to November’s riots, the Czechs witnessed the drama that played out in Prague’s West German Embassy. Trying to thread their way to the West, thousands of East Germans spent months camped in its muddy garden. The Czech authorities eventually gave in, letting them pass directly to West Germany. Then the Berlin Wall fell. By the end of November, amid ongoing rallies, Czechoslovakia’s parliament stripped the Communist Party of its leading role. In June 1990, the country’s first democratic parliamentary election since 1946 was held.

The Islamic Revolution

In a rapid and dramatic upheaval, the 1978 revolution transformed Iran from a monarchy to an Islamic state. As Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was ousted, the revolt caught much of the West by surprise, toppling a regime thought to be guarded by a generously financed army and security services. The revolution was dominated by one man, Ayatollah Khomeini, who came to prominence by boldly criticizing the Shah’s secularism and ties with the US. In 1964, Khomeini was banished from the country, but he wasn’t forgotten. In exile, he became the acknowledged leader of the opposition. There, Khomeini also shaped his revolutionary doctrine, attacking the regime’s legitimacy and calling for a clerical state. In 1978, huge street riots demanding the abdication of the Shah paralyzed the country. The protests were drawing blood, but the monarchy was crumbling. The Shah had no one to turn to but Washington for help, with no tangible results. In January 1979, he fled Iran. Two weeks later, Khomeini returned home in triumph. In April, Iran officially became an Islamic Republic, with Khomeini as Supreme leader.

The American Revolution

It was the war that made America. Known as the American Revolution, it broke the thirteen North American colonies away from Britain’s rule and created the United States. The “shot heard round the world” fired at Lexington on April 19, 1775 started the war for American independence that ended eight and a half years later with the Treaty of Paris. From the outset, the colonies were, by and large, allowed to develop with little interference from Britain. Things changed in 1763, when London moved to tighten political control over the colonies, make them pay for their defense and return revenue to the mother country. The measures proved extremely unpopular. In April 1775, shots were exchanged by colonials and British soldiers and a revolution began. The following year, the colonies adopted a Declaration of Independence, establishing the United States of America. Things first looked grim for the ill-trained, poorly- armed American volunteers, but an alliance with France evened the strengths somewhat. Several decisive victories over the British led to peace, as the Treaty of Paris formally recognized the new nation in 1783.

The French Revolution

On July 14, 1789 a mob of angry Parisians stormed the Bastille. After several hours of fighting, the infamous prison fell, marking the start of the French Revolution. The Seven Years’ War, involving all major European powers, and the American Revolution across the ocean made the Western world a volatile place. The warfare took its toll on the French treasury, plunging the country into an economic crisis, while the King’s absolute power became increasingly questioned. Amidst the ongoing unrest, with some calling for constitutional monarchy and others wanting to do away with it altogether, the royal family tried to flee Paris in June 1791, disguised as servants. Recognized and arrested, they were paraded back to Paris. France was proclaimed a Republic; and Louis XVI was brought to trial and subsequently executed on January 21, 1793. The so-called Reign of Terror followed, ruthlessly killing anyone deemed an enemy of the revolution. The guillotine became the symbol of the bloodshed. In 1799, a rising star of the army, Napoleon Bonaparte, staged a coup, effectively becoming France’s next leader and, ultimately, Emperor.

Chilean Coup d’Etat

In autumn 1973, the world’s first democratically-elected Marxist head of state was overthrown. Chilean president Salvador Allende was replaced with General Augusto Pinochet, whose anti-communist military dictatorship lasted until 1990. Opposition to Allende had been brewing for months. After his election to power in 1970, his attempts to re-structure the nation’s economy led to runaway inflation and food shortages. The crunch came in the early hours of September 11, when Chilean armed forces took control of most of the country. With Allende rejecting an initial demand for his resignation, the presidential palace in Santiago was bombed and bloody fighting broke out in the city. Allende died during the coup. An official announcement declared that he had committed suicide with an automatic rifle, purportedly the one offered to him by Fidel Castro. The US role in the coup remains controversial. Files declassified during the Clinton administration detailed decisions and operations to undermine the election of Salvador Allende in 1970, and to promote the military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power.

The Cuban Revolution

On July 26, 1953, a small group of poorly-armed revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro stormed the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba. The attack is widely seen as the launch of the Cuban Revolution, which ended with the ousting of General Fulgencio Batista’s regime. The assault itself proved a tremendous failure, with nearly all of the rebels having been killed or captured. At his trial, Fidel Castro famously stated: “History will absolve me”, and was surprisingly released after two years. He went into exile in Mexico, where he trained an army for a guerrilla war against Batista. On December 2, 1956, Castro and some of his supporters returned to Cuba. Their numbers were quickly slashed by Batista’s soldiers, but many made their way into the mountains. As the revolutionary movement grew, Batista’s army was unprepared for the guerrilla style of warfare, and his troops were depleted by desertions and surrenders. Eventually deeming the situation hopeless, Batista fled the country on January 1, 1959. After a long victory march, Castro entered Havana several days later, bringing his military triumph to a close.

Source: Russia Today

Ukraine Still Providing Georgia With Weapons

MOSCOW, Russia -- Ukraine is openly continuing to supply Georgia with arms, and despite President Dmitry Medvedev’s order that those supplying weapons to Tbilisi face sanctions, Russia appears to be in no hurry to carry out the threat.

President of the breakaway South Ossetia region, Eduard Kokoity stands near Russian tanks and troops in the South Ossetian town of Dzhava on August 9, 2008.
Eduard Kokoity, president of breakaway South Ossetia, said Monday that the United States, Ukraine and Israel were still arming Georgia.

In early July, Ukrainian newspaper Segodnya published an interview with Sergei Bondarchuk, chief of state arms exporter Ukrspetsexport, in which he said they were continuing to fulfill arms contracts signed earlier with Georgia.

Medvedev signed an order in January banning Russian companies from supplying arms to Georgia. The order also allows the government to halt military and technical cooperation with countries and companies that are delivering Soviet- or Russian-designed weapons. The Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation is responsible for determining who is in violation and for sending proposed sanctions to the government for approval.

Vedomosti sent questions to the service two weeks ago asking whether it was aware of Bondarchuk’s comments and whether a decision had been made on seeking sanctions against Ukrspetsexport, but the service has yet to respond.

Ukrspetsexport declined comment.

A source in the Russian defense industry said no sanctions had been introduced against Ukrspetsexport and that the company continued to work with partners in Russia. The Georgian Interior Ministry, which is also supplied with arms purchased abroad, declined comment, saying the matter was classified. The country’s Defense Ministry could not be reached for comment.

Georgia’s defense budget for 2009 is $500 million, down from last year’s $900 million, according to figures from Lawrence Sheets, head of International Crisis Group’s office in the Caucasus.

After last August’s war, Western suppliers are worried about selling weapons to Georgia, despite President Mikheil Saakashvili’s requests, said Mikhail Barabanov, scientific editor of the magazine Export Vooruzhenii.

But Ukraine has supplied weapons since the war as part of contracts signed in early 2008, including another 20 T-72B tanks and likely several dozen BTR-70DI armored personnel carriers and anti-tank Kombat rockets.

It is highly unlikely that Ukraine will face sanctions for its arms sales to Georgia, said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies. They’re even less likely to affect the critically important enterprise Motor Sich, which is the monopoly producer of helicopter engines for the army and would be impossible to replace, Pukhov said.

Vyacheslav Boguslayev, chairman of Motor Sich and a Verkhovna Rada deputy from Party of the Regions, said the company had not delivered any military hardware to Georgia and has no plans to do so in the next 20 years. He said he thought that Russia was right to sanction suppliers of weapons to Georgia.

Source: The Moscow Times

Russia Hits Back At Ukraine With Diplomatic Tit-For-Tat

MOSCOW, Russia -- Moscow asked Ukraine on Wednesday to recall two senior diplomats from Russia, following a similar request from the Ukrainian side, the Foreign Ministry said.

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Ukrainian Ambassador to Russia, Kostiantyn Hryshchenko, was summoned to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday to discuss the issue with Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin.

"The Ukrainian ambassador was notified that Russia proposes that Ukraine consider recalling its consul general in St. Petersburg and one of the counselors at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow," the ministry said in a statement.

Kiev earlier asked the Russian consul general in Odessa and the senior counselor at the Russian embassy to end their work in Ukraine. However, Ukraine's decision on the consul general was later "suspended". Mirroring the announcement, Russia's Foreign Ministry said its decision on the Ukrainian consul general was also suspended.

However, the ministry said in a statement: "Russia considers the diplomatic actions previously taken by Ukraine to be a move aimed against Russia, to the detriment of bilateral relations."

The ministry also said that before making the announcement, Russia had warned Ukraine that it would be responsible for any negative consequences of "unfriendly" actions.

The statement said that Russia "nevertheless reaffirms its desire to develop friendly and neighborly relations with Ukraine to serve the interests of our peoples."

Source: RIA Novosti

The Russian Economy And Russian Power

AUSTIN, TX -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Georgia and Ukraine partly answered questions over how U.S.-Russian talks went during U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Russia in early July.

Vladimir Putin (L) and Joe Biden.

That Biden’s visit took place at all reaffirms the U.S. commitment to the principle that Russia does not have the right to a sphere of influence in these countries or anywhere in the former Soviet Union.

The Americans’ willingness to confront the Russians on an issue of fundamental national interest to Russia therefore requires some explanation, as on the surface it seems a high-risk maneuver. Biden provided insights into the analytic framework of the Obama administration on Russia in a July 26 interview with The Wall Street Journal.

In it, Biden said the United States “vastly” underestimates its hand. He added that “Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”

U.S. Policy Continuity

The Russians have accused the United States of supporting pro-American forces in Ukraine, Georgia and other countries of the former Soviet Union under the cover of supporting democracy. They see the U.S. goal as surrounding the Soviet Union with pro-American states to put the future of the Russian Federation at risk.

The summer 2008 Russian military action in Georgia was intended to deliver a message to the United States and the countries of the former Soviet Union that Russia was not prepared to tolerate such developments but was prepared to reverse them by force of arms if need be.

Following his July summit, Obama sent Biden to the two most sensitive countries in the former Soviet Union — Ukraine and Georgia — to let the Russians know that the United States was not backing off its strategy in spite of Russian military superiority in the immediate region.

In the long run, the United States is much more powerful than the Russians, and Biden was correct when he explicitly noted Russia’s failing demographics as a principle factor in Moscow’s long-term decline. But to paraphrase a noted economist, we don’t live in the long run.

Right now, the Russian correlation of forces along Russia’s frontiers clearly favors the Russians, and the major U.S. deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan would prevent the Americans from intervening should the Russians choose to challenge pro-American governments in the former Soviet Union directly.

Even so, Biden’s visit and interview show the Obama administration is maintaining the U.S. stance on Russia that has been in place since the Reagan years. Reagan saw the economy as Russia’s basic weakness. He felt that the greater the pressure on the Russian economy, the more forthcoming the Russians would be on geopolitical matters. The more concessions they made on geopolitical matters, the weaker their hold on Eastern Europe. And if Reagan’s demand that Russia “Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev” was met, the Soviets would collapse.

Ever since the Reagan administration, the idee fixe of not only the United States, but also NATO, China and Japan has been that the weakness of the Russian economy made it impossible for the Russians to play a significant regional role, let alone a global one. Therefore, regardless of Russian wishes, the West was free to forge whatever relations it wanted among Russian allies like Serbia and within the former Soviet Union. And certainly during the 1990s, Russia was paralyzed.

Biden, however, is saying that whatever the current temporary regional advantage the Russians might have, in the end, their economy is crippled and Russia is not a country to be taken seriously. He went on publicly to point out that this should not be pointed out publicly, as there is no value in embarrassing Russia. The Russians certainly now understand what it means to hit the reset button Obama had referred to: The reset is back to the 1980s and 1990s.

Reset to the 1980s and 90s

To calculate the Russian response, it is important to consider how someone like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin views the events of the 1980s and 1990s. After all, Putin was a KGB officer under Yuri Andropov, the former head of the KGB and later Chairman of the Communist Party for a short time — and the architect of glasnost and perestroika.

It was the KGB that realized first that the Soviet Union was failing, which made sense because only the KGB had a comprehensive sense of the state of the Soviet Union. Andropov’s strategy was to shift from technology transfer through espionage — apparently Putin’s mission as a junior intelligence officer in Dresden in the former East Germany — to a more formal process of technology transfer. To induce the West to transfer technology and to invest in the Soviet Union, Moscow had to make substantial concessions in the area in which the West cared the most: geopolitics.

To get what it needed, the Soviets had to dial back on the Cold War. Glasnost, or openness, had as its price reducing the threat to the West. But the greater part of the puzzle was perestroika, or the restructuring of the Soviet economy. This was where the greatest risk came, since the entire social and political structure of the Soviet Union was built around a command economy. But that economy was no longer functioning, and without perestroika, all of the investment and technology transfer would be meaningless. The Soviet Union could not metabolize it.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a communist, as we seem to forget, and a follower of Andropov. He was not a liberalizer because he saw liberalization as a virtue; rather, he saw it as a means to an end. And that end was saving the Communist Party, and with it the Soviet state.

Gorbachev also understood that the twin challenge of concessions to the West geopolitically and a top-down revolution in Russia economically — simultaneously—risked massive destabilization. This is what Reagan was counting on, and what Gorbachev was trying to prevent. Gorbachev lost Andropov’s gamble. The Soviet Union collapsed, and with it the Communist Party.

What followed was a decade of economic horror, at least as most Russians viewed it. From the West’s point of view, collapse looked like liberalization. From the Russian point of view, Russia went from a superpower that was poor to an even poorer geopolitical cripple. For the Russians, the experiment was a double failure. Not only did the Russian Empire retreat to the borders of the 18th century, but the economy became even more dysfunctional, except for a handful of oligarchs and some of their Western associates who stole whatever wasn’t nailed down.

The Russians, and particularly Putin, took away a different lesson than the West did. The West assumed that economic dysfunction caused the Soviet Union to fail. Putin and his colleagues took away the idea that it was the attempt to repair economic dysfunction through wholesale reforms that caused Russia to fail. From Putin’s point of view, economic well-being and national power do not necessarily work in tandem where Russia is concerned.

Russian Power, With or Without Prosperity

Russia has been an economic wreck for most of its history, both under the czars and under the Soviets. The geography of Russia has a range of weaknesses, as we have explored. Russia’s geography, daunting infrastructural challenges and demographic structure all conspire against it. But the strategic power of Russia was never synchronized to its economic well-being.

Certainly, following World War II the Russian economy was shattered and never quite came back together. Yet Russian global power was still enormous. A look at the crushing poverty — but undeniable power — of Russia during broad swaths of time from 1600 until Andropov arrived on the scene certainly gives credence to Putin’s view.

The problems of the 1980s had as much to do with the weakening and corruption of the Communist Party under former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev as it had to do with intrinsic economic weakness. To put it differently, the Soviet Union was an economic wreck under Joseph Stalin as well.

The Germans made a massive mistake in confusing Soviet economic weakness with military weakness. During the Cold War, the United States did not make that mistake. It understood that Soviet economic weakness did not track with Russian strategic power. Moscow might not be able to house its people, but its military power was not to be dismissed.

What made an economic cripple into a military giant was political power. Both the czar and the Communist Party maintained a ruthless degree of control over society. That meant Moscow could divert resources from consumption to the military and suppress resistance.

In a state run by terror, dissatisfaction with the state of the economy does not translate into either policy shifts or military weakness — and certainly not in the short term. Huge percentages of gross domestic product can be devoted to military purposes, even if used inefficiently there. Repression and terror smooth over public opinion.

The czar used repression widely, and it was not until the army itself rebelled in World War I that the regime collapsed. Under Stalin, even at the worst moments of World War II, the army did not rebel. In both regimes, economic dysfunction was accepted as the inevitable price of strategic power. And dissent — even the hint of dissent — was dealt with by the only truly efficient state enterprise: the security apparatus, whether called the Okhraina, Cheka, NKVD, MGB or KGB.

From the point of view of Putin, who has called the Soviet collapse the greatest tragedy of our time, the problem was not economic dysfunction. Rather, it was the attempt to completely overhaul the Soviet Union’s foreign and domestic policies simultaneously that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. And that collapse did not lead to an economic renaissance.

Biden might not have meant to gloat, but he drove home the point that Putin believes. For Putin, the West, and particularly the United States, engineered the fall of the Soviet Union by policies crafted by the Reagan administration — and that same policy remains in place under the Obama administration.

It is not clear that Putin and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev disagree with Biden’s analysis — the Russian economy truly is “withering” — except in one sense. Given the policies Putin has pursued, the Russian prime minister must believe he has a way to cope with that. In the short run, Putin might well have such a coping mechanism, and this is the temporary window of opportunity Biden alluded to. But in the long run, the solution is not improving the economy — that would be difficult, if not outright impossible, for a country as large and lightly populated as Russia.

Rather, the solution is accepting that Russia’s economic weakness is endemic and creating a regime that allows Russia to be a great power in spite of that.
Such a regime is the one that can create military power in the face of broad poverty, something we will call the “Chekist state.”

This state uses its security apparatus, now known as the FSB, to control the public through repression, freeing the state to allocate resources to the military as needed. In other words, this is Putin coming full circle to his KGB roots, but without the teachings of an Andropov or Gorbachev to confuse the issue. This is not an ideological stance; it applies to the Romanovs and to the Bolsheviks. It is an operational principle embedded in Russian geopolitics and history.

Counting on Russian strategic power to track Russian economic power is risky.

Certainly, it did in the 1980s and 1990s, but Putin has worked to decouple the two. On the surface, it might seem a futile gesture, but in Russian history, this decoupling is the norm. Obama seems to understand this to the extent that he has tried to play off Medvedev (who appears less traditional) from Putin (who appears to be the more traditional), but we do not think this is a viable strategy — this is not a matter of Russian political personalities but of Russian geopolitical necessity.

Biden seems to be saying that the Reagan strategy can play itself out permanently. Our view is that it plays itself out only so long as the Russian regime doesn’t reassert itself with the full power of the security apparatus and doesn’t decouple economic and military growth. Biden’s strategy works so long as this doesn’t happen. But in Russian history, this decoupling is the norm and the past 20 years is the exception.

A strategy that assumes the Russians will once again decouple economic and military power requires a different response than ongoing, subcritical pressure. It requires that the window of opportunity the United States has handed Russia by its wars in the Islamic world be closed, and that the pressure on Russia be dramatically increased before the Russians move toward full repression and rapid rearmament.

Ironically, in the very long run of the next couple of generations, it probably doesn’t matter whether the West heads off Russia at the pass because of another factor Biden mentioned: Russia’s shrinking demographics. Russian demography has been steadily worsening since World War I, particularly because birth rates have fallen. This slow-motion degradation turned into collapse during the 1990s.

Russia’s birth rates are now well below starkly higher death rates; Russia already has more citizens in their 50s than in their teens. Russia can be a major power without a solid economy, but no one can be a major power without people. But even with demographics as poor as Russia’s, demographics do not change a country overnight. This is Russia’s moment, and the generation or so it will take demography to grind Russia down can be made very painful for the Americans.

Biden has stated the American strategy: squeeze the Russians and let nature take its course. We suspect the Russians will squeeze back hard before they move off the stage of history.

Source: Stratfor Global Intelligence

Russian Patriarch Kirill: No Independent Church In Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine -- The head of the Russian Orthodox Church rejected calls from Ukraine's president to create a local Orthodox church that would be independent from Moscow, saying he firmly supports the status quo.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill conducts a religious service at the Monastery of Caves in Kiev, Ukraine, Monday, July 27, 2009. The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church arrived in Ukraine Monday for a 10-day visit aimed reasserting Moscow's dominance over a key Orthodox land whose leaders seek to shake off Russia's spiritual and political grip.
Patriarch Kirill arrived in Ukraine for a prolonged visit, which observers say is aimed at reasserting Moscow's religious and political influence over this predominantly Orthodox nation of 46 million, which is trying to integrate with the West.

President Viktor Yushchenko has led a campaign to win recognition of a separatist church that broke away from the Moscow Patriarchate in the 1990s.

''The main aspiration of the Ukrainian people is to live in a united, self-governing Apostolic Orthodox church,'' Yushchenko said in a speech, standing alongside Kirill.

Kirill was quick to stress that the dominant Orthodox church in Ukraine, which answers to Moscow, is the only legitimate church here.

''This church, Mr. President, already exists,'' Kirill said. ''If it didn't exist today, Ukraine wouldn't exist either.''

''But wounds have formed in this church and these wounds must be healed,'' he said.

The two leaders made the statements after laying flowers at a memorial commemorating the victims of a 1932-33 famine that killed millions which was engineered by Soviet authorities to abolish private land ownership.

Yushchenko is also leading a campaign to win recognition of the famine as an act of genocide; Moscow counters that the campaign was not aimed specifically at Ukrainians.

Kirill said that he mourns the tragedy and prays for all those who perished, but stressed that other ethnic groups, including Russians, also suffered.

The Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the Kremlin, worry about losing dominance in Ukraine.

The mainstream, Moscow-aligned church claims about 28 million believers, while the separatist Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate claims about 14 million followers. Opinion polls show the splinter church's popularity is growing.

Earlier Monday, Kirill led a service on St. Volodymyr Hill in central Kiev near the statue of Prince Volodymyr, who launched the Slavic world's conversion to Christianity in 988. Kirill called for friendship, brotherhood and unity.

Yushchenko, who has sought to break free from Russia's centuries-old political dominance and integrate with the European Union and NATO, has appealed to the spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox believers, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, to recognize the separatist church.

Bartholomew, who visited Kiev last summer, has not given a clear response.

Kirill is to visit a number of Ukrainian cities during a prolonged visit that his office says is devoted strictly to pilgrimage. But observers note that his trips to such strongholds of pro-Russian support as the eastern coal-mining city of Donetsk and the port of Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula have clear political undertones.

Before Kirill led the prayers, a group of nationalist activists shouting ''Moscow priest get out!'' briefly scuffled with his supporters near the St. Volodymyr Hill. The scuffle was broken up by police.

Source: AP

Ukraine's Suffering Still Overlooked By World

KIEV, Ukraine -- Nazi Germany’s greatest war crime is the Holocaust, of course, but the genocides against Ukrainians and Belarusians constitute a close second. And yet, while the Holocaust is common knowledge, few know much about the extermination of Ukrainians and Belarusians — and Germans may know about this least of all. The tragedy of these peoples’ suffering in the war has been compounded by the world’s almost complete ignorance and indifference.

Local resident shows bones found in what Jewish leaders say is a mass grave of Jews slaughtered in Ukraine during World War II, in the village of Gvozdavka-1, Ukraine.
That lamentable condition may be about to change, if only among professional historians. In a ground-breaking article that was published in the July 16 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yale University historian Timothy Snyder describes in excruciating detail just how Nazi policy was directed at exterminating first the Jews and then the Slavs. Since Belarus and Ukraine were occupied for almost four years, they suffered enormous population losses.

According to Snyder: “Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country. … The peoples of Ukraine and Belarus, Jews above all but not only, suffered the most, since these lands were both part of the Soviet Union during the terrible 1930s and subject to the worst of the German repressions in the 1940s. If Europe was, as Mark Mazower put it, a dark continent, Ukraine and Belarus were the heart of darkness.”

The devastation that affected both countries is even greater when one considers their experiences in the Stalinist 1930s and in World War I. Ukraine lost at least 3 million people in the genocidal famine of 1933. Both countries also served as the main killing fields of the Eastern Front during World War I (1914-18), the Civil War in Russia (1918-21) and the Polish-Russian War (1919-21).

According to a recent study of the Moscow-based Institute of Demography, Ukraine suffered close to 15 million “excess deaths” between 1914 and 1948:

■ 1.3 million during World War I.

■ 2.3 million during the Civil War, the Polish-Soviet War, and the famine of the early 1920s.

■ 4 million during the genocidal famine of 1933.

■ 300,000 during the Great Terror and the repressions in Western Ukraine

■ 6.5 million during World War II.

■ 400,000 during the post-war famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.

Ukraine and Belarus experienced nearly 40 consecutive years of relentless death and destruction, starting in 1914 and ending with Stalin’s death in 1953. Although Soviet Russia bears a great deal of responsibility for the killing, the lion’s share falls on Germany.

And yet Germany, which so assiduously remembers its crimes during the Holocaust, has still to build one monument to the millions of Belarusians and Ukrainians its armies killed in the 20th century.

How can this blindness be explained?

Partly, it’s a function of ignorance. The German media devote almost no coverage to Belarus and Ukraine. It is also partly because Germans just don’t “see” these countries.

Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Boll’s 1949 novel “The Train Was Punctual” provides a good example of this cultural mindset. The novel describes a young German soldier’s return to the front in southern Ukraine. As he travels eastward from his furlough, he traces his route on a map and “visits” various cities, towns and villages in Ukraine.

He speaks of Poles and Jews and Russians in great detail, but he doesn’t mention Ukrainians once, even though they formed the vast majority of the country and were the people whose farms he and his comrades probably plundered on a daily basis. Imagine a trip through the American South without a single reference to the black population.

But why don’t Germans “see” people who are so manifestly there? To some degree it’s because the “Untermenschen have remained Untermenschen” — economically underdeveloped peoples with silly cultural practices who either can’t get their political act together (Ukraine) or are proud to be Europe’s only dictatorship (Belarus).

The more important explanation is that German elites have traditionally viewed their neighbors to its east through the prism of great-power politics. Russia is big and strong and therefore demands respect. Its ruler may be a dictator, and its policies may be neo-imperialist, but these matters are easily overlooked.

Former German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder still managed to describe former President Vladimir Putin as a “true democrat” at precisely the time that Putin was doing all he could to crush Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.

Poland may be prone to polnische Wirtschaft (the derisive term for Poles’ inability to do things efficiently), but they’re right next door and have to be dealt with.

But Belarus and Ukraine? They’re just places with pipelines that carry Russian gas to German homes and factories.

Source: Kyiv Post

Soros: In Revolutionary Times The Impossible Becomes Possible

LONDON, England -- From the mid-1980s, Hungarian-born investor and philanthropist George Soros pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into foundations in Eastern Europe dedicated to promoting the idea of the "open society" and challenging the region's Soviet-backed regimes. Here, writing exclusively for CNN.com, he describes how the work of his foundations ultimately contributed to the collapse of communism.

Philanthropist George Soros
I set up my first foundation in Hungary in 1984. The idea behind it was simple. The state dogma, promoted by the ruling communists, was false and by providing an alternative we could expose its falsehood. Accordingly we supported every cultural initiative that was not an expression of the established dogma.

I was guided by the concept of the "open society," which I adopted from the philosopher Karl Popper. I saw the open society as a more sophisticated form of social organization than the totalitarian closed societies of the Soviet bloc.

The latter were trying to implement central plans; in an open society every individual or organization was supposed to implement their own plan. To make the transition from a closed to an open society would require outside help and that was what my foundations sought to provide.

In Hungary the authorities insisted on having a controlling presence on the foundation's board. We eventually agreed to appoint two chief executives, one nominated by them and one by me.

The project succeeded beyond my expectations. With very small amounts of money people could engage in a wide variety of civic initiatives ranging from self-governing student colleges to zither clubs.

One of our first projects was to offer photocopying machines to cultural and scientific institutions in exchange for local currency. We used the money to give out local grants and support all kinds of unofficial initiatives, but the photocopying machines also did a lot of good.

Up until then, the few existing copy machines were literally held under lock and key -- as more and more became available, the Party apparatus lost control of the machines and the dissemination of information.

We did not have to exercise direct control. Civil society watched over the foundation. For instance, we were warned that a blind association, to whom we gave a grant for talking books, was stealing some of the money. With a budget of $3 million, the foundation had more influence on the cultural life of Hungary than the Ministry of Culture.

Carried away my success in Hungary, by 1988 I had set up foundations in Poland, China and the Soviet Union. I think that I could have influenced General Jaruzelski in Poland to change his attitude toward the opposition and to see that dissidents such as Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron were also patriots despite their criticism of the ruling party.

As the Soviet empire collapsed, and eventually the Soviet Union and also Yugoslavia disintegrated, we continued to expand. By 1992 there were foundations in 22 countries and expenditure had reached $53 million. A year later we were spending nearly $184 million.

Right at the beginning, I had a disagreement with the Polish board about the way the foundation should be run. But that taught me a lesson. They were right and I was wrong. I realized that the people living there understood their country better than I did and I deferred to their judgment.

It did not always work. In Bulgaria, a board member who made his name as a human rights activist turned out to be a racist. A Latvian businessman sought to hijack the foundation for nationalist purposes. It was the Russian foundation that gave us the most trouble; we had to reorganize it twice.

But the foundations were the first out of the gate everywhere. I remembered the lesson my father who had lived through the Russian Revolution in Siberia taught me: In revolutionary times things that are normally impossible become possible.

In Ukraine, we set up the Ukrainian Renaissance Foundation before Ukraine became independent. In Tajikistan, we persevered with the foundation during the five-year civil war although we had no way of controlling its activities. Our impact was the greatest during that turbulent period.

When I set up the foundations in Eastern Europe I hoped the open societies of the West would follow in my footsteps, but in that regard I was disappointed. Unwilling to burden their own budgets, they gave the job to the International Monetary Fund, which was ill suited to the task.

The IMF was accustomed to signing letters of intent with governments, making the continuation of their programs conditional on the governments fulfilling their obligations. The countries of Eastern Europe fared better, but in the former Soviet states one after another, the programs largely failed.

East Germany was the exception: West Germany was willing to make the sacrifices that were necessary to integrate it. Eventually, the countries of Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states, also made the grade when the European Union gave them accession. But the rest of the former Soviet Union in the Caucasus and Central Asia never succeeded in making the transition.

This has left a bitter legacy. Rightly or wrongly, both the rulers and the people of Russia harbor a deep resentment against the West, which the West has not come to grips with.

The new order in Moscow that has emerged out of the chaos of the 1990s is very far from an open society. It is an authoritarian regime that preserves the outward appearances of democracy but derives its power from its control of Russia's national resources.

It uses those resources to maintain itself in power, to personally enrich the rulers, and to exercise influence over its neighborhood, both in Europe and in the former Soviet sphere.

But the ideal of an open society is difficult to suppress and I have not given up hope.

Source: CNN International

Russia Frees Crime Boss Wanted By U.S.: Report

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russia has released a suspected organized crime boss who is wanted by the United States for alleged fraud and racketeering, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing his lawyer.

Semion Mogilevich
Semion Mogilevich, who the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says created a powerful crime group in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, was arrested in Russia in 2008 and accused of tax evasion at a major cosmetics retailer.

"I spoke with him on Friday after he was released. He is happy to be home," Mogilevich's lawyer in Israel, Zeev Gordon, was quoted as saying by the FT.

Mogilevich's lawyers repeatedly said their client was innocent and denied any links to the cosmetics chain Arbat Prestige, where prosecutors said the tax evasion took place.

Gordon said a Russian court had freed Mogilevich and an alleged associate, Vladimir Nekrasov, on bail because the terms under which he could be held had expired.

Gordon said the court had sent the prosecutors' tax fraud case back to investigators claiming it needed more work.

"There is no evidence against him," Gordon was quoted as saying by the FT. A spokeswoman for the Russian Prosecutor-General could not be reached for immediate comment.

The FBI says on its Web site that Mogilevich is wanted for racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Ukrainian-born Mogilevich has denied U.S. allegations that he is a crime boss.

When Mogilevich was arrested, analysts said the real motive could be linked to accusations that he was involved in the multi-billion-dollar gas trade between Russia and Ukraine.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has accused Mogilevich of being behind RosUkrEnergo, an intermediary firm which sells gas to Ukraine. Mogilevich has previously denied through a lawyer any links to the firm.

Source: Canada News

Russian Patriarch Visits Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine -- Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has begun a visit to neighbouring Ukraine.

Kirill was elected Russia's patriarch in February.
He will meet the country's President, Viktor Yushchenko, in Kiev, before travelling to the east of the country.

Like Russia, Ukraine is a predominantly Orthodox country, but the Orthodox Church itself in Ukraine is split.

Some Ukrainian Orthodox believers think Patriarch Kirill's visit is aimed primarily at boosting political Russian influence in their country.

After arriving in Kiev on Monday, Patriarch Kirill set off in a motorcade to visit the holiest sites in the capital. He will later travel to the industrial heartlands of eastern Ukraine.

What makes this trip so controversial is Patriarch Kirill's vision.

He is a relative newcomer to the post, having been elected in February.

He has articulated a vision of Orthodoxy's future, in which the Russian Orthodox Church holds the dominant, first position among the scattered branches of Orthodoxy.

This makes the visit highly sensitive.

Divisions

It raises questions of spheres of religious and political influence, which often cross what are the region's relatively new state borders.

After 1991, when Ukraine gained its independence, the Orthodox church there split, with the Moscow patriarchate controlling the larger branch of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.

Meanwhile, believers from the smaller Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate think the Russian-backed church does not support Ukrainian independence, culture or language.

Furthermore, there are political divisions inside Ukraine.

In Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill will be seen as the head of one big family.

But in western Ukraine, nationalist groups have protested against what they say is his treatment of Ukraine as his own country.

President Yushchenko says he wants unity of the Orthodox churches.

Moscow arguably wants church unity on its terms.

The Russian Orthodox Church, after all, has a powerful role at the heart of Russia, aimed both at strengthening the state, and restoring its influence abroad.

Source: BBC News

Russia Admits Violation In Ukraine Base Incident

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russia made a rare admission on Sunday that it had violated Ukrainian law by trying to transport cruise missiles outside its Black Sea naval base of Sevastopol, Russian news agency RIA reported.

Russian Navy commander, Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky.
Earlier this month, Ukrainian police blocked a convoy of Russian trucks from leaving the base to transport missiles through the Ukrainian city, adding to tensions between the two ex-Soviet states.

"We acknowledged there were violations of basic agreements on basing the Russian Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol," RIA quoted Russian navy commander Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky as saying.

"We believe those were serious violations," he said. "Those responsible will be punished, quite heavily at that."

Vysotsky, who was in Sevastopol to mark Russia's annual Navy Day, said the paperwork dealing with the convoy had not been not done properly.

Moscow leases a base for its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, a port in the Crimea peninsula populated mainly by ethnic Russians. The status of the base has been a thorn in relations between Moscow and Kiev since Ukraine's independence in 1991.

Ukraine, which has committed itself to closer ties with the West and whose President Viktor Yushchenko is pressing for NATO membership, wants Russia to close the base in 2017 as stipulated by existing agreements.

Russia sees NATO expansion up to its borders as a threat to its security and was troubled by joint Ukrainian-NATO naval exercises last July in the Black Sea.

Tensions hit a peak the following month, when Russia sent warships from the base to Georgia during its five-day war with the Caucasus state. Yushchenko backed Georgia in the conflict.

The two sides have traded accusations over a series of incidents concerning the base and in the past have been reluctant to acknowledge any guilt.

Relations are also marred by disputes over Russia's gas supply to Ukraine and its transit to Europe.

Source: Javno

Pukach's Arrest Looks Like Pre-Election Yushchenko Ploy

KIEV, Ukraine -- The July 21 arrest of ex-Interior Ministry general Oleksiy Pukach, a suspect in the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, came on the same weekend that President Victor Yushchenko declared his re-election bid for the Jan. 17 presidential election. Were these two events merely coincidences or a bizarre attempt to rekindle Yushchenko’s popularity above its paltry 2-3 percent?


We can all be excused for being skeptical. After all, it is only two months before the election campaign officially kicks off.

We can also be skeptical because the same Yushchenko awarded a state medal on Feb. 17, 2007 to Prosecutor-General Mykola Potebenko, who covered up Gongadze’s murder. The award was for “his great personal contribution to the building of a law abiding state, the strengthening of legality and law abiding, and his long years of conscientious toil on the occasion of his 70th birthday.”

There are three aspects to the arrest of Pukach that do not add up.

Firstly, why did Pukach decide to hide in a village in Zhitomir Oblast and not, as we were repeatedly told, abroad? Why did he not flee when the State Security Service (SBU) officers began to pretend they were fishing in the village five days before he was arrested? In small villages strangers are easily spotted. Pukach apparently knew he might be apprehended but did nothing to defend himself.

A retired SBU officer had come to live in the village at the same time as Pukach and had made friends with him. Is that another coincidence? Or was he sent to watch over him so Pukach could be used in a future political battle? As they say, there is no such thing as a “former” spook.

Secondly, why did Pukach not hide his identity card? Children playing near his car found his Interior Ministry identification card inside it. Pukach’s lawyer, Serhiy Osyka, claimed that nobody had ever tried to find Pukach. “I can give you exclusive information that Pukach decided to give himself up. In reality nobody was looking for him ad he never hid,” Osyka said.

The first deputy head of parliament’s committee on organized crime and corruption, Hennadiy Moskal, also said that police officers had told him that Pukach was in contact with them and that he never went into hiding.

Thirdly, the YouTube video of Pukach’s arrest was a public relations gimmick. It is rather strange that only the fragment of the video made by the SBU where he is asked if he had been involved in the Gongadze case and says “yes” was posted on YouTube. Such questions are unusual during an actual arrest and it was obviously made for the camera and YouTube.

Former Justice Minister Serhiy Holovatiy, a Regions Party deputy since the 2007 elections, was head of parliament’s 2006 commission to investigate the Gongadze murder. He told Glavred magazine that he believes that the security forces released Pukach from custody in 2003 and have “controlled” him ever since (which could explain why the “retired” SBU officer was living in the village). Holovatiy believes Pukach’s release and subsequent life was controlled until a certain point in time when he would be used for political games.

Holovatiy doubted that Pukach’s release would solve the Gongadze case as he did not see any political will in Ukraine to do this. Holovatiy is right. A full investigation would throw a dragnet over the roles of ex-President Leonid Kuchma, Potebenko, ex-SBU chairman Leonid Derkach and ex-presidential chief of staff Volodymyr Lytvyn.

Yushchenko would not escape scrutiny himself in a full investigation. He condemned protesters in February 2001 who had been mobilized by Gongadze’s murder. Another signature on the condemnation of the protesters was Ivan Plyushch, whom Yushchenko had appointed National Security and Defense Council secretary in 2006. Plyushch was elected to the parliament on the pro-presidential Our Ukraine-Peoples Self Defense party in 2007.

As prime minister, Yushchenko and his allies to this day, such as Roman Besmertnyi who was then Kuchma’s representative in parliament, refused to ever condemn Kuchma. Besmertny threatened to disband parliament if it had voted to support Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s call for Kuchma’s impeachment.

The Pukach arrest could blow a hole in the conviction of three policemen (Mykola Protasov, Oleksandr Popovich and Valeri Kostenko) sentenced on March 19, 2008, to 12 and 13 years each. The three officers had admitted that they had been present when Pukach, who had commanded the surveillance unit, strangled Gongadze. Pukach’s lawyer says that his was fabricated by the three officers.

Following the conviction of the three officers, Tymoshenko called for the Gongadze investigation to move to finding the organizers, “who are political and public figures.” This view was echoed by Gongadze’s family and other politicians from the Orange Revolution’s two political groups in the parliamentary coalition.

The Council of Europe’s representative on the Gongadze case, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said: “While I welcome the conviction of the three police officers, I must admit that the Gongadze file is not closed until the instigators and organizers of this crime have also been held to account.”

There is little likelihood that senior officials will be ever charged, despite Pukach’s arrest. Three officials were de facto given immunity in 2004-2007 (Kuchma, Judge Maria Prindiuk, Potebenko) and three are no longer alive (General Yuriy Kravchenko, Ihor Honcharov, General Edward Fere).

The “guarantor” of the immunity deal was Sviatoslav Piskun who was – again not coincidentally - reinstated as Prosecutor General on Dec. 9, 2004. This happened a day after parliament approved a compromise package approved by Yushchenko at European Union-sponsored roundtables.

Kravchenko allegedly committed suicide with two bullets to the head on March 4, 2005, the same day he was set to give testimony at the prosecutor’s office. Former Health Minister Mykola Polishchuk, an expert in firearms, ruled out suicide, the official verdict, because an individual would lose consciousness after the first shot and would not have been able to inflict the second wound himself.

Ukraine’s judicial system came out of the Gongadze murder very badly. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), which has issued three reports into the Gongadze case in January and September 2005 and September 2007, believes that Potebenko and the prosecutor’s office deliberately obstructed the investigation of the murder.

Judge Maria Prindiuk closed the case against Pukach in April 2004 for destroying documents related to the Gongadze investigation. Prindiuk continued to work as a judge and was awarded a state medal by Yushchenko on Dec. 14, 2007.

Police detective Honcharov died in police custody on Aug. 1, 2003, and his body was cremated two days later, before an autopsy was performed. Leaked documents showed that an injection of the sodium thiopental drug caused Honcharov's death.

Honcharov claimed to have knowledge of those behind Gongadze’s murder. Light sentences of five years (with three years suspended) were given to three prison guards at pretrial detention facility No.13 in Kyiv for their involvement in Honcharov’s murder. General Fere, another witness, died on June 4.

The timing of Pukach’s arrest is highly suspicious because it took place at the same time as Yushchenko announced he would be a candidate in the upcoming presidential election. Just after being elected in 2004, Yushchenko promised the Council of Europe and Ukrainians that it was a matter of his honor to resolve the Gongadze murder.

Until now, in seeking to prosecute only the three lower-ranking police officers, while ignoring the organizers, the Yushchenko administration has continued a longstanding policy of keeping ruling elites above the law. If Yushchenko is seeking to use Pukach to score political points in the election campaign, it will backfire and become the final nail in his discredited presidency.

Pukach’s arrest is unlikely to bring to justice those who ordered Gongadze’s murder. And this is the real tragedy for his family and for Ukraine’s rule of law.

Source: Kyiv Post

Delivering Tough Love To Ukraine, Georgia

WASHINGTON, DC -- Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and expert on former Soviet republics, says Vice President Joseph Biden's recent trip to Ukraine and Georgia was meant to balance President Barack Obama's Moscow summit earlier in the month.

Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
But in both countries, Pifer says, Biden had to convey tough messages. In Ukraine, his message to Ukraine's feuding leadership was to repair relations and resolve their energy crisis, caused in large part by heavily subsidized domestic prices. In Georgia, Biden wanted to press Georgia's leaders on domestic political reforms, but he also made it clear that there was no way for Georgia to use military force to regain South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two provinces that have now been recognized by Russia as independent.

Vice President Joseph Biden has just completed a trip to Ukraine and Georgia to reassure both of those former Soviet republics that the American desire to "reset" relations--Biden's words in Munich last February--with Russia were not meant at their expense. But he also had what one Biden aide called "tough love" for both of them. Could you elaborate on this trip?

That was the first point of the trip: to reassure Kiev and Tbilisi that the United States remains interested in robust relations with Ukraine and Georgia, and that we will work to keep open their pathways to Europe and the North Atlantic community. When I was in Ukraine about five or six weeks ago, what I heard from the Ukrainians was a concern--and I suspect there is a parallel concern in Georgia--that the effort to reset relations with Russia would somehow come at Ukraine's expense.

So part of the trip by the vice president was to assure both Ukraine and Georgia that the United States is not going to undercut relations with those two countries as it tries to develop relations with Russia. You've seen points made by this administration, indeed going back to the Munich speech itself, saying the reset of relations would not mean recognition of a Russian "sphere of influence" over the former Soviet states, and then repeated assurances that the United States supports the rights of countries such as Ukraine and Georgia as sovereign states to choose their own foreign policy course.

What was also interesting to me was that in his speech in Ukraine, Biden was virtually demanding that the Ukrainian leadership get their act together. In Georgia, I don't think he was publicly as tough. Can you elaborate on the "tough love" part of the visits?

Let me start with Ukraine. Certainly the primary goal of the visit was to reassure Ukraine, but there was also a tough message there. In Ukraine, it's not only due to the presidential election, but you've had a situation in the past year and a half where the government really hasn't functioned because of infighting between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

It's meant that Ukraine has passed up opportunities to accomplish some important things. A big part of the vice president's message in Kiev was to say, "You need to put aside political differences, come together as mature political leaders, find compromises, and get things done."

He also singled out the importance of Ukraine getting serious about reforming its energy sector. This is a huge national security vulnerability for Ukraine because they have a distorted price structure where people buy natural gas at prices that don't begin to cover the cost of the gas that Ukraine buys from Russia. As a result, Naftogaz, the national gas company, is perpetually in debt to Russia and on the verge of bankruptcy. That creates vulnerabilities for Ukraine.

Part of the vice president's message was, "You need to get serious about this." Part of the problem in Ukraine is if you are a household, you are probably paying a price that amounts to less than 30 percent of the actual cost of the gas bought from Russia. It's no wonder why Naftogaz is always in financial straits. But it's not just an economic problem because of the way it factors into the Ukraine-Russia relationship. It creates a national security issue for Ukraine. So there are two aspects to the tough message: One, the need for political leaders to get together, compromise, and produce good policy; and second, the special importance of tackling this energy security issue.

At the time of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were united. What's caused this major rift?

This has been one of the surprises and one of the disappointments since the Orange Revolution. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were allies during the revolution. Tymoshenko was prime minister for eight months in 2005. She's been prime minister again since December 2007, but the relationship between the president and the cabinet just has not worked. There's been continual infighting where the president blocks cabinet actions and vice versa.

Over the last fifteen or sixteen months, it's been hard to get the $16 billion loan from the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. And it's hard to find too much else that the government has been able to accomplish, in large part because the president, the presidential secretariat, the cabinet, and the prime minister seem to be undercutting each other so badly.

Is it a personal thing?

I suspect part of it is personal. If you go back to December 2007, the initial shots seemed to have been fired by the chief of staff to the president, Viktor Baloga, who has since left that position. In that fight, it seemed to reflect a concern on the part of the presidential administration that in the presidential election, which will be held in January 2010, Tymoshenko would be a strong rival to the president. There seems to have been an effort to undercut her.

Unfortunately, this means the government has not performed as expected. Interestingly in politics what we've seen is that President Yushchenko's rating has fallen to the low single digits. Tymoshenko's rating remains at about 15 percent, falling second in most polls for the president.

It's interesting how the leader of the Orange Revolution has fallen so low in the polls. There's a similar situation in Georgia with President Mikheil Saakashvili, right?

There's a different situation in Georgia. There are two factors motivating opposition to Saakashvili. One is a concern that goes back to the fall of 2007, when Saakashvili was walking back on some of the democratic achievements that Georgia had obtained since the Rose Revolution. And significant opposition has been generated to Saakashvili in the aftermath of the conflict between Russia and Georgia last August.

There's a feeling held by many in the opposition that while the Russians may have provoked the conflict, Saakashvili made a huge mistake. He took the bait and sent the army into South Ossetia, bringing about a strong Russian response that crushed the Georgian military in a matter of days.

Biden met with the opposition both in Ukraine and in Georgia on this rather brief trip, which I guess presidents and vice presidents usually do.

In the case of Ukraine, in addition to meeting with President Yushchenko and Prime Minister Tymoshenko, he also had meetings with Regions Party head Yanukovych, the former parliamentary speaker Yatsenyuk, and the current parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn. That's natural. That's appropriate in a country that's five months out from a presidential election.

No matter who wins the election in January, the vice president has met with that person on this trip. That's the appropriate way to show that the United States doesn't have a favorite in that election, and as the vice president made clear, the important thing is that Ukraine continue to demonstrate that it knows how to do free and fair elections, and that it is a leader in the region in terms of democratic progress.

In the case of Georgia, there was an effort to meet with the opposition to show some balance. This may reflect some quiet concern on the part of this administration that the Bush administration's policy toward Georgia may have become too personalized with Saakashvili. There's an effort to say the United States wants a strong, robust relationship with Georgia, but perhaps without the personal attachment to Saakashvili.

Certainly there are figures in the opposition--the former head of the Georgian parliament, Nino Burjanadze, and the former Georgian ambassador to the United Nations, Irakli Alasania--who are in favor in Washington. So the approach to Georgia will be more balanced and not so personalized as what we saw in the Bush administration. There's a fine line to walk here, and the vice president is doing it fairly well, where you don't want to signal to the Russians that we're chopping off Saakashvili completely.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev showed up in South Ossetia just a week before Biden arrived in Georgia, to demonstrate Russia's presence inside what used to be Georgia. There was also a strong message from Moscow during Biden's trip warning against any military aid to Georgia. Are the Russians really worried that the United States may do something that might provoke them?

The Russians, since last August, had a very sharp rhetorical stance against Georgia and against Saakashvili in particular. But it seems to me that if they look at how the United States has engaged with Georgia since the conflict, there was passage of a major assistance program, but that assistance has been primarily on economic recovery and such.

Certainly I suspect that the administration is going to have a military-to-military relationship with Georgia, but I don't think providing weapons to Georgia is high on anybody's priority list in the United States. And the simple fact is that there's no conceivable defense assistance program the United States could do with Georgia that would give the Georgians the ability to defend themselves against Russia, to say nothing of trying to take back South Ossetia or Abkhazia.

In fact, in his speech to the Georgian parliament , Biden said specifically: "It is a sad certainty, but it is true there is no military option to reintegration, only peaceful and prosperous Georgia--a peaceful and prosperous Georgia that has the prospect of restoring your territorial integrity by showing those in Abkhazia and South Ossetia a Georgia where they can be free and their communities can flourish."

You did a report for the Council on Foreign Relations, Averting Crisis in Ukraine, in which you pointed out some of the danger possibilities. What is the situation now?

My read now is that the one crisis possibility out there that is real is another gas conflict. It's a possibility because, due to the weakness in the energy sector in Ukraine, the country is perpetually in danger of missing payments. In fact, Ukraine is technically in default on the gas contract it signed in January because it hasn't bought the minimum amount of natural gas that it contracted to buy.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said they won't push that point, but the Russians haven't amended the contract. So Ukraine is still in technical default. And there are suspicions that the Russians may look for an opportunity in the fall or early winter to again apply some pressure on the gas side with a view of having an impact on Ukraine's internal politics. So there's that concern.

The other concern that I wrote about in January between Ukraine and Russia is that somehow they might get into a conflict over Crimea. My sense is that the probablility of that is declining now.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations

Ukraine Tightens The Screw In Sevastopol

KIEV, Ukraine -- President Viktor Yushchenko announced his bid for a second term on July 18 defying pundits who believed his low popularity of 2-3 percent would deter him. Yushchenko used the highest peak in Ukraine - Hoverla in the Carpathians - to declare his bid for re-election, following a tradition set on Hoverla in 2002 (when he launched the Our Ukraine political party) and 2004 (when he announced his presidential candidacy).

Russian missile cruiser Moskva in the Ukrainian Black Sea port of Sevastopol.
Yushchenko's election speech included little concerning everyday realities facing Ukrainians such as the global financial crisis, but it was instead full of references to Ukrainian national identity, the re-writing of history, historical memory, language and the nation.

The speech - as reflected in actual presidential policies in the Crimea - points to Yushchenko following Leonid Kravchuk in 1994 in campaigning for re-election on a nationalistic platform.

Yushchenko had targeted the Black Sea Fleet during the August 2008 Russian-Georgian war, passing two decrees that sought to restrict its ability to move in and out of Sevastopol without Ukrainian authorization.

The Black Sea Fleet, which sent vessels and marines to the August 2008 war, refused to abide by these decrees, while the Ukrainian president did not seek to enforce them in the face of Russian objections.

Typically, the decrees therefore remained on paper reinforcing the Yulia Tymoshenko government's view that it was pointless issuing them, since it would not have risked a direct confrontation over the Black Sea Fleet.

Most Ukrainian politicians have always sought to grudgingly accept its presence, through a temporary twenty year provision in the Ukrainian constitution that bans foreign bases, and hope that Russia will abide by the treaty and withdraw in 2017.

This approach to Sevastopol and the fleet only served to embolden Russia to act with impunity and ignore the 1997 basing agreement and Ukrainian legislation, whether through illegally occupying buildings, such as lighthouses, or transporting missiles through Crimean towns without Ukrainian authorization.

In addition, Russia - particularly Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov - invested large financial sums into Sevastopol while Kyiv ignored the challenge of raising Ukraine's profile in the port by financing socio-economic and educational institutions. Sevastopol has a large shopping mall named "Moscow" and branches of the Moscow State University provided by the mayor of Moscow.

Yushchenko has ordered law enforcement agencies to investigate Russian activities in Sevastopol. Yushchenko believes that they are "directed not only against the state, but against us all, against our families, and our children. These are those projects that bring instability and squabbles".

Yushchenko has also lobbied for the idea of removing Sevastopol's Soviet era special status which combined with Kyiv, gives it an all-republican status. His aim is to integrate Sevastopol with the Crimea. In Yushchenko's criticism of Russian projects he in effect called for the Ukrainianization of Sevastopol by tying it closer to Ukraine geographically and through promoting Ukrainian national identity and military traditions.

Luzhkov denied Yushchenko's charges that its Sevastopol education and economic projects were "unfriendly" and a "provocation against Ukraine," counter claiming that the Ukrainian authorities have invested little themselves.

Moreover, Yushchenko has also tightened the screws on Sevastopol in other ways. On July 8 a Russian military convoy of three trucks transporting SS-N-2 short and SS-N-9 medium range missiles without permits through Sevastopol was intercepted by Ukrainian Interior Ministry (MVS) Special Forces. The missiles were en route to a technical repair base 30 kilometers outside the port that is used by the fleet.

SS-N-9 missiles, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, were used as conventional weapons during the fleet's intervention in the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. The Russian foreign ministry protested at the Ukrainian intervention claiming that transporting missiles was permitted by the 1997 agreement. "Our sailors were not conducting any new type of action," the statement said.

On July 21 another Russian convoy was halted by MVS traffic police that was transporting "Malakhit" missiles without a permit or the required fire engine escort, while three more trucks carrying missiles were stopped on July 23.

Earlier this year Ukraine protested over plans to add a submarine to the Black Sea Fleet, claiming it cannot be enlarged without Ukraine's consent. A separate addendum would have to be agreed to the 1997 basing agreement in order to permit the fleet's expansion.

Russia continues to distribute passports to Crimean's thereby infringing Ukrainian legislation, which does not permit dual citizenship. The practice, used extensively in South Ossetia, permitted Russia to claim that it was intervening to protect "Russian citizens" from "Georgian aggression" and could thereby provide a similar pretext for a future Russian intervention in Sevastopol, in the event of a Ukrainian crackdown on separatists.

Another widely used infringement is the violation of Ukrainian immigration laws by the fleet's personnel. Last month it protested against Ukraine's new policy of checking the documentation of Russian naval personnel, claiming it was an "unfriendly move directed against Russian-Ukrainian relations".

The Ukrainian interior ministry, which oversees the issuing of passports and immigration controls, estimated that 10 percent of illegal immigrants in Sevastopol were Russian sailors.

The Black Sea Fleet has positively responded to one Ukrainian demand and requested permission (for the first time in 18 years) to hold its annual parade. A spokesman from the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow said that, "this step will strengthen the practice of providing full respect by the Russian side towards Ukrainian sovereignty, its legislation and the bilateral agreement that regulates the basing of the Russian Black Sea Fleet on Ukrainian territory".

Equally, Russia is likely to negatively respond to the majority of Ukrainian demands. Although Russia is conducting an ideological campaign against Ukraine (EDM, June 12) and is openly provocative, Yushchenko's nationalist election platform is likely to maintain tense relations with Russia, while deepening Western European suspicions of him as a Russophobe.

Consequently, this might reduce Ukraine's prospects to pursue closer European integration. Yushchenko's nationalistic campaign for a second term repeats that of Kravchuk's desperate attempt for re-election in the 1994 pre-term presidential elections.

However, Yushchenko's nationalist platform, reminiscent of Kravchuk's, is likely to fail while also undermining the young pretender Arseniy Yatseniuk's campaign -by splitting the Our Ukraine vote between two candidates.

Source: Jamestown Foundation

Key Suspect In Gongadze Murder Arrested; Pukach Allegedly Strangled Journalist, But Who Gave The Order?

KIEV, Ukraine -- A key suspect in the 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze has turned up in Zhytomyr Oblast, ending five years as one of the nation’s most-wanted fugitives.

General Oleksiy Pukach as he was arrested by the SBU.
The suspect, Oleksiy Pukach, is cooperating with the investigation, according Vasyl Hrytsak, deputy head of the State Security Service, who is in charge of the investigation. He said Pukach named those who ordered the murder. He said Pukach also confessed to strangling the journalist and promised to say where where the late journalist's missing head is buried.

Hrytsak said there were "high-ranking officials" among those named. He declined to elaborate, but promised "a lot more interesting information" later on.

Myroslava Gongadze, the journalist's widow, told the Kyiv Post that former president Leonid Kuchma should be worried about the capture of the main suspect in the case.

"Former president Kuchma has reason to be afraid. The head of his administration, Volodymyr Lytvyn, has reason to be afraid. Many ranks within the Interior Ministry have to be afraid. Because this was a serious, great camapign," she said. "Georgiy's murder was just one of the crimes committed by President Kuchma regime. And if Pukach really tells everything he knows, I think we can expect great discoveries."

Victor Yushchenko said he is concerned about the safety if the witness. "I gave an order yesterday to make sure not a single hair falls off Pukach's head, that he should be on a territory where every second the security of his life is being controlled," he told Silski Visti newspaper. Pukach's whereabouts are currently kept secret.

Earlier, other politicians, including Oleksandr Turchynov, the nation’s first deputy premier, called on investigators to protect Pukach from harm. “Many influential people are not interested in the answer to the question of who ordered [the murder] getting to court,” Turchynov said.

Verkhovna Rada deputy Gennadiy Moskal implied that Pukach was easy to find – just that the will to find him was missing until now.

“Former colleagues who have retired during meetings often told me that Oleksiy [Pukach] called them and asked how things are. He never really hid. It’s simply that nobody was looking for him,” Moskal said. “Pukach has a mass of passports. He worked in the service where cover-up documents are issued. But, in the end, as soon as he realized nobody’s looking for him, he quietly lived in the country, ate everything fresh, shepherded cows and cared nothing for those who searched for him.”

Kuchma, on audiotapes made by former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko, is allegedly heard discussing the need to silence Gongadze for his online news reports about high-level corruption. Not only Kuchma, but current Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn and other top-level administration officials are reportedly heard on the Melnychenko tapes plotting against Gongadze.

Kuchma and other politicians implicated in the murder have consistently denied any involvement. The authenticity of the Melnychenko tapes, released by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz in November 2000, is disputed and has never been conclusively proved.

In videotaped testimony in 2000, Melnychenko – who in recent years has been living in Ukraine and the United States – accused Kuchma of ordering the disappearance of Gongadze. Melnychenko said Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko directed a special department within the ministry to kidnap Gongadze at the instruction of the president.

The investigation into the Gongadze’s murder before Kuchma left office in 2005 quickly degenerated into farce. It was characterized by stonewalling, misleading statements and outright lies, fueling suspicions of an official cover-up.

Solving the Gongadze case – and other high-profile crimes allegedly captured by the Melnychenko tapes – were among the driving forces of the 2004 democratic Orange Revolution. But President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have never made good on their promises to solve most of these cases.

On the most recent anniversary of Gongadze’s Sept. 16, 2000, disappearance, the nation’s human rights ombudsman, Nina Karpacheva, blasted the ongoing lack of progress in solving the case. “It seems to me that [the Prosecutor General’s Office] lacks the courage, professionalism or independence to name those who ordered this murder,” Karpacheva said “Until the head of Georgiy Gongadze is found, Ukraine will remain the ‘headless rider.’”

Pukach was indicted for the slaying in absentia in 2005, his arrest was the result of a joint operation between the Prosecutor General’s Office and Interior Ministry. According to SBU's Hrytsak, he never left Ukraine and lived in Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions since 2003. Apparently, he expected to be arrested, Hrytsak said.

Lower-level Interior Ministry police officers Mykola Protasov, Valeriy Kostenko and Oleksandr Popovych have been convicted of abducting Gongadze in Kyiv. Gongadze, founder of the muckraking Ukrainski Pravda news website, reportedly angered Kuchma and other high-ranking members of the administration with his willing to report in detail on corruption.

During a trial, the three convicted police officers claimed they were only following orders from Interior Ministry police general Oleksiy Pukach, who suspected of strangling Gongadze himself. Pukach was a key aide to then-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko.

Kravchenko died of two gunshots to the head on March 4, 2005, just hours before he was to begin providing testimony as a witness in the case. The official ruling of suicide is doubted. Media reports surfaced that Kravchenko was under surveillance in the days before his death and that his body was found with two broken fingers and other injuries.

Kravchenko left this alleged suicide note: “My dear ones, I am not guilty of anything. Forgive me, for I became a victim of the political intrigues of President Kuchma and his entourage. I am leaving you with a clear conscious, farewell.” Suicide or not, Kravchenko’s death exposed law enforcement officials’ inability to protect key witnesses to the nation’s greatest crimes.

Gongadze’s decapitated body was found in the suburbs of the Ukrainian capital in November 2000.

Pukach was first detained in the fall of 2003 on suspicion of destroying documents proving that Gongadze had been shadowed by police. Pukach was later released under a written pledge not to leave town, but disappeared soon afterwards.

The official investigation theory is that Pukach sanctioned the surveillance of Gongadze and led the convicted group of officers in kidnapping Gongadze and taking him out to a field near the village of Sukholisy in the Bila Tserkva district of Kyiv Oblast.

According to investigation findings, after strangling Gongadze, Pukach ordered the other policemen to keep silent about the crime. Pukach might also have reburied Gongadze’s body in a forest in the Tarashcha district.

But strong suspicions – fueled by the Melnychenko tapes -- remain that Pukach acted on instructions either from Kuchma or high-ranking members of the presidential administration. He may have even been rewarded for the crime with the gift in August 2003 of a new three-room apartment in an elite housing complex in Kyiv.

The press service of former Verkhovna Rada Speaker Oleksandr Moroz, who released the Melnychenko tapes in 2000, released this statement: “Detaining Pukach is an important step to establish justice…it’s important for investigators to find out more about Gongadze’s reburial, the way his body was transported and everything connected with the dismemberment, including information taped in Leonid Kuchma’s office already decoded abroad, it will be easier to answer questions about those who ordered and organized the murder and the motive behind the crime overall.

Source: Kyiv Post

Yushchenko Loses Support

KIEV, Ukraine -- Helen Dashkovckrr was among the thousands who thronged Independence Square in the capital of Ukraine in support of what became the country’s Orange Revolution.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko (R) shakes hands with US Vice President Joe Biden before a working breakfast in Kiev. Biden has told Yushchenko to stop the infighting with PM Tymoshenko.
Like many of her countrymen, she believed the presidential victory declared for the pro-Russian prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, in November 2004 was a sham and she was prepared to brave freezing winter temperatures to show how she felt.

Eventually, the protesters prevailed and the country’s supreme court annulled the result, with the rerun election won by the western-orientated Viktor Yushchenko.

Nearly five years after those heady days, which came one year after the Rose Revolution in Georgia propelled Mikheil Saakashvili to power, Ms Dashkovckrr has, like many of her countrymen, grown disenchanted. The Orange Revolution, she now says, “was a mistake”.

“Because we didn’t live better,” she said. “I don’t think people have become more happy. We believed in this revolution. We believed in the person. But in the end we have nothing.”

In his time in office, Mr Yushchenko has partially regained the good looks he lost so suddenly during the last election campaign after an apparent poisoning, but his political fortunes look harder to salvage.

His support in opinion polls has been as low as two per cent, so although recently he officially launched his campaign for re-election in the January presidential polls, his chance of winning is slim.

According to Olga Demyanets, 23, a lawyer who took part in the Orange Revolution demonstrations while a student, Mr Yushchenko has represented less of a break with the style of his Moscow-orientated predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, than expected.

In particular, many feel he has failed to stem the influence of the oligarchs, the wealthy industrialists who made fortunes when state companies were privatised after Ukraine became independent following the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Many oligarchs hold parliamentary seats, and the political system under Mr Yushchenko has failed to become the transparent one many expected after the cronyism complained of during Mr Kuchma’s 10-year spell in power.

“There were a lot of hopes connected with the revolution and promises made by the politicians, and they’ve not kept their promises,” Ms Demyanets said.

“The same people are running the country. It was promised they would change at the highest level, but for them it was better to make some arrangement with these than to change it.”

It is a view echoed by Kristina Bidny, 32, a logistics manager, who said: “The main problem is the oligarchs. They have their people in each party so it doesn’t matter who wins. Corruption is the biggest problem of this country.”

A major issue reducing Mr Yushchenko’s effectiveness in pushing through reforms has been a lack of unity within the Orange Revolution camp and in particular his falling out with a former ally during the campaign, Yulia Tymoshenko, who became his first prime minister.

Poor parliamentary election results for the former Orange Revolution allies even allowed Mr Yanukovych to secure the prime ministership between 2006 and 2007.

Although Mrs Tymoshenko regained the post, relations between her party, All Ukrainian Union Fatherland, and Mr Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine remain at a low ebb.

Mr Yanukovych, who at the last presidential election was Mr Kuchma’s favoured candidate, and who heads the Party of the Regions, now stands a better chance than either of his rivals of winning next year’s election.

Aside from the political infighting that has plagued the former Orange Revolution allies, Mr Yushchenko has also suffered as a result of Ukraine’s economic difficulties. The country has been heavily affected by the global financial crisis.

There have also been tensions with the country’s neighbour, Russia, which has cut gas supplies more than once in a dispute over fees. Many think the regional superpower raised prices to punish Ukraine for Mr Yushchenko’s enthusiasm for EU and Nato membership.

Some believe Mr Yanukovych is a more credible candidate than Mr Yushchenko to bring Ukraine out of its economic malaise.

“People thought that five years ago some big change was coming, but there was no such change,” said Igor Shcherbyna, 22, a manager in a private company, summing up the disenchantment of many.

People expected “stability and a growing of the country and their lives. Yanukovych proclaims he will make it more stable than Yushchenko, and I think that’s why he’s much more popular now”.

Source: The National

Stop Infighting, Biden Tells Ukraine's Leaders

KIEV, Ukraine -- U.S. Vice President Joe Biden chided Ukraine's political leaders on Wednesday, telling them they had to stop "posturing" if the country was to seal its post-Soviet independence and economic development.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks during an address to prominent Ukrainians at the close of a two-day visit in Kiev, July 22, 2009.
In a speech marked by a sharper tone that contrasted with previous expressions of unflinching support from Washington, Biden said Ukraine stood at a historic moment in building on the gains of the 2004 pro-Western "Orange Revolution."

"Literally, you are standing in a moment in history that you have never stood at before, literally," Biden said. "Frankly, your success will bear on the successes or failures of many people in this part of the world."

Infighting has pitched Ukraine into non-stop political turmoil since a heady week of street protests in 2004 against electoral fraud swept President Viktor Yushchenko to office.

The protests -- and a re-run of a rigged election -- caught the world by surprise and opened the way for Yushchenko to move Ukraine away from its former Soviet master, Russia.

Initial euphoria and pledges to secure membership of the European Union and NATO, staunchly supported by the administration of former U.S. president George W. Bush, gave way to bickering and stalled reforms as Ukraine plunged into recession.

"Ukraine, in my humble opinion, must heed the lesson of history. Effective, accountable government is the only way to provide a stable, predictable and transparent environment that attracts investments ... the economic engine of development," he said.

Biden suggested 19th century poet Taras Shevchenko, a national hero who opposed centuries of Russian dominance, would be critical of rows pitting Yushchenko against Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his estranged ally from the revolution.

"I think he would also be wondering why the government is not exhibiting the same political maturity as the people," he told the gathering of prominent Ukrainians.

"Why communications among leaders have broken down to such an extent that political posturing appears to prevent progress, especially now, especially in difficult economic times.

COMPROMISE TO REFORM

Biden's sharper tone is part of a changed U.S. policy since President Barack Obama took over from Bush, who aggravated ties with Russia by his push for NATO expansion to Russian borders.

Biden said Washington would support any decision Ukraine might make on membership of NATO, which is vehemently opposed by Moscow. Most Ukrainians remain opposed to joining NATO, despite Yushchenko's drive to seek membership.

Biden encouraged Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and other leaders to resolve differences ahead of a January 17 presidential election. "In a democracy, compromise is not a sign of weakness, it is evidence of strength," he said.

Disputes have exasperated the IMF, which has delayed the release of some of the $16.4 billion it has agreed to loan Ukraine to withstand the economic crisis.

"The path to renewed prosperity runs through the International Monetary Fund which is offering a way out of the current crisis," Biden said. A senior U.S. official said late on Tuesday that Washington would not offer Ukraine any extra loans.

The IMF wants authorities to raise domestic gas prices to right the finances of state energy firm Naftogaz, often at the center of rows with Russia, including a three-week New Year cutoff of flows. But that would be unpopular before an election.

Many analysts say Russia has used its vast gas resources to keep control over its Western-leaning ex-Soviet neighbors.

But Biden suggested Ukraine could cut Russia out of national security concerns by moving to reduce energy consumption, now three times less efficient than in European countries.

"If you lift Ukraine to the European standards, your need for energy imports will dramatically decline, dramatically," he said. "That would be a boom to the economy and an immeasurable benefit, I respectfully suggest, to your national security."

Source: Georgian Daily

Suspect In Ukraine Journalist's Murder Confesses: Officials

KIEV, Ukraine -- A former senior figure in Ukraine's interior ministry has confessed to the murder in 2000 of journalist Georgy Gongadze and implicated high-ranking state officials, authorities said Wednesday.

A television-grab taken from a video handed-out by Ukrainian secret services shows Olexy Pukach during his arrest by security services in the Zhitomir region in north Ukraine. The former senior figure in Ukraine's interior ministry has confessed to the murder in 2000 of journalist Georgy Gongadze and implicated high-ranking state officials, authorities said Wednesday.
Asked by reporters if the suspect, arrested on Tuesday, had confessed and if he implicated senior Ukrainian officials in the killing, Vassyl Grytsak, deputy head of the SBU domestic security agency, answered "yes" to both questions.

"He confirmed his involvement in this crime," Grytsak said at a news conference to announce the arrest.

The suspect, Olexy Pukach, was a top Ukrainian interior ministry official at the time of Gongadze's murder.

Footage presented as a videotape of Pukach's arrest was shown at the news conference.

In it, a corpulent, suntanned man with gray hair purported to be Pukach was apprehended by SBU agents and asked what his relationship was to the Gongadze case.

He responded with one word: "Direct."

Gongadze, an outspoken critic of the government of then-president Leonid Kuchma, was kidnapped on September 16, 2000. His decapitated body was found near Kiev two weeks later.

The murder, branded instantly by Kuchma critics as a political assassination, rocked Ukraine and also triggered an international uproar.

Asked if Pukach had participated himself in the murder, Grytsak replied: "Yes."

The suspect however did not immediately explain the motive of the killing and told the SBU agents that some of those behind the murder "are already dead" themselves.

President Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power in 2004 on the back of a popular uprising against the claim of victory in presidential elections by Kuchma's preferred successor, has long vowed to solve the case.

But the affair remains murky despite Wednesday's announcement, which did not resolve whether Kuchma had any role in, or knowledge of, Gongadze's murder.

Investigators said Pukach is believed personally to have strangled Gongadze, who was 31 when he was killed. Grytsak said he had agreed to show them the location of Gongadze's severed head, which was never found.

Grytsak also said Pukach put up no resistance when the SBU agents arrested him, saying instead: "I have been waiting for you since the beginning."

Yushchenko -- who suffered near-fatal poisoning himself on the eve of 2004 elections, with that enquiry at a dead end -- has charged that the former regime had shown no desire to solve the murder and "protected the killer."

Those who accuse Kuchma of involvement in the killing point to about 700 hours of recordings said to have been made in secret in his office by a former presidential bodyguard, Mykola Melnichenko.

In the recordings, a voice resembling Kuchma's -- though never independently confirmed to be his voice -- says that the journalist should be kidnapped by Chechens or taken somewhere and "stripped naked".

The bodyguard, who fled to the United States shortly after releasing the tapes six years ago, later returned to Kiev to answer prosecutors' questions on the killing.

A parliamentary commission subsequently ruled the recordings' authenticity could not be proved.

While the evidence was ruled inadmissible, the commission nevertheless implicated Kuchma, although the former president has always denied any involvement in, or knowledge of, the circumstances surrounding the death.

Source: AFP

Fugitive Officer Held In Ukraine Reporter's Murder

KIEV, Ukraine -- A fugitive top policeman charged in the murder of an investigative reporter in Ukraine that triggered a protracted political crisis has been arrested, Ukrainian security forces said Wednesday.

Murdered journalist Georgy Gongadze
Senior officials said they hoped the arrest Tuesday evening of Oleksiy Pukach would shed light on who ordered the 2000 murder of Georgy Gongadze, head of an internet news agency highly critical of then-president Leonid Kuchma.

Pukach, a former general and top interior ministry official, had been on the run since 2003. He was charged in absentia with the murder of Gongadze, whose headless corpse was found outside Kiev two months after he disappeared in September 2000.

President Viktor Yushchenko established as a top priority the solving of Gongadze's murder after being swept to power by pro-Western "Orange Revolution" rallies in 2004.

Three policemen were arrested soon after and last year were sentenced to long prison terms. But it has not been established who ordered the murder.

"I believe this time it will not be underlings brought to justice, but those who ordered the murder," Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

Yushchenko's spokeswoman said prosecutors believed Pukach had been in charge of a unit of police that tracked the reporter's movements before he was killed.

Tapes produced by the speaker of Ukraine's parliament, Oleksander Moroz, purported to show that Kuchma as president had ordered the reporter's murder in discussions in his office.

But Kuchma, accused by the opposition and rights groups of hobbling the independent media, denied the allegations and his involvement was never proven.

Yuri Kravchenko, the interior minister of the time also implicated by the tapes. He was found shot dead at his country home, in what investigators said was a suicide, within days of Yushchenko vowing to punish those behind the murder.

Source: SwissInfo

Biden, Georgia, Ukraine And War

KIEV, Ukraine -- Officially, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is visiting Ukraine and Georgia this week to balance President Barack Obama’s warming relations with Russia and reassure Kiev and Tbilisi that Washington still supports their aspirations to join NATO (but in slow motion, please). Unofficially, his mission is to try to prevent another war in an unstable region that Russia regards as its backyard.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (L) and US Vice President Joe Biden leave a hall after their talks in Kiev. Biden reassured Ukraine on Tuesday of US support for its right to join NATO and promised a "reset" of Washington's relations with Moscow would not undermine warm ties with Kiev.
If that sounds over-dramatic, it’s not because hostilities look imminent in either country. Georgia is licking its wounds from last year’s August war over South Ossetia. Ukraine is mired in domestic power struggles ahead of a presidential election next January.

And Moscow, while determined to reassert its influence in the former Soviet republics, has enough on its hands with the severe economic fallout from the financial crisis. A major Russian military exercise in the region was well flagged in advance and passed off without leaving raised troop levels or unusual military activity.

The European Union monitoring mission deployed in Georgia after the conflict to build confidence reports that the situation on the boundaries of the Russian-backed breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is broadly calm, with regular talks and a hotline between the Russian command and the EU team used to defuse occasional incidents.

The Georgian government has agreed with the EU to limit the activities of its army and police force in the area, while the Russians have replaced troops in South Ossetia with professional border guards. That reduces the risk of an incident over smuggling or stray cattle escalating into armed conflict. Georgia wants to involve the United States in the monitoring mission.

The EU has also diplomatically delayed the publication of a report it is compiling on the origins of the war until after next month’s first anniversary.

However, both Moscow and Tbilisi consider there is unfinished business. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin does not hide his desire to get rid of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and reverse the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia and the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine that overthrew post-Soviet rulers more pliant towards the Kremlin.

Saakashvili is not resigned to the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, nor to an indefinite wait for NATO membership. In Ukraine, there is the slow-burning fuse of a 2017 deadline for the closure of Russia’s main Black Sea naval base in the Crimea, and the status of the Russian-speaking majority in that region, some of whom have been given Russian passports. And there are frequent disputes over Russian gas supplies.

Biden, a forthright but seasoned foreign policy specialist, has a delicate task to calibrate his public and private messages in Kiev and Tbilisi. The Obama administration has put the explosive issue of Ukrainian and Georgian NATO membership on the back-burner, recognising that it is a red rag to Russia and deeply divisive in the alliance (as well as in Ukraine). Washington neo-conservatives view this as appeasement, but it is common sense.

Biden needs to reaffirm the West’s commitment to the territorial integrity and political support for democracy in both countries, while privately urging Saakashvili to focus on democratic governance reforms at home (which the president anticipated in a broadcast on Monday) and avoid provocations with the Russians.

The Vice President needs to privately tell Ukraine’s divided leaders that their feuding and failure to tackle corruption are doing more to destroy their country’s prospects than any Kremlin-backed destabilisation.

That leaves some hard strategic questions unanswered. What would Washington do if an incident in Abkhazia or South Ossetia rekindled armed conflict between Russia and Georgia? How would the United States and the EU respond if unrest erupted in another potential flashpoint, such as Moldova, after a fiercely contested parliament election on July 29? What could the West do if Russia stepped up issuing passports to Russian-speakers in Crimea?

The Obama administration may have chosen to emphasise common ground and mutual interests such as nuclear arms control in improving relations with Russia, but the contest over what Moscow calls its “near abroad” is far from over.

Source: Kyiv Post

Biden: US Supports Ukraine's NATO Bid

KIEV, Ukraine -- Washington supports Ukraine's bid to join NATO, and the former Soviet republic is free to choose its allies regardless of what other nations want, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden told Ukraine's president on Tuesday.

Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, right, looks on as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden waves during their meeting in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, July 21, 2009. Biden arrived in Ukraine for a three-day working visit.
Both statements were aimed at Russia, which vehemently opposes NATO membership for its neighbors and is uncomfortable with their desire for greater economic and political integration with the West.

Russia warned the U.S. against playing "under-the-carpet games" or building its ties with Ukraine at Moscow's expense.

Biden met with President Viktor Yushchenko in Kiev, then said in a speech later that if Ukraine chose to join NATO, "which I believe you have, we strongly support that."

Polls, however, have shown a majority of Ukrainians oppose NATO membership.

Ukrainian officials were looking for signals that Washington's effort to improve ties with Moscow would not hurt Ukraine's push for integration with the West. Ukrainians also are looking for support as Russia acts to reassert some control over its former Soviet satellite states — most blatantly with its invasion of Georgia last year.

"We don't recognize, and I want to reiterate this, any spheres of influence. We do not recognize anyone else's right to dictate to any other country what alliance it should seek to belong to, or what relationships, bilateral relationships, you have," Biden said.

President Barack Obama stressed at a July 6-8 summit in Moscow that "NATO seeks collaboration with Russia, not confrontation." Obama's speech was part of a White House effort to form a more productive relationship with Russia. Those ties reached post Cold-War lows after last year's Russian-Georgian war.

Better ties with Moscow "will not come at Ukraine's expense," Biden said. "To the contrary, I believe it can actually benefit Ukraine. The more substantive relationship we have with Moscow, the more we can defuse the zero-sum thinking about our relations with Russia's neighbors."

Welcoming Biden, Yushchenko called Ukraine a "European country where democracy rules."

"We are going forward, we have chosen a European path," Yushchenko said.

Biden was to meet Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko later Tuesday, as well as key opposition leaders who are also likely to challenge Yushchenko in January's presidential election.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were allies in the 2004 Orange Revolution, which brought Yushchenko to power. They are now bitter foes, and the rivalry has hampered the government's response to the global economic crisis, which has hit Ukraine hard.

That has allowed Viktor Yanukovych, the Moscow-backed presidential candidate who lost the 2004 election but is very popular in Ukraine's largely Russian-speaking east, to come back into the running for the January vote.

Biden is also set to meet with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the reformist former parliament speaker, who plans to run for president.

Russia was watching Biden's visit to its former Soviet backyard with keen interest, suspicious that Washington is out to block any moves to bring Ukraine and Georgia back into Moscow's orbit.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told a weekly news conference that Moscow is "not usurping or monopolizing anyone's rights," and that all nations are free to choose their partners.

But in a warning to Washington, he added, "It's important that this be done transparently, without under-the-carpet games and not at the expense of others' interests."

He also suggested the U.S. should keep Ukraine's traditional ties with Russia in mind, saying the regional context and "historical specifics" should be taken into account.

The U.S. has repeatedly denied that it seeks to dictate who should rule in any democratic country.

Biden on Wednesday visits Georgia, where the opposition is demanding President Mikhail Saakashvili resign over his handling of the war with Russia and what they say is his retreat from democracy.

Saakashvili has vowed not to resign before the end of his term in 2013.

The Russian army quickly crushed the Georgian army last August after Georgia attacked its own breakaway province of South Ossetia to try to bring it back under control.

Thousands of Russian troops remain in South Ossetia and another separatist-held Georgian enclave, Abkhazia, and Russia has recognized both regions as independent nations.

Washington said it did not support Georgia's attempt to retake South Ossetia by force.

Saakashvili, who had committed thousands of troops for U.S.-led missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, pleaded for military support from Washington during the fighting, but the U.S. did not intervene.

Source: AP

Chinese Diplomat Throws Tantrum In Cabinet of Ministers Of Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine -- Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko had a meeting with the vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Wang Gang. He promised that China would donate 3 million dollars to Ukraine for boosting its economic development.

At a meeting with Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko, Chinese officials requested that NTDTV journalists should not be admitted.
Many accredited journalists were attracted to this event, including reporters for New Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV). Right before the meeting, some members from a Chinese delegation approached the door, through which journalists were entering the building, and started screaming out insults toward the NTDTV filming crew. Pointing to the NTDTV emblem, they insisted that they were “against China.”

Chinese officials requested that NTDTV journalists should not be admitted to the meeting. At this time, a media representative showed up and crossed the NTDTV entry out from the list of the accredited media. He justified this action by saying that it was being done to prevent the possibility of an international scandal.

While a diplomat continued to shout and threaten, a camera man was videotaping the whole scene. Upon seeing this, a Chinese official threatened him with a lawsuit and requested that all recordings be deleted. He summoned security guards to carry out his requirement. He kept screaming: “I know that you will broadcast it all over the world! You have no right to do it, I am a governmental official!”

Policemen, who arrived upon the demand, wrote down the passport data from all the NTDTV crew members and forced the cameraman to erase all recordings. They claimed that their actions were based on the laws of the Ukraine.

“I regret that Ukrainian officials yielded to the pressure from the Chinese regime and violated the rights of journalists, accredited to cover the event in the government cabinet of ministers of the Ukraine,” said Aleksey Podsosonniy, a camera man from the Ukrainian NTDTV office. In his opinion, this incident was connected with economic pressure, which official Beijing uses in order to “to mute the voices of independent media and democratic movements abroad.”

Alexander Nimenko, the other member of the NTDTV crew who was also present during this incident, remarked: “I think their actions are ridiculous. A person, who represents a foreign state abroad, cannot behave like this.

I was not surprised that one of them with a frightened face grabbed our camera man demanding to erase all he had shot and even threatened to sue him. When a government official behaves like that, I think, this is an obvious indication of weakness. Every reasonable person can realize it.”

Source: Epoch Times

Soccer-Former Ukraine Striker Rebrov Retires, Returns To Dynamo

KIEV, Ukraine -- Former Ukraine and Tottenham Hotspur striker Serhiy Rebrov has retired from the game to become a coach for his former club Dynamo Kiev.

New Dynamo youth team assistant coach Serhiy Rebrov.
The Ukrainian champions said on their website that Rebrov would become an assistant to youth team coach Vladimir Muntyan.

"I've recently decided to end my career and I always wanted to come back to my home club," said Rebrov, who remains Dynamo's all-time leading scorer with 161 goals in 335 games.

The well-travelled 35-year-old last played for Rubin Kazan, helping them to the Russian premier league title last year. He left Kazan by mutual consent earlier this year.

Rebrov made his name at Dynamo before joining Spurs in 2000 for a then club record fee of 11 million pounds ($20.11 million) but after a promising start, fell out of favour at White Hart Lane.

After a troubled five-year spell in English football, he returned to his old club in 2005, helping them to the domestic league and cup double in 2007.

This month Dynamo also made an offer to Chelsea forward Andriy Shevchenko, Rebrov's old strike partner in Kiev, to return as a player and then after his retirement to become part of the coaching staff.

Source: ESPN

Biden In Ukraine To Reassure On Russia 'Reset'

KIEV, Ukraine -- Vice President Joe Biden arrived here Monday on a mission to reassure Ukraine that US efforts to repair relations with Moscow will not come at the expense of support for Russia's ex-Soviet neighbours.

US Vice President Joe Biden passes an honour guard after his plane landed at Kiev's airportl. Biden is on a working visit in Ukraine and then in Georgia amid concern in both nations that their relations with the United States could suffer as US-Russian relations improve.
But while Biden's programmes in Ukraine and, later this week, in Georgia, provide ample opportunities to express US backing in word, his trip was not expected to spur much new support from Washington in deed, experts said.

Biden was scheduled to hold talks Tuesday with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other political leaders before travelling Wednesday to Georgia to meet leaders there.

Briefing journalists in Washington ahead of Biden's departure, one of his top aides summarized the message President Barack Obama's vice president was being sent to Russia's neighbours to deliver.

"Our efforts to reset relations with Russia will not come at the expense of any other country," said Tony Blinken, national security advisor to the vice president.

"We will continue to reject the notion of spheres of influence, and we will continue to stand by the principle that sovereign democracies have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own partnerships and alliances."

Leaders in Kiev and Tbilisi are nervous that an improvement in US-Russian ties could translate into a rollback of Washington's aggressive past backing of their respective drives to move away from Moscow and integrate with the West.

Russia has strenuously protested expansion of western influence and bedrock western institutions such as NATO into countries close to its borders and once part of the Soviet Union.

Tensions also remain high since Russian troops in August 2008 pushed deep inside Georgia in a war over its breakaway regions, sparking new fears that Moscow would use force to assert its interest in the former satellite states.

Obama spoke to such fears in a keynote speech in Moscow when he stressed his administration's "firm belief that Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected."

Biden's two state visits are expected to drive home the message that the United States has not, and will not, abandon Ukraine and Georgia.

But in its latest edition, the Ukrainian weekly Zerkalo Nedeli said that US interest in Ukraine has already sharply faded four years after a pro-Western coalition ousted the old Moscow-aligned elite in the 2004 Orange Revolution.

"In geopolitical terms, Ukraine remains a suitcase without a handle. It is too valuable to throw away but too cumbersome to carry" for the United States, the weekly commented ahead of Biden's visit.

"Times have changed, and the instruments of American 'influence' are minimal here."

Biden will also use his visit to continue to press for more progress on democracy efforts inside both countries, according to Blinken, who said both nations face "the challenge of fulfilling the promise" of their revolutions.

According to a source close the Ukrainian presidency, Kiev is hoping to secure a bilateral deal with the United States containing national security guarantees in connection with the expiry of the Cold War-era START nuclear disarmament treaty at the end of this year.

Energy concerns will also be a topic of discussion in Kiev, where chronic disputes over gas prices with Moscow have interrupted European gas supplies, 80 percent of which are piped to Europe via Ukraine.

Biden was scheduled to leave Ukraine on Wednesday for Georgia, where he was due to meet President Mikheil Saakashvili and deliver an address to the Georgian parliament.

Source: AFP

Ukraine Challenger Advances

KIEV, Ukraine -- A new face in Ukraine is gaining popularity among voters looking to reignite the hopes of the Orange Revolution and to end the political squabbling that has hamstrung efforts to grapple with recession.

Former speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and presidential candidate Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, a former parliamentary speaker and foreign minister, has seen a surge in support in recent months as voters in the presidential election early next year look for a candidate who can put an end to the political paralysis and turn around an economy that contracted 20.3% in the first quarter.

The mass protest in 2004 against an allegedly rigged presidential ballot swept pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko to power on a reformist, anticorruption platform at the expense of Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych. But integration with the West has hit the rocks with overhauls delayed amid political infighting and in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is set to visit Ukraine next week to allay concerns that the U.S.'s efforts to patch up relations with Russia could undermine Washington's commitment to pro-Western governments in the region like Ukraine's. In a measure of his rising prominence, Mr. Yatsenyuk is scheduled to meet Mr. Biden.

Ukraine's politics look ripe for a new approach. President Yushchenko is locked in a political battle with his former ally, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Mr. Yanukovych's opposition party has added to the deadlock, blocking the work of parliament on several occasions in recent weeks. The political turmoil is exacerbating the economic crisis, as the government struggles to meet the terms of a $16.4 billion bailout package from the International Monetary Fund.

The dual crises go a long way in explaining the surge in popularity that Mr. Yatsenyuk has enjoyed over the past six months. Promotional posters bearing his portrait and saying "To save the country" have been plastered across Kiev.

Mr. Yatsenyuk is a touch less bombastic. "No messiahs," he said in an interview this month. "But Ukrainians are frustrated with current political figures."

Polls show he is right.

With his support at 11.8%, according to a June survey by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, he is snapping at the heels of Ms. Tymoshenko, who is at 14.5%. Mr. Yanukovych leads the way with 23.4%, with Mr. Yushchenko languishing at 2.3%, a turnaround from the 60% he garnered following the Orange Revolution.

Mr. Yatsenyuk shot up from only 3.4% in October, stealing support especially from Ms. Tymoshenko in her stronghold in the west and center of the country. Mr. Yanukovych, popular in the pro-Russian east and south, has made limited advances.

At 35 years old, Mr. Yatsenyuk is from Ukraine's first post-Soviet generation. A lawyer by training, he Twitters and speaks fluent English. He has already collected a bulging résumé as parliamentary speaker, foreign minister, acting head of the central bank and economy minister. A member of Mr. Yushchenko's party, he is forming his own, on the basis of his movement, "the Front of Change."

Rather than focusing on contentious issues such as the future of a Russian naval base or the status of the Russian language -- key rallying points for Mr. Yushchenko that have alienated Russia -- Mr. Yatsenyuk promises to focus on developing the country's industry and agriculture, education and health care by building consensus in the country's fractious parliament. He also stressed the need to curtail the political influence of powerful business tycoons.

"Mr. Yatsenyuk belongs to a new generation of the elite that isn't weighed down with corruption and unfulfilled promises," says Yevhen Bystrytsky, executive director of the Soros Foundation in Ukraine. "His discourse is fresh, and he is able to talk to people and put his ideas across in simple but clever language."

Mr. Yatsenyuk faces a number of obstacles in the run-up to the Jan. 17 election. Beyond the need to back up his rhetoric with substance, analysts say his campaign could struggle against the established parties. Mr. Yatsenyuk is only now creating a regional support network and has yet to name any political allies. Even more damaging could be the claims from Ms. Tymoshenko and analysts that Mr. Yatsenyuk is receiving support from oligarchs whose political influence he says he wants to reduce. He strongly denies this.

His efforts to balance between the West and Russia also could founder on contentious issues like NATO membership, something Moscow bitterly opposes.

Analysts say Moscow is unlikely to bet on one candidate after the failure of its overt support for Mr. Yanukovych in 2004. Mr. Yushchenko has provoked the Kremlin's ire with his attempts to integrate Ukraine into NATO and his support for Georgia during the war in South Ossetia in August 2008, while the previously critical Ms. Tymoshenko has taken a much softer stance on Russia recently.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Ukraine To Be Firmly Re-established Among The World's Top Wheat Exporters By 2013

SIDNEY, Australia -- Agriculture in Ukraine, once the bread basket of Europe, has fallen on sorry times since the collapse of the Soviet Union and independence in 1991. Now, however, in some sectors, a recovery is under way.

A Ukrainian wheat field.
After government subsidies and guaranteed markets fell along with the Soviet Union, Ukraine's agriculture went into a long decline through the 1990s. By the end of the decade, production volumes had collapsed, agricultural GDP had fallen by half and more than two million jobs had been lost in rural areas.

Since 2000, however, the sector's prospects have improved and a nascent recovery has begun. This has been driven by the development of a small number of larger, profitable operators, though production in most sectors is still dominated by inefficient, loss-making farms.

The emergence of a new class of efficient farms can most clearly be seen in the poultry sector, which we forecast to grow 2009-2013 by 47.1%. Despite the recession growth is still expected, if at a slower rate, partly because poultry's relative price advantage over other meats will continue to attract customers. Two large, profitable firms account for more than 70% of production.

Grain production is expected to retake lost ground over the medium term, and, by the end of our forecast period in 2013, Ukraine should be firmly established among the world's top wheat exporters.

With yields far below the potential of Ukraine's fertile soil and much arable land lying fallow, there is plenty of room for production growth. Some agricultural companies, seeing this potential, are capitalising on the opportunity.

There are, however, a number of challenges that must be met if this recovery is to continue. Recent government interference in the form of export quotas on grain have starved the industry of much-needed funds for investment. A ban on the sale of agricultural land has hampered the expansion of profitable farms, forcing them to lease land instead of owning it outright.

This has served to discourage investment in land improvement. A drain of workers from rural areas into the cities also threatens to derail the recovery of the agricultural industry. Some sectors, such as beef and veal production, are in perpetual decline.

Ukraine's former agricultural success may also come back to haunt it if measures to preserve the environment are not taken. The intensive agriculture introduced to Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union and the rapid expansion of area under agricultural harvest have put pressure on natural resources.

This has led to falls in the fertility of the soil and declines in water retention. As agriculture in Ukraine redevelops, more attention will have to be paid to the environment if the recovery is to be sustainable.

However, despite the above and the recession, a growing number of experts believe that investing in Ukraine's agricultural industry during the current turbulent times, while undoubtedly a risk, could provide savvy entrepreneurs with strong gains and a marked competitive advantage before global economic health returns.

The major potential lies in grains where Ukraine has done much to improve production methods and a growing sentiment for mechanised commercial farming has helped to foster increasing efficiency gains.

Source: OfficialWire

Biden To Reassure Allies In Ukraine, Georgia

WASHINGTON, DC -- Vice President Joe Biden travels to Georgia and Ukraine next week to reassure the two U.S. allies that the Obama administration has not abandoned them in its efforts to "reset" ties with Russia.

US Vice President Joe Biden
Biden's trip comes just two weeks after Obama visited Moscow for talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin aimed at improving ties that hit a post-Cold War low under former President George W. Bush.

"Our efforts to reset relations with Russia will not come at the expense of any other countries," Biden's national security adviser, Tony Blinken, said on Friday.

Russia regards the former Soviet states as part of its sphere of influence, a view Obama has strongly rejected. Moscow has also fiercely resisted proposals -- led by the Bush administration - to bring the countries into NATO.

Blinken stressed that the message of continued U.S. support to Ukraine and Georgia was not a blank check and Biden would press them to carry out economic and democratic reforms.

In Kiev, Biden's first stop, he will deliver a major speech and urge Ukraine's squabbling leaders to make "hard choices" on energy sector reforms seen as vital for the country's recovery from a severe economic contraction.

The International Monetary Fund last month called on Ukraine's leaders to agree on restructuring the country's ailing state energy firm, Naftogaz.

A European Union official said in Brussels on Friday that Ukraine had promised to raise household gas prices and enforce payment of bills to strengthen Naftogaz's finances.

The IMF and other international institutions are discussing financing for Ukraine to pay for Russian gas. In January a dispute over payments led Moscow to turn off supplies to Ukraine of Russian gas destined for Europe for two weeks.

'POLITICAL PARALYSIS'

"Our hope is these leaders will live up to the promise of the revolution and make the hard choices to work together," Blinken said, referring to the mass "Orange Revolution" rallies that swept President Viktor Yushchenko to power.

He said the Obama administration was concerned about the "political paralysis" in Kiev that has seen constant bickering between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Biden's trip to Georgia comes nearly a year since his last visit, during Russia's invasion to thwart an assault by Tbilisi to try to reestablish control over its breakaway region of South Ossetia.

In Tblisi, Biden will push for constitutional and electoral reforms, saying that, as in the case of Ukraine, its revolution "remains a work in progress." Georgia's opposition has accused President Mikheil Saakashvili of monopolizing power since the 2003 "Rose Revolution."

On the politically thorny issue of NATO membership, Blinken said it was up to Ukraine and Georgia to decide whether they wanted to join the alliance.

Obama has been less aggressive than Bush in pushing for the two countries to sign up to NATO, which has said they will join eventually but has declined to put them on an immediate path to membership.

Source: The Boston Globe

Wary E.U. Girding For Disruptions Of Russian Natural Gas

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- A directive announced today by the European Union will do little to relieve the bloc's dependence on Russian natural gas -- nor should it, analysts say.

E.U. Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs.
It is "pure fantasy" to think Europe could wean itself from Russian natural gas, which fulfills 25 percent of the European Union's demand, said Julian Lee, a senior energy analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies in London.

Rather, Europe should try to diversify the ways it gets Russian gas, adding pipelines that avoid troubled former Soviet states. Historically, Russia and Gazprom, its state-owned gas agency, have been reliable partners to the European Union, rather than a looming energy menace, analysts said.

The E.U. directive, proposed by its executive arm, the European Commission, calls for each member state to prepare itself for a disruption of its largest gas supply for at least two months during the depths of winter, when demand is at its highest.

"We have known for some time that the existing arrangements to deal with gas emergencies are insufficient," E.U. Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said. "The Russia-Ukraine gas dispute in January 2009 confirmed our fears."

Many feel that the commission, which accelerated its issuing of the directive in response to the latest gas crisis, has been tardy in its proposal.

"I think this is something, frankly, that the E.U. should have done several years ago," Lee said. "And it's finally got its act together."

Nearly all Russian gas runs through Belarus and Ukraine, former Soviet states that Russia regards as within its sphere of influence. On several occasions, Russia has shut off the supply of gas to Ukraine, most recently this past January when the countries were debating gas prices.

Several eastern E.U. countries, like Slovakia and Bulgaria, that depend on Ukraine's pipelines for all their gas became innocent bystanders in the January dispute. Reports emerged of kindergartens closing for lack of heat and similar crises.

These countries can prepare for disruptions in several ways, principally by diversifying their gas pipelines or increasing their total gas storage, said Ferran Tarradellas Espuny, Piebalgs' spokesman.

"Each member state must be prepared to face such a crisis," he said.

Some supply solutions are simple to implement. Slovakia, for example, relies on Ukrainian pipelines for 97 percent of its gas, but with some minor engineering work, the east-west flow of the pipe can be reversed, allowing imports from well-supplied Germany.

While there has been broad support for improved coordination on gas, some of the Western European countries may balk at helping their peers to the east.

"The E.U.-wide sharing of existing [gas] storage may be resisted by those with plenty of storage," said Jonathan Stern, director of gas research at the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies. There could be accusations, he added, of "free riding."

Major investments needed

The European Union estimated that €150 billion ($211 billion) needs to be spent on gas infrastructure by 2030. The European Union will help fund some of this work, but much investment needs to come from individual countries and industry, according to Piebalgs.

Increasing the use of liquefied natural gas (LNG), which can be shipped in tankers, is also part of the solution; Britain recently opened its third LNG terminal. However, many of the eastern E.U. countries hardest hit by the January crisis are landlocked, and increasing LNG flow to them could call for further reliance on Turkey, Lee said. It is a "major question" how much LNG the European Union can import, Stern added.

Other steps will be more difficult. Many southeastern E.U. countries are anticipating the construction of two new gas pipelines. The first, called Nabucco, will grant gas providers like Iraq and Azerbaijan access to E.U. markets for the first time. A formal agreement among five E.U. nations and Turkey was announced Monday granting legal clearance for Nabucco, which could begin flowing by 2014.

Russia, which could supply gas to Nabucco, has also proposed a southern pipeline, called South Stream, that avoids flowing through Ukraine and Belarus. Italy has strongly supported the pipeline, and Germany has shown similar interest in another pipeline, called Nord Stream, which would flow from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

Nord Stream, in particular, will provide economic advantages to German industry, which depends dearly on Russian gas, said Jon Levy, an analyst for the Eurasia Group.

Purely from the standpoint of energy security, Europe would be smart to shift its gas infrastructure out of former Soviet states to avoid future troubles between Russia and its former dominions, Stern said.

Such a position gets strong political opposition from many E.U. leaders, who "are very careful in their approach to anything that would destabilize Ukraine," Levy said. Many European banks are deeply invested in the country and want to see it politically stable.

'The big kid in the playground'

While equal portions of blame can be doled to Ukraine and Russia for the most recent crisis, E.U. leaders have fixed on Russia because, compared to Ukraine, "It's the big kid in the playground flexing its muscles," Lee said. Plus, Russia did appear "very willing to turn [its dispute with Ukraine] into a European problem."

E.U. officials are set to hold talks tomorrow with Gazprom and its Ukrainian counterpart. The latter is asking for a multibillion-dollar loan to help pay its debts to Gazprom. Any loan will be linked to a promise no further disruptions will occur, the European Union said.

Demand for Russian gas will decline dramatically this year, largely thanks to the recession, and probably won't recover for another one to two years, Stern said. While an influx of Central Asian gas through Nabucco, which the United States has strongly supported, could be a blow to Russia's market share, the mutual economic dependence between the regions will continue for some time.

What should not be forgotten is that since the 1970s, Russia has reliably provided gas to Europe through all sorts of upheaval, Lee said.

"There's a lot of expertise and trust there," he said, "that have survived some very fundamental political differences."

Source: The New York Times

After 3 Refusals, Yushchenko Agrees To Sell Chemical Plant

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has agreed to the privatization of one of the country’s largest companies, a senior adviser said Thursday, after banning its sale three times over the past two years.

Viktor Yushchenko
The government has been trying to sell the Odessa Port chemical plant for years and on Wednesday set a minimum price of 4 billion hryvnas ($525 million) for an auction Sept. 29. It hopes to earn up to $1 billion.

Yushchenko, in a power struggle with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for 18 months, last banned the sale in May 2008 on the grounds that the plant was a strategic asset, giving the buyer exclusive access to a key pipeline and port terminal.

“We talked to the government and we agreed that the Odessa Port plant will be … privatized,” Oleksander Shlapak, the president’s chief economic adviser, told reporters.

“The new owner of the plant cannot receive a monopolistic right to decide to whom he would give access to the pipeline to the terminal, and to whom not,” he said. “This will remain under government regulation.”

Shlapak said Yushchenko agreed to the sale also because the plant started to make losses this year, mainly because of a sharp rise in the price of Russian gas, which it needs to produce chemicals — mostly fertilizers.

The government’s stretched finances would benefit from any new funds. Export and tax revenues have declined sharply as the country faces a deep recession and billions need to be spent to shore up the banking and energy sector.

The government has set conditions for the sale including guarantees that the plant becomes profitable and investments of 1.3 billion hryvnas ($170 million) in the first five years.

Source: The Moscow Times

The Summer Of Eastern Europe's Discontent

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Crisis in Eastern Europe has disrupted the last three holiday seasons. War in Georgia in August 2008 caught most European diplomats on the beaches. The gas crisis in Ukraine came during a very cold New Year. And the Moldovan parliament burned during Easter. The EU should be gearing up for another eventful summer.


New elections are due in Moldova on July 29, after the deadlocked parliament twice failed to elect a new president. Another gas row between Ukraine and Russia could erupt in July or August, as Gazprom struggles for revenue to boost its plummeting cash-flow and Ukraine struggles to pay.

Amid this flurry of activity, the EU is taking its ability to influence events in Eastern Europe for granted. That's a mistake. The EU expansions in 2004 and 2007 have actually managed to push the farther Eastern region further away. On a practical level, for instance, visas are now needed to travel from the region to new EU members like Poland or Hungary.

EU expansion has also created less tangible problems for the EU. People in corrupt and divided Ukraine, which sees the offer of EU membership recede over the horizon, ask how their country is so different from corrupt and divided Romania, which has been welcomed into the EU fold.

Recent polls in Ukraine, the "linchpin" state in the region, show 42% of the population in favor of integration with Russia, as opposed to 34% with the EU. The local states are weak and are either unable or unwilling to adopt the EU's massive rule-book, which is necessary even to be considered for EU membership. Only in tiny Moldova is opinion solidly in favor of the EU.

The picture is not all bad. The practical benefits of the common market are pulling new member states closer to the West economically. As for the nonmembers in the region, five of the six -- Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan -- now trade more with the EU than they do with Russia; Belarus, the sixth, is the exception. But the EU is failing to transform its economic role into political influence.

Russia marshals its resources more carefully, and has learned the power of incentives. It has offered neighborhood states concrete benefits, such as open labor markets, cheap energy and hard cash (loans and trade concessions) during the present economic crisis. As the war in Georgia showed, Russia also uses hard power -- not just with military force, but also with economic coercion. Russia has now had trade conflicts with all its neighbors, each one coinciding with a political row.

The EU isn't keeping pace with Russia in this regard. It doesn't really do hard power. Its occasional use of smart sanctions -- travel bans and asset freezes against the leadership of Belarus over faked elections and the rebel "Transnistrian Republic" in Moldova -- have not borne much fruit.

Its soft power is also too often ineffective, particularly on the people-to-people level. Its restrictive visa policy means that the fragile middle class of the eastern neighborhood is excluded from the European mainstream. Education exchanges are minimal, and the EU has no real mass media presence in Eastern European markets that are increasingly monopolized by Russian media and increasingly centralized local governments.

The inability of the EU to transform the region, and the tendency of weak states to play Russia against the West, make the problems so frequent. The crises are not only serious, but multiple and reinforcing. Some result from weak statehood, such as lack of territorial control and state capture by corrupt special interests.

Some stem from Russia's attempts to build a sphere of influence (Russia seeks to control the gas energy infrastructure and maintains a military presence in all six states). These problems were exacerbated by the economic crisis, which hit the region particularly hard.

The EU's policy toward the region should not be based on the remote prospect of accession, nor on "enlargement-lite" policies that are effectively trying to export the EU's rulebook and promote EU interests without offering accession or substantial financial assistance in exchange.

Instead, the EU should develop country-specific solidarity strategies to deal with underlying weaknesses, such as building on the March 2009 agreement with Ukraine to upgrade its gas pipeline system. Visa regimes for citizens of the neighborhood countries urgently need to be liberalized to boost the EU's waning soft power and promote travel for bona fide citizens of the neighborhood countries back and forth from the EU, rather than the current de facto reality of permanent illegal migration.

The EU also needs to start putting Eastern Europe back on the diplomatic map. The "Eastern Partnership" launched in May is a good start. It aims to re-energize EU policy in the East by offering the region a new set of association agreements, discussion on visa-facilitation, and regular summits. But it started in exactly the wrong way, when Angela Merkel was the only leader from the big EU states to attend the Prague summit.

What is needed is an "EU listening tour" of the region, in which leaders from EU states start taking into account the political and security concerns of the region and incorporate them in the emerging discussion between the U.S., Russia, and the EU on the new European security architecture. These discussions currently exclude the neighborhood countries.

While the region is beset by short-term crises, the EU's policies are too long-term. As the U.S. is discovering with its Mexican and Caribbean backyards, problems of poverty, corruption and weak statehood do not stop at the border. The EU is understandably preoccupied with its own internal problems, but these will only get worse if the EU is surrounded by a collapsing neighborhood.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Yushchenko Names Euro 2012 Effort Shoddy, Club Owners Sue

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's attempt to host its share Euro 2012 football championship looked increasingly in jeopardy on Tuesday, with President Viktor Yushchenko calling the preparation effort "shoddy" and club owners locked in a nasty court dispute. "We are going to have to redo the entire (Euro 2012) preparation programme," Yushchenko said in remarks to the Korrespondent newspaper published on Monday.

President Viktor Yushchenko
The UEFA in April 2007 named Ukraine and Poland co-hosts for the Euro 2012 tournament.

Lack of financing and political in-fighting have dogged Ukraine's preparation effort, prompting UEFA chairman Michel Platini in May to threaten moving games planned in Ukraine to Poland or even Germany, if Kiev is unable to show real progress by a final November 30 deadline.

Ukraine's government to date has spent only 5 per cent of a projected 911 million dollars in infrastructure development projects, and at the present rate will fail to meet the UEFA deadline, the Ukrainian leader predicted.

"This would be a terrible shame for our entire nation," Yushchenko said. "We cannot allow it to happen."

Ukraine's government, with Yushchenko's personal backing, promised between four and five billion dollars investment in modernisations to the former Soviet republic's road and rail network, airports, and public transportation in its 2007 bid to UEFA.

Hopes at the time were high that private businessmen owning football clubs in Ukraine's four planned host cities also would contribute, developing stadiums and fan support facilities meeting UEFA standards, and drawing investment into Ukraine's currently primitive hospitality industry.

But as Yushchenko was calling for maximum focus on the Euro 2012 effort, Ukrainian tycoons controlling the sport of football in the country were locked in a bitter court dispute over whether or not the country's top club league could hold games, or indeed exist as a legal entity.

At issue is the legal status of the Ukrainian Premier League (UPL) an organization on paper including the country's top 18 sides and, according to its founding documents, the single responsible body for selling television and advertising rights for its games.

Money in Ukrainian football currently is not shared evenly, with two major clubs, the 2009 UEFA Cup champion Shakhtar Donesk and long-time rival Dynamo Kiev, able to demand premium prices for their matches' air and ad rights.

A goal of the UPL is to share out that income stream more evenly. The planned cash diversion is particularly critical in two Ukrainian cities, Lviv and Kharkiv, that are home to lower-table sides lacking football infrastructure, but are nonetheless along with Kiev and Donetsk designated game venues for Euro 2012.

But a suit filed by Yury Kolomoisky, a powerful industrial tycoon and owner of Dnipro Dnipropetrosk, has challenged the UPL's right to exist. He argued that the UPL's charter not only violated Ukrainian law, but also UEFA statutes, and does little more than create a bureaucracy to strip money from private football clubs.

"The Premier League was supposed to be a commercial organization of clubs to make our league a profitable enterprise," Kolomoisky told Sport Express newspaper. "But what we have is something strange, without a legal basis."

Some 14 of Ukraine's 18 clubs, with one exception poorer than Dnipro, opposed Kolomoisky's court challenge. According to his critics, a motivator for the suit was the UEFA's decision to exclude Dnipropetrovsk from the planned Euro 2012 game venue list, a charge rejected by Kolomoisky.

But on July 7 a Kiev city district court backed Kolomoisky, saying his suit was valid, and banned the UPL from holding games of any kind, pending further appeals.

The UPL on Saturday defied the court order by staging the Ukrainian Supercup match.

The standoff between the 12 - 14 club owners supporting the UPL, and the reported 4 club owners opposing the formation of the UPL, has for the last week displaced Euro 2012 as Ukraine's top sports story.

"Sure, we'll keep playing (club) games," Kolomoisky said. "But no way the UPL is going to get any air rights or advertising income from my team."

For Yushchenko, the dispute is the very last thing Ukrainian football needs now.

"We are running out of time. We cannot afford any more distractions," he said.

Source: DPA

After Borat, Ukraine Now Set To Ban Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno

LONDON, England -- It may have been the visit to the swingers' party that did it. Or perhaps it was the scene where Brüno drops in to see a medium and simulates oral and anal sex with a ghost.

Sacha Baron Cohen in Bruno
Either way, the antics of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest comic antihero – the prancing gay Austrian journalist Brüno – all appear to be too much for Ukraine. According to reports, Ukraine's culture and tourism ministry is set to ban the film Brüno, which was due for release in the post-Soviet country next week.

The ministry has so far not explained its decision. But it appears to have taken the view that several of the scenes – among them a mock gay parade, and one in which Brüno shows off his penis – were likely to offend conservative and religious opinion. Ukraine's Catholic west and orthodox east take a dim view of gay rights, and hold highly traditional social views. And despite efforts by Ukraine's western-leaning political elite to integrate with Europe, there is little sign of a more liberal view taking hold.

"Ukrainian society is a conservative one. The topic is not discussed, but in reality public attitudes are exactly the same as in Russia," one Ukrainian diplomat said last night. "The west of Ukraine, especially, is very conservative on family issues. They are devoted Catholics, and Greek Catholics."

In Russia, and much of eastern Europe, homophobia remains widespread. Last month, Moscow's mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who has denounced gay parades as "satanic", sent in riot police to break up a small demonstration of gay rights activists protesting during the Eurovision song contest.

Baron Cohen's last film – Borat, or Cultural Learnings of America to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan – was also banned in Ukraine. Other post-Soviet countries, including Russia, similarly outlawed the film, unwilling to offend Kazakhstan's touchy leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Needless to say, Kazakhstan banned Borat, too.

Another factor is Ukraine's presidential election: the country's president, Viktor Yushchenko, is staging an uphill struggle for re-election in January. In 2004, he received the support of Ukraine's powerful Catholic church. His officials may calculate that the anti-Brüno factor could just revive his flagging appeal among elderly voters.

Yesterday, however, some sources in Ukraine's cinema industry suggested that the controversy may simply be an elaborate publicity stunt, dreamed up by distributors Sinergia to boost the film ahead of its release.

The Ukrainian website Korrespondent, however, today reported the ban was genuine.

Since its release last Friday, the 18-certificate Brüno has gone to the top of the US box office, and earned £35m in the UK. Amid reports of queues of teenagers being turned away from cinemas, its makers are now preparing a second, more teen-friendly version, to be released in Britain on 24 July.

Universal Pictures has trimmed the original film by 1 minute and 50 seconds. And it has excised some of the more lurid scenes, including the one with the ghost.

Source: Guardian UK

Without Russia, Europe Has No Reliable Source Of Gas

MOSCOW, Russia -- "There has been no change on the gas supply market." In the past few months, this phrase has brought for the EU, Ukraine and Russia more anxiety than calm, because no change means that the question over the supply of Russian natural gas to the EU this coming winter has not been settled.


In early July, the EU's Gas Coordination Group met in Brussels to examine the level of preparedness of the EU and the Energy Community (EnCT) to face a possible gas supply disruption in the coming weeks or months. It established that the gas storage situation in Ukraine remained uncertain, and that it was still unclear who would finance Ukraine's acquisition of the required amount of gas.

Russia is fed up of lending money to the Yushchenko government, which only pokes insults at Russia, and has proposed that the EU provide several billion dollars to the "democratic" Ukrainian government.

Unwilling to part with such a large sum, Europe asked if Ukraine could save itself, or if half of the required sum would suffice.

Kiev and Moscow argue that democracies in a market economy cannot be saved without investment. To paraphrase Vladimir Lenin, any democracy is worth something only if someone can pay for it. In the case of Ukraine, it could be a permanent EU agency such as the European Commission. Its president, Jose Manuel Barroso, has been conducting endless meetings on the issue with his colleagues and pondering over the problem alone, but has so far not approved the allocation of funds to Ukraine.

Mr. Barroso is acting unwisely from the viewpoint of European values and ideology. Why not give money to the young Ukrainian democracy, which has been calling, in unison with some East European EU members, for the need to fight "Russian imperialism"?

However, one can also understand the European Commission president's stance, as such allocations may never be recouped. If West European companies pay in advance for the gas that Russia has not yet supplied to Ukraine, who can guarantee that they will receive the contracted gas?

European companies, which have had negative experience of dealing with Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, refuse to believe the two again.

The Ukrainian president and prime minister, the current darlings of the European public, have promised to transit the Russian gas. But they may quarrel again, with Yushchenko again sanctioning searches in the office of Ukraine's national oil and gas firm Naftogaz, as he did last spring, or even halting Russian gas and thereby stopping its transit to Europe.

In this situation, the European Commission has reminded the EU countries of "the need to fill storage units and seek further regional arrangements before any possible new disruption occurs." As of late June, EU storage units contained 4.5 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas less than in June 2008, according to Swiss investment bank UBS.

Kiev paid for Russian gas supplies in May and June at the last possible moment. Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said that Ukraine planned to dramatically increase gas purchases in July.

Ukraine, which consumed 33 million cu m (mcm) of gas per day in mid-June, has contracted 120 mcm for July.

Does it have enough money to pay for the contracted amount? Ukraine "scraped and scratched" to pay $300 million for gas in June, but Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has recently said that her government was planning to increase the authorized capital of Naftogaz to $2.45 billion.

Ms. Tymoshenko has also said in an interview that Ukraine needs $4.2 billion to buy the required 16 bcm of gas for the country's underground storage facilities, while President Yushchenko said $1.6-$2 billion would suffice.

Which of them is lying?

The European Commission is keeping silent, but Russian sources in Brussels say that even the most tolerant Eurocrats are losing patience with the Ukrainian leaders.

A solution was proposed to the European Commission five years ago. According to it, the EU, Russia and Ukraine should set up a consortium to ensure the transit of Russian natural gas across Ukraine. Unveiled in 2002, the idea of the consortium was an unwanted child for the EU, because it does not conform to its ideology. How can Europe work with Russia and not against it, helping the "new imperialist," which is seeking to restore its former influence in the ex-Soviet countries, in a joint project?

As a result, the consortium kicked the bucket.

Making another go at this policy, the EU signed a separate agreement with Ukraine last spring to modernize its gas transportation system. But its enthusiasm waned when the question of paying for the project was raised.

Maybe it is considering cooperation with the "gas imperialist" ahead of the winter colds?

Source: RIA Novosti

Crimea: Mythical Threats And Actual Problems

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine -- Even before Russia’s large-scope military exercise Caucasus ‘09 many people had serious worries, expressed sensational forecasts, and drew parallels with last year’s events. Shortly before the end of Caucasus ‘08 the five-day war between Russia and Georgia broke out, whereupon Russian annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko takes part in a celebration marking the anniversary of Ukraine's Fleet in at the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
Andrei Illarionov, head of the Institute for Economic Analysis, told a press conference that July 2009 might see a replay of the Russia’s August 2008 scenario in the South Caucasus. He also believes that US President Obama’s visit to Russia (July 6–8, 2009) can be used to demonstrate to the world that Russia is discussing with the United States a new phase of hostilities [in the Caucasus].

This year’s military exercises cause concern among Ukraine’s political analysts, as did last year’s war in Georgia. Some believe that there is a threat of Russian army’s repeated invasion of Georgia for the purpose of getting control over the strategically important oil pipeline. Others fear that the Crimea is in for a replay of the South Ossetian and Abkhaz scenario; that the Kremlin may come up with legal grounds for taking the Crimea away from Ukraine.

During the Ukrainian Navy Day festivities, President Viktor Yushchenko declared that the Ukrainian people would always uphold neighborly relations with Russia. His official website quotes him as saying, “I hope that this policy will meet with understanding and respect.”

President Yushchenko went on to say that official Kyiv would see to it that there would be no risks involved with regard to Russia’s national security: “Ukraine guarantees that no foreign soldier, from any bloc or country, will ever be on its territory. Ukraine’s air, sea, and land space will never be used against Russia.”

Yushchenko said he would instruct Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies to investigate all programs and projects being carried out by Russia in Ukraine. He explained that there may be “parallel projects aimed against the Ukrainian state… such projects should be approached uniformly while demonstrating a consolidated stand, national solidarity, and the awareness that such projects are directed against you, your families and children…” President Yushchenko is convinced that “wise politicians, regardless of whether they represent big powers or small countries, must see to it that there is mutual understanding, neighborly relations, with the ethnic policy on each side geared to uphold equality, friendship, and understanding.”

However, there are political analysts in Ukraine who believe that Russia is working on a Crimea annexation scenario. In what follows we offer Oleksandr TERLIUK’s compilation of what he believes are possible Crimean scenarios, along with comments from Ukrainian and Russian experts and Mykyta Kasianenko’s piece on the Crimea’s inner problems. Unless resolved, these problems will have grave consequences on a scope surpassing by far that of any foreign threat to Ukraine. In fact, President Viktor Yushchenko flew to the Crimea to try and find solutions to these problems.

ALL OF EUROPE IS INTERESTED IN THE CRIMEA

Ukrainian presidents have always played the most important role in the life and death of the Crimean Autonomy. First, there was the Autonomous Soviet Republic of the Crimea in 1921–44, followed by the 1991–92 autonomy established by a referendum. President Leonid Kravchuk played the key role in its organization. However, the autonomous unit existed for a couple of months and was reorganized (under Kravchuk) first into the Republic of the Crimea and then the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea, which had nothing to do with the peninsula’s status before the Second World War.

Owing to Kravchuk, the Republic of the Crimea nearly ceased to exist in the spring of 1994 when the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine canceled the constitution and over 40 bills passed by the Supreme Council in Simferopol. Kravchuk let the Crimea live without a president and constitution, thus securing long-lasting headaches for his successors.

Under President Leonid Kuchma, the Crimea became known officially as the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea (ACR) and received a new constitution that still causes debates among lawyers who specialize in legislation, while it remains an unsolved issue in Ukrainian legislation. It cannot be resolved by any of the proposed amendments to the Constitution of Ukraine, including Viktor Yushchenko’s draft. Outlined below are several legal dilemmas, including the tax-collecting procedures, taxation system, personnel appointments, property rights, and the limits of authority—there are discrepancies in the treatment of all of these issues in the Crimean Constitution and the laws of Ukraine. As a result, various legal and business entities often act as they see fit.

BREAKTHROUGH PROJECTS

It is hard to say whether it was President Yushchenko’s mistake, slip of the tongue, or a statement reflecting his conviction when he addressed the audience made up of ranking bureaucrats and told them that “a public servant is a lackey of business.” On hearing this, quite a few respected members of the Crimean cabinet, who had just made some progress in dealing with business representatives as their equals, had the shivers, visualizing themselves as errand boys being ordered around by the Crimean Mafia dons. Needless to say, the Crimean media, which are always on the lookout for such slips, raised the issue of what the Ukrainian president meant exactly: the rule of lackeys or lackey-like authorities?

Yushchenko said the Crimea needed breakthrough projects for its progress, ones that would be based on new technologies. Also, he is actively promoting the Crimea on the international market. Brussels is to host a conference on Crimean economic progress in mid-July, he said.

Yushchenko went on to say that he had made arrangements with the European Commission, specifically with the Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, and that during this meeting the investment projects launched there and then in the Crimea will be on the EU agenda because the Crimea may well top its Eastern Partnership regional development list.

Along the lines of the European neighborhood policy, Ukraine proposed a separate Crimea economic development program to the EU, and it will be considered before long. Other such projects are being analyzed by the European Investment Bank, EBRD, and the World Bank. President Yushchenko said this would make it possible to attract national as well as foreign businesses to the development of this territory: “All of Europe is interested in the Crimea… All problems faced by the investors in the implementation of this or that investment projects should be eliminated.”

President Yushchenko pointed out that the Crimea has vast recreation potential owing to its unique medical resorts, not to be found anywhere else in Europe. At the presentation of the projects, President Yushchenko proposed complete denationalization of the Crimea’s recreation and resort facilities. “The [government-run] resorts are not functioning in the Crimea. Let me say again that the longer we hold back this sector and keep it under the government’s management, the worse recession this country will plunge into.”

The Ukrainian head of state evidently has a point there, but this is nothing new to the people in the Crimea. The problem most likely lies elsewhere. The Ukrainian state has a mere handful of resorts. These belong to various agencies, which are not transferring them for privatization. The problems vary: no buyers, no legal framework, or no way to solve the land title issue.

In fact, these [government-run] resorts do not play the decisive role in the recreation business. The worst threat for the local resort business is the absence of duly adopted upper-level bureaucratic procedures that regulate the use of all such resort facilities. As it is, most of the Crimean beaches are fenced off by private owners, barring vacationers’ access to the beach. Out of several thousand privately owned resorts, only several hundred are officially registered as such, while the rest are in the shadow. What impedes the development of quality resort facilities is precisely this lack of regulation.

Doubtlessly, the Crimea was grateful to President Yushchenko for upholding its interests on the international arena, but there is also the irksome presidential draft constitution that curbs its powers. Yushchenko refutes this, but in his draft he replaced Chapter X with several articles in the chapter on local self-government. “In my draft I proceeded from the assumption that the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea should at least be fixed in its current status,” said President Yushchenko.

However, the Crimea’s current status is already fixed in the legislation. Second, this status does not satisfy the Russians, Ukrainians, and Crimean Tatars. Needless to say, this isn’t the kind of reform the Crimea needs today, with three ethnic groups demanding that their state powers to be expanded. Moreover, an autonomous republic, if it already exists, is a kind of state rather than self-government entity—this knowledge is one of the basics of state building. The only reason the Crimea remains silent about President Yushchenko’s draft constitution is that no one believes this bill will be passed by parliament. Otherwise, international organizations will be there to defend the Crimean Autonomy—some of them will campaign for its Russian nature, while others will call for its transformation into a Crimean Tatar state.

Crimean political analysts have serious doubts about President Yushchenko’s idea of including Sevastopol within the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea. To begin with, this happened in the early years of the renewed autonomy, and we all remember the Sevastopol members formed a powerful separatist center in the Crimea’s parliament. Second, placing a city whose seaport accommodates a foreign fleet under the Crimean parliament’s jurisdiction means that this parliament must be authorized to make decisions on foreign policy issues, such as the status of the Russian fleet and the terms and conditions of its deployment, but this would run counter to Ukraine’s national sovereignty — the more so that few if any Crimean MPs have the professional and international experience to cope with such matters. Most of them represent agencies where the exclusive language of communication is Russian, so it is easy to guess what kind of resolutions they will pass.

Also, if this kind of City Council existed in Sevastopol and were under the Crimean parliament’s jurisdiction, there would be no public confrontation in Sevastopol, just as there would be no such administration. President Yushchenko, obviously, has never attended a session of the Crimean parliament or that of the Sevastopol City Council. Kravchuk and Kuchma attended some, so they had the opposite ideas and they carried them out differently. Obviously, the Sevastopol clause in Yushchenko’s draft is the stumbling block that will wreck the president’s project.

In the Crimea Yushchenko voiced concern for Ukraine in general and the Crimea in particular. He said countries are perishing these days not because they are occupied by foreign armies (it would be interesting to know if he remembers Georgia’s experience), but because these countries “lose their attributes,” which lie in the foundation of the state. “These attributes are simple: our unity, our territory, its integrity, and the integrity of its borders. Third, this is our language. Fourth, this is our culture. Fifth, this is our history, without which no nation can exist… A state is not a tumbleweed that can live in someone else’s history while forgetting its own history, talk about culture without respect for its own roots, and view its history through its neighbor’s, rather than its own, eyes,” he said.

The Ukrainian president said the right things, something Ukrainians understand and agree with. However, he was speaking before the predominantly Russian-speaking audience in the Crimea and did not explain why all these attributes should be respected by ethnic Russians residing in Ukraine. The problem with the Crimea is that, being aware of their territorial (i.e., essentially Russian) autonomy, most of its ethnic Russian residents refuse to accept precisely these attributes of the Ukrainian state—its language, culture, history, and even the national flag and anthem.

PRESIDENT AND THE CRIMEAN TATARS

Yushchenko must be aware that in the Crimea he will not enjoy either electoral, ideological, or organizational success. He visited the peninsula in 2005, as a full-fledged head of state, and witnessed rather disillusioning realities, which he did not understand and refused to accept. As a result, the Crimea never saw the reforms it expected from the new head of state.

Although there were no fundamental reforms during Yushchenko’s presidency across entire Ukraine, the Crimea is currently the most unreformed part of Ukraine where people are waiting for any reforms with anxiety and trepidation, simply because all such reforms are unpredictable. After this visit of the president to the Crimea, it became obvious that no reforms will take place before the forthcoming presidential elections, in particular regarding the Crimea’s autonomy and the peninsula as a whole, so the Crimeans could heave a sigh of relief.

The Crimea is basically the Party of Regions’ electoral ground, yet every election campaign is a struggle for 300,000–400,000 Ukrainian and 200,000–230,000 Crimean Tatar votes. Last time they voted for NS-NU on the national level and for the NRU–Crimean Tatar Bloc on the level of the Crimea.

That is why one could sense keen anticipation in the tense atmosphere reigning at Yushchenko’s meeting with the Crimean Majlis leadership. Yushchenko was testing the ground, trying to see whether the Crimean Tatars could once again trust Our Ukraine, considering that this party had done nothing for their good. Mustafa Jemilev was taking stock and considering his options: keeping with Our Ukraine and NRU or changing partners to set up a bloc with another pro-Ukrainian and more effective political force.

Yushchenko and Jemilev are not likely to have broached the subject (there is still time left), but both have doubtlessly studied each other closely. Yushchenko must have regretted more than once that he has paid so little attention to the Crimea and the Crimean Tatars during his presidency. Moreover, at his first meeting with the Crimean Tatar Majlis leadership he suggested that they revoke their declaration on national sovereignty, something the Crimean Tatars couln’t do by definition. This kind of proposal could be made only by a person who was unfamiliar with the Crimea’s realities and history. Although the age-old history of relations between Ukrainians and the Crimean Tatars has seen worse things, it is clear now that 2004–10 will not mark an especially effective period in our relationships since Ukraine regained its independence.

President Kuchma founded the Council of Crimean Tatar Representatives attached to the president as a way to legalize the Crimean Majlis and form the legal framework in order to find ways to solve the problem of Crimean Tatar integration into Ukrainian society. He met with the Crimean Tatar community 13 times, in the presence of local authorities and activists, and issued a total of 110 directives (90 percent of which, however, remained on paper, according to Jemilev).

In contrast to this, Yushchenko met with the Crimean parliament for the second time. The first time was at the Palace of Bakhchisaray, in a semiofficial atmosphere, and the head of state was made welcome in the Divan Room, essentially in keeping with khanate traditions. Most likely, Yushchenko failed to find a common language with the Majlis and did not think it necessary to use Council of Crimean Tatar Representatives as a powerful political lever in the Crimea—or maybe he failed to appreciate its potential.

This time Yushchenko’s meeting with the Crimean Tatars also left much to be desired. Initially, he suggested having a meeting with the Crimean Tatar Council members and “certain other” Crimean Tatar NGO representatives. This could only mean organizations that are in opposition to the Majlis. Jemilev proposed two other formats: a meeting with the Council members (i.e., the Majlis) only or with “all the other” Crimean Tatar organizations.

Yushchenko insisted on his format, so Jemilev declared that “the Majlis would refrain from meeting the president.” After that Yushchenko made a conciliatory move by agreeing to meet with the Council members only and instructing the chief of the SBU to open a criminal case connected with deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

In order to avoid scandals, the meeting with the Majlis took place in small room and involved only the core of the Crimean Tatar Council, several ministers of Ukraine, and the leadership of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea. Yushchenko said he approved of the convention of the World Congress of the Crimean Tatars and its choice of Refat Chubarov as president.

As usual at meetings with presidents, Jemilev raised the pressing integration issues. He thanked President Yushchenko for his order to open a criminal case with regard to the Crimean Tatar deportation and listed the most pressing current issues. These include a law to restore the rights of the deportees, allocation of parcels of land, reviving the system of education, cultural facilities, restoring place names, allocation of land for a major mosque in Simferopol, and granting the national status to the Bakhchisaray National Historical and Cultural Preserve.

Jemilev pointed out that 108 million hryvnias were earmarked in 2009 for the state-run resettlement program of the Crimean Tatars. However, what was actually received was 3.5 million. This amount was increased to 35 million after a meeting with the Ukrainian prime minister. Crimean Speaker Anatolii Hrytsenko offered a brief and precise report on the measures being implemented by the Crimean parliament and government to accommodate Crimean Tatar repatriates, including designating land plots for their settlement, corresponding legal procedures, and filling in the register of the deportees.

For reasons best known to himself, Yushchenko considered himself only an arbiter between the Crimean government and the Crimean Tatars, the two “sides of the conflict,” and tried to talk both into an amicable settlement and the signing of “a harmonized document,” so they could subsequently monitor its implementation. This was hardly an effective solution, considering that most of the legal problems, including the restoration of rights, cannot be solved in the Crimea and require political, administrative, legal, and financial decisions on the state level, analysts say.

Summing up his Crimean visit, Yushchenko said he would issue directives, including the one regarding budget appropriations for the 2010 Crimean Tatar Deportee Accommodation Program. “As President of Ukraine, I am prepared to assume my share of responsibility and will urge the government to push the necessary bills through parliament to solve this problem,” he said.

In conclusion, President Yushchenko said he was sure that the problems relating to the Crimean Tatars could be resolved more effectively if all sides showed a greater degree of coordination: “You have no enemies in coping with these problems; you have a number of partners,” he said with conviction.

Source: The Day

Ukrainian President Blasts Govt Over Euro 2012 Financing

KIEV, Ukraine -- President Viktor Yushchenko accused Ukraine's government on Monday of breaking promises on financing the Euro 2012 soccer championship, placing in doubt preparations already criticised by European soccer officials.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko
Yushchenko issued the criticism three days after Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his estranged ally turned rival, said preparations to co-host the event with Poland were proceeding normally despite the effects of the global financial crisis.

She backed longstanding plans to have matches staged in four cities in each of the two countries.

Yushchenko, addressing top officials, including the central bank chief, said the government had met no more than five percent of pledges to provide 2009 financing equivalent to $945 million.

"The financing programme for Euro-2012 is under threat," the president's press service quoted him as saying. "Together with the central bank and the finance ministry, we must find financial resources."

He ordered the central bank and finance ministry to produce, within a week, plans for financing Euro 2012 sites, including stadiums, airports and transport networks.

Europe's soccer governing body, UEFA, has expressed doubts about Ukraine's ability to stage the tournament and has so far confirmed Kiev as the sole Ukrainian city able to host matches.

But the capital's staging of the final was made contingent on completion of renovations at the Olympic Stadium -- already subject to major delays.

Three other Ukrainian cities -- Lviv, Donetsk and Kharkov -- must be confirmed at a UEFA meeting on November 30 along with Kiev's right to stage the final. UEFA has already granted four Polish cities to hold Euro 2012 matches.

UEFA President Michel Platini decried "huge infrastructure problems" in Ukraine in May -- airport instructure, transport networks and suitable accommodation for a huge influx of fans.

Ukraine and Poland were chosen as co-hosts in 2007. Platini and other UEFA officials have said the tournament will not be withdrawn from either country but have suggested the distribution of cities hosting matches could be altered.

Source: The New York Times

Russian Journalists Find A Haven In Ukraine

LONDON, England -- Russian journalists are complaining about the absence of open political debate in Russia, and prefer working in Ukraine where there is "real politics," the British newspaper the Financial Times has reported.

Well-known Russian television anchorman Yevgeny Kiselev.
In an article dedicated to the work of Russian reporters in the Ukrainian media, the newspaper cites an interview with well-known Russian television anchor Yevgeny Kiselev.

Kiselev, who had been Russia's most influential TV journalist, and is currently commuting to his new job as an anchor in Ukraine, said that "traveling to Ukraine is like going back in a time machine to the 1990s."

"They have real politics there. Working in Ukraine allows me to be a true political journalist," he said, adding that in Kyiv, unlike in Moscow, "politicians not only come on his show; they answer their own mobile phones."

"In Russia, there is no open political debate any more. The authorities are hermetically sealed, we can just hypothesize about the discussion going on inside," Kiselev said, adding that "here [in Ukraine] you have access to tonnes of information on almost any politician." He said that the Ukrainian political scene is "so open, it is not that hard to learn it."

The journalist also denied claims that he had come to Ukraine to advocate the Kremlin line.

"Everyone here knows perfectly well that the current owners of the channel [where Kiselev currently works] can in no way be seen as representatives of the Russian government," Kiselev said.

Vladimir Gusinsky and Konstantin Kagalovsky, the owners of equal stakes in the TVi channel, also expressed the same views.

"I haven't been to Russia for five years. Gusinsky has criminal charges against him in Russia. No one will worry that this channel is advocating the Kremlin line," Kagalovsky said.

"They thought the media market would develop here [in Ukraine] and they could do journalism, which they can't in Russia," Kiselev said, adding that the founders of TVi also thought Ukraine's intensely politicized culture, and the close connections between business and politics, offered an opportunity to make money.

He also said that his work on a new television channel had not been an attempt to harm anyone in Moscow.

"This program [Itogi (Conclusions) broadcast on NTV] isn't an effort to jab a needle into the bottom of any Russian leader, despite my skeptical attitude towards many of them," the journalist said.

The owners of the TVi channel expressed hope TVi would be broadcast throughout Ukraine by the autumn, and added that at the moment, the channel was is available free only in half-a-dozen eastern and southern cities.

Igor Malashenko, who ran Gusinsky's media empire at its height and is now a "senior counselor" at TVi, in turn said in an interview with the newspaper that he regretted that he had failed to persuade Gusinsky to refrain from confronting then Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000-2001.

"I knew Gusinsky was wrong and I told him so, but I let him overrule me," Malashenko said.

He also said he wished that he and Gusinsky had, like the more pliant oligarchs, found a way to do a deal with Putin and continue working in Russia.

Source: Kyiv Post

John Demjanjuk Trial To Break Legal Ground In Germany

SAN FRANCISCO, USA -- The trial against suspected concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, is a legal first for Germany. For the first time, a person who was low on the chain of command is to be indicted, even though there is no proof of his having committed a specific offence. Other alleged henchmen have gotten off far more lightly.

A copy of John Demjanjuk's UN identity card from when he was a displaced person: The trial of the suspected camp guard will be a legal first in Germany.
The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter listened in on the conversation. “She hopes and believes that he will somehow return home,” says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple’s son.

That is unlikely to happen. His father is being detained in Bavaria, waiting for his trial to begin. US authorities deported Demjanjuk in early May, when he was flown to Munich on a chartered flight. When he arrived, a German investigating judge handed Demjanjuk the arrest warrant, which stated that the accused was “under strong suspicion” of aiding and abetting the murders of at least 29,000 people.

Demjanjuk is alleged to have worked in 1943 as a guard in the Sobibor death camp, and to have helped the Nazis commit mass murder against thousands of Jews. He has repeatedly denied the charges, and his family insists that it is the victim of a prosecution-obsessed justice system.

On July 3, prosecutors said that doctors had determined that Demjanjuk, who has been held in custody in Munich since May 12, was fit to stand trial. However, they imposed one condition, saying that his court appearances be limited to two 90-minute sessions a day. State prosecutors said that formal charges could be expected this month and that a trial could commence as early as the autumn.

The case against this alleged member of the SS is a first for the German legal system. For the first time, a foreign henchman from the lowest rung of the chain of command will be prosecuted, not because of his particularly gruesome behavior as a perpetrator of so-called “excessive acts,” but because he helped keep the killing machinery running smoothly.

That won’t be easy. Will the prosecution in the case, the Munich public prosecutor’s office, be able to provide sufficient proof of his guilt? Can it demonstrate that he participated voluntarily in the campaign of murder?

A number of documents suggest that Demjanjuk was part of a group of about 5,000 foreign helpers — people from the Baltics, Ukrainians and ethnic Germans living in other countries — who the Nazis trained at the Trawniki training camp, east of the Polish city of Lublin, to commit mass murder in occupied regions.

Nevertheless, there is no evidence that Demjanjuk killed out of murderous intent or greed. Instead, he was probably an ordinary henchman, like thousands of others. But German courts have been extremely lenient in the past when it has come to putting these Nazi helpers on trial. In fact, even their superiors almost always got off lightly.

In other words, the judiciary is planning nothing less than a radical break with a decades-long practice which was often perceived as offensive.

Responding to a complaint against Demjanjuk’s detention filed by his attorney Ulrich Busch, the Munich Regional Court explained that the established practice of German courts in cases relating to SS overseers and guards in extermination camps “does not create a precedent.” In the arrest warrant, it states that Demjanjuk, as a guard, was not compelled to participate in mass murder. “He could have deserted, as many other Trawniki men did,” is the argument in the warrant.

For Demjanjuk’s defense attorney, this line of argument “upends the entire postwar legal practice in Germany.” The court must conduct its proceedings on the basis of evidence, and yet it presumably also wants to avoid being accused of inaction or perhaps even leniency toward former Nazis. All of this creates the impression that the German judiciary is using the Demjanjuk case, which has become well-known because of its previous history, to make up for past omissions.

Relatively Safe

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, is not the first presumed Nazi helper that the United States has deported to Germany. More than 100 men have had their US citizenship revoked for concealing their Nazi past, and 27 of them ended up in Germany.

Dmytro Sawchuk, for example, traveled to Germany voluntarily in 1999 when he was about to be deported. US investigators accused the man, born in Poland of Ukrainian parents, of having participated in brutal ghetto evacuations after being trained in Trawniki, and of having supervised Jewish forced laborers in the Belzec extermination camp as they dug up thousands of bodies and incinerated them.

The public prosecutor’s office in Heidelberg, to which the case was assigned, terminated the proceedings against Sawchuk after three years, arguing that Germany could only prosecute the case if the “Republic of Poland, as the criminal investigation authority principally responsible for criminal prosecution,” dispensed with extradition. Poland investigated the case itself, but later suspended its investigation. Sawchuk died in 2004.

Liudas Kairys, who also trained at Trawniki and was a senior guard at the Treblinka camp, was a rank above Demjanjuk’s presumed rank in Sobibor. There was a lot of evidence against him from survivors and documents. He was sent to Germany in 1993, as he had hoped, after US authorities revoked his passport. From Kairys’s perspective, it was the right decision. Investigation proceedings launched against the native Lithuanian in 1993 for murder were suspended six years later by the prosecution in the western city of Darmstadt. Kairys had died in the meantime.

In February 1982, the US attorney general asked his counterpart in Bonn for a stronger commitment. He wanted Germany to petition for the deportation of Nazi collaborators from Lithuania, Ukraine and Latvia who had been tracked down in the United States, and put them on trial in Germany.

But Bonn’s justice minister turned down the request, arguing that deportation was only allowable in the case of crimes “that had been committed on the territory of the country submitting the request.” And because of the statute of limitations, he argued, only murder cases could be prosecuted anyway.

The former Trawniki men living in Germany could also feel relatively safe, as long as there was no evidence of their having been Exzesstäter, in other words, people who committed excessively cruel acts. One such Exzesstäter was Treblinka guard Franz Swidersky, who was sentenced to a seven-year prison term in Düsseldorf. Another former guard in Belzec, who had held the rank of Zugwachmann, or platoon member, is spending his retirement in an idyllic village in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. He had testified about the Nazi death camps in two trials, but he was unwilling to talk about his experiences with SPIEGEL.

Those at the lower ends of the chain of command, and their supervisors, invoked the principle of Befehlsnotstand, a legal term applied to those who carried out a criminal command because they would otherwise have endangered their lives. The historian Jochen Böhler characterizes the defense as being the justice system’s “top favorite for acquittals”: Almost all of the accused alleged that they would have suffered if they had refused to follow orders — and that they had only killed on command.

Sadists or Pitiful Old Men?

In the trials conducted in Hagen, West Germany, in 1965-66, against former SS men who had served at Sobibor, only one defendant was given a life sentence: Karl Frenzel, the camp director, a gruesome sadist who had whipped a dying prisoner and shot him personally. Five defendants received prison terms of between three and eight years, and five others were acquitted.

Karl Streibel, the commandant of the Trawniki training camp, was tried in a Hamburg court from 1972 to 1976. He and five other defendants, all senior members of the camp administration, went unpunished. The judges argued that the Trawniki trainers had not been aware of the purpose for which they were training the foreign workers — a somewhat dubious interpretation of their tasks.

If it was already so difficult to bring to justice the men who had been higher up the chain of command, how are the courts expected to deal with a man like Demjanjuk, a captured member of the Red Army who was apparently recruited by the SS in 1942?

The Trawnikis — as the men trained at the camp of that name are known — were undoubtedly among the “most notorious offenders of World War II,” says Hamburg historian Frank Golczewski. Many profited shamelessly from the death camps, using money and gold taken from the murdered prisoners to pay for sex with women in the surrounding villages.

And yet, says Peter Black, chief historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, one cannot conclude that these men volunteered to commit mass murder. The conditions in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were so horrific, according to Black, that the men “had limited options.” The non-German volunteers were at the lowest end of the hierarchy. If they refused to cooperate, says Black, “they could be shot on the spot,” at least until the spring of 1943.

Helge Grabitz, a well-known Hamburg criminal prosecutor who has since died, also believed that the Trawnikis were “coerced.” They volunteered, according to Grabitz, “to escape certain death from starvation, freezing to death or epidemics in the camps.” The “proven inhuman atrocities” could hardly be attributed to individual offenders, she wrote, making criminal prosecution “relatively difficult.”

Neither Canada nor Britain nor Australia managed to convict former Trawnikis who had immigrated to those countries.

In the Demjanjuk case, Germany now hopes to improve on that record, while at the same time establishing stricter benchmarks.

Source: San Francisco Sentinel

Culture Wars Arrive In Ukraine, With Bans On Gambling And Porn

BOSTON, USA -- Igor Gaidai considers himself an artist, who, among other things, produces erotic photography that glorifies the beauty of the feminine form.

Kiev artist Igor Gaidai worries that a new law extending the ban on pornography in the Ukraine may prevent him from creating portraits such as this one.
In his photo studio and gallery in the center of the Ukrainian capital, he displays his various projects, including one called “Saman,” which hearkens back to a “pre-Christian era” when “witches” roamed the earth. In it, naked women are depicted in various poses with brooms, as if in mid-flight, and are meant to glorify “the power of feminine energy, beauty and wisdom.” His main display window also exhibits four young nude mothers, partially covered by their equally nude infants.

In recent days Gaidai may have become an outlaw.

In a flurry of moral protectionism, Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, overwhelmingly agreed last month to beef up the country's law on pornography, outlawing its “possession” in addition to “its sale, distribution and manufacture.” Signed last week by President Viktor Yushchenko, the addition to the criminal code has caused many observers to fear that a crackdown against all erotic materials may soon follow.

The culture wars have arrived in Ukraine — albeit with a post-Soviet twist. The pornography law closely followed another new piece of Ukrainian legislation attempting to eradicate immoral living. Casinos, slot machine halls and bookmaker offices were closed practically overnight in June, when deputies voted to enact an immediate ban on all gambling-related activities.

“We want every Ukrainian family not to have a porno mag in the bedroom dresser, but a Bible,” said Viktor Shvets, chairman of the parliament committee that drafted the pornography law.

Shvets says that the legislation's purpose is to prevent the accumulation of large quantities of pornography with the intention to then sell it. Deputies also originally intended to target child pornography, said officials with close knowledge of the law, but “got a little carried away.”

Despite the terseness of the 38-word text that was passed — or perhaps because of it — many struggled to understand the law’s actual intent. It came as news to many, for example, that the sale and distribution of pornography has already been banned for some time in Ukraine.

More of a problem is that “pornography” is not defined in the criminal code. According to Shvets, a special commission of experts must be assembled to determine exactly what pornography is every time an arrest is made.

The law’s vagueness is actually the point, said Gaidai. “The text gives the government the ability to act as it wants,” he said. “This is a step back into the Middle Ages.”

(Some news reports and blogs claimed that the legislation outlawed all pornography, except that needed for “medicinal purposes.” The phrase is not anywhere in the original text, however.)

Political observers say that the new laws are an attempt to score easy populist points in the run-up to hotly contested presidential elections in January. Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko immediately seized upon the gambling law, which her party co-authored, claiming that she was protecting the population and asking citizens to call a hotline if they discovered any underground gambling houses.

“This is a classic political stunt,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta political think tank in Kiev, adding that a small percentage of the population takes advantage of gambling and pornography, while bans are popular among the poor, elderly and religious.

Or as Igor Samoylov, general director of the Avalon entertainment center and casino in Kiev puts it, referring to the gambling law: “This was a sanctimonious decision.”

The gambling law mirrors a similar one that took effect in Russia July 1, moving gambling halls from cities to Las Vegas-like centers in investment-needy regions in the Russian hinterland.

But the Russian legislation, adopted back in 2006, allowed businesses a grace period to adjust and close down; in Ukraine it was just a matter of days. Valerii Pysarenko, one of the Ukrainian law’s authors, says that the harsh terms were necessary to rip up by the roots an “epidemic on the level of AIDS or tuberculosis.”

“Russia’s experience showed us that a transitional period doesn’t work — it didn’t facilitate the building of the special zones,” he said.

Pysarenko claimed that 70 percent of those visiting gambling halls are “youth.” What’s more, the government earns only 2 percent in taxes from what he says is a $5 billion a year industry. Anywhere from 70 to 90 percent of the businesses are working in the shadow economy, he added.

Gambling proponents concede that the industry has negatively affected the country’s poor, but say that this is primarily the fault of the government, which inadequately controlled the growth of slot machine halls, the main culprit. More to the point, they say, the law has closed a legitimate and legally-working line of business, throwing more than 200,000 people out of work in the middle of a debilitating economic crisis.

“A civilized state would try to change the situation and regulate it — not close it down completely,” said Aleksei Konshin, director of the Aurum casino, which shut its doors on June 11.

Just over a year ago Konshin achieved his life’s goal after 18 years in the casino business when he opened his own establishment, modeled on an English private club. All the fixtures were state of the art: furniture from Italy, roulette wheels from England, walnut wood fixtures, all surrounding a plush marble fireplace. He says he invested more than $3 million of his own money, which he hoped to earn back in three years. Now it is all lost. He did not have outside investors. “Thank God — I’m much more relaxed,” he said.

“The government delivered a knockout punch. It was like a meteor dropping from the sky,” Konshin said, standing in the middle of the deathly silent gaming room. “It’s as if you are playing blackjack and the dealer suddenly grabs all your cards and money and says ‘That’s all.’”

Source: GlobalPost

Kiev Charges Russian Military With Unauthorized Transport Of Missiles Through Sevastopol

KIEV, Ukraine -- The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has confirmed media reports on the stoppage of vehicles belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet transporting cruise missiles in Sevastopol.

A Russian cruise missile
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Kyrylych said in a statement on Friday that Ukrainian law enforcement agencies on July 8 stopped three vehicles and a group of Russian Black Sea Fleet servicemen, who were transporting cruise missiles through densely populated districts of Sevastopol without agreement of competent Ukrainian bodies "in gross violation of the May 28, 1997 agreement between Ukraine and the Russian Federation on the status and conditions of the Russian Black Sea Fleet's presence in Ukraine."

"These steps by the Russian side manifest once again how [the terms and conditions] of the Black Sea Fleet's temporary presence in Ukrainian territory stipulated by international agreements and Ukrainian law are being ignored," Kyrylych said.

He pointed out that Russia had committed itself to honoring Ukraine's terms and laws, including regulations on the transportation of dangerous cargo and the need for authorization of any movement related to the operations of the Russian Black Sea Fleet military units outside their bases.

Ukraine expressed "strong protest" against such actions and demanded that the Black Sea Fleet refrain from them during its presence in Ukrainian territory.

Interfax could not immediately obtain comments on this information from the Russian Defense Ministry.

Source: Interfax-Ukraine

IMF Downgrades Ukraine 2009 GDP

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's gross domestic product for 2009 is expected to decline 14 percent, a big drop from an original forecast of 8 percent, a global banking official said.

IMF's Ceyla Pazarbasioglu
Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, head of the International Monetary Fund's mission in Ukraine, in Kiev told a news conference Friday the GDP forecast was downgraded from 8 percent to 14 percent due to the sharp downturn in Ukrainian economic development in the first three months this year.

Ukraine's GDP dropped 20.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009 when compared with the first three months of 2008.

Pazarbasioglu said the IMF also revised its forecast for Ukraine's 2009 state budget deficit from 4 percent to 6 percent, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported.

Source: UPI

Polish PM Rejects Euro 2012 Ukraine Jitters

LONDON, England -- Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Thursday rejected claims that Poland could ditch its troubled co-host Ukraine and find a new partner for the 2012 European football championships.

Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk is still optimistic about Ukraine finding investors for Euro 2012 preparations.
"I'm going to reassure the Ukrainian government that we still want to organise Euro 2012 with Ukraine," Tusk told reporters, saying he planned to visit Kiev on Friday.

"The rumours of another scenario - in other words, a plan for Poland to organise it with another country - are baseless," he affirmed.

In 2007, Poland and its eastern neighbours Ukraine were unexpectedly picked by European football's governing body UEFA as co-hosts for the continent's showcase tournament.

But there have been recurring concerns over their ability to be ready in time. Poland, however, has won plaudits from UEFA, leaving Ukraine in sharp focus because of its deep economic recession and regular political bust ups.

Tusk said he was "aware" of Ukraine's headaches but said he was convinced by "the will of our Ukrainian friends to overcome them".

Speculation has ebbed and flowed that Germany, Poland's western neighbour, could come on as a substitute. Its 2006 World Cup stadiums, plus its solid transport and hotel infrastructure, outstrip anything on offer in Ukraine.

In May, UEFA formally confirmed four match venues in Poland: the capital Warsaw, the Baltic port of Gdansk, and the western cities of Wroclaw and Poznan.

But it only accepted the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Three other venues in Ukraine were given until November 30 to provide assurances they were capable of properly hosting games.

Last month, Ukraine's Euro 2012 pointman Ilya Chevliak also admitted that the country was struggling to build the hotels needed to accommodate fans, because construction had been meant to be financed by the private sector, now battered by the economic crisis.

Source: Football WorldCupWeb

Clean Getaway

KIEV, Ukraine -- Victor Lozinsky, stripped of his parliament seat after becoming a suspect in a June 16 murder, is on the run. Troubling as it is, no one should be surprised at how events are transpiring. This pathetic case is the rule, not a shocking exception. It’s just another sign that lawlessness rules in the young and fragile democracy.

Victor Lozinsky (sitting) talks on the phone in parliament in this 2008 file photo. Lozinsky case demonstrates how post-Orange Revolution Ukraine remains a land of lawlessness.
The elite and influential are free to pillage the country’s population and riches and do as they wish, even going so far as murder.

In the 2004 Orange Revolution, millions of citizens cried out for justice and a better life. Nearly five years later, the escape of yet another high-profile murder suspect is treated as everyday news. Disturbingly, Ukraine’s 46 million citizens are becoming accustomed to this lawlessness.

Has anyone been brought to justice for the unsolved murders committed since Ukraine became independent, or the sham privatizations of former Soviet assets, or all the election frauds? No. Everyone gets away scot-free because the privileged political and business leaders turn a blind eye.

Impunity leaves the possibility for crimes to happen time and time again. If Lozinsky calculated that he could escape the short arm of Ukrainian law, he was correct. His deputy’s seat was lifted on July 3, when even his alleged behavior went beyond the tolerance of a very crooked Verkhovna Rada.

Lozinsky went missing the day he stopped being a member of parliament. Nobody, certainly not fellow lawmakers whose closets are full of skeletons, noticed or helped catch him.

Speculation on his whereabouts range from Moldova’s breakaway enclave of Transdniester, to homes of legislators immune from searches by law enforcers.

It all smacks of a cover-up by fellow deputies, prosecutors and others in authority who are supposed to prevent the alleged criminal from disappearing. We imagine someone close to Lozinsky giving him a phone call and a warning: “Nothing will happen to you, but you’ve got to find a new place to live.”

Lozinsky was a member of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s bloc, but still kept influential friends with allies in his former Regions Party, led by ex-premier Victor Yanukovych.

Tymoshenko’s camp has shown little interest in finding him. A prosecutor’s office reportedly friendly to the Regions Party opened a criminal case against him on July 1, two weeks after the murder of Valery Oliynyk in Kirovohrad Oblast.

The vote to terminate Lozinsky’s parliamentary mandate was also slow. Just like previous suspects, such as former Interior Ministry official Oleksiy Pukach, a key figure in the 2000 murder of Georgiy Gongadziy, Lozinsky was given ample time to disappear and cover his tracks.

President Victor Yushchenko has urged law enforcement to punish those to blame. But not even the State Security Service (SBU) law enforcement agency controlled by the president was able to track Lozinsky. Ukraine’s leaders once again are incapable or have no nterest in bringing their criminal friends to justice and establishing rule of law. This makes them accessories to the crime. The weight of the evidence leads us to pronounce a verdict of guilty.

Source: Kyiv Post

KIEV, Ukraine -- Lord Byron, Pushkin, and Victor Hugo wrote poems about him. Liszt composed a symphonic work in his honor, Tchaikovsky devoted an opera to him, and Gericault painted him tied naked to a horse. In centuries past he was a historical superstar -- a poster child for the Romantic era.

Ivan Mazepa
His name was Ivan Mazepa, a Ukrainian Cossack chieftain who allied with Sweden's Charles XII to fight Russia's Czar Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava, 300 years ago this week.

The swashbuckling subject of Romantic-era adulation is once again attracting attention, this time as the subject of a dispute over history between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. In the eyes of the Russian state and its propagandists, Mazepa is Public Enemy No. 1 -- a turncoat who betrayed Peter the Great, Orthodox Christianity and the unity of Slavic peoples.

Most Russian historians have judged Mazepa a traitor. Acting under the instruction of Czar Peter, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him and placed an anathema on him, and still vilifies him in annual Poltava services. In turn, many Ukrainian historians regard Mazepa as an honored fighter for Ukraine's statehood. President Viktor Yushchenko extols Mazepa as a heroic precursor of Ukraine's independence and his image is emblazoned on the 10 hryvnia note ($1.30).

Passions over Mazepa have not been as heated in three centuries as this year. In recent days, amid ceremonies, costumed reenactments, conferences and television programs on the Poltava battle, Russian demonstrators have burned him in effigy. Ukrainian patriots rallied in Poltava on June 27 and unfurled a 30-meter by 45-meter Ukrainian flag in his honor. And a security force of nearly 1,000 has been deployed in Poltava and successfully staved off conflicts between the two sides.

On the surface, there is little in Mazepa's biography that would warrant such intense feelings. He was born to a prosperous and educated family in Polish-occupied Ukraine in 1639 and served in the Polish court until 1665, when he returned to Ukraine, eventually joining the ranks of the Cossacks loyal to the Polish crown. In 1687, Mazepa was elected Hetman, or chieftain, of the Cossack Host in eastern Ukraine that was loyal to the Muscovite Czar.

A prosperous magnate, Mazepa built churches and supported the arts and education while pursuing the goal of uniting all Ukrainian lands in a Cossack state. After years of partnership with Peter the Great, Mazepa sensed Russia's growing ambitions were a threat to Ukraine's sovereignty. He abruptly turned against Peter and in 1709 joined Sweden's young king, Charles XII, in a campaign against Russia. The Swedish-Ukrainian alliance suffered a crushing defeat at Poltava. Charles died from a battle wound and Mazepa fled to today's Moldova, where he also died soon after.

Poltava helped shape Europe's geopolitics for three centuries. Russia's emphatic rout of Sweden and its Cossack allies signaled its emergence as a European superpower and ensured Russian dominion over Eastern Ukraine for the bulk of three centuries. Peter constructed a new narrative for his realm. Instead of being Muscovy, it was to be Russia.

As such, he and his state could claim lineage with the Kievan state called Rus that had accepted Christianity in 988 and collapsed in the 13th century. In one simple historical revision that complemented his opening to the West, Peter and his realm would be transformed from Asiatic upstarts to a European empire. Kiev would become the "mother of all Russian cities."

There was, of course, no place in this scheme for anything resembling an independent or autonomous Ukraine. Indeed, any claim to Kiev's autonomy or separate nationality, any Ukraine-based opposition to Russian rule, was a direct threat to the Petrine myth and the legitimacy that it helped confer on the Russian state. Mazepa had to go, and has never been allowed to return to historical grace for the same reason. Every Russian ruler has vilified him since the fateful battle at Poltava.

For Russians, Poltava without question was a great historical victory and Russians should be free to memorialize it as such. And there is no question that in the 17th century, national identities were ill-formed and many inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine felt a stronger kinship for the common Orthodox faith they shared with Russians than for any aim of independence.

But for contemporary Ukrainians, there can be no similar ambivalence. As a young state that gained independence in 1991, Ukraine must develop its own sense of history, its own heroes and founding fathers. In short, it needs a common historical narrative to bind its citizens.

Such efforts are at best benign and should excite from Russia no more than a firmly agnostic ambivalence. But the vehemence of Russian polemics over events and personalities three centuries old speaks to the Russian state's interest in keeping alive the idea of the eventual reunification of the two states. It also helps perpetuate a cultural divide between Ukraine's Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russophone east.

In this context, there are several reasons why Poltava resonates. First, Mazepa and the Cossacks represent a political force that sought autonomy and independence from Russian dominion. Second, Mazepa not only turned against Russia, he made common cause with Sweden, i.e. with Europe and the West. Third, for politicians like Vladimir Putin who lionize the Russian empire and lament the disintegration of the Soviet Union, branding Mazepa a traitor sends a not-so-subtle message that proponents of Ukraine's statehood today are also betraying the cause of Slavic unity.

With Russia adamantly opposed to Ukraine's integration into European structures and with Mr. Putin on record as questioning the permanence of Ukraine's statehood, Russia is investing significant resources on challenging Ukraine's shaping of a separate national identity and history.

These efforts include film documentaries challenging Ukraine's effort to commemorate Stalin's famine as a national genocide, and financing "Taras Bulba," a big-budget epic film that depicts the Cossacks as loyal supporters of the Russian empire and adds scenes -- absent in Gogol's 19th century novel on which the movie is based -- of Poles as murderous barbarians engaged in pillaging and rape.

While this Russian effort to upend Ukrainian national identity is not likely to succeed, over the short term it can help perpetuate Ukraine's east-west divide, promoting instability and increasing Russia's opportunities to reassert hegemony over its weak neighbor.

Until Ukraine can shape its historiography calmly and professionally without external interference, its polity will continue to be plagued by divisions and its society by lack of cohesion. This is why the contemporary battle over the meaning of Poltava is as significant as the Battle of Poltava was three centuries ago.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Will The Ukrainian Parliament Be Disbanded?

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko may return to the idea of disbanding parliament and call snap elections. The opposition Party of Regions (PRU), which has the largest caucus in parliament, has disrupted parliament's work following its leader Viktor Yanukovych's failure to form a grand coalition with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc (BYT).

Deputies Ukraine's Party of Regions block the speaker's platform.
BYT is the only major force that is decidedly against holding snap elections. Apparently, it is only the uncertainties surrounding the legal basis of the move that prevents Yushchenko from dissolving the legislature.

In late June, the PRU started blocking the rostrum in parliament, making the procedure of voting physically impossible. The PRU is determined to continue this action until Tymoshenko's coalition agrees to increase national wages and pensions. Such a populist move is hardly possible now, since the state coffers are empty following the 20 percent GDP contraction in the first quarter of 2009, as Ukraine has been the nation worst hit by the global recession within Eastern Europe and the CIS.

Tymoshenko's cabinet struggles to contain the budget deficit within the 4 percent allowed by the IMF, otherwise the IMF might delay the disbursal of its $16.4 billion stand-by loan-without which the Ukrainian budget will collapse. If the PRU's demands on wages and pensions are met, the state finances may slip out of control.

The PRU understands that there is a very slim chance that its conditions will be met. However, even if Tymoshenko bows to this pressure and agrees to increase wages and pensions, the PRU will hardly stop its destructive activities in parliament, as it has formulated a set of additional demands which, if met, would dissolve the ruling coalition.

These include dismissing the ministers of interior, education and culture. These three ministers have cemented the coalition as representatives of its junior partners, the Self-Defense group of the Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko and several nationalist groups. If they are removed, the coalition will cease to exist, and Tymoshenko will be undermined as prime minister.

Yanukovych said that snap parliamentary elections should ideally coincide with the presidential elections scheduled for January 17. However, Yanukovych has stopped short of admitting that his party has actively disrupted parliament's work in order to prompt Yushchenko to disband it.

His "shadow finance minister" Mykola Azarov is more forthcoming. During a recent press conference, he admitted that the PRU would push for snap parliamentary elections if its demands regarding wages and pensions are not met.

Yushchenko has not yet reacted to the PRU's initiative, although he is known to favor the dissolution of parliament. He is apparently uncertain that he has sufficient legal grounds to dissolve the legislature. He tried to do so last fall, but the BYT managed to block it with the help of the courts, and Yushchenko subsequently suspended his dissolution decree, through which snap parliamentary elections were scheduled for December 7, 2008.

According to the Zerkalo Nedeli weekly, Yushchenko is considering the possibility of reviving the decree. This would be a legally dubious option, since the constitution provides for holding snap elections within 60 days from the signing of the respective presidential decree, and that term has long since expired. Zerkalo Nedeli suggested that Yushchenko might issue a new decree to dissolve parliament based on its inability to function, partly since Tymoshenko's coalition lacks a majority.

There is little time remaining for Yushchenko to consider these options. According to the constitution, the president may not dissolve parliament within six months of his term expiring. Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn said that Yushchenko can dissolve parliament on July 24 at the latest, as his term should expire on January 23, 2010.

If Lytvyn is correct and the PRO's goal was to prompt Yushchenko to dissolve parliament, then they left it too late to obstruct its functioning. One indisputable legal option for the president to dissolve the legislature is in the event that it proves unable to work for one month, but the blockade of the rostrum by the PRU started on June 26, and there will be less than 30 days until July 24.

The PRU is so fixed on snap elections because its popularity has probably peaked, while that of the BYT is set to slump as it steers the government during a period of deep economic crisis. According to the latest opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, the PRU would secure 37 percent of the vote had the elections been held in June, while the BYT would muster only 21 percent, followed by the party of former speaker Arseny Yatsenyuk with 15 percent. Moreover, the poll showed that Yatsenyuk's party might defeat Tymoshenko's in her stronghold of West Ukraine.

Source: Jamestown Foundation

Time For A New Energy Policy

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Of all the difficult challenges currently facing Europe, the need to secure a sustainable and affordable supply of energy for the long-term is surely among the most important. Given that almost every EU member state is now a net importer of energy, there could scarcely be a clearer example of the common European interest.


Yet we have failed so far to develop the common policies required to face the future with confidence. Unless we can fashion a more integrated and robust European energy system with a stronger external energy policy to match, rising import dependency will become an acute source of political and economic vulnerability in the decades ahead.

The problem is compounded by the trend toward energy nationalism evident among some of the world's leading producers of oil and gas. In the case of the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine earlier this year, a disagreement over price was magnified by political factors and the desire of the Russian government to use energy supplies to assert "privileged interests" within the post-Soviet region.

Efforts led by Russia, Iran and Qatar to develop a cartel-type arrangement among gas-producing nations point in a similar direction. The temptation for authoritarian states in particular to use energy resources for political or monopolistic effect will only increase as global demand rises and oil and gas supplies become more limited. The recent surge in the oil price suggests that we do not have time on our side.

This is an issue that keeps forcing itself onto the EU agenda, as we have seen again in the last few weeks. The recently revised version of Russia's National Security Strategy makes it plain that Russian leaders regard their energy assets as tools of foreign policy leverage and envisage a future in which resource competition may be resolved by military means.

Moscow's hostile reaction to the recent EU initiative to modernize Ukraine's gas supply network and to the Eastern Partnership project reveals a competitive, zero-sum mentality in European energy affairs. Finally, President Dmitry Medvedev has hardened Russia's stance on the Energy Charter Treaty, which protects the rights of international energy investors, calling for it to be replaced by a looser, non-binding conceptual approach to a new agreement.

The motive behind this last proposal is not difficult to understand. The ECT establishes multilateral rules on issues like transit and investment protection, along with legal arbitration mechanisms. Russian leaders would clearly prefer energy relations to be determined by power politics and the logic of supply dominance rather than by market forces and the rule of law. The EU, in turn, has to be firm and united in defending its own interests.

Any departure from the rules-based approach should be deemed unacceptable. Although Russia has still not ratified the ECT, it agreed to be legally bound according to Article 45 when it signed in 1994. There can therefore be no question of allowing Russia to renege on its obligations just because it finds them inconvenient.

The starting point for any new relationship must be a commitment by Russia to respect the rules to which it is already party. It would be extremely dangerous to flirt with the idea that the ECT should be abandoned and replaced in the face of Russian obstructionism. Which ECT provisions should be sacrificed in the process? The protection of property rights for European investors in the Russian energy sector?

The obligation to allow the transit of third country energy supplies? The commitment to resolve disputes by international arbitration? If the EU's response to rule breaking by a major partner is to abandon the rules, then what future is there for international law and ultimately the EU system itself? This is about something much more fundamental than one treaty. It is a question of Russia's willingness to accept the rule of international law and the EU's determination to hold them to it.

The EU needs a credible policy for encouraging Russia to return to the multilateral, rules-based approach it embraced in the 1990s. Taking "no" for an answer should not be an option. A large part of the solution is for the EU to get its own house in order and press ahead with the rapid completion of its internal energy market.

The latest energy liberalization package goes a long way to meeting that objective by proposing the separation of supply and transmission. It needs to be matched by investment to build the interconnectors needed to overcome market segmentation and switch gas and electricity supplies rapidly to meet demand within Europe.

There also needs to be a more active approach to energy diplomacy with countries in the eastern neighborhood and beyond. Extending the benefits of the single-market approach to transit countries in the east would benefit everyone involved. In particular, any measure that strengthened Ukraine's energy security would automatically strengthen our own.

Also welcome is the new political momentum behind the Nabucco gas pipeline project. Envisaged as part of a wider project to build a new energy corridor to the Caspian basin and beyond, this would transform the geopolitical reality of energy diplomacy in Europe's favor. President Obama has announced his intention to develop the new technologies needed to reduce America's reliance on carbon fuels. The EU should work with him, hand in hand.

Equipped with more effective instruments of internal and external policy, the EU would find itself in a much stronger bargaining position with respect to Russia. Even so, our intention should not be antagonistic. Russia has as much to gain from an energy relationship conducted according to market principles as we do, even if its leaders don't always see it that way.

One consequence of Russia's shift to energy nationalism is that its energy sector has become chronically inefficient, with under-investment in new production putting a question mark over its ability to meet future supply commitments.

Russia needs European investment and technology to unlock its energy potential and return to the high growth rates of recent years. Europe needs Russia to be a reliable energy supplier according to the market rules it has already signed up to.

The important thing for EU policy makers to understand is that Russia will be more likely to accept a new bargain on these terms if Europe takes the initiative by demonstrating its ability to solve its energy security problems by independent means.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Averting A Post-Orange Disaster

KIEV, Ukraine -- After several years of impressive economic growth and encouraging political change, Ukraine has recently entered troubled waters. The democracies west of Ukraine are institutionally consolidated and internationally embedded enough to circumscribe the political repercussions of their so far relatively mild economic contractions.


While being hit almost as hard as Ukraine by the world financial crisis, Russia has managed to build considerable financial reserves thanks to the enormous cash inflow into her state budget during the years of rocketing energy prices, allowing her to soften the social repercussions of the economic downturn.

Ukraine, in contrast, has neither a consolidated political system nor significant financial reserves. During the first quarter of 2009, the Ukrainian economy seems to have contracted between 20-23 percent, and its industrial production might have fallen as much as 30 percent. Given the limited capacities of the Ukrainian government to deal with the social aftermath of these developments, the effects of the crisis on Ukrainian domestic politics and foreign relations are unpredictable.

To be sure, Ukrainians have shown considerable maturity in earlier periods of political crisis, such as during the country's last contested presidential elections. It is often ignored, however, that 2004 was not only the moment of the Orange Revolution, but also a year of steep economic growth of almost 10 percent. In contrast, Ukraine's economy today is experiencing a depression that rivals the 1992-1994 plunge in industrial production.

As if this were not challenging enough, Ukraine is facing an increasingly assertive Russia on which it is economically dependent. Until recently, Ukraine's energy reliance on its Eastern neighbour was partly neutralized by Russia's heavy dependence on the Ukrainian gas pipeline system which delivers Russian gas to the European Union (EU) and on the Kremlin's stated interest in preserving the Sevastopol naval base for Russia's Black Sea fleet.

Neither of these two balancing mechanisms is fully functional today. Out of parochial interests, the EU has been pressuring Ukraine to "internationalize" energy transportation. While understandable from a Central and West European view, “internationalization” is weakening Ukrainian control of perhaps the most important instrument of securing Ukrainian independence from Russia. Out of his familiar political myopia, President Viktor Yushchenko has prematurely declared that Ukraine, in any case, intends to close Sevastopol for the Russian fleet when the current contract for the lease of the Crimean port expires in 2017.

Whereas earlier, the Russian and Ukrainian governments had something to negotiate about, Kiev’s diplomatic leverage has diminished today. The Kremlin, aware of Ukraine's new weakness on a daily basis, threatens via mass media to cut gas deliveries if Ukraine does not pay in time for them.

Moreover, in 2008, the Moscow leadership demonstrated in Georgia – not the least to Kiev - that it is prepared to use military force to defend vital interests in her "near abroad." Many Russian politicians have let it be known, in public, that the Crimea’s majority Russian ethnic makeup places the peninsula within Moscow's natural sphere of influence. Some even see Crimea as a part of Russia's historic territory.

Worse, Ukraine's political system prescribes new presidential elections in January 2010, when a new standoff between Ukraine and Russia concerning gas deliveries and payments is likely to occur. In fact, given the Ukrainian state's current financial difficulties, Russia may regard it politically opportune as well as domestically and internationally justifiable to cut gas deliveries to Ukraine already before January 2010.

Polling data shows that anti-Ukrainian sentiment is growing in Russia’s population as a result of the daily xenophobic brainwashing by the Kremlin-directed propaganda machine. As a hard line against Kiev becomes increasingly popular among ordinary Russians, the Moscow leadership may conclude that cutting gas deliveries to Ukraine would kill two birds with one stone: it would divert attention from its own omissions in reforming Russia's post-Soviet state and economy, and it would cause serious trouble for Kiev's Orange government, in domestic affairs and/or foreign relations.

In the case of new gas delivery cuts, the government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will face an awkward choice. If it chooses to stomach the cuts, it will alienate the Ukrainian population when further industrial plants come to a standstill and Ukrainians’ flats become cold. If it chooses to siphon gas from the Ukrainian pipelines that deliver gas from Russia to the European Union, Ukraine's Orange cabinet will alienate its EU partners and violate international law.

As Ukraine's economic, social and political crisis sharpens, more and more Ukrainians may question the wisdom of conducting a costly presidential election when the Ukrainian state is almost bankrupt – if not on the brink of collapse. After all, Ukraine does have a legitimate legislature as well as a more or less operational government.

In the increasingly difficult situation that Ukraine awaits during the coming months, the election of a second ruler appears as luxury. Moreover, by participation in these elections, Ukrainians would legitimize the semi-presidential system that is obviously unsuitable for Ukraine – as has been manifestly demonstrated by the agonizing intra-executive conflicts, during the last years.

Not only is the current Ukrainian dual power system deficient, but semi-presidential systems, at least in transition countries, are generally a bad choice, if one believes the results of comparative research into this political system. For instance, in 2008, the Irish government professor Robert Elgie and American political researcher Sophia Moestrup published the collected volume Semi-Presidentialism in Central and Eastern Europe.

This book contains research papers by leading specialists on post-Soviet institutional design and performance in Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. The study confirms previous scholarly work that has indicated concerns about the political system that Ukraine inherited when it acquired independence in 1991.

Elgie’s and Moestrup’s paper collection shows once more that the impact of semi-presidentialism on the transition to and consolidation of, democracy is negative or at least unhelpful. In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, this concerns both highly presidentialized semi-presidentialism, like Ukraine until 2005, and balanced presidential-prime ministerial semi-presidentialism, like Ukraine has had since 2006. The scholars conclude that, "if democracy is fragile, then semi-presidentialism of any form is probably best avoided."

With presidential elections scheduled for January 17, 2010, Ukraine is about to reproduce a political system that will be detrimental to its interests, especially considering the possibly grave domestic repercussions of the world financial crisis and Moscow's continuously growing imperial appetite. In the unlikely best-case scenario that the latter issues do not become salient, Ukraine will still be losing if it decides to go ahead with the 2010 presidential elections.

Recent rumours in Kiev are indicating that at least a part of the Ukrainian political elite seems to be interested in serious institutional reform. From late May to early June 2009, secret negotiations were conducted between Tymoshenko's Bloc and Viktor Yanukovych's opposition Party of Regions about the formation of a coalition to change the constitution, create a parliamentary republic, and cancel next year's presidential elections.

The idea was to have Ukraine’s parliament, instead of the people, elect the President. This would preserve the current dual executive and power-sharing arrangement while depriving the President of a direct popular mandate. Although Ukraine would still be ruled by both a President and Prime-Minister, the two leaders would be dependent on parliament and on each other; they would be less inclined to enter into the agonizing conflicts prevalent throughout the last few years.

While these changes would not have solved Ukraine's two major headaches – payment for gas deliveries and Kremlin hostility – they would have calmed down political bickering in Kiev and stabilized the Ukrainian government. The modification was obviously designed to provide Yanukovich with an important office in the executive.

It would also have avoided the dirty electoral campaigning that has already started and the costly two-round voting process scheduled for early 2010. However, Yanukovich decided to leave the negotiation table. As of today, the presidential elections will thus continue as prescribed under the current Constitution.

Hard times are awaiting Europe's youngest and largest democracy, and one can only hope that the encouraging sanity and moderation that Kiev's elites have shown before will also prevail in the current situation. Ideally, Yanukovich and Tymoshenko will return to the negotiation table and reconsider the issue of the upcoming elections.

Preserving the current semi-presidential system serves neither the short-term nor the long-term interests of Ukraine. Switching to a parliamentary republic would free Kiev’s political elite to focus its attention on numerous other pressing problems.

In the coming months, Kiev’s political elite will need to concentrate on far more important issues than electoral campaigning.

Source: Harvard International Review

Ukraine Will Not Host NATO Bases

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko said on Sunday that Ukraine will not host foreign military bases, and its territory will not be used against Russia, when the country joins NATO.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko takes part in a celebration marking the anniversary of Ukraine's Fleet in at the Crimean port of Sevastopol, Sunday, July 5, 2009.
"Ukraine guarantees that there will be no foreign soldiers of any bloc or any country. This is implied by the Constitution of Ukraine and Ukraine's Law on the Fundamentals of Security," Yushchenko said.

Ukraine has been pursuing NATO membership since pro-Western Yushchenko was inaugurated in January 2005.

Ukraine's NATO membership, however, needs approval at a nation-wide referendum on the issue. Meanwhile, regular opinion polls show that the majority of Ukrainians continue to oppose joining the alliance.

NATO has enlarged since 1999, admitting three ex-Soviet Baltic republics and four Communist-bloc states in Eastern Europe. The expansion has strained relations between the West and Russia, which is concerned by the new military bases emerging along its borders.

Last December, European NATO members led by Germany blocked U.S.-backed bids by Ukraine and Georgia to join programs leading to membership in the military alliance, but the ex-Soviet states were told they would eventually be allowed to join.

Yushchenko also said that the Russian Black Sea Fleet based in Sevastopol in Ukraine's Crimea must leave the base in 2017 when a bilateral treaty expires.

Russia's Black Sea Fleet uses a range of naval facilities in Ukraine's Crimea, including the main base in Sevastopol, as part of a 1997 agreement, under which Ukraine agreed to lease the bases to Russia until 2017.

Yushchenko announced last summer that Ukraine would not extend the lease of the Sevastopol base beyond 2017, and urged the Russian fleet to start preparations for a withdrawal.

Source: Defence Professionals

In 'Near Abroad,' A Mix of Hope, Anxiety Ahead Of U.S.-Russia Summit

MOSCOW, Russia -- When Washington and Moscow get cozy, the saying goes, Russia's neighbors get nervous. So when U.S. President Barack Obama signaled his intention to "reset" U.S.-Russian relations, which had sunk to levels not seen since the Cold War, there was palpable anxiety in Georgia and Ukraine.

Tbilisi and Kyiv are watching warily for signs of any "trade-offs."
Those countries will be watching warily as Obama begins his high-profile visit to Moscow on July 6.

"There are some fears, of course, that there might be some kind of trade-off between the United States and Russia," says Tbilisi-based political analyst Ghia Nodia, head of the International Research Institute for the Caucasus. "There may be a deal according to which Russia supports the United States in Afghanistan or elsewhere and the United States will sacrifice its support for Georgia."

Not 'Bargaining Chips'

Georgia, like Ukraine, has sought to move out of Moscow's orbit, and enjoyed overt U.S. encouragement under George W. Bush, whose relationship with Russia grew increasingly antagonistic during his eight years in the White House.

Now, in the face of emerging pragmatism in U.S.-Russia ties, many post-Soviet countries are wondering if their emerging democracies will be sacrificed on the altar of better relations with Russia.

U.S. officials have repeatedly said that Washington does not recognize spheres of influence in the former Soviet space and that Georgia and Ukraine -- both of which aspire to join NATO -- have the right to choose their alliances.

Obama himself appeared to throw down the gauntlet ahead of the summit in an AP interview, dismissing as "outdated" the "old, Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations" favored by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who hotly opposes the defection of Russia's post-Soviet neighbors and is seen as the driving force between last year's war in Georgia.

Michael McFaul, the White House National Security Council's senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, told reporters on July 1 that the administration has no intention of using Georgia or Ukraine as bargaining chips with Moscow.

"We're not going to reassure or trade or give anything to the Russians with regard to NATO expansion," McFaul said. "We are not in any way, in the name of the reset, abandoning our very close relationships with these two democracies, Ukraine and Georgia."

U.S. Assurances

Skeptics point out that NATO recently restored full relations with the Kremlin, which had been suspended following Russia's military incursion into Georgia in August, despite the fact that Moscow continues to deploy troops in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia and has barred international monitors from entering the territories.

In a clear effort to ease such fears, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden is scheduled to visit Kyiv and Tbilisi in late July, right on the heels of Obama's trip to Moscow.

In remarks to reporters on July 1, Georgian opposition politician Irakli Alasania, Tbilisi's former ambassador to the United Nations, called Biden's visit "a clear signal that the United States is not going to change its policy toward these countries, Georgia and Ukraine, and is not going to give up its support for their aspirations to join NATO and Western institutions."

Alasania spoke in Tbilisi after returning from the United States, where he met with high-ranking officials in the State and Defense departments.

Levan Ramishvili, founder of the Tbilisi-based Liberty Institute think tank, called Biden a "friend of Georgia" and noted that it was the vice president who first put forward the notion of the reset in a speech at a security conference in Munich earlier this year.

Ramishvili added that in the same speech, Biden also made it "clear that U.S. policy supports Georgia's territorial integrity and supports Georgia's right to join any alliance it chooses."

Homegrown Problems

The integration of Georgia and Ukraine into Western institutions has been complicated by political crises in both countries.

Georgia has been plagued by street protests against the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili since April.

And with presidential elections looming in Ukraine in January, the political establishment there has been paralyzed by an ongoing power struggle between President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Moreover, while Georgia is largely united in its desire to join NATO, Ukraine remains divided on the issue and dependent on Russia for energy supplies.

Analysts say Ukraine's ongoing political deadlock plays into Russia's hands.

"Until the political crisis ends, until the U.S. and its European allies see that Ukraine is united, until they see that there are people in Kyiv who think alike on security and foreign policy issues, there won't be any clarity in the U.S. position towards Ukraine," says Yevhen Kaminsky of the Kyiv-based Institute for Global Economy and International Relations Institute.

"This is what we need in order for us to see Barack Obama's position on Ukraine," Kaminsky adds. "Everything that is happening in Ukraine today is more conducive to Russian 'great state' ambitions than American democratization goals."

Yuriy Shcherbak, Ukraine's former ambassador to the United States, says he doubts that Obama would allow Russia to "dominate the post-Soviet space" but adds that Ukraine needs to take steps to beef up its own security.

"There may be a postponement of Ukraine's entry into NATO for some three to five years. This is fully possible," Shcherbak says.

"That is why Ukraine must come up with a new security strategy," he adds. "It is absolutely necessary to immediately to strengthen our armed forces. This is extremely important for us as we are currently in this gray, undetermined security zone."

Room For Maneuver?

The lessons of history continue to loom large as the region contemplates its future. Fearful of a Western retreat from Bush-era commitments of support, observers in post-Soviet countries have queried whether the big powers will once again carve the world into spheres of influence -- much as U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin did at the Yalta conference in the waning months of World War II.

Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College, says that while Georgia and Ukraine's NATO plans may be put on hold indefinitely, this should not be interpreted as ceding a sphere of influence to Russia in the former Soviet space.

"The president doesn't have the freedom that an FDR or a Churchill had in the middle of World War II to be able to do these sweeping kinds of arrangements about geopolitical divisions of influence. I don't think that the president is going in with a sense of doing a lot of trade-offs," Gvosdev says.

"He may at the margins do some things that the Ukrainians and Georgians may not like."

Source: Radio Free Europe

Being A Playboy Politician In Ukraine Can Help An Official's Career

KIEV, Ukraine -- What sex scandal? Unlike in the West, extramarital affairs in this nation tend to enhance a public man’s reputation

Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko and his lover, Oksana Vashchenko, a Radio Era journalist, come out of a nightclub in Kyiv on Apr. 24. Their affair was exposed by his wife after Vashchenko gave birth to Symonenko’s daughter on Jan. 22.
Politicians of many countries can envy their Ukrainian peers. If Ukrainians have an extra-marital love affair, not only does it not hurt their career, they can even get more public support. For example, the 56-year-old leader of the Communist Party, Petro Symonenko, turned out to be a real playboy and seduced 31-year-old journalist Oksana Vashchenko.

Not only had the main communist been unfaithful to his wife of 35 years, he easily showed up in public with his younger lover. One result of the affair came on Jan. 22, when the lover gave birth to their daughter.

Only one party colleague and rival, Leonid Hrach, wanted to kick Symonenko out of the party. Instead, Hrach got kicked out of the leadership structure of the Communists. But then again, Hrach’s opposition to Symonenko may not have been motivated by high moral principles. He plainly wished to move into Symonenko’s seat.

One can assume that if society, and particularly, the moral electorate of the Communists had condemned Symonenko’s behavior, he would have been rejected by the party with the speed of a bullet flying out of a gun. But we still have the pleasure to observe him in the chair of the leader of proletariat. Communist parliament member Oleksandr Holub even went so far as to say that Symonenko’s private life was no one else’s business.

Ukrainians are fairly tolerant towards amorous adventures of their leaders, unlike, say, the Italians. Their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, also was at the center of an amorous scandal recently. The head of the Italian government has to take public attitudes into consideration. He had to publicly swear that he had no out-of-marriage relationships with girls. One of the young female visitors of his country house even wrote a book in his defense. There is a whole information campaign going on to prove his innocence.

About 20 years ago, I visited the American town of Norfolk, Virginia, home of a U.S. -military base, a much-hated organization in this part of the world. It was during a trip of European journalists, organized by the U.S. government and the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. We witnessed at the base that the Americans have no idea about this Ukrainian saying: “A female aboard a ship brings bad luck.”

I cannot recall whether it was aboard the world’s biggest aircraft carrier, George Washington, or another ship, but we discovered there a uniformed, but very pretty, representative of the fair sex. It turned out during our conversation that there were more lady officers on board. We asked her many questions, and – among others – delicately questioned her about whether the male representatives of the crew ever try to seduce her during the long ocean journeys. Nature, we thought, is difficult to resist and the men aboard do not see other women for many months. She firmly said it was impossible and that she would cut anyone off who tried.

I remembered this lady vividly before the beginning of the second American campaign in Iraq. The media then came out with a story of the resignation of Rear Adm. Steven Kunkle, commander of USS Kitty Hawk Battle Group. What do you think he was relieved from his duty for? That’s right, for an “inappropriate relationship” with a female officer, which resulted in “a loss of confidence in his ability to command.” His human nature took over his military discipline. The reason for his resignation was not the scandal as such, but the conclusion of his superiors that such behavior caused a loss of ability to command. I was even wondering if my old acquaintance from Norfolk could have been that female officer.

There are almost no amorous scandals among politicians in Ukraine. Apart from Symonenko, I can remember very few of this kind. There had been rumors, of course, about a relationship between Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and lawmaker Nestor Shufrych. It seems that we would hear about more of these scandals if the effect was more similar to what happens in the West. Anyone who may think of making such scandals public in Ukraine understands that even if they catch somebody red-handed, the person who is caught will be in trouble, but only at home.

Among the people, the “hero lover” whose story gets splashed about press in tabloid fashion will only grow in popularity. He will even be more respected. His ability to lead an organization will not be doubted. On the contrary, the perception of his management skills will be improved. So, information about an affair at work will only enhance his reputation.

The American press did not report in 2003 where the information about the admiral’s affair with a female fellow officer came from. Perhaps the lovers were discovered by their colleagues and reported in an appropriate manner. It seems that in the USA, reporting these private matters is quite normal.

What comes to mind is the most famous love affair ever. Salivating, the whole world followed the intricacies of the investigation into the details of a tender relationship between the head of the world’s most powerful state, Bill Clinton, with Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old intern in the White House. So how did the world find out about it? It was revealed by a close friend of Lewinsky, Linda Tripp. She reported the love affair between the president and the intern to a relevant institution.

Informers in America do not have to worry about their reputations. Possibly, that’s because Americans are more egocentric than Europeans and everyone does whatever they want. If somebody has the need to make an office romance public, it’s their right, and it is respected as such.

In Ukraine, a person who would do such a thing would be considered a repulsive stool pigeon and would be treated with contempt.

Source: Kyiv Post

Happy Independence Day, America!

USA -- To our American readers, we wish you a Happy Independence Day, Happy Birthday America, Happy 4th of July!!!


Independence Day is the national holiday of the United States of America commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

On this day independence was claimed from Britain and Democracy was born. This day calls for parades, fireworks, wishes and celebrations.

Lenin's Nose Put Out Of Joint In Kiev

KIEV, Ukraine -- The recent damage caused to Lenin's monument in Kiev has provoked a debate about the future of the capital's only public monument to the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Some Ukrainians clearly believe it is time to get rid of Lenin's statue in Kiev.
The Ukrainian Nationalist Congress party is proud to proclaim that it smashed the statue's nose and left hand.

Kiev police have arrested a number of men suspected of causing the damage.

After 19 years of Ukrainian independence, statues of Lenin are still quite common, particularly in the eastern part of the country.

And despite earlier calls for its removal, the Kiev Lenin, which is situated at the top of the city's Shevchenko's Boulevard has somehow managed to survive intact until now, partially on account of it being the work of a renowned Soviet era sculptor, Sergey Merkurov.

Barbarism

But far from discussing the monument's artistic merits, the small crowd milling around the damaged statue on a hot summer's day, watched over by two policemen, argue about politics.

"It is just barbarism," says an elderly woman.

After seeing the damage on television, two teenagers wanted to see it for themselves.

"I liked this monument, they should let it be. You cannot erase history and you should look towards the future," says one of them.

Many people come to look, argue, take pictures or just stand around contemplating the defaced monument.

One man says: "I'm happy I lived to see the day. I would happily cut off his head myself."

He is not dissuaded by the arguments about the statue's artistic value.

"There were many Hitler statues of artistic value in Germany. It would not occur to anyone to keep them."

Humiliating

Some see the forthcoming removal of Lenin from his pedestal for repairs as an opportunity to rid the city of what they see as a symbol of the Soviet occupation of Ukraine.

"A continuing presence of Lenin's monuments in our country is humiliating to any Ukrainian with a national conscience," says one middle-aged man.

But 80-year-old Raisa Petrivna tearfully declares: "I was resting at my dacha when I heard about this act. I came here to ask his forgiveness. I said to him: Ilych, forgive them for what they did to you…"

For Raisa Petrivna, Lenin represents her Soviet youth, she is already collecting money for the repairs.

A Ukrainian Communist Party official says it will raise the money to get the karelia marble statue repaired but that it will cost tens of thousands of dollars.

But ultimately the decision whether or not to return the listed monument to its traditional location belongs to the Ukrainian government.

Death mask

A Kiev architect, Heorhiy Duchovichnyi, warns against removing the monument on political grounds, but also questions its artistic merits, stressing that it was put up in haste when it was realised in 1946 that unlike all the other Soviet republic's capitals, Kiev had mysteriously remained Lenin-free.

"They took an existing Lenin statue made for an exhibition in New York of Soviet achievements. And the pedestal was found in the Zhytomir region. It was originally meant for some heroic Soviet figure who had unfortunately become a victim of Stalin purges," he says.

Looking at the damaged monument, a Kiev historian, Olexander Anisimov says that the statue should be repaired and remain where it is.

"The sculptor, Sergey Merkurov was an interesting man. He personally took Lenin's death mask in 1924 and indeed had created a lot of Lenin monuments right across the Soviet Union," he says.

But Mr Anisimov's main concern about the potential disappearance of Lenin's monument from the top of Shevchenko's Boulevard is the future of the boulevard itself.

The 4km, tree-lined street is the longest boulevard in any European capital, he says.

The historian is worried that without Lenin's monument in place, the ever-growing Kiev traffic may swallow up the boulevard which may become yet another six-lane highway choked with cars.

Source: BBC News

Platini Says Ukraine Could Be Deprived Of Euro Championships

PARIS, France -- UEFA president Michel Platini said that Ukraine could be deprived of playing co-host with Poland to the Euro-2012 football championships, the daily L'Equipe reported Friday. "We have to take a decision by the beginning of December," Platini said. "December is the deadline."

UEFA president Michel Platini
UEFA issued a November 30 deadline two months ago when it picked all four Polish host cities but only Kiev (pending improvements) from the Ukraine cities due to ongoing intrastrucure problems.

The decision on Donetsk, Lviv and Kharkiv will then be made in December.

If UEFA then decides that Ukrainian stadiums will not be ready for the 2012 matches, an alternative could be to use German venues, Platini said.

"If we don't go to Ukraine, we have to find two other stadiums," Platini said, noting that the German cities of Berlin and Leipzig were "an option."

Source: DPA

Ukraine Hospitals Survive On Charity

KIEV, Ukraine -- One of the countries worst hit by the financial crisis is Ukraine, with its economy shrinking 21% in the first quarter of 2009. At the same time, the government has come to a virtual standstill, as politicians fight among themselves ahead of a presidential election. Amid all the turmoil, the country's healthcare system is suffering, says the BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse in Kiev.

Inside a Ukrainian hospital. Budgets have been squeezed to almost nothing.
It is a sunny Saturday morning, and a group of volunteers, most of them foreigners living and working in Kiev, have given up their weekend to renovate a hospital ward.

They are washing the walls, painting them, putting in new floors and bathrooms.

After that, they plan to get to work on the operating theatre.

"We're doing a complete refurb on theatre one," says Dave Young, one of the volunteers.

"New flooring, new electrics, and new doors to make it sanitary and to make sure they can carry on giving decent levels of service."

Mr Young runs a construction company in Ukraine. But, thanks to the economic crisis, there is not much work.

"Construction is near enough extinct in Ukraine at the moment," he says cheerfully. "It's heavily hibernating."

But instead of laying off his workforce, he has decided to put them - and himself - to good use.

"We have crews who are keen to keep working, so we thought: 'Why not get some good out of them and get something worthwhile completed?'"

The volunteers are paying for everything, including materials and labour. It is a good news story. Until you hear the bad news.

'Condemned to death'

Professor Yuri Orlov, the doctor in charge of this children's ward and Ukraine's most senior paediatric neurosurgeon, said his budget for medicines this year is one quarter of what it was last year. And there is worse.

"We've got nothing, not a kopek, not a dollar, not a pfennig - nothing for new equipment, for upkeep, or for buying the most elementary necessities," he said.

And it certainly shows. The main bathroom on the ward is absolutely filthy.

The walls are filthy, the toilet has an open cistern covered in mould, and by the door, there is a cardboard box lying on the floor for rubbish - an open dustbin with discarded rubber gloves, used syringes, dirty tissues and other bits of medical equipment.

Marco Zecchinato, who deals with young cancer patients for an Italian medical charity, Soleterre, took a break from scrubbing one of the walls to give me the wider picture.

"In paediatric oncology, we have a rate of mortality that is double what it is in Europe or the US," he said.

"These children, just because they were born on the wrong side of Europe, 40% are surviving, 60% are condemned to death."

He confirmed Professor Orlov's picture of an already underfunded healthcare system, squeezed further by Ukraine's economic woes.

Expensive medicines

Since summer 2008, demand for Ukraine's main export, steel, has dropped dramatically.

The national currency, the hryvnia, has lost more than a third of its value against the dollar.

This is causing problems not only for the government, which is not getting the revenues it expected.

It also directly affects individual patients.

Because while, on paper, Ukraine has a system of universal free healthcare, in practice, you have to pay for almost every aspect of medical treatment, including supplying your own bandages, syringes and other medication.

And imported medicines have effectively doubled in price - not because the pharmaceutical companies have put their prices up, but because people's salaries are worth half what they used to be in foreign currency terms.

Defenders of the government point out that the situation in Ukraine is not unique.

"Health services across the world are to some extent underfunded," says Andrei Musienko, a former deputy health minister, now the director of one of Kiev's main hospitals.

"In our country the situation is the same. And of course at a time of economic crisis, medicine suffers along with all other social services."

'Trying to survive'

Back on the children's ward, nine-month-old Nastya is waiting for her operation.

Her mother, Tanya, had to borrow money travel to the capital from their village in central Ukraine. Now she has nothing left to pay for things like blood transfusions or extra medicines.

If there are complications, she says, she does not know what she is going to do.

Professor Orlov says that the hospital does everything it can to help people like Tanya - that somehow they will get by.

But he believes that for the government, healthcare simply is not a priority.

"The ministry of health is aware of the situation. But they are tied to the budget. And the health service in this country is financed according to the following principle - whatever's left over goes on health care."

"There are many factors at play here - political instability, massive economic problems. I get the impression that [the government is] just trying to survive, rather than thinking about the future."

In the meantime, people like Tanya and Nastya will have to survive only thanks to the charity of others.

Source: BBC News

Russia’s Neighbors Resist Wooing And Bullying

MOSCOW, Russia -- This was supposed to be Russia’s round in the battle over its backyard. All year, despite its own economic spasms, Moscow has earmarked great chunks of cash for its impoverished post-Soviet neighbors, seeking to lock in their loyalty over the long term and curtail Western influence in the region.

The Kremlin
But the neighbors seem to have other ideas. Belarus — which was promised $2 billion in Russian aid — is in open rebellion against the Kremlin, flaunting its preference for Europe while also collecting money from the International Monetary Fund.

Uzbekistan joined Belarus in refusing to sign an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, an idea Moscow sees as an eventual counterweight to NATO.

There are other examples, like Turkmenistan’s May signing of a gas exploration deal with a German company, and Armenia’s awarding of a major national honor to Moscow’s nemesis, President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia.

But the biggest came last week when Kyrgyzstan — set to receive $2.15 billion in Russian aid — reversed a decision that had been seen as a coup for Moscow, last winter’s order terminating the American military’s use of the Manas Air Base there.

“A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote the military analyst Aleksandr Golts, when news of the Manas decision broke. “Such a brilliant result of Russia’s four-year diplomatic efforts!”

There are few projects that matter more to Russia than restoring its influence in the former Soviet republics, whose loss to many in Moscow is still as painful as a phantom limb.

Competition over Georgia and Ukraine has brought relations between Moscow and Washington to a post-cold-war low, and the matter is bound to be central to the talks that begin on Monday between Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and President Obama.

Russia’s ability to attract its neighbors to its side and keep them there is unimpressive. The Kremlin’s methods have been reactive and often bullying, combining incentives like cheap energy or cash disbursement with threats of trade sanctions and gas cutoffs.

The war in Georgia seems to have hurt Moscow in that regard. Rather than being cowed into obedience, as most Western observers feared, the former republics seem to have grown even more protective of their sovereignty.

Moreover, the leaders themselves have thrived by playing Russia and the West and, in some cases, China off against one another, although that has not brought stability or prosperity to their countries.

In Moscow’s so-called zone of privileged interests, in other words, Russia is just another competitor.

“There is no loyalty,” said Oksana Antonenko, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, based in London. “Rivalry is the persistent dynamic. They have to play in that game, to compete.”

Kyrgyzstan’s reversal on Manas is a case study in canny horse trading. Russian officials, including Mr. Medvedev, have said they blessed the decision, and that may be true, but President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev is the one who walked away with what he wanted.

Moscow wanted the base, a key transit hub for the United States’ war in Afghanistan, shut down; Kyrgyzstan wanted more money. In February, Moscow seemed to have achieved a master stroke — at a news conference announcing the pledge of $2.15 billion in Russian aid, Mr. Bakiyev said the United States would have to leave Manas in six months.

The first Russian payments — a $150 million emergency grant and a $300 million low-interest loan — arrived in April, allowing Mr. Bakiyev to pay wages and pensions as he began his re-election campaign.

Then Kyrgyzstan shocked the region by announcing a new agreement with the United States. Washington will pay more than triple the rent for the base — now called a “transit center” — increasing its annual payment to $60 million from $17.4 million, while kicking in upwards of $50 million in grants to the government. No one knows if the Kremlin will make good on the rest of its pledge.

Mr. Bakiyev “played the Russians, then he played us,” said Alexander A. Cooley, an associate professor of political science at Barnard College who addressed the Manas dispute in a recent book, “Base Politics.” “It’s all about getting as much as they can.”

This should be easier for Russia, which dwarfs its Eurasian neighbors in both size and wealth. Russia retains a military presence in more than half the former Soviet countries, and huge swaths of their populations rely on Russian media for their news.

Russia can offer muscular assistance in elections, as in Moldova, which has just received a Russian pledge of $500 million four weeks before voters go to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

But Russia’s strategy for consolidating support in neighboring capitals can hardly be called a strategy. Belarus’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who is avidly pursuing Western partners, has been barraged with carrots and sticks from Moscow — first promised $2 billion in Russian aid, then bitterly chastised for his economic policy, then punished with a crippling ban on the import of milk products, then rewarded by a reversal of the import ban. Russia regards Mr. Lukashenko’s truculence as a bluff.

“He is imitating a quarrel with Russia until the West demands serious changes from his regime, at which point, he will, of course, surrender,” said Parliament member Konstantin F. Zatulin, a standard-bearer for Russia’s ambitions in former Soviet space. “It’s just his greedy line of behavior.”

But the examples extend much farther. Every post-Soviet country that can manage it is pursuing a “multivector policy,” Mr. Zatulin acknowledged. Mr. Zatulin said he was not upset by these tacks away from Russia, but there was an edge to his answer.

“What is the point of being disappointed?” Mr. Zatulin said. “Pride comes before a fall. These are weak, dependent and poor countries which want to attract attention to themselves — not only attention, but aid. I cannot criticize them for that. But there are some red lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”

Herein lies the problem: Russia’s appeal to them just does not sound very seductive. Ideally, it would present an attractive model for its neighbors, politically and economically. Young generations would learn Russian because they wanted to, and the post-Soviet alliances would be clubs its neighbors are lining up to join.

In any case, Moscow will have to use tools other than wire transfers if it hopes to emerge from the financial crisis with a solid political bloc. As Alexei Mukhin, director of the nonprofit Center for Political Information, put it, “Love bought with money will not last long.

“That is purchased love,” he said. “It’s not very reliable.”

Source: The New York Times

Ukraine To Continue Arms Sales To Georgia, Says Government

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine will continue arms deliveries to Georgia despite objections from Russia, a Ukrainian government official said Thursday.

Ukrspetsexport at a trade show.
'We have made deliveries (to Georgia) in the past, and we will continue as long as there are no bans (to the deliveries) from United Nations Security Council,' said Serghy Bondarchiuk, director of Ukraine's state-owned arms exporter Ukrspetsexport, in a Sehodnia newspaper interview.

'If there are further (legal) orders from Georgia, we will consider them as well,' he added.

Moscow was furious a year ago with Ukraine for selling Georgia anti-aircraft equipment, tanks, artillery, helicopters, small arms, and ammunition - all used against Russian forces during the 2008 war over the disputed South Ossetia.

The Ukrainian anti-aircraft kit in particular surprised Russian military planners, who had expected total air superiority over Georgia during the conflict, but in fact lost between 5 and 17 planes and helicopters to missiles guided by high-tech Georgian radars.

Ukraine had, prior to the war, sold Georgia at least one Kolchuga radar system described by its Donetsk manufacturers as a leading-edge technology capable of detecting even modern stealth aircraft.

The US considered sanctions against Ukraine in 2003 over suspicions it sold a similar Kolchuga system to then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Russia-Georgia war provided 'excellent advertising' for Ukrainian anti-aircraft technologies, and the east Ukrainian Topaz plant manufacturing the Kolchuga radar 'has a long list of orders,' Bondarchiuk told the newspaper.

Ukraine is rated the world's 10th largest arms-exporter, having sold some 800 million dollars of weapons and military equipment to foreign customers in 2008, up 12 per cent from 2007, according to data provided by the state-run arms exporter Ukrspetsexport.

Ukraine's customers are most often are nations lacking strong defence ties to US and NATO nations, or Russia.

Buyers of Ukrainian weaponry in recent years aside from Georgia include Syria, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, Thailand and Myanmar.

Source: DPA

Ericsson To Modernize Kyivstar's Network To Meet Uptake Of Mobile Data In Ukraine

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Ericsson is paving the way for leading Ukrainian operator Kyivstar to offer its 23.9 million subscribers mobile broadband services under a three-year network modernization deal between the two companies.


While Ukraine awaits the imminent release of 3G licenses, Kyivstar's customers across 99.9 percent of the country will be able to access multimedia data services and superior voice service thanks to an expansion and modernization of Kyivstar's GSM/EDGE network.

Ericsson will boost capacity and coverage of the operator's radio access and core network, which serves more than half the nation's total subscriber base of 55.2 million.

By increasing capacity by more than 30 percent, Kyivstar will be able to manage the anticipated uptake of mobile data in the network.

The core network capacity is expanded by using the Ericsson Mobile Softswitch Solution, which also enables cost-efficient migration to an all-IP network.

The deal also covers microwave transmission, network deployment, systems integration and support services, as well as competence development for staff.

Igor Lytovchenko, President of Kyivstar, says: "This network modernization furthers Kyivstar's strategy of maintaining its technology leadership, while preparing for the launch of mobile broadband services with the introduction of 3G in Ukraine."

Jan Campbell, President of Ericsson Eastern Europe and Central Asia, says that the deal is an extension of Ericsson's established partnership with Kyivstar, which dates back to the nationwide rollout of its GSM network in 1996. "By using Ericsson's latest GSM/EDGE technologies, Kyivstar can deliver seamless services to its customers today and be well prepared for future needs."

Kyivstar and Ericsson have also joined forces in the area of advanced mobile technologies, with the first Ukrainian demonstrations of 3G and MMS in 2002 and EDGE in 2004.

Source: Marketwire

Russian Corruption Reporter Dies Of Head Injury

ROSTOV-ON-DON, Russia -- A local corruption reporter in Russia died of head injuries on Monday in what police, said Tuesday, was a drunken fall. Colleagues, on the other hand, are sure it was a revenge attack for muckraking journalism.

Vyacheslav Yaroshenko
Vyacheslav Yaroshenko, 63, the editor of a Rostov-on-Don newspaper whose name translates as Corruption and Crime died Monday of a severe head injury sustained April 30.

Police say Yaroshenko was drunk and hit his head on the stairs, but colleagues claim Yaroshenko was attacked.

''I have no doubt that the attack was directly connected to Yaroshenko's writing and is payback for his journalistic work,'' said Sergei Slepzov, a close friend and colleague of Yaroshenko.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has called for an investigation, suggesting that Yaroshenko was targeted because he had written about corruption in the local law enforcement agencies, government office and the prosecutor's office.

But police say there was no evidence of foul play.

''The authorities have already conducted a thorough investigation of all evidence of the crime and did not find any precedent for opening a new investigation,'' said Col. Aleksei Polyaski, a local police spokesman.

Russia is considered the third-most dangerous country in the world for journalists, after Iraq and Algeria. Nearly 50 journalists have been killed in Russia since the Soviet breakup, among them Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya and U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov.

Few of the murders have been solved in a country where reporters are frequently harassed, threatened and killed for exposing facts that embarrass authorities.

The Union of Journalists of Russia said the problem was that the country's wholly adequate laws to protect journalists are applied arbitrarily.

''Unfortunately we don't have independent courts and that's why all the laws to protect journalists are disregarded,'' the union's deputy chairman Mikhail Fedotov told The Associated Press.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has urged President Barack Obama to raise the issue of Yaroshenko's death when he visits Russia on Monday.

In Ukraine, the 2000 kidnapping and murder of muckraking journalist Georgiy Gongadze resonated throughout Ukrainian society and the world. Ukraine’s ability to solve the case became a litmus test for the strength of its democratic institutions – an exam the nation has so far failed.

Nine years later, three former police officers are behind bars, convicted of abducting and killing Gongadze. But they are seen as the fall guys. Those responsible for ordering the crime remain unidentified, while a police general remains wanted on suspicion of organizing the kidnapping and murder.

Source: Kyiv Post

Ukraine's Economy Plunges 20.3% In First Quarter: Official Data

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's economy shrank 20.3 percent in the first three months of this year, official data showed on Tuesday, making Ukraine one of the world's worst hit countries in the global economic crisis.

An elderly homeless woman drags her belongings as she walks in the centre of western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
The National Statistics office data, based on a comparison with the first quarter of 2008, showed the construction sector was hardest hit, declining 54 percent over the 12 months while industry went down 36.5 percent.

The energy sector also fell 19 percent but farming and financial services instead showed growth of 1.3 percent and 27 percent respectively.

President Viktor Yushchenko warned earlier that first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) would shrink by more than 20 percent in ex-Soviet Ukraine.

The steep recession comes after a prolonged period of economic growth.

The Ukrainian economy grew at an average of seven percent per year between 2000 and 2007. GDP has since shrunk because of the economy's reliance on metals and chemical exports whose prices have plunged on world markets in the crisis.

The International Monetary Fund has forecast that Ukraine's economy will shrink by 8.0 percent over the whole of 2009, while the World Bank says the fall will be more than 9.0 percent.

Ukrainian analysts are even more pessimistic, forecasting a contraction of between 12.5 percent and 14.0 percent of GDP.

Some analysts have said however that the recession in Ukraine could be bottoming out and growth will resume next year.

Ukraine's precarious financial position has raised the risk on monthly payments to Russian gas giant Gazprom, which cut off supplies to much of Europe in January as part of a dispute with Kiev over payments, debts and prices.

Ukraine is also suffering from a political crisis, with a deep rift between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko -- two former allies during the pro-Western Orange Revolution of 2004 who have since fallen out.

Ukraine is set to hold a presidential election in January.

The International Monetary Fund has already given 7.3 billion dollars (5.2 billion euros) in loans to Ukraine as part of a 16.5-billion-dollar bailout agreed last year in exchange for budget and economic reforms.

Source: AFP