236 vote for BSF Agreement Extension, including 9 BYuT and 7 OurUkraine-Peoples Self Defence. Without 16 orange votes, the ratification would have failed, receiving only 220 votes.
http://gska2.rada.gov.ua/pls/radac_gs09/gol_karta_zal3?g_id=11639
RE-INTRODUCING VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH
Five years in the political wilderness has taught Ukraine’s apparent next
president that the world does not end with the democratic rotation of power.
Opinion Europe, Analysis & Commentary: By Adrian Karatnycky
The Wall Street Journal, NY, NY, Monday, February 8, 2010 But, notwithstanding the chaos, “Orange” rule also deepened Ukraine’s political pluralism, and allowed time for the political transformation of Mr. Yanukovych and his Party of Regions.
[1] First, the oligarchs around Mr Yanukovych became economically transparent. They hired first-rate managers, rigorously paid their taxes, promoted sophisticated philanthropy, and became globalized in their tastes and manners. Just as importantly, they now see their future prosperity integrally linked to a reduction in corruption, the expansion of free market policies, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and Ukraine’s eventual integration into the rich EU market.
[2] Second, Mr. Yanukovych and other Regions leaders have become public personalities irrespective of some rough edges, and have accustomed themselves and found success in the democratic rules of the game. Five years in the political wilderness has taught them that the world does not end with the democratic rotation of power, nor does it put anyone’s massive fortunes at risk.
[3] Third, after his political setbacks in 2005 and 2007, Mr. Yanukovych and his allies were treated dismissively and—say some of his closest confidantes—humiliated by Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. This, and Mr. Putin’s tilt last year toward Ms. Tymoshenko, have created distance between the Regions leadership and Moscow. Coupled with Kyiv’s need to extract Ukraine from its deep economic decline, and a state budget deficit of 12%, this means the world can expect Mr. Yanukovych to eagerly work for close cooperation with Europe and the U.S., not to mention the International Monetary Fund.
Indeed, the signals emanating from Mr. Yanukovych’s closest aides, as well as key leaders from the Our Ukraine coalition with whom I met last week in Kyiv, suggest the new president and the government he will try to bring into office will likely represent a broad-based mix of longtime Regions party officials, and competent financial and economic technocrats and market reformers—including some from the former Yushchenko team.
For instance, there is a good chance that banker Serhiy Tyhypko, who finished a strong third in the presidential race, will be offered the prime minister’s post rather than Mr. Yanukovych’s longtime ally and campaign director, Mykola Azarov, who is also under serious consideration. The odds of a broad-based coalition are reinforced by the modesty of Mr. Yanukovych’s victory, clear-cut though it was.
At the same time, the agreement on uranium was a sign that Yanukovych is aiming to maintain a balance in Ukraine’s relationships with Europe, the U.S. and Russia. Strong and pragmatic relations with the U.S. – as with Europe – are essential for the new Yanukovych team, which understands that U.S. support is crucial within international financial institutions. The visit also suggests that Yanukovych appears to understand that Ukraine will have a stronger hand in shaping its relationship with Russia in the context of deepening relations with Brussels and the Washington.
As Jackson Diehl, a Washington Post editor and acute foreign policy analyst, noted: “By quickly accepting [Obama’s proposal to get rid of Ukraine’s highly enriched uranium], Yanukovych built a link to the White House to balance his longstanding connection to the Kremlin – and managed to stand out among the dozens of leaders jamming the luxury hotels of downtown Washington Monday.”
In addition to participating in the summit and meeting with Obama, Yanukovych held talks with International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The Ukrainian president paved the way for the upcoming visit of Deputy Prime Minister Sergiy Tigipko to the World Bank-IMF annual gathering. He also held bilateral discussions with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, Prime Minister Manhmohan Singh of India, President Hu Jintao of China, Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
And the schedule included a substantive meeting with members of the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council, an interview with CNN and a discussion with the editors of the Washington Post, who received a clear-cut message from Ukraine’s president: “Yanukovych’s ambition [is] to position Ukraine between Russia and the NATO powers – outside the Western alliance, but also not part of a Russian sphere of influence.”
No less energetic have been his other foreign travels, which have included an early trip to Brussels that yielded the most concrete official expression of Europe’s commitment to Ukraine’s eventual membership in the European Union, as well as two “atmospheric,” rather than substantive, visits to Russia and one to Kazakhstan.
To be sure, there are strong advocates inside the Party of Regions and among its coalition Communist partners, of a tilt toward Russia. But the early signs are that Yanukovych is resisting these lobbies and is seeking to create a genuine equilibrium that will allow Ukraine to protect its sovereignty as he works to rebuild the economy and move the country toward the aim of eventual membership in the European Union.
Ukraine’s president is yet to be tested by conflict or crisis. And his efforts to maintain equally friendly relations with Russia, Europe and the U.S. may in the end prove unsustainable. It is also an open question whether Ukraine’s security neutrality can be sustained and its security ensured solely by relying on its own defense capabilities.
While one swallow does not a spring make, the early weeks of Yanukovych’s presidency –and his U.S. visit – suggest that Ukraine’s international relations are moving forward in a balanced fashion. So, too, are the first indicators of Ukraine’s commitment to economic reform, fiscal stability and cooperation with international financial institutions.
Such pragmatism creates some hope that Ukraine’s new president will in the end also pursue a similar tack on matters of national identity and reject the divisive cultural and linguistic agenda being pursued by some in the current government.
These, at least, are the hopes and signals that come from a substantive and successful first foray to a city that is one the centers of our globalized world.
Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council of the U.S. and the managing partner of Myrmidon Group LLC.
Wall Street Journal Europe, March 30, 2010
Ukraine’s Democracy in Danger
By Alexander J. Motyl
As Ukraine’s recently elected President Viktor Yanukovych prepares to
visit Washington in April, he will aim to project an image of stability,
confidence, and control. In reality, Mr. Yanukovych has committed a series
of mistakes that could doom his presidency, scare off foreign investors,
and thwart the country’s modernization.
Mr. Yanukovych’s first mistake was to violate the constitution by changing
the rules according to which ruling parliamentary coalitions are formed,
making it possible for his party to take the lead in partnership with
several others, including the Communists. That move immediately galvanized
the demoralized opposition that clustered around his challenger in the
presidential elections, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
His second mistake was to appoint as prime minister his crony Mykola
Azarov, a tough bureaucrat whose name is synonymous with government
corruption, ruinous taxation rates, and hostility to small business. The
appointment dispelled any hopes Ukrainians had that Mr. Yanukovych would
promote serious economic reform.
His third mistake was to agree to a cabinet consisting of 29 ministers as
opposed to 25 before-an impossibly large number that will only compound
its inability to engage in serious decision making. That the cabinet
contained not one woman-Mr. Azarov claimed that reform was not women’s
work-only reinforced the image of the cabinet as a dysfunctional boys’
club.
His fourth mistake was to appoint two nonentities-a former state farm
manager, and an economics graduate from a Soviet agricultural institute-to
head the ministries of economy and finance. Meanwhile, he created a
Committee on Economic Reform, consisting of 24 members, to develop a
strategy of economic change. The size of the committee guarantees that it
will be a talk shop, while the incompetence of the two ministers means
that whatever genuinely positive ideas the Committee develops will remain
on paper.
His fifth mistake was to appoint the controversial Dmytro Tabachnik as
minister of education. Mr. Tabachnik has expressed chauvinist views that
democratically inclined Ukrainians regard as deeply offensive to their
national dignity, such as the belief that west Ukrainians are not real
Ukrainians; endorsing the sanitized view of Soviet history propagated by
the Kremlin; and claiming that Ukrainian language and culture flourished
in Soviet times. Unsurprisingly, many Ukrainians have reacted in the same
way that African Americans would react to KKK head David Duke’s
appointment to such a position-with countrywide student strikes,
petitions, and demonstrations directed as much at Mr. Yanukovych as at Mr.
Tabachnik.
These five mistakes have effectively undermined Mr. Yanukovych’s
legitimacy within a few weeks of his inauguration. The 45.5% of the
electorate that voted against him now feels vindicated; the 10-20% that
voted for him as the lesser of two evils now suspect that their fears of
Mrs. Tymoshenko’s authoritarian tendencies were grossly exaggerated. And
everyone worries that Mr. Yanukovych and his band of Donbas-based “dons”
are ruthlessly pursuing the same anti-democratic agenda that sparked the
Orange Revolution of 2004.
Several other key dismissals and appointments have only reinforced this
view. The director of the Security Service archives-a conscientious
scholar who permitted unrestricted public access to documentation
revealing Soviet crimes-has been fired. The National Television and Radio
Company has been placed in the hands of a lightweight entertainer expected
to toe the line. Most disturbing perhaps, several of Mr. Yanukovych’s
anti-democratically inclined party allies have been placed in charge of
provincial ministries of internal affairs-positions that give them broad
scope to clamp down on the liberties of ordinary citizens.
Democratically inclined Ukrainians are increasingly persuaded that Mr.
Yanukovych wants to become Ukraine’s version of Belarus’s dictator,
Alexander Lukashenko. But Mr. Yanukovych’s vision of strong-man rule rests
on a strategic, and possibly fatal, misunderstanding of Ukraine.
First, the Orange Revolution and five years of Viktor Yushchenko’s
presidency empowered the Ukrainian population, endowing it with a
self-confidence that it lacked before 2004 and consolidating a vigorous
civil society consisting of professionals, intellectuals, students, and
businesspeople with no fear of the powers that be. Mr. Yanukovych’s
efforts to establish strong-man rule already are, and will continue to be,
resisted and ridiculed by the general population.
Second, Ukraine’s shambolic government apparatus cannot serve as the basis
of an effective authoritarian government. Tough talk alone will fail to
whip a bloated bureaucracy into shape. Worse, Ukraine’s security service
and army are a far cry from those in Belarus. Mr. Yanukovych may try to
emulate Mr. Lukashenko, but without a strong bureaucracy and coercive
apparatus, he will fail.
Third, with an ineffective cabinet, all decision making will be
concentrated in Mr. Yanukovych’s hands. Even if one ignores his deficient
education and poor grasp of facts, Mr. Yanukovych’s appointment of Mr.
Tabachnik demonstrates that Ukraine’s president is either completely out
of touch with his own country, or arrogantly indifferent to public
opinion.
Fourth, Ukraine is still in the throes of a deep economic crisis. If Mr.
Yanukovych does nothing to fix the economy, Ukraine may soon face default,
and mass discontent among his working class constituency in the southeast
is likely. If Mr. Yanukovych does embark on serious reforms, that same
constituency will suffer and strikes are certain. So negotiating the
crisis will require popular legitimacy-which Mr. Yanukovych is rapidly
squandering; a strong government-which he does not have; and excellent
judgment-which is also missing from the equation.
Indeed, if Mr. Yanukovych keeps on making anti-democratic mistakes, he
could very well provoke a second Orange Revolution. But this time the
demonstrators would consist of democrats, students, and workers. The
prospect of growing instability will do little to attract foreign
investors, while declining legitimacy, growing incompetence, and tub
thumping will fail to modernize Ukraine’s industry, agriculture, and
education. Mr. Yanukovych could very well be an even greater failure as
president than Mr. Yushchenko.
Although the outlook is grim, it is not yet hopeless for Ukraine’s new
president. He could still grasp a modest victory from the jaws of an
embarrassing defeat by ruling as the president, not of Donetsk, but of all
Ukraine. All he has to do is restrain his appetite for power and learn to
rule with the opposition and with the population. It’s not so
complicated-it’s democracy.
Mr. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.
(Full Version. Shorter version published in Kyiv Post, http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/62040/)
Gender and anti-semitism were two important factors that probably tipped the balance in Viktor Yanukovych’s favour in the 2010 elections. Yanukovych won by only 3.5%, or approximately 900,000 votes, and became the first president to not win a majority of Ukraine’s regions or 50% of the vote.
The foremost expert on gender in Ukraine, Reed College Professor Alexandra Hrycak, believes that ‘traditionalistic attitudes’ towards women ‘are considered to be more prevalent within the ‘Orange electorate’. Much of this electorate originates in the country’s Western region and in rural areas of Central Ukraine’.
An October 2008 psychological portrait of Yushchenko published by Ukrayinska Pravda showed him to have patriarchal and traditionalist views of the role of women in society. Yushchenko’s inability to work with Tymoshenko is undoubtedly a product of her being a strong willed and self confident woman. Yushchenko surrounded himself with sycophants and motherly figures, such as his last chief of staff Vera Ulianchenko, and would never tolerate anybody talking back to him like Hanna Herman does to Viktor Yanukovych.
Anti-semitism was used against only two candidates in the 2010 elections: Tymoshenko and Arseniy Yatseniuk, but the campaign was more systematic and at a higher level against her. Marginal candidate Serhiy Ratshniak, Mayor of the Trans-Carpathian capitol city of Uzhorod, was openly anti-semitic against Yatseniuk. Ratushniak’s views did not win widespread support and Yatseniuk still won more votes than the mayor in Uzhorod. Ratushniak came in 16th out of 18 candidates with only 0.12% of the vote.
Anti-semitism was not a threat to Yatseniuk’s campaign as he was never going to enter the second round. He came in fourth with 7% of the vote. Yatseniuk, who is from Chernivtsi, has denied having Jewish origins.
The anti-semitic campaign against Tymoshenko presented more of a threat against her winning the presidency. I myself witnessed anti-semitic leaflets distributed throughout Galicia during the last week of the second round that called upon Galicians to not vote for Tymoshenko as she is allegedly ‘Jewish’.
Such spurious allegations had been around for the last 2-3 years but had come to the surface in the 2010 elections with the support of President Yushchenko. His allies in Lviv’s Rukh, such as Yaroslav Kendzior, who was expelled by Rukh leader Borys Tarasiuk, a supporter of Tymoshenko, had openly described Tymoshenko as the ‘Jew in the braid’.
The West Ukrainian branch of the Ukrainian Language Society ‘Prosvita’ had published booklets by the rabid anti-Tymoshenko former parliamentarian Dmytro Chobit which also claimed she had Jewish origins. Tymoshenko’s father had separated from her mother when she was three and his surname was Grigorian, suggesting an Armenian ethnic origin.
Regardless of Yatseniuk’s or Tymoshenko’s ethnic heritage they were both born in Ukraine and are therefore ‘Ukrainian’ as defined by Ukrainian legislation. The European norm is to use territorial and therefore civic criteria to determine citizenship, not ethnicity. The only exceptions who used ethnic criteria were Germany, Latvia and Estonia but all three have moved towards the civic norm.
Yushchenko stirred the issue of Tymoshenko’s ethnicity over the last two years by casting doubt on her Ukrainian patriotism. In August 2008 the presidential secretariat issued a 300-page dossier revealing her alleged ‘treason’. The dossier was returned by the prosecutor-general’s office as not constituting any criminal evidence of ‘treason’.
Although the dossier had been prepared by secretariat deputy head Andriy Kyslynskyi, who was then promoted to the position of deputy chairman of the Security Service (SBU), the allegations of ‘treason’ and ‘un-Ukrainian’ stuck to Tymoshenko. Kyslynsky was discredited and removed from the SBU after it was found that he had forged his University degrees on his CV.
Yushchenko repeatedly argued that Ukraine needed a ‘Ukrainian’ government indicating he did not believe that Tymoshenko is a ‘Ukrainian’. Yushchenko campaigned during the second round in favour of not voting for either of the two candidates, Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovych (see leaflet).
This served to dampen the ‘orange’ vote in Western Ukraine and reduce votes for Tymoshenko (Yushchenko’s call for a double ‘no’ vote would not have been listened to in Eastern Ukraine where he had no support). Tymoshenko received three million fewer votes than Yushchenko in December 2004 while Yanukovych won approximately the same number of votes in 2010 as he had in December 2004.
Yushchenko claimed that both candidates were allegedly ‘Moscow projects’, a view that he has stuck to. On a visit to Lviv on March 10, Yushchenko said that the Tymoshenko bloc are ‘not the kind of patriots who form the Ukrainian viewpoint’.
In the second round of the elections, nationalist groups in Lviv and the diaspora rallied to Yushchenko’s call to vote against both candidates. Yuriy Shukhevych, son of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander whom Yushchenko had honored in 2007, was a leading supporter of the ‘no’ campaign.
So too were nationalist parties, such as Oleh Tyanybok’s Svoboda (Freedom), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN), as well as the Andriy Melnyk (OUN-m) and Stepan Bandera (OUN-b) wings of the émigré Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. All four political forces supported Yushchenko’s double ‘no’ vote campaign.
Appeals to vote against both candidates were published widely in the Galician media. I was shown evidence that these were paid for by the Lviv branch of the Yanukovych election campaign, without, I was told, authorization from the central headquarters of his election campaign.
Views of Tymoshenko as ‘unpatriotic’, sometimes tinged with anti-semitism, had moved during the last two years to the Ukrainian diaspora. A senior member of the Congress of Ukrainians in Canada (KUK) lambasted Tymoshenko as a ‘Jew’ to myself last year.
I pointed out to him that mixed marriages, like those of my parents, was the norm for Ukrainian men in Britain who came from the military or slave labor camps, like my father, to Britain in the late 1940s because there were few Ukrainian women available to marry. The émigré OUN-b had a strong base in Britain which provided proportionately the largest financial contribution of any Ukrainian diaspora to that organization. How ironic that this was a diaspora composed of mixed marriages and therefore not ‘pure Ukrainian’ in Yushchenko and the KUK leader’s eyes.
The Ukrainian diaspora stayed very silent during most of the 2010 election campaign, unlike five years earlier, because it had partially bought into the Yushchenko view about both candidates lack of ‘patriotism’ who would enter the second round. Tymoshenko had successfully established herself with the diaspora during her speech and meeting with World Congress of Ukrainians (SKU) leaders at its August 2009 Lviv congress.
But, the SKU had entered the elections late in the day with a statement only issued on February 2, five days before round 2, that indirectly called upon Ukrainians to vote for Tymoshenko. Had the SKU been on holiday since the August 2009 congress and only woken up in February to the Yanukovych threat?
Former SKU head Askold Lozynsky issued strongly worded support for Tymoshenko. Lozynsky, as with SKU leaders, are from the OUN-b milieu and had therefore broken with the ‘no’ campaign initiated by Yushchenko and supported by both wings of the émigré OUN.
The supreme irony of the 2010 elections is that anti-semitism in Western Ukraine directed against Tymoshenko and fanned by Yushchenko could have been one of the factors that led to the election of the pro-Russian autocrat, Yanukovych. In a 50:50 election where every percentage point counts the ‘no’ vote could have proven to be decisive in Tymoshenko’s defeat.
A second conclusion is that the Ukrainian diaspora cannot hope to counter charges of anti-semitism against Bandera or itself unless it condemns such views within its ranks. When Yushchenko fanned the flames of Tymoshenko’s ‘un-Ukrainianess’ and his supporters went further and unleashed spurious anti-semitic allegations of her ‘Jewishness’ no Ukrainian diaspora organization issued a protest.
Suspicions about Yushchenko’s ‘patriotic’ motives should have emerged over the intentional timing of the decree to honor Bandera on the eve of the second round. This was undertaken to undermine Tymoshenko’s campaign by mobilizing Eastern Ukrainian voters against the ‘nationalists’. Nothing could have stopped Yushchenko issuing the decree any time during the last five years.
And yet diaspora Ukrainians and Galicians still have sympathy for the ‘patriotic’ Yushchenko. A majority of Ukrainians on the other hand, see him as the worst of the three presidents to have ruled the country and who did more than anything to bring about Yanukovych’s election.
Yanukovych’s thank you was not to make Yushchenko Primer Minister, as he had hoped, but to make the non-Ukrainian speaking Nikolai Azarov his Prime Minister and the Ukrainophobe Dmytro Tabachnyk the Minister of Education in the new Kuchma-2 government. Thank you Yushchenko.
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 7 Issue: 31
February 16, 2010 08:04 AM Age: 1 days
Category: Eurasia Daily Monitor, Domestic/Social, Ukraine, Home Page
By: Taras Kuzio
President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko
Two major myths promoted by President Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections were that there was no difference in policies between the two main candidates, Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko, and that both were “pro-Russian.” These myths helped defeat Tymoshenko by 3 percent in an election where every vote counted.
Several pieces of evidence point to the Yushchenko-Yanukovych alliance that facilitated Yanukovych’s election. For instance, the lack of criticism by Yushchenko of Yanukovych preceding the elections (Ukrayinska Pravda, February 10). Yushchenko never criticized Yanukovych’s pro-Russian policies on energy (gas consortium, return to non-market subsidized prices, and revival of the corrupt RosUkrEnergo); Russian as a state language; the extension of the Black Sea Fleet base beyond 2017; opposition to NATO membership, and the Party of Regions alliance with Russian extremist nationalists in Odessa and the Crimea. Yushchenko and the presidential secretariat levelled daily abuse at Tymoshenko, accusing her of “treason” and vetoed a record number of government policies.
Moreover, a draft agreement was leaked in December 2009 by a staff member in the presidential secretariat that revealed plans for a Yushchenko-Yanukovych alliance (UNIAN, December 25, 2009; EDM, January 5, 6). The Ukrainian media discussed the issue of Yushchenko becoming prime minister under President Yanukovych (www.comments.com.ua, December 4, 2009).
In the event of a Our Ukraine-Peoples Self Defence (NUNS) – Party of Regions grand coalition being formed, the Yushchenko loyalist Yuriy Yekhanurov might be offered the post of prime minister (Ukrayinska Pravda, February 8-10). Prime Minister and Our Ukraine leader Yekhanurov led the negotiations with the Party of Regions after the March 2006 elections for a grand coalition that collapsed. Yekhanurov was the head of the State Property Fund in the 1990’s and the oligarchs are his creation.
The Party of Regions and the NUNS faction, together with the Communists and Volodymyr Lytvyn bloc, sought to remove pro-Tymoshenko Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko. The vote was supported by NUNS deputy Petro Yushchenko. Similarly, between rounds one and two Yushchenko vetoed the cabinet’s December 16, 2009 decree appointing General Hennady Moskal as Crimea’s police chief (UNIAN, February 2). Moskal, who is a deputy in the pro-Lutsenko Peoples Self Defense group in NUNS, was praised for halting election fraud in favor of Yanukovych in round one. “The Party of Regions, who is as thick as thieves with Yushchenko, controls the administrative resources on the peninsula,” Moskal said (www.zik.com.ua, February 11). The Tymoshenko campaign found evidence of fraud in the Crimea in round two (www.vybory.tymoshenko.ua, February 10).
Meanwhile, between rounds one and two Yushchenko removed the Kharkiv and Dniproptrovsk governors who had expressed support for Tymoshenko and had refused to provide administrative resources for Yanukovych’s campaign. Yushchenko also removed six ambassadors where there had been few votes for Yushchenko in round one (Ukrayinska Pravda, February 10). The Tymoshenko campaign will contest in the courts the election results in the Crimea, Donetsk, Zaporozhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk (www.vybory.tymoshenko.ua, February 10).
Only five days before the second round the Party of Regions, the pro-Yanukovych wing of NUNS and the Communists, passed changes to the election law. President Yushchenko quickly signed the law, ignoring a plea to veto it by the Committee of Voters (www.cvu.org.ua, February 4), independent experts, and Tymoshenko (Ukrayinska Pravda, February 3, 4).
These changes were widely condemned because they changed the electoral rules in the middle of the elections. If the changes were deemed so important, they should have been demanded by Yushchenko prior to round one. Yushchenko’s actions proved that he had forged an alliance with Yanukovych, Kyiv expert Volodymyr Fesenko said (www.politdumka.kiev.ua, February 4).
What was left of Yushchenko’s reputation, in Ukraine and abroad, was effectively destroyed by his support for the electoral law changes, because they undermined his role as the constitutional guarantor of free elections and his election campaign slogan of having brought democracy to Ukraine, Kyiv expert Ihor Zhdanov said (www.politdumka.kiev.ua, February 4). Oleksandr Tretiakov, a long time ally, resigned from the Our Ukraine party in which Yushchenko is its honorary chairman.
Most controversially, between the election rounds Yushchenko signed two decrees giving hero status to Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and to honor members of various Ukrainian national liberation movements in the twentieth century (www.president.gov.ua, January 28). The decrees, immediately condemned by Russia, helped to additionally mobilize pro-Yanukovych voters in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. Professor Myroslav Popovych claimed the decrees “disorientated” Eastern-Southern Ukrainian voters and mobilized them against the “Orange” candidate, Tymoshenko (Ukrayinsky Tyzhden, January 29-February 4).
The timing of the two decrees was odd, as they were not issued prior to round one, when they could have given Yushchenko additional nationalist votes from supporters of the Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok. The decrees could have been issued at any time during his presidency, as he did with an October 2007 decree giving hero status to Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) leader Roman Shukhevych (EDM, October 23, 2007). A decree in honor of Sich Sharpshooters, a Ukrainian unit in the Austrian army in World War I, was issued on January 6 before the first round.
Finally, Yuriy Shukhevych, the son of the UPA commander, led a campaign in Lviv with other nationalist leaders in support of Yushchenko’s call to vote against both candidates in round two. Evidence was provided by Tymoshenko in an appearance on Inter television (February 5) that these appeals were published in Lviv newspapers with financial assistance from the Yanukovych campaign.
Anti-Semitic leaflets appeared in Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk (witnessed by this author) urging voters: “Do not vote for that Jew,” a reference to Tymoshenko’s father’s alleged ethnicity (the leaflet was reproduced on www.rferl.org, February 3).
The irony of Ukraine’s 2010 election campaign is that the nationalist candidate, Yushchenko, long vilified by Russia, likely facilitated the election of the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, Moscow’s favourite in the Ukrainian elections (EDM, January 22, 27, 29). Yushchenko, brought to power by the 2004 Orange Revolution, effectively destroyed the Orange Revolution himself. The Revolution, long the personal object of hate by the former Russian President Vladimir Putin who saw it as one of his personal policy failures, was buried by that very person (Yushchenko) so despised by Putin.
No better final epitaph could have been written for Yushchenko.
Serhiy Kudelia, a Jacyk Visiting Scholar from Ukraine in the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine at CERES (Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies) at the University of Toronto, is on a mission. That mission is to use any forum he has access to unashamedly attack Yulia Tymoshnko’s candidacy in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential elections.
The main forum Kudelia has used is the ‘Ukraine’s 2010 Election Watch’ at the Jacyk Program where of the five bloggers his represent three quarters of the entries. Kudelia’s Yuliaphobia came to prominence during a panel held on the upcoming elections at the Canadian-Ukrainian Art Foundation in October 2009 where he was one of four speakers.
Writing in his Jacyk Program blogs Kudelia does not even attempt to show any objectivity in his coverage of the elections painting Tymoshenko as the arch villain. His latest blog (19 January) on the first round results, for example, talks of a ‘predictable’ first place by Viktor Yanukovych and ‘surprisingly solid showing of the “next generation” politicians in third and fourth place’ (Serhiy Tihipko and Arseniy Yatseniuk).
When Tymoshenko is mentioned it is in a disparaging manner as somebody who did not receive many votes. In reality a second place showing of 25% is a very good result considering two factors. Firstly, the fracturing of the former orange camp into six candidates that heavily divided the “orange” vote, something that Yanukovych was not faced with. Secondly, Tymoshenko is the first candidate to seek election as president from the difficult position of sitting prime minister – in 1994 and 2004 former prime ministers who had become opposition leaders were elected. To crown this, Tymoshenko is a sitting prime minister during the worst economic crisis for even decades.
Why then is her first round result not considered by Kudelia as a good one?
Kudelia repeats President Viktor Yushchenko’s arguments when he claims that the main threat to democracy in Ukraine is Tymoshenko – not Yanukovych. This canard is used to claim that she would, if elected, adopt the ‘Putin model’, using the law ‘as a selective weapon to subdue the critics and punish those who refuse to fall in line’ (8 December blog). Yanukovych, in Kudelia’s eyes, ‘is no longer viewed among Western Ukrainian voters as an existential threat to Ukraine’ and Western Ukraine will accept him as president in the same way as they did Kuchma in 1994 (4 November blog). This claim bears no relationship to reality in western-central Ukraine where again a large group of Tihipko, Yatseniuk and Yushchenko voters will be voting negatively against Yanukovych in the second round
Kudelia never feels the need to explain why the ‘Putin model’ would be impossible to implement in Ukraine for a large number of reasons as his Yuliaphobia blinds him to these realities. Putinism is built on anti-Western Russian nationalism that has broad appeal in Russian society. Where is such a nationalism to emerge from in Ukraine? Russia adopted a super presidential constitution in 1993 and Ukraine a semi-parliamentary constitution in 2006. How can Ukraine’s parliamentarism be transformed into an autocracy? Most importantly, how could any political force could overcome Ukraine’s regional diversity and obtain a monopoly of power and does he really believe that a president in Ukraine could be elected with the same landslide vote as in Georgia or Russia?
Kudelia revives the canard of re-nationalisation which was raised by the 2005 Tymoshenko government but has never been raised by her government since December 2007. He also warns of the threat that Tymoshenko would ‘kick big business out of politics’ in the same way that Putin did. What Kudelia ignores is the total failure of the Yushchenko term in office to separate big business and politics and the continued domination of politics by them. Yushchenko neither implemented ‘Bandits to Jail’ (for some reason Kudelia does not describe this Maidan slogan as a ‘Putin policy’) or an amnesty. Of the two candidates in the second round only Tymoshenko if elected could separate big business and politics as a Yanukovych victory would cement the domination of Ukraine by oligarchs.
As Kudelia is forced to admit, Ukraine’s oligarchs thrived under Yushchenko where they ‘secured most of their assets’. His pro-Yushchenko bias is again in evidence when he writes that both the Tymoshenko and Yanukovych governments provided oligarchs with state support while the ‘president became almost irrelevant for the distribution of rents and business deals’ (11 December blog).
Kudelia’s analysis ignores the cozy relationship of the 2005-2006 Yekhanurov government with the ‘national bourgeoisie’, as the prime minister described the oligarchs, in the only pro-Yushchenko government of the four to serve under Yushchenko. This pro-oligarch government is for some reason ignored by Kudelia. Kudelia ignores the close relationship between the president and the opaque gas intermediary RosUkrEnergo (i.e. Dmytro Firtash) included by Yekhanurov in the January 2006 gas contract, the close relationship between chief of staff Viktor Baloga and the Party of Regions (Baloga is Yanukovych’s campaign organizer in Trans-Carpathia in the 2010 elections where he used administrative resources to ensure Yanukovych’s first place in the oblast in the first round, the only West Ukrainian region which Yanukovych won) and the funding of Our Ukraine’s 2006 and 2007 election campaign by the most odious (in terms of unrepentant non-transformed oligarch) of Ukraine’s oligarchs, Igor Kolomoysky.
Kudelia complains at Tymoshenko’s threat to fulfill the 2004 Maidan pledges of putting ‘criminals in jails’ by appointing an honest Prosecutor-General. It would seem that nothing can be done correctly by Ukrainian politicians: when they don’t fulfill the Maidan’s pledges (i.e. Yushchenko) they are criticised and when they promise to do so (i.e. Tymoshenko) they are also criticised. Kudelia ignores the complete lack of reform under Yushchenko of the prosecutors office as seen by the appointment of two throw backs to the Kuchma era, Prosecutor-Generals Sviatoslav Piskkun and Oleksandr Medvedko, the former a Party of Regions deputy and the latter with close ties to them.
Kudelia’s pro-Yushchenko bias also emerges in his treatment of former chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk who is widely seen as the architect of constitutional reform under Kuchma. Kudelia is critical of Medvedchuk’s December 2009 article where he backtracks from supporting parliamentarism but Kudelia ignores the fact that Yushchenko has clamoured for two years to return to a presidential system and that he also supports the same constitutional reforms as Medvedchuk – the very same ones Kudelia dislikes. Yushchenko was the only Ukrainian president to serve under two constitutions. Kudelia ignores the fact that most candidates campaigned in the 2010 elections in support of a presidential constitution: Yushchenko, Anatoliy Grytsenko, and the two ‘alternative, new face’ candidates Arseniy Yatseniuk and Serhiy Tihipko whose slogan was ‘Strong President, Strong Country!’
Could Kudelia explain why he only criticizes Medvedchuk’s and Tymoshenko’s policies as leading to authoritarianism but not other politicians who also seek a return to the same presidentialism? Why is Medvedchuk’s recipe for constitutional reform back to presidentialism ‘a return to competitive authoritarian regime of the Kuchma era’ but Yushchenko’s proposal to follow the same path ignored?
A final note on this question: Kudelia claims that Medvedchuk ‘has been Tymoshenko’s long-term behind-the scenes advisor helping her to establish close ties with the Kremlin and serving as a chief mediator during negotiations with Yanukovych’ (11 December blog). This claim could have come straight from Yushchenko and has no evidence to back it up. Unless Kudelia has inside information on Medvedchuk’s alleged relationship with Tymoshenko then he should not repeat rumours taken from the conspiracy-minded Ukrainian media that suit his ideological bias.
When discussing what kind of prime minister Tymoshenko desires to see if elected, Kudelia believes that she would seek an ‘invisible and obedient Prime Minister’ (30 December blog). This ignores the fact that Yushchenko also desired such a prime minister and his favourite of the three who served under him was Yekhanurov. Kudelia’s comment obviously failed to predict that Tymoshenko would offer Tihipko the position of prime minister after the first round, unless he is of the opinion that Tymoshenko believes that Tihipko would be ‘invisible and obedient’.
Kudelia praises Yushchenko as ‘The Last Pro-Western Democrat’ (30 November blog) whereas Tymoshenko is ‘Running Against Herself’ (9 November blog). Tymoshenko’s background in the energy sector in the mid 1990s is combed through in great detail but in Kudelia’s discussion of Yushchenko he ignores the various scandals that have dogged Yushchenko over the Bank Ukrayina and in the National Bank which also took place in the 1990s. In addition, should we not be asking what Yushchenko’s favourite prime minister, Yekhanurov, was doing in the 1990s when as head of the State Property Fund he oversaw the rise of oligarchs through insider privatization? Little wonder Yekhanurov describes the oligarchs in glowing terms as Ukraine’s ‘national bourgeoisie’.
In Kudelia’s discussion of the candidates, Tymoshenko is the only one which he portrays in such negative terms as somebody with a ‘mythical image’, who possesses ‘hypocrisy’ turned from a mere technique into an art form, and a ‘devious and insincere politician’ (9 November blog). The most biased discussed relates to the claim that ‘the number of filthy-rich oligarchs in Tymoshenko’s close circle has long ago surpassed that of Yanukovych’ (9 November blog).
This claim simply has no relationship to reality and is purely a product of Kudelia’s Yuliaphobia. Kudelia claims that of Ukraine’s top 10 oligarchs six are allegedly identified with Tymoshenko and two more are on good terms with her (80%!). To make such a claim requires Kudelia to stretch his imagination beyond breaking point and claim that Tymoshenko’s allies seemingly include Renat, Viktor Pinchuk and Igor Kolomoysky. As Ukrayinska Pravda (9 January) has pointed out, Ukraine’s five leading oligarchs met in a French ski resort to discuss whom to back and they opted to support Yanukovych, not Tymoshenko. Akhmetov is a major funder of Yanukovych’s election campaign, Kolomoysky has strained relations with Tymoshenko and Pinchuk, although neutral, backed Yatseniuk.
Yushchenko’s 2004 election programme hardly mentioned nation building and never mentioned Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic Choice, despite Kudelia arguing otherwise. Any careful reading of the 2004 programme will show it to be social-populist. In the 2010 elections first place for populist billboards went to Yanukovych and second place to Yushchenko (I have been based in Ukraine since August 2009).
Kudelia claims ‘Yushchenko is adamant in his support for NATO’ (30 November blog) but ignores the fact that NATO has never once been mentioned in Yushchenko’s two election programmes (2004, 2010) or Our Ukraine’s three election programmes (2002, 2006, 2007). Kudelia quotes Yushchenko’s widely criticised comment that neither Yanukovych or Tymoshenko could spell NATO right which presumably could also be applied to him in the light of the absence of any mention of NATO in his programmes.
In quoting Yushchenko’s disingenuous comment Kudelia ignores the differences between Yanukovych and Tymoshenko. The former rejected the need for a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) in September 2006 (after supporting President Kuchma’s request to NATO join a MAP in 2002 and 2004). In contrast, Tymoshenko signed an open letter (with Yushchenko and parliamentary speaker Yatseniuk) in January 2008 to NATO requesting a MAP. Putting Tymoshenko and Yanukovych in the same anti-NATO camp also ignores the large pro-NATO wing of the Tymoshenko camp, including former Yushchenko supporters such as Borys Tarasiuk. The Yanukovych election campaign and Party of Regions has no pro-NATO wing and its position on MAP and NATO membership is a regression in comparison to the Kuchma era.
Kudelia’s blogs on Ukraine’s 2010 elections show an unrepentant bias and Yuliaphobia that should have no place in a scholarly institution such as CERES and in programmes funded from external sources by the Ukrainian diaspora. Kudelia’s domination of the Jacyk Programme Election 2010 blog has aimed to use it as a platform to propagate highly biased and inaccurate claims.