Ukraine and NATO
Ukraine’s joint letter to NATO signed by the president, Rada speaker and prime minister represents a watershed in Ukraine’s long declared goal of integration into trans-Atlantic and European structures. Ukraine finally has a clear foreign policy goal for the country that has clear implications for domestic reform.
The clear goal of seeking NATO membership breaks with the previous vacuous multi-vector foreign policy. As head of the NATO Information office in Kyiv in the late 1990s it was then impossible for us to know what Ukraine wanted which made the task of running an effective information campaign an impossible task to successfully accomplish.
Following the joint letter, unofficial discussions are taking place in Washington on whether to offer Ukraine a Membership Action Plan (MAP) at NATO’s April summit in Bucharest. The indications look positive that Ukraine will receive a MAP.
In effect, the clock in Ukraine-NATO relations has returned to 2006 when the US and NATO expected an orange coalition to be established following the elections, President Bush was to visit Kyiv in June of that year and NATO was to offer Ukraine a MAP at its November 2006 summit in Riga.
The unfulfilled NATO-Ukraine 2006 timetable has been carried into 2008 following the successful establishment of an orange coalition and Tymoshenko government. President Bush may visit Kyiv in April on his way to the NATO summit. Unlike his predecessor, Bill Clinton, Bush has never visited Ukraine during his eight years in office.
The Party of Regions emotionally reacted to the joint letter asking for NATO to consider inviting Ukraine into a MAP. This is both surprising and not surprising. The Party of Regions has been caught out by its duplicity on foreign policy since it entered Kyiv politics in 2002. Yanukovych likes to argue that his Party of Regions adopts consistent policies. Well, we can check the veracity of this claim by watching their attitude to NATO.
In the same year that Viktor Yanukovych first became prime minister (2002) Ukraine officially declared its intention to seek NATO membership. The Yanukovych government, in power until the end of 2004, and the Party of Regions never rejected the official goal of NATO membership.
The Yanukovych government sent Ukrainian troops to Iraq in 2003. The US was grateful to the Ukrainian government for sending the largest military contingent from any non-NATO member country. Ukrainian troops were brought home by President Yushchenko in late 2005.
It was also the first Yanukovych government that put Ukraine on the path to a NATO MAP. The Yanukovych government implemented the first two annual NATO-Ukraine Action Plans in 2003-2004.
Introduced at the 2002 Prague NATO summit these NATO-Ukraine Action Plans are unique to Ukraine. The Action Plans cover military, security and political-economic reforms and therefore could, without too much effort, be converted into a Ukraine-NATO (Membership) Action Plan.
The addition of the word “Membership” to “Action Plan” would be significant in showing that Ukraine was moving towards NATO membership. Then US Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer remembered, “We told Ukrainian officials in early 2003 that the NATO-Ukraine Action Plan agreed at the November 2002 Prague summit was 90-95 percent of a MAP. The main difference was in the title.”
Action Plan or Membership Action Plan, what’s the difference? The issue is one of pure symantics as the tasks asked of Ukraine are the same in both.
When Ukraine eventually joins NATO the then Ukrainian government should put up monuments in central Kyiv to Yanukovych and Kuchma in gratitude for having launched Ukraine’s drive to NATO in 2002-2004. Molodtsi!
Dr. Taras Kuzio is a Research Associate and former Visiting Professor, Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto. www.taraskuzio.net
The Ukrainian Elites Continue to Believe That They Are Above the Law
The failure of parliament to vote for Yulia Tymoshenko as Prime Minister through the inability of two deputies to vote because of interference in parliament’s technical equipment will not lead to criminal charges against Party of Regions deputies. Why? Because Ukraine’s elites continue – as they have since Ukraine became an independent state in 1992 – to regard themselves as above the rule of law.
It is not unusual for the president to undermine his own policies. The president in granting state medals to former Prosecutor Mykhailo Potebenko, former Central Election Commission Chairman Sergei Kivalov and the head of the Party of Regions 2007 election campaign Borys Kolesnikov undermined his submission of Tymoshenko’s candidacy to parliament. Ukraine’s elites can openly break the law – as in parliament on Tuesday – without fearing any criminal responsibility (and not only because they possess parliamentary immunity).
A major failing in the presidents three years in office has been his inability to deepen the rule of law in Ukraine. His choice of three prosecutors, including Sviatoslav Piskun on two occasions, are testimony to the presidents inability to improve the rule of law.
Not only was immunity given to former President Leonid Kuchma but to his entire entourage while this was act was crowned by their full rehabilitation through state medals, joint presidential-oligarch community projects and the signing of memorandums and universals. Even former BYuT and Our Ukraine deputy and Justice Minister Serhiy Holovatiy was convinced enough of the Kuchma camps alleged respectability for him to join the Party of Regions.
The organizers of the murder of Georgi Gongadze were either permitted to flee Ukraine, commit double ‘suicide’ or write books in retirement. Meanwhile, the organizers of the presidents own poisoning remain a mystery. Volodymyr Shcherban returned from exile in the USA in autumn 2006 after deciding that he was more likely to be criminally charged in that country than in Ukraine. He was of course absolutely right as only three members of Ukraine’s elites have ever been criminally charged and all abroad.
While senior elites remain above the law Ukrainian citizens continue to feel the wrath of the law. In the Gongadze trial it is lower ranking Militiamen who are being sentenced in a (to the presidents apparent surprise) a closed trial. Although the Supreme Court ruled in December 2004 against massive election fraud only those forced to undertake such actions out of fear of losing their jobs have been sentenced.
On each occasion when we have been told that criminal charges may be pending towards Ukrainian elites (whether Shcherban, Vasyl Tsushko and Party of Regions deputies in parliament on Tuesday) we roll up our eyes with disbelief as we know nothing will happen. We should not be surprised that no charges will again be forthcoming.
If you wish to understand who lies behind Tuesday’s technical problems in Ukraine’s parliament you only need to recall similar interference in the Central Election Commission’s server in the 2004 elections. Perhaps the same organizers are behind both events. Rehabilitating Kivalov gives the green light to those who interfered with his server to continue to undertake such actions with impunity.
For the rule of law to be strengthened in Ukraine the Tymoshenko government should fulfill Yushchenko’s 2004 election manifesto (and that of the Orange Revolution) of ‘Bandits to Prison’. This unfulfilled election promise can then be removed from the president’s shoulders.
There is a Need to Go All The Way
Last weekend Ukraine commemorated the millions of Ukrainians who perished in the 1933 artificial famine. President Viktor Yushchenko has led the way in promoting these commemorations and has devoted a lot of his energy in revealing the horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism http://www.president.gov.ua/content/150_1.html
In 1983 the Ukrainian diaspora commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Ukrainian famine. This was during the era of stagnation when Leonid Brezhnev still ruled the USSR and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky ruled Ukraine. The Ukrainian diaspora’s commemoration was denounced by Soviet propaganda and by pro-Soviet and Russophile academics and journalists in the West. It took another 7 years before the Communist Party in Ukraine admitted that the famine had taken place.
What is the situation today?
Nobody doubts that a famine took place in Ukraine at that time. But, among some Western academics (particularly among some historians and former Sovietologists) there remains the view that the famine was not directed against Ukraine specifically but against peasants throughout the former USSR who all equally suffered. The millions of deaths were a product of poor weather and economic disorganisation arising out of collectivisation.
This view of all Soviet peoples suffering and the famine not being a deliberate Soviet policy is also to be found in contemporary Russia. There is though, an important nuance.
How a country relates to its history is a reflection of what kind of regime is in place. In Ukraine, whether under Leonid Kuchma or Yushchenko, the crimes committed under Stalinism are commemorated and denounced.
In Russia under Vladimir Putin these Stalinist crimes are ignored and marginalised, being replaced by a new cult of Stalin as the “great leader” who transformed the USSR into a superpower. This fits in with Putin’s new emphasis on rebuilding Russia as a “great power”.
What would the outside world have thought of Germany if in 1962, seventeen years after the defeat of Nazism, there was a former Gestapo officer as Chancellor who praised Adolf Hitler as a “great leader” and had successfully placed Wehrmacht, SS and Gestapo officers in high ranking positions throughout his regime? Well, welcome to a Russia in 2007 ruled by a former KGB officer who praises Stalin and has put in place military and intelligence officers as his new ruling elite.
Clearly this radically different Ukrainian-Russian view of Stalinist crimes is a reflection of the contrast between the great power nationalist autocracy in Russia and a young, but nevertheless flowering, democracy in Ukraine. Ukraine’s denunciation of totalitarian crimes is therefore following in the footsteps of the denunciation of Nazi totalitarianism after World War II by the young and revived German, Austrian and Italian democracies.
There is though, one notable exception.
When President Yushchenko demands that those who deny the famine should be prosecuted he should take this rationale to its logical conclusion in two ways.
It makes no logical sense to have such legislation if the Communist Party is permitted to continue to exist as a legally registered party. Just as in Germany, Austria and Italy, where Nazi and fascist parties have been illegal since World War II, the Communist Party of Ukraine should also be banned as a body that is the direct descendent of the criminal political force that unleashed Stalinist crimes against Ukrainians.
A second logical step is to morally denounce the members of the former secret police (NKVD, KGB), some of whom are still alive and receive state pensions. If it is perfectly humane to legally prosecute old men in the West who allegedly committed Nazi crimes than why not prosecute old men who committed Stalinist crimes?
Ukraine, as a country that suffered inordinately from both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, should lead the way in establishing a moral equivalence between Communist and Nazi crimes against humanity. There should be no place for either Communist or fascist parties in Hitler’s and Stalin’s playground - Ukraine - except that is in the rubbish bin of history.
Have they Learnt Nothing?
In the last week controversy again reigns over who will be voted speaker
during the opening of parliament on 23 November. The Our Ukraine-Peoples
Self Defense bloc (NUNS) voted for the leader of the Our Ukraine party
Vyacheslav Kyrlylenko to be their candidate for speaker. President Viktor
Yushchenko and the presidential secretariat were seemingly backing an
alternative candidate, National Security Council secretary Ivan Pliushch.
Why this confusion? Has Yushchenko not learnt a single lesson from last
year¹s post-election fiasco?
After the March 2006 elections, the orange forces (Our Ukraine, the Yulia
Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT) and the Socialists [SPU]) took 3 months to establish
a coalition. Then they were divided over whether the parliamentary speaker
should be Petro Poroshenko (supported by Our Ukraine) or Oleksandr Moroz
(supported by BYuT and SPU). The end result was the Socialists defection to
the Party of Regions, the collapse of the orange coalition and Viktor
Yanukovych¹s return as Prime Minister.
It seemed that Ukraine was repeating thosese Byzantine intrigues except that
now it is a clash over whether Pliushch or Kyrlyenko should be speaker.
The Segodnya newspaper (http://vybory.segodnya.ua/news/472824.html), owned by Renat Akhmetov,
claimed that the President is backing Pliushch¹s candidacy on 23 November
which will be followed by the formation of a grand coalition. The aim like
last year - is to prevent the return of Tymoshenko as Prime Minister. A BYuT
deputy even claimed that he had been offered by the Party of Regions the
princely sum of $10 million to not attend parliament.
http://www2.maidan.org.ua/news/view.php3?bn=maidan_free&key=1195732875&first
=1195738507&last=1195727760
If the president supports Pliushch NUNS will split Yuriy Lutsenko has
already said that their candidate is Kyrlyenko. BYuT will never vote for
Pliushch because he has refused to sign the NUNS-BYuT coalition accord and
is antu-Tymoshenko.
As I have written
http://jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=420&issue_id=4286&ar
ticle_id=2372567
NUNS is an unstable factor in any coalition orange or grand because of
its internal divisions and the indecisiveness and the Byzantine intrigues of
the presidential team.
If Pliushch receives the support of the President he will be remembered with
having split for ever the orange forces on the third anniversary of the
Orange Revolution.
Yushchenko Will Follow Moroz’s Fate
Friends who have returned from Ukraine tell me that the person on the street is saying “Yushchenko will follow Moroz’s fate”. I had reached this conclusion myself but I always find it interesting to have my views confirmed by Ukrainians.
Two decades covering Soviet and Ukrainian affairs gives people like myself a “gut insight” into the way developments are moving in that region of the world. Ilko Kucherov, head of the well known and highly respectable Democratic Initiatives, told me on the train to Ottawa this week that often it is easier to sense what is going on in Ukraine when one is, like myself, outside the Byzantine intrigues of Ukraine. Distance sometimes helps.
There is only a 7-10 day window left before the end of the month to create an orange coalition. I do not think that an orange coalition will take place for four reasons. Yuriy Lutsenko is openly attacking Viktor Baloga, Ivan Pliushch is openly saying he will only support a grand coalition and BYuT are demanding that President Viktor Yushchenko finally outline his view on the coalition.
Yushchenko meanwhile (just like after the 2006 elections) is silent.
Perhaps he is too busy with other important matters of state? Yushchenko has unusually for a president devoted enormous time and energy to propagating the issue of the 1933 genocide-famine. I would be the first person to support such endeavours but this is not the work that a president typically deals with as he would delegate this to a senior member of the government. Yushchenko is giving talks on Channel 5 on the famine when this channel is viewed by only two percent of Ukrainians.
One would think that the formation of an orange coalition to be far more important than a historical issue, even if it was a genocide?
Yushchenko promised three important things during the election campaign and he has betrayed all of them.
The president promised that there would not be a repeat of developments after the 2006 elections and instead an orange coalition would be created very quickly after this years elections. He has not fulfilled this promise.
The president promised to support the formation of an orange coalition if it won sufficient votes. In both the 2006 and 2007 elections the orange forces won victories and on both occasions the president has not fulfilled his promise by supporting an orange coalition.
The president backed Our Ukraine-Narodna Samoborona’s (NU-NS) election slogan of “The Same Law for Everybody” (“Zakon Odyn Dlia Vsikh”). Secretary of the National Security Council Pliushch remains in this position even though Ukrainian legislation makes it illegal for people over 65 to remain in state service. The president and NU-NS have not fulfilled their election promise of one law for everybody and Pliushch refuses to support an orange coalition.
Ukraine’s elites, including President Yushchenko, remain neo-Soviet in their unwillingness to treat Ukrainians as citizens and to respect their election wishes. For the second time in two years the president and his entourage have ignored Ukrainian voters by not respecting the fact that Our Ukraine lost the 2006 and 2007 elections and have twice betrayed agreements to make Yulia Tymoshenko Prime Minister.
In this year’s elections Ukrainian voters punished the Socialists for their betrayal of the orange coalition in summer 2006. Ukrainian voters will use the next elections to punish Yushchenko for betraying the orange coalition.
It could have been all very different but instead Yushchenko will be remembered as having following Oleksandr Moroz’s footsteps.