Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Downward Slope of Self-Destruction

The BBC Ukrainian service rang me during my recent visit to western Ukraine for an interview on Our Ukraine’s decision to officially go into opposition. I think that the interviewer was taken aback at my pessimism (or realism?) that Our Ukraine is close to a finished political force and that there will be no united opposition. This view is that found “on the street” in Kyiv and throughout my tour of western Ukraine.

It just so happened that before I was being interviewed I was listening in my hotel room to a song by the American band Hoobastank. One of their songs on the album The Reason is entitled “Same Direction”. The song seems very apt to Ukraine. It goes: “It seems to me that all of us have lost our patience. Because everyone thinks they’re right. Nobody thinks there might just be more than one way to our final destination…Tired of playing games, of looking for someone else to blame and for answers which are clearly showing”.

No matter how much the media, politicians and others crititize Our Ukraine for its indecisiveness and lack of moral clarity, it remains on a downward slope of self-destruction. Perhaps the most pathetic of all is the unwillingness of Our Ukraine ministers to resign their government positions as they will end up with nothing having been forced to earlier give up their parliamentary seats. Their ending up with nothing in parliament or government is a product of Our Ukraine’s own total lack of strategy since the creation of the Viktor Yanukovych government, and more broadly since the March elections.

President Viktor Yushchenko, on the other hand, seems to have finally realized that he actually needs a strategy in his position. This is, at least, a start! But, it is not clear what the strategy is except that he maybe realizes that he is fighting for his political life and that on his record since being election he will not be re-elected in 2009. This again is the view “on the street” in Kyiv and western Ukraine.

Yushchenko maybe cutting his links to Our Ukraine ahead of its weekend congress (although don’t hold your breath for Our Ukraine to make any decision). It might not be palatable that Yushchenko brought “good oligarchs” (Industrial Union of Donbas [ISD]) into the presidential secretariat and National Security Council, but its understandable in the face of the Yanukovych bulldozer. During the Orange Revolution the ISD gave financial support to Yushchenko. A colleague who works in an ISD newspaper in Kyiv told me how he visited ISD offices to collect cash to may the staff but was told “(Oleh) Rybachuk has just been and emptied the safe. Can you come back tomorrow”.

As to bringing back Oleksandr Zinchenko the strategy is not clear at all, except that he was appointed a presidential adviser on Petro Poroshenko’s birthday. Now, this was a well timed snub to a Kum! Zinchenko was an ineffective head of the Yushchenko campaign in 2004 and even more incompetent head of the presidential secretariat. His accusations of corruption against the Liubi Druzi were never backed up by evidence, except for newspaper articles published after his accusations.

Maybe I am wrong to be pessimistic about Our Ukraine? After all, they have until 2011 to make a decision!