Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Legal Chaos or Bardak in Ukraine

US-American Judge Bohdan Futey spelled the situation out well in Ukraine with his opinion editorial on legal chaos in Ukraine in the Kyiv Post http://www.kyivpost.com/opinion/oped/25873/. Or, to put it more simply, bardak.
The general consensus of everybody I have spoken to in England, Canada and the USA over the last month, and especially since last week, is that Ukraine is on a slippery slope to institutional and legal chaos and conflict.
Another conclusion everybody seems to have reached is that of an inability to understand what is going on in Ukraine? We all understood that Byzantine politics rules the roost in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Those of us who have been following Soviet and post-Soviet developments have become used to reading between the lines and figuring out what is really going on behind the scenes.
This ability is now seriously stretched. Even recent members of the fourth wave living in Washington, such as Myroslava Gongadze, or visiting researchers to Washington, such as Ilko Kucheriv from Democratic Initiatives in Kyiv, are baffled and bemused at the last week’s events in parliament. After a lunch time seminar at the National Endowment for Democracy by Ilko on Ukraine’s membership aspirations into NATO, we stood around and tried to get our heads around recent developments.
How does one explain the continued silence, except for occasional unfulfilled threats, from the president whose powers are being reduced each month by a power hungry Prime Minister? How to understand the voting of the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT) with the Party of Regions when BYuT always condemned Our Ukraine for seeking to do deals with Regions? BYuT was the only parliamentary force that refused to sign the Universal in August.
More specifically, how to square the circle when BYuT has consistently been against constitutional reform and was the only parliamentary force that voted against it on 8 December 2004? Our Ukraine and the president have periodically threatened to ask the Constitutional Court to review the legality of constitutional reforms, but have failed to act. The only request that has been sent to the Constitutional Court is from BYuT.
Yet, by voting with the so-called Anti-Crisis coalition in favour of the law on the Cabinet of Ministers, BYuT has strengthened constitutional reforms. As the Russian proverb goes, ‘without vodka nothing is clear’.
Ukraine entered ‘a time of ruin’ in August after President Yushchenko chose to permit Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych to become Prime Minister. Did the Presidents team not know what kind of person Yanukovych was and what he still represented? Had they naively come to believe the views of the ‘Liubi Druzi’ (Dear Friends) in Ukraine and the USA that the Party of Regions was reforming into a democratic party?
During the summer a member of the presidential secretariat assured me that Yushchenko would never agree to Yanukovych returning as Prime Minister and would rather dissolve parliament. Why then had he drawn back from implementing his decree and television address to dissolve parliament?
I asked the same presidential secretariat staffer in October and he replied ‘I am still confused as to why he did not dissolve parliament’. Another staffer in the secretariat explained to me in November in Kyiv that the reason President Yushchenko backed away from dissolving parliament was because of blackmail over his brothers corrupt business deals in the energy sector. If the president acted to dissolve parliament, the Party of Regions threatened to release ‘kompromat’ on Petro Yushchenko to the media.
So there we have it. The energy sector, corruption, a lack of political will and legal chaos.