Ukraine’s Last Chance? by Timothy Snyder. Few countries have a better case for sovereign government and the rule of law than Ukraine.
Even today you can take a short ride from the capital Kiev, as I did a couple of weeks ago, and speak to villagers who still remember the catastrophe of 1933, when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union, and more than three million of its inhabitants starved when Stalin decided to blame the Ukrainian people for the failures of his own policy of collective agriculture. A Prisoner’s Christmas - Yuliya Tymoshenko. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space LUKYANIVSKA PRISON, KYIV – It has been said that there are no atheists in a foxhole. The Mega-Stupidity of Imprisoning Yuri Lutsenko. Throwing opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in jail was profoundly dumb, but sentencing her minister of the interior, Yuri Lutsenko, to four years was jaw-achingly, eye-poppingly dumber.
After all, Tymoshenko actually posed a threat to President Viktor Yanukovych. She almost beat him in the last presidential election, and she would almost certainly have crushed him in the next one. Worse, as a self-confident woman, she undermined his desperately fragile male ego. To be sure, jailing her also subverted Ukraine’s chances of moving toward Europe and exposed it to Russia’s predations—strategic considerations that most leaders would have acknowledged as trumping the frailty of their personalities—but at least her imprisonment served some of Yanukovych’s immediate interests.
Nothing of the sort can be said about Lutsenko’s imprisonment. Third, Lutsenko posed absolutely no threat to anybody. Fourth, only a dolt could believe that his sentencing will scare Ukrainians. Who’s Afraid of Yulia Tymoshenko? Which two Ukrainians most detest Yulia Tymoshenko, most fear her, and most obsess about her?
It’s the two Viktors, of course: Yushchenko and Yanukovych. Most Ukrainians have very strong opinions about the former prime minister turned political prisoner, but it’s only the two Viktors who’ve let their feelings about her become borderline psychotic. In the last three years of his presidency, 2006 to 2009, Yushchenko abandoned whatever reform aspirations that may have guided him during the Orange Revolution and concentrated almost exclusively on squabbling with and attacking Tymoshenko, never passing up an opportunity to denounce her, regardless of whether his audience was listening or cared. I personally witnessed him bore two roomfuls in New York with hour-long attacks on Tymoshenko: the first group consisting of some 50 potential American investors who wanted to hear about Ukraine’s economy; the second, of some 100 Ukrainian-Americans who wanted to hear about Ukraine’s culture.
Ukraine on the Edge - Tatiana Zhurzhenko. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space VIENNA – Seven years ago, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution inspired hope that the country was moving towards genuine democracy. Since then, democratic freedoms have been curtailed, the former prime minister and co-leader of the revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, has been imprisoned, and President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime has become internationally isolated. Ukraine is unraveling. Taxing Ukraine. Paying Taxes 2012, the annual study from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the World Bank, and the International Finance Corporation, was released a few weeks ago.
The study “measures the ease of paying taxes across 183 economies worldwide, covering both the cost of taxes and the administrative burden of tax compliance.” It contains grim news for Ukraine. Cars, Chutzpah, and Crashes in Ukraine. As visitors to Ukraine know, the country’s automobile drivers are a menace to society.
They drive too fast and too carelessly, they drink and drive and then drink some more, and they think they own the roads. That they rarely wear seatbelts goes without saying. They’re also a menace to themselves. President Yanukovych’s close adviser Hanna Herman lost a son in a tragic car accident in 2009. Take a walk in downtown Kyiv and you’re likely to find that there are as many cars on the sidewalks as there are people. Naturally, drivers take to Kyiv’s sidewalks because many of them are exceptionally wide and because there’s insufficient room for parking.
And chutzpah is the real reason that cars own the sidewalks. That chutzpah is also evident in the way these guys drive—which is always too fast. On February 20th, in Kyiv, six cars got involved in a big accident, and one driver suffered serious injuries. Ukraine: The Yanukovych Family Business. Just when did people start referring to the inner circle around President Viktor Yanukovych as “The Family”?
The term is now commonplace, but my impression is that it started entering the political vocabulary of Ukraine about six to twelve months ago, when son Oleksandr joined Viktor Senior and Viktor Junior to form a triumvirate of power holders and all three began promoting their buddies to positions of authority in the government or to positions of unbounded rapaciousness in the economy. Truth and Hopelessness in Luhansk. I recently came across the saddest commentary on Ukraine’s eastern provinces that I have ever encountered.
It’s a video blog by one Stanislav Tsikalovsky from the city of Luhansk. The 34-year-old Tsikalovsky goes by the name of Proctologist. His slogan is: “Believe me, because madmen always speak the truth.” The truth that recently caught the attention of some 30,000 Ukrainians came in a video Tsikalovsky made after a trip to Lviv, in western Ukraine. Here’s what he had to say: I would like to dedicate this video blog to the city of Lviv, which I visited, and to those people who hosted us, showed us their city, and told us about its beauty and prospects for the future.
The bit about hopelessness and lack of future prospects is depressing enough. Ukraine's Future Amidst an Unstable Russia, EU. I wrote in a recent posting for this blog that Europe’s troubles and Russia’s turbulence herald an “unhappy new year” for Viktor Yanukovych and the Regionnaires. Let’s up the ante and ask what the European Union’s meltdown and Russia’s breakdown might mean for Ukraine. Both possibilities may still strike us as unlikely, but, in contrast to the conventional wisdom that ruled over the last decade, they’re no longer unimaginable. Indeed, one can easily imagine the EU’s transformation into a loose economic association without political aspirations or a tight political-economic entity under German leadership. Soft and Hard Power Threats to Ukraine. Ukrainians like to blame their country’s ills on “Moscow and the Muscovites,” but the UK’s highly respected Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a.
Chatham House) has just provided good grounds for thinking that their paranoia may be justified. Take a look at the January 2012 briefing paper, “A Ghost in the Mirror: Russian Soft Power in Ukraine,” by two Kyiv-based analysts—Alexander Bogomolov and Oleksandr Lytvynenko. Yanukovych’s Shady Royalties. President Viktor Yanukovych has stepped into another scandal, this one over his assets. He declared his total income for 2011 as being 17,362,024 hryvnia, which, at 8.03 hryvnia to the dollar (the exchange rate on April 15th), comes out to $2,163,257. The Regionnaire-Burson-Marsteller Axis. The Regionnaires must be getting desperate. Tymoshenko Beating: Business as Usual in Yanukovych's Ukraine. It had to come to this, of course.
When thugs throw an innocent person in jail, how can they resist showing her who’s boss? How can they resist beating her up? They can’t. The Inevitability of Regime Fraud in Ukraine's October Elections. At a recent meeting with David Kramer, the Executive Director of Freedom House, President Viktor Yanukovych “underlined” that the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2012 “will take place honestly and openly.”
Don’t believe him for a millisecond. It’s not just that Yanukovych has a decidedly casual relationship with the truth. It’s that he and his Party of Regions know three things that all Ukrainians also know: that absolutely everything depends on their winning the elections, that they will never win in fair and free elections, and that the only way they can square that particular circle is by cheating. The elections matter for two reasons. Ukraine’s Reality, Post-Orange Revolution » Salon. 07.05.2012 | Andrey Kurkov Photo: Peter Župník. A Looming Soccer Disaster in Ukraine? Hats off to the Regionnaires for pulling off the impossible!
The Euro 2012 soccer games in Ukraine and Poland seemed like a sure bet. Ukraine’s Opposition Declares War. Ukraine’s united democratic opposition recently adopted an Action Program that defines its goals in stark opposition to the Regionnaire regime of President Viktor Yanukovych. "Ukraine’s Own Goal" by Leszek Balcerowicz. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space KYIV – Politics and sports are often an incendiary mix, as the controversy now swirling around the Euro 2012 football championship, to be co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland, demonstrates. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, and other European Union leaders have said that they will boycott matches held in Ukraine, owing to the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other opposition figures. Ukraine's Euro 2012? We’ll do it our way! Extremism in Ukraine. Which Ukrainian political parties are extremist?
The fear of 'racist' Ukraine is itself xenophobic. A protest in Ukraine The irony of the campaign to boycott the Euro 2012 football championships in Ukraine is so huge it is difficult to compute. Here is a lobby which presents itself as anti-racist, keen only to protect English footballers and fans from being racially abused in Ukraine, yet which simultaneously depicts that Eastern European nation as a weird hotbed of backward attitudes. Marcel Theroux: life with Ukraine's street children. Seventeen-year-old Seryozha squeezes himself through a pair of absurdly narrow bars and beckons me to follow. It's -8C, but I have to take off my coat or I'll never make it through the gap. Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past by Philippe Sands.
Tucked away in the far western corner of present-day Ukraine, the city of Lviv defies expectations. Far smaller than Kiev, it was a closed city during the Soviet period from 1945 to 1991, and even today remains relatively little known. Yet it once was a capital of eastern Galicia and played a crucial part in the borderlands of central Europe for centuries.