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. Intermingled with these recollections are memories of the German invasion only eight years later, which brought a second starvation campaign alongside the better known crimes of the Holocaust.
In a world where food was a scarce resource, both Stalin and Hitler were obsessed with the Ukrainian “breadbasket,” and millions of Ukrainians died as a result. Before Tymoshenko’s 2009 gas deal, Russia had cut off all gas supplies to Ukraine, and thus to countries west of Ukraine as well. 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. Here, after my show trial and four and a half months in a cell, I have discovered that there are no atheists in prison, either. When, despite unbearable pain, you are interrogated – including in your cell – for dozens of hours without a break, and an authoritarian regime’s entire system of coercion, including its media, is trying to discredit and destroy you once and for all, prayer becomes the only intimate, trusting, and reassuring conversation that one can have.
In this season of love and family, the loneliness of a prison cell is almost unbearable. But what is strange is that your senses are not dulled by this dead and dreadful world. One particular passage resonates with me as I contemplate Ukraine’s plight. More importantly, the suffering of Ukraine’s people has also become more widely known, and we are no longer so alone in our plight.
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. First, his trial was even more of a farce than Tymoshenko’s. Third, Lutsenko posed absolutely no threat to anybody. Photo Credit: Влада Ярославська. 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. Today, a small group of oligarchs clustered around Yanukovych have captured power. Whatever one thinks of Tymoshenko, she was not imprisoned for any ostensible crimes she committed while in power. It is difficult to predict how Tymoshenko’s case will play out – whether Yanukovych will succumb to pressure from the European Union and the United States to release her, or to the forces that want to exclude her from politics forever. Perhaps Yanukovych himself did not foresee the consequences of Tymoshenko’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment.
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. The study ranks countries along four measures: ease of paying taxes, the number of tax payments, the time to comply, and the total tax rate (which measures the “amount of taxes and mandatory contributions borne by the business in the second year of operation, expressed as a share of commercial profit”).
According to the 2012 study, “In high income economies the case study company makes 15.2 payments, takes 168.7 hours to comply with its main taxes and has an average Total Tax Rate of 37.4%. This compares to 38.3 payments, 271 hours and 67.8% for low income economies.” So consider the difference between Yushchenko and Yanukovych. 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. All of them are going somewhere, but whereas most people are polite enough to let you pass, most drivers feel that it’s you who are imposing on them.
A friend of mine once tried to sidestep an automobile that was bearing down on him on the sidewalk. 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. Photo Credit: Pieter Lanser. 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.
Little Viktor has long been active in the youth branch of the Party of Regions—call them the “Regionnairettes”—and has served as a dutiful member of Parliament, where he’s been filmed acting uprightly by voting on behalf of absent comrades (a constitutional infraction, by the way, but what the hell). The head of the central bank, the 36-year-old Serhii Arbuzov, is a friend of “The Family,” as is the recently appointed minister of finance, the 38-year-old Yuri Kolobov.
See the pattern? 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. I wasn’t sure what to say until I sat down in the Lviv-Luhansk train and arrived in my native Luhansk. The bit about hopelessness and lack of future prospects is depressing enough. It’s easy to understand Tsikalovsky’s despair. In contrast, Luhansk is your quintessential Soviet, and Sovietized, city. 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. And one can just as easily imagine Russia’s experiencing popular uprisings, coups d’etat, and regional secessionist movements that would make it a weak, brittle, and possibly even failed state. Recall why both the EU and Russia are important for Ukraine. A simultaneous economic decline in both the EU and Russia will knock the wind out of Ukraine’s economy.
Photo Credit: www.kremlin.ru. 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. Bogomolov is president of the Association of Middle East Studies, while Lytvynenko is director of research projects at the Foreign and Security Policy Council. Neither is a “nationalist hothead.” Here are the bullet points of their argument: “For Russia, maintaining influence over Ukraine is more than a foreign policy priority; it is an existential imperative. The problem with existential imperatives is that they are “zero-sum games.”
“Russia’s socio-economic model limits its capacity to act as a pole of attraction for Ukraine. Here’s the bad news for Ukraine. 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. Not bad enough for a populist president who claims to be one of the regular folk, but the real scandal concerns the source of Yanukovych’s money. A mere 757,615 hryvnia ($94,396) constitute his presidential salary, while 155,409 hryvnia come from dividends and interest.
(He’s got 14,521,454 hryvnia stashed away in banks.) Turns out those are his “author’s royalties” and other income due to “intellectual property.” So is all this stuff really worth two million bucks? You gotta wonder what’s scarier: the thought of Yanukovych writing fiction or the preposterousness of Semynozhenko’s comments. By the way, note that Semynozhenko assumes that Yanukovych will be around after 2020 to give long interviews. Got that? The Regionnaire-Burson-Marsteller Axis. The Regionnaires must be getting desperate.
When the vast majority of Ukraine’s population thinks of you as thugs, crooks, and vandals a few months before an election you can’t possibly win, there’s only one thing to do. No, not go straight, silly. You go to Burson-Marsteller, of course, a self-styled “leading global public relations and communications firm” that has a special relationship with the world’s rogues. You pay B-M a ton of money and you hope they can remove your stench. Andrew Rettman of the EUobserver broke the story on April 27th: Robert Mack, a senior manager at Burson-Marsteller, told EUobserver: “Our brief is to help the Party of Regions communicate its activities as the governing party of Ukraine, as well as to help it explain better its position on the Yulia Tymoshenko case.” (Tip to Mr. Here’s how the firm describes its mission: The Regionnaires are the latest in a long list of clients reaching out to B-M “when the stakes are high.”
I pity Mr. Honesty Integrity. 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. And, in Viktor Yanukovych’s Ukraine, they didn’t. It happened on Friday, April 20th, shortly after 9 p.m., and the victim of the Regionnaire assault was the recently incarcerated opposition leader and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.
Here’s her description of the beating: At around 21:00 my fellow prisoner was taken out of her cell and shortly thereafter three enormous men came into mine. Naturally, the Regionnaires deny all wrongdoing. Yeah, right. I suppose it all depends on what you mean by a beating. I suppose it’s possible that Tymoshenko punched herself in the stomach, and that her subsequent decision to go on a hunger strike is just grandstanding, but the long-standing Regionnaire association with thugs, pogromchiks, fisticuffs, violence, and sexism surely suggests otherwise.
It won’t work, of course. 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. First, the fewer Regionnaires become deputies, the more Regionnaires will be open to prosecution for corruption, malfeasance, theft, and thuggery. Everyone in Ukraine knows that a seat in Parliament is the only real guarantee of immunity for crimes committed inside and outside that august institution.
Worse, the scandals keep on coming. Ukraine’s Reality, Post-Orange Revolution » Salon. A Looming Soccer Disaster in Ukraine? Ukraine’s Opposition Declares War. "Ukraine’s Own Goal" by Leszek Balcerowicz. Ukraine's Euro 2012? We’ll do it our way! Extremism in Ukraine. The fear of 'racist' Ukraine is itself xenophobic. Marcel Theroux: life with Ukraine's street children | World news. Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past by Philippe Sands.