Category Archives: Ukraine

The Genie Outside The Bottle.

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While we are waiting, Veronica Khokhlova offers her impressions from inside the Ukrainian Supreme Court hearing and finds the proceedings almost surreal given the atmosphere on the independence sqare – much better tv, for sure -

The judges look tired, interrupt every once in while, but let the Yushchenko’s team guy finish. Channel 5 interrupts the broadcast from the Supreme Court midway through the questions from Yanukovych’s team guy, switching live to Yushchenko’s address at Independence Square.

Yet there are equally important events going on in the Eastern provinces. With rising concern about a possible irredentist wave growing even within the Yanukovich camp – as indicated by President Kuchma’s statements today as well as by
the resignation of Yanukovich’s campaign manager Serhiy Tihipko – The Kyiv post notes that some oligarchs – notably Kuchma?s son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk, valued at $3bn, may be ready to switch sides, while others, notably Rinat Akhmetov, reportedly Ukraine’s richest man and in “complete control of the Donetsk oblast”, do not yet appear to be ready to deal.

Although his relation to Mr Yanukovich has not been friction-free, Mr Akhmetov has significantly supported Mr Yanukovich’s presidential campaign. Allegedly, he met him on a Kyiv airfield last Wednesday, complaining about his lost “venture capital”, and punching Mr Yanukovich in the face before leaving.

Such episodes may not help Mr Akhmetov “to present a civilized face by patronizing the arts, learning to play the piano and being keen on football.” Yet the politically far more relevant question right now is – as noted by Yulia Mostovaya in her detailed analysis of the “Yanukovich nebula” – “has Akhmetov legalized his business enough so as to pursue an independent course or is he still vulnerable to state power, whatever name this power will have?”

It is still unclear (certainly to me) to which extent the “secessionist movement” is based on true popular support in the East, and to which extent it is (merely) an element of a game plan by oligarchs who may or may not be able to correctly judge their ability to put the genie back into the bottle after the the power struggle is over.

At the very least, it seems to me, the centuries-old ethnic/religious and linguistic cleavage will become an even more pressing problem in the future. Below, I have superimposed a couple of maps relating to the question.

The base map is from Wikipedia and reports the regional results of the Presidential elections. The violet area on top of the blue, Eastern, districts denotes some sort of “Russian-Ukrainian ethno-linguistic zone”, according to a map from ethnologue.com referred to by Mark Liberman on the language log, while the red ares indicate settlements by ethnic Russians according to a CIA map from 1994 (which, as well as many other maps of the area, you can find here, courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin)

The difference of the two areas may explain why the CIA map refers only to 22% of Ukrainians as ethnic Russians, while “opinion polls conducted in 1994-1998 by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences in Kyiv show that the proportion of respondents who said that Russian was their native language ranged from 34.7 percent to 36.5 percent,” according a report by “The Ukrainian Weekly”, published in 2000.

While Russian seems to have lost some ground – particularly in the educational system – since Ukrainian independence, once again referring to the article quoted above, “between 1994 and 1999 the proportion of Ukrainians who chose Russian as their language of “convenience” increased from 43.5 percent to 50.9 percent.” It seems to me that the most pressing linguistic problem may be a status issue: the recognition of Russian as an official language.

So there may be a chance to put the genie back into the bottle.

It happened.

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As the Constitutional Court seems to be playing wait and see, progress on the legal front has become unlikely in the immediate future. Yet following the increasing tension between the camps, what may be the first major outbreak of violence in the ongoing Ukrainian stand-off may have occurred in the Eastern city of Luhansk. Maidan reports -

… a huge crowd with banners and signs reading “For Yanukovych” came out onto the square. Around 60 thugs with bats and brass-knuckles ran out from their ranks and without further ado began to pummel the attendees. Result of the slaughter: broken arms, fractured skulls, smashed noses.

The police posted nearby DID NOT REACT IN ANY WAY to what was happening. This, however, hardly comes as a suprise. According to our information, police officers have an order NOT TO NOTICE attacks of thugs on people in orange. In addition, there were eyewitnesses to personal participation of employees of the city police department in the assault.

Right now, today, to wear orange in Luhansk means facing a mortal danger. That is not an exaggeration. Currently, workers in the Yushchenko headquarters are preparing to repel a possible attack. It is apparently in the making. The workers will have to repel it on their own. There is no more police and no more law in Luhansk.

Let’s hope there won’t be an escalation that would taint the orange ribbon red.

Ukraine: Kuchma backs new elections

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Reuters (and the BBC, presumably based on that report) say that outgoing President Kuchma now supports the idea of new elections in Ukraine. However, there’s no word on whether he’s accepted Yuschenko’s full conditions for a revote – no absentee ballots and a new, independent CEC – in his statement.

Update: It appears he hasn’t accepted the Yuschenko conditions, and the call is for an entirely new election – not just a rerun of the runoff, but the whole electoral process. SCSU Scholars have more:

My Ukrainian student is listening to news reports and says this is not a real offer, that Kuchma is not only offering to redo the second round but the first as well. This could take 180 days. This is exactly the scenario I thought may happen — Kuchma doesn’t want Yanukovych as much as he wants himself to be president. If he can buy six months, he has found his ideal solution.

My student also reports Yushchenko has refused this offer and is holding out for the Supreme Court decision.

Enter The People. Why We Are Wearing Orange.

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It is getting colder in Kyiv, so it may not be too surprising both camps are busy fueling the flames of their conflict. In a country eagerly awaiting its Supreme Court’s decision about the validity of last week’s Presidential election, the second week of popular protests in Kyiev begins with the incumbent president Kuchma’s threat to enforce martial law, and more secessionist motions passed by Eastern regional assemblies/authorities, which, although likely a consequence of oligarchic pressures and thus questionable true popular support, have caught the attention of the Yushenko campaign – as Scott’s post below indicates. In many ways, things could take an ugly turn soon.

Given the growing awareness that Mr Yushenko is a politician with oligarchic friends of his own, who is making, as the Kyiv Post stated on Saturday, “a multi-faceted attempt to take power”, and not a saint, I think it is appropriate to explain exactly what we want to express by wearing orange these days: orange is, after all, Mr Yushenko’s campaign color. But then, it seems, orange is no longer just his campaign color.

Former US National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated last Thursday, in a roundtable discussion, hastily arranged by the American Enterprise Institute, that we witness “the meeting of Ukrainian nationalism with Ukrainian democracy on a popular basis”. Well, nationalism clearly has its role, and not unexpectedly in a country featuring such a motley collection of salient cleavages. Yet for all I hear, I do not get the impression that the nationalism exhibited by the crowds peacefully demonstrating for Yushenko is of divisive, ethnically exclusive nature – while the Yanukovich camp apparently scared ethnic Russian voters in the East. Arguing that the Kuchma administration has talked up ethnic tensions to be able to act as mediator, Tarik Amar writes in a very informative, long primer at John Quiginn’s -

“[c]rucially, even in round one the opposition managed to win all Ukrainian regions in the West as well as the Centre of the country, including ? by a large margin ? the largely Russiophone capital city Kyiv. The government has always liked to pretend that the opposition?s base was restricted to the Ukrainophone West, implying that it was ?nationalist?, even ?separatist.? Some Western observers still cling to these facile stereotypes. It is Yanukovych who has been cornered in a minority of eastern oblasts. If anybody represents an above-regional Ukrainian solidarity, it is clearly Yushchenko. He speaks proper Russian as well as Ukrainian and his being a native of one of Ukraine?s most eastern oblasts and having spent his student and working life in western as well as central Ukraine cannot be matched by Yanukovych, whose biography is strictly mono-regional and whose Ukrainian is not perfect.”

So I think Mr Brzezinski’s statement is by and large correct about the nature of what’s going on. And while most Ukrainians as well as political analysts will probably have agreed even before last week that this election was a crucial event for Ukraine, I think everyone has been surprised by the hundreds of thousands of people who have turned the election into a plebiscite about the kind of society they want to live in. Let me again quote Tarik Amar -

Even if some Western minds jaded by overfeeding on ?Civil Society? rhetoric may find it old hat, for Ukraine things are at stake that were achieved in Poland in 1989: essential respect for the law and the sovereign people, pluralism, and, indeed, freedom from fear. Ukraine is facing a choice not between different policies or regions but between mutually exclusive political cultures. Without undue idealization, the opposition stands for a reasonable understanding of rules, laws, and good faith in observing them.

Wearing orange is – now – essentially about aspiring to a different standard of governance. Yet I am not as certain about the prospects of Ukrainian civil society as Mr Brzezinski, who believes it would survive even a failure of the current stand-off. I am worried by the failed 1953 East-German uprising – it’s (bloody) failure led to widespread decades-long political apathy. Despite all efforts by political activists from inside (and outside) Ukraine, Ukrainian civil society must still be weak. Thus, as every little thing may count, we have decided to display a few additional orange bits to show our support for all those in Kyiv who are aspiring – and freezing.

One more thing. Over the last few days, some reports have led to not unreasonable suspicions about a renewed confrontation between Russia and “the West” about Ukraine, including some about several Western, particularly American, governmental as well as non-governmental organisations having “meddled” with the Ukrainian elections, particularly by funding grassroots protest-organisations like the student movement PORA.

Yet “meddling” is a matter of degree – a week before the second round of the elections, the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow quoted a Russian political consultant with the so-called “Russian club”, Sergei Markov, using the American grassroots support to justify the – far more extensive – Russian involvement in Ukraine –

“[l]ook at what the U.S. is doing here – supporting foundations, analytical centers, round tables. It’s how contemporary foreign policy is pursued. And it’s exactly what we’re doing.”

I would never claim that “the West” or any of its constiuent parts would be above the use of electoral manipulation; particularly, in situations where it had a clear idea where it wants to go and what to expect, how to direct, and what to achieve through any political movement.

Yet, as opposed to Russia, whose motives with respect to Ukraine are clear – if there is one truth about the American and European involvement in Ukraine, I think it would be that there is no strategy, simply because there isn’t a monolithic or even prevailing view of Russia anymore. Absent any real strategy, Western support is likely to have actually achieved what it was supposed to achieve: create process awareness.

It was the latter that brought the people to the streets, not some handbook of popular opposition, pollsters, political consultants, or stickers paid for with money from Washington or Brussels. And that is one more reason to wear the ribbon.
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One Week Later

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It’s strange to think that it’s only a week since Ukraine exploded into the world’s attention. It’s also pretty incredible to think that for most of that week temperatures in Ukraine have been around and (mostly) below freezing, yet so much of this has been made on the streets.

One thing that’s been true thtorughout the crisis is that we’ve had a lot of false climaxes – times when we thought everything was building up to a resolution of some sort – either good or bad – yet someone, somewhere, stepped back from the line and everything continued. Today could be yet another of those, with everyone waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on Yuschenko’s appeal, yet news reports over the weekend indicated that this isn’t simply one case, but a lot of little cases grouped together, each relating to a different charge of electoral fraud with the potential of there being a ruling due on each separate case. We could be here for the long haul waiting for them.

Another new news source for you – Obozrevatel has begun an English language site (via Neeka, who has a few updates of her own) while the Guardian pulls its head out of its own backside and prints a good comment piece from Nick Paton Walsh, who’s actually in Kiev.

There’s a comment I saw when I was looking through blogs – and I now can’t remember where I read it – that said the media outside Ukraine are being a lot more sceptical and pessimistic than comments from within the country, both from professional media and bloggers. It is certainly something I’ve noticed and seems to be heightened today with the secessionist threats of the east (and Yuschenko’s response) getting more attention outside than inside. As I’ve said before (and as Jon Edelstein noted in the comments on Scott’s post below) I think this is as much a negotiating ploy as a threat, using the ‘we’ll take our ball home if we can’t play with it’ argument. The problem for the secessionists is that they’re trying to push the issue too far, too fast (such as Donetsk’s threat to hold a referendum on the issue on this coming Sunday) to even pretend to be having a proper, democratic debate on the subject and thus losing the chance of there being any international recognition of their actions – outside parts of the CIS, anyway.

And the quick runround of the latest – there’s far too much new stuff on Le Sabot to link to it all, but his views on anti-semitism and the opposition are worth reading if you don’t have the time to look at everything, Foreign Notes looks at possible outcomes, the Kyiv Post remains as one of the best news sites for the crisis at present, there’s a roundup from the SCSU Scholars, and more reports from Orange Ukraine, Obdymok is at a slightly new location, Registan looks at the effect the events in Ukraine may have in the Central Asian republics and I have to link to this Dan Drezner post just for its description of John Laughland’s British Helsinki Human Rights Group:

Basically, BHHRG is what would exist if a cartoon version of Edmund Burke were divined into existence and asked to monitor elections in regions outside Western Christendom.

More later, when we should have heard something from the Supreme Court.

Just a quick Update: An interesting article from the Chicago Sun-Times about a Chicago judge’s experience of acting as an election observer: “I’ve seen Chicago elections, but that was shocking.”
The Yorkshire Ranter also looks at the emergence of the protest movements, and points out that they’re not an ‘American creation’ as some have alleged, but can trace their lineage back to Solidarity and others.

Momentum

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As I discussed in my post yesterday, one of the strengths of Yuschenko’s campaign has been the way he’s created the positive impression that he’s going to be President which has made it easy for people to rally to him, not just making every day’s protest bigger than the last but also in the way he’s created a parallel authority and obtained the support of the instruments of the state (diplomats, police, armed forces etc). See this Kyiv Post article for more analysis of the same issue.

This is what makes the vote in the Ukrainian Parliament today important. Earlier in the week, Yuschenko’s supporters in Parliament tried to get a vote on the same issue, but as a quorum of deputies wasn’t present (only 191 turned up, when 226 of the 450 deputies were needed) no vote was taken – though Yuschenko did make his symbolic oath to be President. Today, though, he was able to get the independent members (as well as some defectors from Yanukovich’s supporters) to back him which meant – even though Parliament’s decisions have no effect without President Kuchma’s signature – they could get the symbolic decision of a majority of the deputies overturning the election result. It’s another piece of legitimacy for Yuschenko, and it also shows how he’s maintaining his momentum and picking up new support.

Elsewhere, there’s another new Ukrainian blog at Orange Ukraine, lots more pictures and analysis at Le Sabot, Neeka has more hopeful posts (as she says: “It’s hard to believe but it does look like this country will not have a civil war anytime soon, despite some people’s fears and other people’s hopes.“) and lots more pictures, Foreign Notes discusses ‘my mother-in-law, revolutionary’, SCSU Scholars have a report from an election monitor in Donetsk and Daniel Drezner has a good round up of the news.

Ukraine elections invalid?

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According to a ‘news alert’ headline at the New York Times from four minutes ago (08.14 EST), Ukraine’s parliament has declared the election results invalid.

Nothing more at the NYT site (registration generally required, but you should be able to see the front page without it); it’s just the headline. Updates to follow as available.

Update (14.35 CET): Reuters reports that what the parliament has done is vote no confidence in the Central Election Commission, which a ‘large majority’ declared ‘had failed to fulfil its duties under Ukraine’s constitution and laws’.

Update (14.44 CET): Parliament’s resolution went a bit farther than that, actually, according to a brief Reuters report on the NYT site (reg. req.): it also expressly declared that the election was ‘invalid, subject to many irregularities and failed to reflect voters’ intentions.’

Update (15.39 CET): Well, maybe the election results are invalid. According to AP, parliament’s resolution will have legal force only if it receives President Kuchma’s assent. There’s a wild card still to be played, then. [Post title augmented to reflect uncertainty, though with hope the question mark may soon come back off.]

Into the weekend

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As the Ukrainian crisis heads into its sixth day, time for another roundup.

First, I’ve found another Ukrainian news portal in English – Ukraine Now - which is covering other news out of the country as well as the crisis. On the blogs, Le Sabot has more photos and continues his fascinating background series on the election. There are several new posts on Foreign Notes, including an interesting analysis of Putin’s motives. Lobowalk has lots of stuff as well, including a story that reminded me of the opening pages of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy as police take a break because the protestors promise not to do anything while they’re away. Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has an interesting article and more background by academic Tarik Ari. Meanwhile, Neeka’s up and has a photo of an amiable discussion between two men from different sides.

Neeka does mention trouble in Kharkiv, and it does seem that things aren’t quite as peaceful in other parts of the country – though there don’t seem to be any serious problems yet. The Financial Times reports that tear gas was used – once – in Chernihiv, while Maidan has reports of rising tempers in Kharkiv.

Scanning headlines in Google News, there appears to be no consensus amongst reporters as to the effect of yesterday’s talks. Some stress the importance of both candidates urging their supporters to reject violence, while others worry that the lack of agreement heralds the beginnings of a descent into chaos. I’m – as I have been for most of the week – in the optimist camp on this one, as I think what’s most important is that they’ve agreed to continue talking as a task force, even if nothing much else was agreed. Both sides are still waiting for the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday before committing to anything, I think, though of course the Parliament could have an impact before then.

More thoughts from me below the fold.
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Elections Or Active Actions.

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Tanya at The Periscope is providing a translation of a Ukrayinska Pravda article explaining that both parties appear to sense Mr Yukshenko’s momentum and accordingly presented antithetic proposals at yesterday’s negotiations (of which Euronews offers some realvideo footage)

Mr Yanukovych allegedly offered an investigation into the fraud alligations, which, according to a statement by Mr Yushchenko, would last “till the end of our days!” In contrast, the Yushenko camp is unlikely to accept any task force proposal short of a well-monitored full scale re-election on December 12.

Further conditions outlined by Mr Yushenko allegedly included a law prohibiting the use of additional voting coupons (which allowed people to vote numerous times in the last run-off and were allegedly used heavily by the Yanukovych campaign), the dismissal of the current Central Election Committee and formation of a new one based on equal representation, as well as equal access of the candidates to the mass media, and a refusal to use administrative resources.

Mr Yushenko knows that exhaustion and the weather are playing against him and added that if a solution is not found in one, two days, and “[i]f Yanukovych aims to wear out the strength and draw out the time, we come to the active actions straight away”.

Nothing in the article specifies what he referred to by “active actions” – or what the original term was – and both men have reiterated their committment to a non-violent solution. Yet this statement can hardly not be interpreted as a thinly veiled threat to at least continue to establish parallel governmental structures.