Thanks to everyone who commented on the Finalité Revisited essay. So much substance in the discussion that I wanted to highlight some of it in a post, instead of just replying in comments.
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A Little More Finalité
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Category Archives: Ukraine
Finalité Revisited
Shortly after the big round of EU enlargement in 2004, I took a look at future prospects for enlargement. At the time, I called prospective members, “largely a collection of the poor, ill-governed and recently-at-war.” Most of them are much less recently at war, many of them are better governed, and almost all of them are less poor, yet for all but a few prospects for EU accession seem to me more distant than in 2004.
What has happened?
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Press freedom in Ukraine: bad, worse
Just three months ago I wrote this about Ukraine’s new President:
Yanukovych’s young administration is interesting for two things: what he’s done, and what he hasn’t… [S]o far, he hasn’t cracked down on Ukraine’s lively press and media. Nor has he moved aggressively to purge the judiciary and the civil service, bring corruption indictments against political rivals, or change the laws to make himself and his supporters immune to investigation or prosecution… Watch this space, I guess.
At that point Yanukovych’s administration was just a few weeks old. Unfortunately, a lot has happened since then:
Most television networks in Ukraine are now owned by oligarchs friendly to Yanukovych. The most-watched Inter channel belongs to State Security Service chief Valeriy Khoroshkovskyy. The nation’s top spy also serves on the High Council of Justice, which appoints judges…
Khoroshkovskyy has maneuvered to expand his media empire through court actions against his competitors, the independent outlets Channel 5 and TVi. In June they were stripped of their broadcast frequencies. A journalists’ group, Stop Censorship, demonstrated outside a recent court session that confirmed the decision… their action was not covered on central television stations.
Khoroshkovskyy also sits on the Board of Directors of Ukraine’s Central Bank; he’s been an ally and backer of Yanukovych for years.
Meanwhile, the crusading editor of a local newspaper has disappeared and is presumed dead:
The one fact everyone agrees on is that Klymentyev vanished. His family reported him missing the next day and Kharkiv police opened a murder inquiry. His friends are convinced he is dead, though so far there is no body. On 17 August a boy discovered his mobile phone and keys in a small rubber boat floating in a rural reservoir…
Klymentyev’s friends and colleagues say they have no confidence in the official investigation into his disappearance. The journalist was a savage critic of local prosecutors who have now been given the task of finding his killers.
Meanwhile, in the background, the laws on press freedom are being amended:
A law protecting personal information, signed by President Yanukovych on 26 June and due to take effect in January 2011, will significantly complicate the work of journalists and expose them to the possibility of criminal prosecution. Under this law, journalists will have to ask a person’s permission before publishing virtually any information about them aside from their name and surname… Draft law No. 6603, which has been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) following approval by the cabinet on 30 June, would require news agencies to register with the state every year. Disseminating news without being registered (or re-registered) would be punishable… The bill has been criticised by [free speech organisations] as an attempt to bring Internet media under political control by treating them as news agencies.
Reporters Without Borders came out with a report in July, but the media situation has continued to deteriorate rapidly since then.
In retrospect, this is exactly what one would have expected. Yanukovych was always an authoritarian — it was part of his appeal — and many of the people around him are worse. Still, it’s pretty depressing. Relatively high levels of press and media freedom was one of the few clear accomplishments of the Orange Revolution. It’s clear now that those freedoms are going to be rolled back; the only questions are how fast, how far, and how permanently.
Orange sunset?
So, President Yanukovych. I don’t always agree with the folks at Foreign Policy, but I think they nail this one:
Ukrainians were absolutely correct to stand up and defend their democratic rights back in 2004. Yanukovych and his party were guilty of egregious election fraud. Moscow supported Yanukovych so openly, and so brutishly, that some Ukrainians presumably ended up voting for his opponent out of sheer spite.
But let’s face it. The record since then hasn’t exactly been an exercise in the glories of Ukrainian democracy. No sooner had Yushchenko and Tymoshenko achieved power (as president and prime minister, respectively) than they began to indulge in a feud that essentially paralyzed Ukrainian politics for the rest of Yushchenko’s term. The result was a long list of non-accomplishments. Kiev-based commentator Mykola Riabchuk, an ex-supporter, ticks off the list: “He failed to bring Ukraine closer to Europe,” thus frustrating one of the central demands of the Orange demonstrators. “He failed to separate business and politics” — another key disappointment for a country where a tiny group of business tycoons wields power constrained only by their competition among themselves. No sooner was the new president elected, Riabchuk notes, than he appointed several of his oligarch supporters to ministerial positions.
Small wonder, then, that Yushchenko didn’t make much headway against Ukraine’s fantastically stubborn culture of corruption. Last year global corruption watchdog Transparency International gave Ukraine a ranking of 146 on the group’s notorious “Corruption Perceptions Index.” To offer some context, that was the same rating achieved by Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, East Timor — and, oh yes, Russia. In 2004, when Yushchenko scored his great victory, Ukraine’s ranking was 122. “I don’t think that’s changed, and no one’s tried to change it,” says David Marples, a Ukraine-watching history professor at the University of Alberta. “In Ukraine the corruption goes right down to the village level.”
Yushchenko turned out to be a pretty big disappointment all around: stubborn, clumsy, tone-deaf, and obsessed with internal rivalries. He got eliminated in the first round this time. The runoff election was between Yanukovych — a former petty criminal who seems unable to string three coherent sentences together — and the equally horrible Julia Tymoshenko. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to blame the Ukrainians for choosing Yanukovych. (N.B., while the 2004 elections were marred by gross fraud, this year’s elections seem to have been pretty clean.)
So far, Yanukovych’s young administration is interesting for two things: what he’s done, and what he hasn’t.
What he’s done: Yanukovych has swerved Ukraine sharply closer to Russia. Continue reading
White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies
Just a few short weeks after the end of World War I on the Western Front, Poland and Soviet Russia started fighting again, skirmishing on their poorly defined border that built into full-scale invasions over the next year. Davies’ book White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 tells this complex story clearly and incisively. In the West, the armistice began on November 11, 1918. In the East, nothing was as simple. The separate peace signed at Brest-Litovsk made room for the collapse of the Russian Empire and the emergence of a number of polities on its former territory.
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Gas row latest: forceful European diplomacy
In a joint letter, Martin Říman, the Minister of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic, and Andris Piebalgs, European Commissioner for Energy, have warned Moscow and Kyiv that the credibility of Ukraine and Russia as reliable partners would be irrevocably damaged should gas supply to European consumers not be immediately resumed.
I am sure that Sergey Shmatko and Yuriy Prodan, the relevant ministers, are trembling in their boots at the prospect. Totally sure.
Ukraine kicks to touch on gas crisis
The Wall Street Journal (subs. req’d) is reporting that Ukraine is to settle the $2 billion debt to Gazprom via loans to the public gas company Naftogaz from two state-owned banks. As Edward explained a few days ago, the gas debt is one of the open wounds of the economic crisis in Ukraine, with many questioning whether stabilization is possible with the huge gas debt unresolved. And this solution really does nothing to resolve it. The debt is now just shifted from Naftogaz to the state banks, and none of the ideas to put the gas transactions on a more sustainable path (e.g. by raising transit fees for gas destined for the EU) have been pursued. Perhaps it’s another sign of the political paralysis. But it’s not clear that the IMF will be amused by this nine zeroes debt juggle.
UPDATE: It seems that reports that the payment would resolve the latest Russia-Ukraine dispute are premature. Naftogaz appears to have made a transfer to Gazprom that did not include “late fees” and deducted $100 million.
Our new monetarist overlords
The Board of the International Monetary Fund yesterday approved a $16 billion loan facility for Ukraine, with $4.5 billion being drawn immediately. Perhaps the main news, at least for anyone not paying close attention to the details of the package as it evolved, is that any attempt at an exchange rate peg for Ukraine is dead. The IMF announcement makes repeated references to a “flexible exchange rate regime” and in particular –
Base money will be the near-term anchor for monetary policy until an inflation targeting regime can be implemented.
In other words, targets will be set for the growth of a narrow definition of the money supply and that will be the only explicit basis for interest rate adjustments. Among other things, the Fund doesn’t want the central bank to be blowing reserves on a futile defence of a particular level of the exchange rate. And money targets are back in style. It’s the 1970s all over again.
The Todd That Failed
The Nation has a cracking, snarky and sharply reported, story out about Rick Davies (John McCain’s campaign manager) and his role in the run-up to Montenegrin independence. Read the whole thing, as they say. What struck me about it was first that AFOE had a damn good little controversy of its own about the same issue, and secondly that the slightly larger controversy – whether Montenegrin independence was at all legitimate, or part of a devious anti-Russian plot orchestrated by the liberal hegemony – now looks very silly. After all, our own dear trolls were very keen to denounce it as a CIA plot against all that was holy, cos of Kosovo and stuff; but it turns out that Davies, in his role as spin doctor for Milo Djukanovic’s campaign, was being lavishly funded by….Russia.
You know, that Russia – big place, with bears, space rockets, birch trees, vodka, pan-Slavic brotherhood, yes? Hilariously, it looks like Davies had the support of Henry Kissinger and at least one Rothschild in this exercise, to say nothing of the aluminium king Oleg Deripaska, new owner of Montenegro’s huge lossmaking bauxite smelter, which you’ll have met in these pages before. It’s as if all the far-left stereotypes about the Balkans were true; but just on the other side. Of course, there’s something of a history of dodgy Russian money and rightwing Republicans when it comes to the Balkans, but that was far more closely associated with Tom DeLay.
As a bonus, the Nation piece is the answer to the question “What is Mark Ames doing with himself these days after The Exile?”
Orange to Blue?
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has officially dissolved the parliament, and new elections are set for December 7. He made no secret of why he thought the coalition broke up:
The democratic coalition – I am convinced, deeply convinced – was destroyed with only one thing – personal ambition. The personal ambition of one individual which was propelled by the thirst for power, and by a preference for personal interests over those of the country.
The coalition’s understanding and the coalition’s agreements are destroyed; the economic reform is not implemented; the fulfillment of electoral promises has grown into a total social populism, which has caused the largest inflation in Europe and the lowering of social standards of living, as reflected in the salary, pension, and many other social programs.
This really looks like the end of the Orange coalition. In the end, there could be only one. Now the question is whether all three parties will continue in rough parity, or whether one Orange party will decisively displace the other, or go into coalition with the Blues (Party of Regions, Yanukovych).
It’s up to the voters now, but it’s still sad to see so much time and opportunity squandered.