Tag Archives: Ukraine

An Orange Solution, Even For Putin.

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Some orange in Brussels.About a week ago, I wondered what the chances were for an explosion when hundreds of thousands of people are smoking at a gas station. Unfortunately, now their leaders seem to have begun fooling around with the gas pump handles in truly ‘zoolanderesque’ manner.

More and more commentators seem to be afraid about Russia’s hardline stance and the possible geopolitical fallout of the Orange Revolution, while such a realpolitical approach offends others for the little concern it has for the people freezing for freedom – or, more precisely, a little democracy and approximate rule of law.

As so often, it’s a little both. And to avoid an explosion, both conceptual layers need to be given the appropriate consideration: How to make sure no one, and above all the Ukrainian people, ends up paying the bill for continuing a pointless conflict when the Orange Revolution, this plebiscite on modern governance, is actually opening up a whole range of opportunities for Ukraine, Russia, and the West, and – particularly – the EU.
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Hotting Up Again!

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Just as things were starting to look as if they may have been heading towards a solution, the latest news from Ukraine suggests the temperature is rising once more. Following the voting- down in parliament of a motion of no-confidence in the government of Viktor Yanukovich, AFP is reporting that a top aide to Yushchenko has announced the breaking off negotiations on the crisis, the resumption of a blockade of government premises in Kyiv and issued a demand that the parliament reconvene in emergency session overnight.

That session must have two questions on the agenda: the dismissal of the Yanukovich government along with Prosecutor General Hennadi Vassiliev, and the creation of a temporary “people’s government,” opposition spokesman Taras Spetskiv announced to protesters on a central Kiev square.
Source: AFP

Javier Solana is on his was to Kyiv, as reportedly is Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski. Negotiations, in principle, were to have resumed tomorrow. Whether this latest development is simply a turn of the screw prior to tomorrow’s meeting, or whether it represents the opening of a new phase remains to be seen.

Certainly, as a lot commentators have been pointing out, many of the moves by Kuchma, Yanukovich and Co. could be interpreted as procrastination in the expectation that the opposition supporters get cold and tired, in which case Yushchenko is left with little alternative to becoming once more proactive, which is just what he seems to be doing.

Update: (Nick 2103 CET) One thing that may cool the temperature down slightly is this report on the Ukrainian Hotline site that states that Sunday’s proposed referendum on autonomy for Donetsk has been called off. The session of Parliament that was called for tonight has also been called off, though it will meet again tomorrow.

Forecasting in Orange.

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It’s a sidenote, but a noteworthy one, given the climate in Ukraine. Matthias Braun, who is blogging the events in Ukraine in German for the weekly Die Zeit mentions that Elena Gajduk, who is reporting from Kyiv for New Iswestija found out that the meteorologists of the central Ukrainian weather service are taking a stance now: I don’t know how they do it, but apparently, weather forecasts are from now on only available to the Yushenko camp…

Waiting, waiting

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After such a busy week in Ukraine, it seems to have become almost quiet over the last day or so, but that’s mainly because the focus of the action has moved away from the streets (though the protestors – from both sides – remain, and show no sign of leaving) to the Supreme Court and, today, the Parliament as well, which will be debating (and if Saturday’s vote is anything to go on, approving) a vote of no confidence in Yanukovich as Prime Minister.

There are various explanations for Kuchma’s offer of new elections last night. For instance, one could think that it means he feels the Court is about to rule in such a way as to make Yuschenko President and he sees it at as the least worst option, another is that it’s for him to be seen being magnanimous and can then claim that the opposition refused his ‘generous offer’ when clamping down on the protests or there’s also the idea that he’s done it to make sure he’s got another six months in office. There is already speculation that a new election might feature a different government candidate than Yanukovich – Neeka has a translation of an article talking about Tyhipko in this regard.

Another Parliament is set to discuss Ukraine – alongside the biometric passports issue Tobias discusses below, the European Parliament will be discussing the issue at its session tomorrow. Maidan has details of a rally to take place outside during the session.

Elsewhere in the media, Salon has an interview (subscription or ad viewing required) with the editor of Ukrayinskya Pravda and David Aaronovitch continues the Guardian civil war with an expose of John Laughland and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. Update: See Doug’s comment below for an interesting analysis of the BHHRG’s position.

And on the blogs, there are lots of new posts on Foreign Notes, Le Sabot has a picture of a result sheet from the election which seemingly shows vote-rigging, as well as other updates there are more photos from Neeka – and send some good thoughts her way as her camera now seems to be broken – and Crroked Timber’s Henry Farrell has a post on the OSCE’s role in spreading democracy.

New Trouble Ahead?

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While the German Chancellor is – contrary to earlier reports – apparently planning to visit the US President even before his second inauguration in January, a US human rights group, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, is about to disturb the two governments’ reconciliation efforts.

According to a report by the German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau (quoted by The Raw Story, Reuters), the American activists will file war crimes charges in Germany against senior U.S. administration officials – including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet – for their alleged responsibility for crimes committed in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Despite claims by the group that “German law in this area is leading the world” – because it allows war criminals to be prosecuted in Germany regardless of where the crime was committed or the defendant’s nationality – whether the German Federal Prosecutor will actually investigate will depend upon the evidence provided. Their German lawyer, Wolfgang Kaleck, seems not overly confident in this respect, stating that he hopes that “the Federal Prosecutor?s Office takes [the] affair seriously.”

However, the case will certainly not be dismissed for political reasons – and thus the Chancellor may actually have to hold another embarrassing meeting with the American President in January. The media, however, is certain to take the issue seriously when details of the case will be presented at news conferences today.
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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.

Orange in Berlin

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Not just orange, but all the colors of the Ukrainian election, analyzed and discussed by top experts.

The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Applied Policy Research and the German-Ukrainian Forum are hosting a day-long seminar on the election on Tuesday Monday, December 6 at the Ebert Fondation’s home in Berlin. Logistical details are here (pdf file, in German).

The program was planned even before the first round, so it’s not sheer luck that they’ve got such good people to talk about the events in Ukraine.
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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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