[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: AP; WT; EDM

[Deychak, Orest]

AP

Ukraine allocates billions to flood relief 

By OLGA BONDARUK 

Associated Press Writer

31 July 2008

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's parliament allocated some 5.8 billion
hryvna (US$1.2 billion) to disaster relief efforts on Thursday after
widespread flooding killed at least 30 people in the southwest of the
country.

Lawmakers also endorsed President Viktor Yushchenko's decree declaring
six regions disaster areas.

Last week, heavy rains in the southwestern Carpathian Mountains caused
the Prut and Dniestr rivers to overflow. Hundreds of towns and villages
were flooded, more than 40,000 houses were affected and around 20,000
people were evacuated, officials said.

Emergency Minister Volodymyr Shandra said 23 people drowned, three were
hit by lightning, three were electrocuted and one was killed in a small
landslide.

A senior minister earlier this week described the flooding as the worst
in a century.

Heavy floods also hit neighboring Romania and Moldova.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko called for an emergency session of
parliament, which was on summer recess, to amend the state budget to
allocate money for relief works.

The parliament spent six hours examining compensation proposals
submitted by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.

Two separate drafts highlighted a simmering dispute between the two
leaders of the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Since Tymoshenko took the job last December, she has seen nearly every
initiative of her government either challenged or blocked by the
president's office.

The Washington Times

 

Thursday, July 31, 2008 

Crimea's port dispute

Svitlana Korenovska 

Crimea, the peninsula immortalized in the mid-19th-century war pitting
Britain and France against Russia, is again at the center of a growing
dispute between Moscow and the West. 

At issue is whether there is enough room, good will or both for naval
fleets from NATO and Russia to share the Black Sea. 

Russia wants its fleet to remain headquartered in Sevastopol beyond May
2017, when its $93-million-a-year lease from Ukraine is set to expire. 

Ukraine, which hopes to join NATO within the next decade - a move
adamantly opposed by Moscow - wants the Russian navy out of its country
before the lease expires. 

Predictably, the issue surfaces at least once each year - as it did
Sunday, when Russia celebrated its Navy Day by firing a salute across
Sevastopol's harbor, where Ukrainian battleships anchor beside their
Russian counterparts like scowling next-door neighbors. 

"Russia has never made a secret of its desire to retain its presence in
Sevastopol after 2017," said Adm. Vladimir Vysotsky, commander of the
Russian navy. 

"After all, it is a natural basing area that has evolved historically,"
the admiral said, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. 

A few days earlier, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko told Russia to
begin preparing without delay for its withdrawal by 2017. 

"The start of negotiations on the removal of Russia's Black Sea fleet
from Ukrainian territory should be included in the agenda of our
relations," he said during a press conference last week. 

The fleet issue has lately roiled a contentious relationship between the
two neighbors that goes back centuries. 

Russia's Catherine the Great annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 1783. In the
mid-19th century, Crimea served as the battlefield for Britain, France
and other allies to fight Russia. Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev
gave Crimea back to Ukraine in 1954. 

During the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia
and Ukraine divvied up the Black Sea fleet. 

According to the 1997 Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership,
Ukraine leased the Sevastopol base to Russia. The rent was applied
toward Ukraine's debt to Russia, which supplies the country with natural
gas. 

Inevitable tensions over Crimea have been exacerbated by Ukraine's
attempts to join NATO. 

"If Ukraine joins NATO, well, the alliance gets access to a port on
Russia's underbelly," said John Daly, a Eurasian foreign affairs and
defense policy analyst for the Jamestown Foundation. 

Russian objections kept Ukraine from being offered a Membership Action
Plan (MAP) - a key step to NATO membership - at the alliance's April
summit in Bucharest, Romania. The decision is expected to be reviewed in
December. 

During a visit to Ukraine last month, NATO Secretary General Jaap de
Hoop Scheffer sought to defuse tensions over the possible presence of
the alliance in Crimea. 

"It does not mean NATO bases on Ukrainian soil," he said. "It does not
mean any Ukrainian soldier will be forced to take part in NATO's
operations or missions. That's a myth, a big myth, and let me debunk
that myth in your presence today." 

However, many analysts consider the basing of Russia's fleet a key issue
determining whether Ukraine's bid for NATO membership will ever succeed.


"Russians want to keep their fleet there to maintain the presence, which
in a way is a kind of leverage to exert on Ukraine and to keep their
finger on the pulse," said Steve Larrabee of Rand Corp. 

"As long as the [Russian] fleet is there, there's little likelihood that
NATO would bring Ukraine into the alliance," he said. "Most of the
members would be afraid to bring Ukraine there with the Russian presence
on Ukrainian soil." 

Markian Bilynskyj, vice president of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, says
Russia's naval presence in Ukraine is potentially more divisive than
U.S. plans to set up a missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic,
both NATO members. 

"The Black Sea fleet issue is a much more pertinent, much more
substantial challenge for the Russians, since it would require a large
Russian investment to relocate the fleet," Mr. Bilynskyj said. 

"It is a psychological question for the missile defense system, but for
the Black Sea fleet, it is the whole question of jobs, military
strategy, political strategy in that part of the world." 

Oleksandr Sushko, a director of the Center for Peace, Conversion and
Foreign Policy of Ukraine, warns against underestimating the symbolic
importance of Crimea to the Russian navy. 

"There are 46 warships of different classes, including submarines. Most
of them are quite old and outdated. ... For Russia, it is more symbolic
issue than military one." 

Still, he said, it would be hard for Russia to find an alternative to
Sevastopol with its well-developed infrastructure.

 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

July 30, 2008
FORMER YUSHCHENKO ALLY CALLS PRESIDENT'S POISONING CLAIMS A MYTH

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has made it clear that he holds
Davyd Zhvania, the sponsor of the populist People's Self-Defense bloc
(NS), responsible for his mysterious poisoning at the height of the
presidential election race in 2004-Zhvania denies this. Zhvania also
insists that Yushchenko's was a case of ordinary food poisoning, and
that his poisoning with dioxin was nothing more than a myth created in
order to help Yushchenko win the election.

The next presidential race, expected in 2009, is probably at stake now.
Yushchenko's team suspects NS and personally Zhvania-a businessman of
Georgian descent, Yushchenko's former close ally, and the godfather of
his son-of supporting Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's presidential
ambitions. NS is part of Yushchenko's Our Ukraine People's Self-Defense
bloc (NUNS), but the presidential secretariat suspects that it is loyal
to Tymoshenko, who may run for president against Yushchenko. Zhvania's
claims that Yushchenko's dioxin poisoning was a fabrication cast a
shadow over Yushchenko's integrity, potentially spoiling his chances of
re-election.

Zhvania's troubles began this past May, when the Prosecutor-General's
Office (PGO) opened a criminal case suspecting that he illegally
obtained Ukrainian citizenship. In return, Zhvania claimed that
Yushchenko's wife had illegally kept her U.S. citizenship, and that the
criminal case against him was in revenge for his disobeying Yushchenko's
orders regarding the recent mayoral election in Kyiv (see EDM, May 29).
Yushchenko's team denied Zhvania's allegations.

Speaking in an interview on May 30, Zhvania sensationally claimed that
Yushchenko was not poisoned with dioxin in 2004 (RFE/RL, May 30). He
said Yushchenko suffered from an attack of pancreatitis caused by
ordinary food poisoning, and that his face was subsequently disfigured
not by dioxin but by an inflammation not related to the poisoning.
Yushchenko's team, he said, decided to sell it to the public as
deliberate poisoning (Komsomolskaya Pravda Ukraina, July 2).

Asked why he did not reveal this earlier, Zhvania said that he did not
want the spirit of the pro-Yushchenko Orange Revolution in
November-December 2004 to be curbed. Zhvania said that the tests which
showed the presence of dioxin in Yushchenko's body were fake (BBC, June
3). An international group of doctors who treated Yushchenko after 2004
denied this allegation. They said that 90 percent of the dioxin has been
removed from his body since then (Channel 5, June 11).

Zhvania also denied the widespread belief that Yushchenko was poisoned
at a dinner with the then head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),
Ihor Smeshko, and his deputy Volodymyr Satsyuk on September 5, 2004. "It
was a beautiful myth for a post-Soviet country. Look how it sounds:
former KGB people wanted to kill a democratic president," Zhvania told
the Ukrainian edition of a popular Russian daily (Komsomolskaya Pravda
Ukraina, ibid). Zhvania did not deny that he organized that dinner as
the then deputy head of Yushchenko's election HQ. He said that
Yushchenko's security as a presidential candidate was discussed there
(Ukrainska Pravda, July 7-8).

Yushchenko, speaking in an interview with an Austrian daily, insisted
that he was poisoned at the dinner. He said that three individuals were
involved who later fled to Russia and obtained Russian citizenship (Der
Standard, July 10). The PGO indirectly confirmed that Satsyuk was one of
the three, reporting shortly after Yushchenko's interview that Russia
refused to extradite him. However, officially Ukraine wants Satsyuk
extradited on charges unrelated to the poisoning (Kommersant Ukraine,
July 17).

Zhvania was for the first time openly accused of involvement in
Yushchenko's poisoning on July 23, when Yushchenko's legal advisor Ihor
Pukshyn claimed that "Zhvania, directly or indirectly, 'helped'
Yushchenko eat poison" (Ukrainska Pravda, July 23). Speaking at a press
conference the following day, Yushchenko, asked whether Zhvania had been
involved in his poisoning, said "I think yes" and added, "to put it
mildly" (Channel 5, July 24). Yushchenko later explained why he
suspected Zhvania, saying that Zhvania insisted on the meeting with the
SBU heads in September 2004, which Yushchenko had not planned to attend,
and that Zhvania was the only member of his staff who was against flying
him to Austria for treatment (Ukrainska Pravda, July 24). Yushchenko was
flown to a private clinic in Austria several days after the dinner, when
his condition worsened.

Zhvania threatened to sue both Pukshyn and Yushchenko for the
accusations against him. He also threatened Yushchenko with impeachment
(Interfax-Ukraine, July 24). Zhvania may find supporters for an
impeachment motion outside his NS. Pukshyn accused Tymoshenko of
supporting Zhvania and using his allegations in her rivalry with
Yushchenko. "As she has never concealed her presidential ambitions, it
is very convenient for her to cast a shadow over Yushchenko," he said
(Ukrainska Pravda, July 23). Viktor Baloha, the chief of Yushchenko's
secretariat, also issued a statement accusing Tymoshenko of supporting
Zhvania. He claimed that she was conspiring against Yushchenko in order
to split NUNS and forge a new coalition in parliament with his rivals
(www.president.gov.ua, July 28).

-- Pavel Korduban






-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 15761 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20080801/482081b5/attachment.bin