[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WSJ; AP; NYT; RFE/RL

[Deychak, Orest]

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World News: IMF Says Ukraine Has Made Progress on Loan Conditions 

By Geoffrey Smith 

12 December 2008

A8

 

KIEV, Ukraine -- The head of the International Monetary Fund's mission
to Ukraine said the government was on track to earn the next part of its
$16.4 billion bailout loan. But she warned it still faces tough
decisions in next year's budget and admonished the country's warring
politicians not to scapegoat its central bank.

The IMF agreed to the two-year standby arrangement with Ukraine last
month to prevent a wave of corporate and bank defaults, after the global
financial crisis crippled its export sector and choked off vital
capital.

A "hard landing" ensued: Industrial output was down nearly 29%
year-to-year in November, Reuters reported Thursday. The economic
troubles have been compounded by political battles. Ukraine's parliament
elected a new speaker this week, but rival leaders are still haggling
over forming a new ruling coalition.

Russian gas monopoly OAO Gazprom <javascript:void(0);>  also is
threatening to cut off gas supplies if Ukraine fails to clear debts of
over $2 billion for gas delivered this year.

In return for the first IMF loan of $4.5 billion, Ukraine's government
had to scrap increases it pledged in public spending. Parliament
approved additional spending cuts Thursday.

"It's understandable that there will be 'two steps forward, one step
backward,'" said the IMF official, Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, at the end of a
10-day visit. "But I think . . . they now have the policies and the
instruments." She said the country had successfully absorbed a traumatic
currency devaluation.

The currency, the hryvnia, has lost 60% of its value since May, but has
settled recently. The collapse has been controversial: The party of
Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko tabled a motion for Friday calling the
central bank to account for its recent actions, and possibly to dismiss
chairman Volodymyr Stelmakh. 

AP

IMF satisfied with Ukraine loan plan amid crisis 

12 December 2008

10:31

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine is on the right track in implementing
policies it had committed to when accepting an emergency loan to survive
its worst economic crisis in a decade, an official from the
International Monetary Fund said in an interview published Friday.

Ukraine has so far received more than a quarter of a $16.4 billion IMF
rescue loan to help it cope with an economic crisis brought on by a
drastic fall in its exports of its main commodity, steel, and in its
national currency, the hryvna.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, the head of the IMF mission to Ukraine, was quoted
by the daily Kommersant Ukraine as backing the central bank's policies
to let the market determine exchange rates and to recapitalize major
banks.

Pazarbasioglu also countered speculation that financial regulators were
misusing the IMF funds.

"So far we have no comments or remarks and we have not felt in any way
that the IMF funds are being used inappropriately," she was quoted as
saying.

Meanwhile, the depth of the economic slump was illustrated by data from
the State Statistics Bureau, which late Thursday said industrial output
fell 29 percent in November from a year earlier, the biggest decrease in
a decade.

Parliament on Friday passed more legislation to soften the effects of
the crisis. Lawmakers backed increasing funding for pensions, deposit
insurance and prohibiting banks from unilaterally reconsidering the
conditions of loans.

Lawmakers approved a transfer of 3.2 billion hryvna ($415 million) to
the state oil and gas company Naftogaz, crippled by a $2.4 billion debt
to Russia's natural gas giant Gazprom <javascript:void(0);>  for
imports.

Naftogaz officials traveled to Moscow Friday to continue talks on
settling the debt and agreeing for next year's imports.

Russia is threatening to more than double the price for Ukraine's
imports to over $400 per 1,000 cubic meters if Kiev fails to pay off the
entire debt.

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Eastern Promises Unfulfilled for European Soccer 

By NICHOLAS KULISH and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ; Nicholas Kulish reported from
Warsaw and Michael Schwirtz from Kiev, Ukraine. 

12 December 2008

Late Edition - Final

12

WARSAW -- It seemed like the perfect plan, if a slightly risky one. Give
Poland and Ukraine, two of Europe's largest emerging economies, the
chance to host a premier soccer tournament, build on the continent's fan
base and help secure the sport's future here.

After less than two years plagued with disorganization, corruption and
now a global financial disaster, the future is looking far from secure
for the 2012 European Championship in the two former Soviet-bloc
countries. What ideally would be a straightforward process -- getting
teams together to play soccer in front of fans and television cameras --
has turned into a multinational melodrama that could have sprung from
the pages of Gogol.

Ukraine has played the part of the down-on-his-luck guy, Poland the
corrupt official and Germany the ready opportunist, prepared to sweep in
and take over part of the tournament if Ukraine stumbles. After a series
of harshly critical reports and comments by officials, there has been a
flurry of activity as the two countries try to prove that they have
their acts together so that European soccer's governing body, UEFA, does
not pull the plug.

Both countries have begun work on the marquee stadiums in their
capitals, Kiev and Warsaw. To satisfy UEFA officials, the Ukrainians had
to demolish a new shopping center built nearly on top of the facility.

So far, it seems to have somewhat allayed the fears of soccer officials.
''We have full confidence in Euro 2012 in Poland and Ukraine,'' Michel
Platini, the president of UEFA, which is based in Nyon, Switzerland,
said Wednesday after meeting with officials from the two countries.

That was an improvement over the UEFA announcement in September, which
stated that Poland and Ukraine had ''erred due to a lack of experience
and rigor'' and that the ''development of the necessary infrastructure
needed for the good running of the final tournament'' was practically at
a standstill.

So it was with understandable relief that a delegation from Ukraine's
Euro 2012 organizing committee arrived at the plush diplomatic reception
hall of Kiev's Boryspil International Airport on Wednesday, jovial, and
a bit tipsy, after the meeting in Nyon, which many said was the most
positive and cooperative one they have had.

''Ukraine and Poland have demonstrated major progress in their
preparations,'' Hryhoriy Surkis, the president of Ukraine's federation,
said. ''We have really gotten into a rhythm.''

It sounds like a familiar old story, as with the Athens Olympics in
Greece. The host is unprepared and a major sporting event begins to look
like a looming disaster, then the imminent deadlines pull everyone
together and the event goes off as planned. But there is one major
difference: the economic forces at play in the global financial crisis,
which are beyond the control of governments.

The troubles faced by the two countries also serve as an object lesson
that sports do not take place on a rarefied plane, but are subject to
the same economic forces plaguing homeowners under foreclosure and
out-of-work investment bankers looking for jobs. Hosting the event
requires a lot more than building two stadiums; it also means
constructing and expanding roads, railways and airports, not to mention
providing hotels.

And there is precedent for a country's losing a big sporting event.
Colombia was to host the World Cup in 1986 but had to yield to Mexico
because of financial difficulties connected with a worldwide recession
in 1982 and a drop in commodity prices for its major export, coffee.

Ukraine has been battered by the current global economic crisis, with
the International Monetary Fund pledging an emergency $16.5 billion loan
to try to stabilize the country, where inflation has reached close to 20
percent and economic growth has nearly bottomed out after almost seven
years of averaging 7 percent gains. There are tangible fears that
private investment dollars, which Ukraine in particular had hoped would
help build up the country's infrastructure ahead of the championship,
will dry up.

The country also remains mired in an intractable political conflict that
can freeze government activity for months at a time. The conflict
appeared to spill into Ukraine's Euro 2012 preparations in November,
when the Ukrainian government scrapped the agency overseeing the
championship plans and replaced it with a 50-member coordinating bureau
after complaints by UEFA about management effectiveness.

That may help explain why the new leader of Poland's federation,
Grzegorz Lato, shortly after being named to the job, said, ''If Ukraine
does not make it, we could host the tournament with Germany.'' Letters
flew back and forth between Kiev and Warsaw, and Lato said that his
comments had been taken out of context.

Franz Beckenbauer of Germany, who like Lato is a national soccer hero in
his home country, but also is the vice president of FIFA, soccer's world
governing body, did nothing to allay Ukrainian fears that the Poles
would carry on with the Germans when he was quoted in the newspaper
Suddeutsche Zeitung about Germany's taking over matches, saying: ''That
has been under discussion. It is no longer a big secret.''

Reports also began to circulate that Spain, the winner of last summer's
European Championship, hosted by Switzerland and Austria, could also
take over as a replacement. Platini of UEFA, a former star of the French
national team, stepped in and reaffirmed that Poland and Ukraine were in
it together. ''If the stadiums in the capitals are not built, the Euro
will go neither to Kiev nor to Warsaw,'' Platini said.

The sound of jackhammers and bulldozers now emanate from the gutted
shell of Kiev's Olympic Stadium. The interior has been stripped of seats
and stairways, and piles of snow-covered rubble litter the outside.
Hammer-and-sickle Soviet emblems and a socialist realist mural are all
that remain of an era of athletic pre-eminence.

Construction on the facility began only on Dec. 1, the fail-safe
deadline set by European soccer officials. Two of the other stadiums, in
Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk, are nearly built, thanks to financial
backing by two Ukrainian billionaires. Municipal governments have had a
harder time financing stadiums in Kiev and Lviv, a city in western
Ukraine, and construction has been lagging.

The government has also pledged an additional $2 billion for Euro 2012
preparations and plans to spend $10 billion to offset the loss of funds
from private investors. But Ivan Vasyunyk, Ukraine's deputy prime
minister in charge of planning the championships, said difficulties were
to be expected.

''When in 2006 UEFA decided who would host the championship, it
understood perfectly that the level of infrastructure -- athletic
infrastructure, transportation infrastructure -- in Ukraine was
insufficient,'' he said. ''This was a political decision for UEFA. UEFA
made a decision to push soccer eastward, and UEFA took a risk on Ukraine
and Poland.''

While Poland remains, at least for the time being, on much more stable
footing economically than Ukraine, it had its own difficulties this fall
after dozens of coaches, referees and officials in Poland were arrested
in a graft inquiry. Even the former national team manager Janusz Wojcik
was charged with 11 counts of corruption.

The Polish government suspended the national soccer association's
management board, running afoul of FIFA rules that require independent
federations, free from government interference. The controversy almost
cost the country its right to host the tournament, as well as qualifying
matches for the 2010 World Cup, before a compromise for electing a new
board was reached in October.

Miroslaw Drzewiecki, Poland's minister for sport and tourism, said in an
interview in his office in downtown Warsaw that everything was back on
track, both with the federation and the preparations for the
championship. The Polish master plan and timetable is in place, he said,
and financing is safe and stable, even in light of the financial crisis.

''In many cases we have made up for lost time when we were behind
schedule, and in other cases we are actually ahead of schedule,''
Drzewiecki said.

At the site of the National Stadium along the Vistula River in Warsaw's
Praga district, still just a muddy hole where the old stadium once
stood, the rhythmic thudding of pile drivers hammering supports into the
earth pounded like a heartbeat, slowing as the pile went deeper.

While the stadiums in the two capitals are clearly required, UEFA has
said that six to eight sites are needed, and not necessarily the same
number in each country. Polish officials sounded confident that they
could end up hosting a majority of the matches. ''The most comfortable
situation is to go together with Ukraine, just choosing the eight best
locations,'' said Rafal Kapler, vice president of PL.2012, the
coordinating body in Poland. ''That creates competition within, which is
good.''

Kapler, who grew up in Praga, even practices his own old-fashioned form
of oversight to ensure completion of the country's foremost project.
''My mother still lives one and a half kilometers away,'' he said.
''She's calling me saying, 'Today they started at 6 a.m.' Then she calls
and says: 'Something happened. Today they only started at 10 a.m.' ''

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

December 09, 2008 

Holodomor Is Ukraine's Never-Ending Trauma 

by Irena Chalupa 

In many ways, Kyiv is a city of contrasts.

On one boulevard you will encounter a rather squat, red granite statue
of Lenin, his right hand aloft pointing to the proverbial better
tomorrow that, thankfully, after 70 years finally became yesterday. The
authorities refuse to dismantle the statue, claiming it has "historic"
value. That's the communist touch.

Walk a few blocks down to a short, gray, treeless street called Passage
and you will be assaulted by ostentatious conspicuous consumption:
Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Bally, Ferragamo. That's the
nouveau riche, oligarchic touch. 

Up the hill from these two telling spots stands a small -- and until,
last week, the only -- monument to the victims of the 1932-33 famine in
Ukraine. It was erected in 1993.

Together these three points in Ukraine's capital create a kind of
historic Bermuda Triangle into which things disappear and people forget.
Lenin gave birth to the people who created the famine; luxury goods
should make everyone forget the deprivations of the Soviet past and the
pain of famine. But today almost 50 million Ukrainians somehow remain
held hostage by one, two, or all three of these points of reference.

Ukraine's current president, Viktor Yushchenko, has made remembering the
famine a cornerstone of his presidency. In 2006, the parliament passed a
law recognizing the famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian
people. Yushchenko went to great lengths to ensure that this year's 75th
anniversary of the famine be commemorated on a national level. Foreign
leaders participated in the commemorations; conferences were held;
memorials unveiled, candles lit, and the names of the dead remembered. 

In a particularly moving sign of solemnity, the president and the prime
minister even suspended their endless bickering for a day to participate
in the unveiling of the new memorial complex in the capital.

Death Of A National Identity

And yet large swathes of Ukraine remain deeply ambivalent about the
famine. Eastern and southeastern Ukraine -- where the famine took its
greatest toll -- even today, when the facts about the famine are widely
publicized and accessible, has the fewest memorials. The first attempts
to commemorate the victims took place very far away from Ukraine in
fact; Canadian-Ukrainians erected the first famine memorial in 1989 in
Edmonton.

The late historian James Mace, who joined the famine project at the
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and collected material for Robert
Conquest's seminal work "The Harvest of Sorrow," called Ukraine a
post-genocidal society. Becoming a famine expert in his own right, Mace
made Ukraine his adopted homeland. He believed that what Ukrainians call
Holodomor (murder by hunger), maimed Ukraine to such an extent that it
created a discontinuity in the normal development of the Ukrainian
people.

In the former Warsaw Pact countries, the collapse of communism brought
about a restoration of a previous independence. But in Ukraine, the
Ukrainian nation -- as a community possessing a clear sense of its
identity, history, and cultural values -- remained a national minority
in its own country even after independence. The damage from the Soviet
legacy was such that Ukrainians lacked a broad consensus concerning
their future. All that remained were the surviving structures of Soviet
Ukraine. The country was no longer a Ukrainian Soviet republic, but it
was also not a Ukrainian Ukraine, in the sense in which Poland is Polish
or the Czech Republic is Czech.

The orchestrated famine wiped out millions of nationally conscious
Ukrainians. Whether or not one accepts that the famine was genocide,
there is little doubt that it was targeted against Ukrainian
nationalism, against Ukrainian-ness. Mykola Khvylovy, one of the most
popular and talented writers of the period and a committed communist,
shot himself in helpless protest. The creative engine of a people was
destroyed, slowing down and distorting nation building for decades. The
Soviet regime prevented families and individuals from processing both
personal and national grief. For more than 50 years, Ukraine could not
address this trauma openly.

Ukrainian society, however, was soon to experience new shocks: the
purges of 1937-38, war, Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, Soviet
reconquest, and the 1946-47 famine. The scars of the Holodomor are
overlaid by those of these other tragedies. Yet, under the consequences
of these repeated blows, traces of the 1932-33 famine are unmistakable.
Without taking it into account, for instance, it is impossible to
account for the much weaker -- compared to what happened in 1914-22 --
Ukrainian national movement that arose in the great upheaval of World
War II. Western Ukraine, which in 1933 was not part of the USSR, is not
surprisingly the exception.

What does it mean to be Ukrainian today? What is Ukraine? What is the
Ukrainian idea? Former President Leonid Kuchma at one time created quite
an angry backlash by stating that the Ukrainian idea had not worked in
Ukraine. If a country called Ukraine endlessly convenes conferences on
self-identity, if pundits pontificate ad nauseum on "project Ukraine,"
if Ukrainians themselves can't define their identity or their values,
then one can safely admit that the country has something of an identity
crisis. 

Is it important to have the world acknowledge the Ukrainian famine as an
act of genocide? For the Ukrainian state, yes. But will such recognition
help the country itself? Will it ease the effects of the famine trauma?
Will it steer Ukrainian society onto a path of self-awareness? Will it
compel the eastern Ukrainian citizen, who is descended from the ethnic
Russians who were resettled into the towns and villages emptied by the
famine, feel a connection to this country? Will it give the inhabitants
of the more than 13,000 towns and villages that died in 1932-33 a voice
and a name? And, most importantly, will today's diverse Ukrainians, who
aren't particularly eager to listen to the stories of their painful
past, hear those voices? 

It seems to me that James Mace was on to something. The famine is not an
only an event in Ukraine's past -- it is an event in its present and its
future.

Irena Chalupa is the director of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. The views
expressed in this commentary are the author's own and do not necessarily
reflect those of RFE/RL

 

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