[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WSJ;FT; CT; EDM (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

Wall Street Journal

World News: Merkel Slows NATO Bids by Georgia and Ukraine --- As German Leader Delays Road Map, Kiev Takes a Step Closer to Russia 

By Marc Champion 

3 October 2008

A14

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization won't give Georgia and Ukraine a road map to membership at a meeting later this year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday.

Meanwhile, Kiev took a step away from the West and closer to Moscow, as Ukraine's Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced gas deals with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and voiced support for Russian accession to the World Trade Organization.

Mrs. Merkel's rejection of a NATO track for Georgia and Ukraine, at a news conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in St. Petersburg, would effectively act as a veto. The Western military alliance operates by consensus.

U.S. officials had hoped a NATO ministerial meeting set for December might be the occasion for the alliance to extend a so-called Membership Action Plan, or MAP, to the two ex-Soviet States. However, any quick move toward their NATO membership grew less likely after Georgia's five-day war with Russia in August.

The U.S. State Department declined to comment, saying it hadn't seen or heard Mrs. Merkel's remarks.

Russia opposes NATO expansion to include more countries of the ex-Soviet Union beyond the three Baltic states that joined the U.S.-led alliance in 2004. Russian leaders have claimed Georgia's NATO aspirations encouraged it to take military action that triggered the August invasion. Georgia and Western nations have called Russia the aggressor.

Georgian Integration Minister Temuri Yakobashvili said it would have been better for Mrs. Merkel to wait to make her decision in December, and base it on NATO's reports on Georgia's progress toward meeting the alliance's criteria for MAP. "This is becoming a highly politicized, rather than a technical, performance-based decision," he said.

Mrs. Merkel also opposed MAP for Georgia and Ukraine before the alliance's last summit in April, where NATO members split, despite efforts by President George W. Bush to persuade reluctant European NATO leaders to back the plan. As a result, no road map was offered, but the decision was to be reviewed in December.

Georgian and some U.S. officials believe NATO's failure in April to show clear commitment to Georgia encouraged Moscow to prepare Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Russian-controlled separatist territories within Georgia, for independence during the summer -- and then to invade. Russia says it attacked in response to a Georgian attempt at genocide against South Ossetian civilians.

Membership in NATO can come as long as a decade after the start of MAP. But Mrs. Merkel argued ahead of the April summit that the move would provoke Russia unnecessarily, and that so long as Georgia had two open territorial disputes it wasn't a suitable NATO member. NATO guarantees it will defend members of the alliance when necessary.

Moscow has been just as determined in opposing efforts by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko to lead his country into NATO. Since the Georgia conflict, Mr. Yushchenko's pro-Western coalition with his political rival Prime Minister Tymoshenko has disintegrated, damping hopes of NATO accession.

Ms. Tymoshenko has taken a much softer line toward Moscow than Mr. Yushchenko and has declined to criticize Russian actions. In Moscow Thursday, she secured a deal with Mr. Putin on natural gas supplies to Ukraine.

While details were unclear, Ms. Tymoshenko said the two sides had agreed to set a three-year transition for Russia to raise the price at which it sells gas to Ukraine to world-market levels, according to news agency reports. Ukraine now pays less than half the global market price for gas.

Nevertheless, tensions persist between Kiev and Moscow. Mr. Putin on Thursday again accused Ukrainian personnel of manning guns that shot down Russian aircraft during the war in Georgia. 

Financial Times

Ukraine reaches accord on Russian gas

By Roman Olearchyk in Kiev and Catherine Belton in Moscow 

Published: October 3 2008 03:00 

Ukraine and Russia agreed yesterday to set a three-year transition period towards market prices on gas that Kiev buys from Russia and on transit for gas pumped through Ukraine to Europe.

A top Ukrainian official said Ukraine would pay between $250-300 per 1,000 cubic metres next year, significantly lower than the $500 (€354, £281) rate Gazprom said it charges Europe.

The agreement came in talks between Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian premier, and Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, amid last-ditch efforts in Ukraine to save Kiev's tottering pro-western coalition.

Ms Tymoshenko said both sides agreed to remove middlemen companies from their multi-billion dollar gas trade.

After the talks Mr Putin criticised Kiev for siding with Tbilisi during Russia's military intervention in Georgia, challenged its pro-western foreign policy and expressed frustration at its domestic political turmoil. "Unfortunately, rather than occurring on the backdrop of improved relations, our meeting comes amid difficult conditions," Mr Putin said at his residence outside Moscow.

With Ms Tymoshenko at his side, Mr Putin referred to the "indecisiveness of decision-making" in Kiev which was "itself due to the internal political situation".

In Kiev, allies of Ms Tymoshenko and of Viktor Yushchenko, the president, were engaged in last-minute efforts to preserve their coalition.

The scale of the challenge they face was underlined by a fresh bout of wrangling between the two rivals after the president commandeered the aircraft that was meant to take the premier to Moscow.

Responding to Mr Putin's sharp words, Ms Tymoshenko stressed that her country would overcome, "step-by-step", its domestic political challenges and improve ties with Moscow.

Earlier, officials had said that Ms Tymoshenko's negotiations in Moscow were aimed at agreeing a multi-year accord for natural gas exports to Ukraine. But the question of the actual price it will pay for the energy is to be left for later this year. Previous haggling over the price of Russia's gas has caused interruptions to European gas supplies. While a final agreement could double the price Kiev currently pays, Ms Tymoshenko has called for a gradual increase.

Her negotiations were closely watched in Kiev, where politics has been paralysed by the bitter rivalry with Mr Yushchenko.

His party quit their coalition last month, in part to protest against Ms Tymoshenko's refusal to condemn Russia for its "aggression" against Georgia.

www.ft.com/russia

Chicago Tribune

 

Ukraine's Russia quandary; Crimean peninsula, home of Moscow's Black Sea Fleet, is potential flash point 

By Alex Rodriguez, Tribune correspondent 

3 October 2008

Chicagoland Final

6

 

SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine

If Ukraine's Crimean peninsula becomes the next flash point between Russia and its West-allied, ex-Soviet neighbors, Gennady Basov is likely to be one of the locals stoking the coals.

A member of Crimea's ethnic Russian majority, Basov engineers pickets at Sevastopol's docks whenever U.S. naval ships cruise into port. He thinks Viktor Yushchenko, leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution and now Ukraine's president, is turning the country into a "banana republic."

And he believes Crimeans will rise up if Ukraine ever joins NATO or evicts Russia's Black Sea naval fleet from its home for the past 225 years, the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol.

"If Ukrainian authorities continue to push away Russians from Crimea, there will be serious consequences," says Basov, a Sevastopol city councilman and head of the pro-Russian Russky Bloc. "I'm sad to pronounce such words, but it will happen so."

What worries Ukrainians is the possibility that Crimeans' fist-shaking will one day be backed up by Russia's military might.

East European nations once subjected to Soviet rule saw Russia's invasion of Georgia in early August and its recognition of separatist enclaves there as independent states as a stern warning from the Kremlin: Pursue NATO membership and risk Moscow's wrath.

Nowhere does that warning ring louder than in Ukraine, which is now looking at pro-Russian rhetoric and demonstrations in Crimea through the prism of the Georgia conflict.

Crimea is not a mirror image of South Ossetia, the breakaway enclave in Georgia that became the impetus for Russia's movement of tanks and troops deep into Georgian territory. South Ossetia and Georgia's other rebel enclave, Abkhazia, are ruled by separatist governments that severed ties with Tbilisi after bloody civil wars in the early 1990s.

Crimea's autonomous parliament adheres to Ukraine's constitution and to rule from Kiev. But there also are disturbing similarities to Georgia's separatist regions that have Ukrainians worriedly trying to forecast the Kremlin's intentions.

As in South Ossetia, allegiance among Crimeans to Russia is widespread and ironclad. More than half of Crimeans are ethnically Russian, and more than 70 percent of them speak Russian rather than Ukrainian. South Ossetians despise Georgian leader and U.S. ally Mikhail Saakashvili; in Crimea, resentment runs deep for Yushchenko, who avidly pushes for Ukraine's membership in NATO.

And Ukrainians worry that, as was the case in South Ossetia, Russian authorities have been trying to distribute Russian passports among Crimeans -- an allegation Russian authorities deny. In justifying its invasion of Georgia, Russia said it had to defend Ossetians with Russian citizenship who were under siege when Georgia shelled their capital, Tskhinvali, in early August.

Russia has stressed that it has no intention of ever invading Crimea or any other part of Ukraine. Shortly after sending armored columns into Georgia, however, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev made it clear that Russia would always defend its citizens, no matter where they lived. And on Thursday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of supplying arms and military personnel to Georgia during the recent conflict.

"When people and military systems are used to kill Russian soldiers, it's a crime," Putin told reporters after meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart, Yulia Tymoshenko, at Putin's residence outside Moscow.

"There is indeed a parallel situation here in Crimea," says Sergei Kulik, director of Nomos, an independent think tank in Sevastopol. "Many people in Crimea have both Russian and Ukrainian passports, which makes it possible to one day declare that the rights of Russian citizens have been violated and must be defended. That would bring us to the same situation we saw in Georgia."

Territorially, Crimea is a part of Ukraine. But here in the port city of Sevastopol, the atmosphere is that of a Russian outpost. Along the city's kiosk-lined avenues and seaside esplanades, almost everyone speaks Russian. Russian flags fly from the tops of several downtown buildings. Souvenir shops sell baseball caps with the slogan "Sevastopol-City of Russian Glory."

Crimea's history explains why it is so distinctly Russian. Annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783, Crimea did not become part of Ukraine until 1954, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred the province to the Soviet republic of Ukraine.

The peninsula was contested in what is considered the first modern war in 1853-56, when Russia fought an alliance of Britain, France and Turkey. Politically, Crimea has enjoyed a degree of autonomy during various stages of its existence, including from 1921 to 1945 when it belonged to the Soviet Union, and since 1992 while it has been part of Ukraine.

Sevastopol has been home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet since 1783. In 1997, Ukraine agreed to lease the port to the fleet until 2017, when the agreement would be up for renewal. Angered by Russia's actions in Georgia, Ukrainian leaders no longer want to renew the fleet's lease after 2017.

If the Black Sea Fleet is forced to leave Sevastopol, said Leonid Grach, a Communist Party member of Crimea's autonomous parliament, "then Crimea will explode. It'll become Kosovo, or Abkhazia, or South Ossetia. ... We won't have enough cemeteries to bury all the dead people."

Eviction from Sevastopol would force the Kremlin to spend tens of billions of dollars to make the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk fit for naval ships, destroyers and submarines. The fleet's presence in Sevastopol also serves as an invaluable vanguard of influence in Ukraine that Russia would find hard to replace.

"Russia feels its newfound power, and wants to revive its influence over former Soviet territory," says Kulik, the analyst. "That's why keeping the fleet here in Crimea is an effective way of preserving that influence in the [western] part of what once was the Soviet Union."

- - -

By the numbers

45,994,288

Ukraine's estimated population as of July

37,541,700

Number of Ukrainians in the population, according to 2001 census

8,334,100

Ethnic Russians in Ukraine, with the rest of the population divided among 128 other nationalities and ethnic groups

2,024,000

Crimea's population, according to the 2001 census

1,180,400

Number of ethnic Russians

492,200

Number of Ukrainians

SOURCES: State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, CIA World Factbook

AP

Lawmakers move to restore Ukraine coalition 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

2 October 2008

16:58

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukrainian lawmakers sought Thursday to salvage the pro-Western coalition of President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister and avoid early parliamentary elections in the politically turbulent ex-Soviet republic.

But the efforts were marred by an embarrassing dispute over the use of a government jet, underscoring the animosity that could scuttle a deal.

As the clock ticked toward time to either restore the coalition or call an early parliamentary election, the two leaders' parliamentary factions voted to rescind a package of laws trimming presidential powers. The legislation had prompted Yushchenko to pull out of the alliance last month.

The heroes of the 2004 Orange Revolution that propelled Yushchenko to the presidency and put Ukraine on a pro-Western course have been locked in a tug-of-war before the 2010 presidential vote.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko sided with the Russia-friendly opposition last month to pass the laws diminishing Yushchenko's authority -- a move he called unconstitutional. Yushchenko accused Tymoshenko of selling out to the Kremlin by taking a moderate stance on Russia's war with Ukraine's ally Georgia last month.

The vote to annul the legislation came a day after Tymoshenko vowed to accept a series of demands from Yushchenko for the sake of preserving the coalition.

But Yushchenko indicated he wants a guarantee the laws will not be restored, signaling a lack of trust in Tymoshenko.

"Where is the guarantee that in 10 days ... they won't be adopted anew?" Yushchenko asked reporters in the western city of Lviv, according to his Web site.

He reiterated that he would call a snap vote if no coalition is formed. It would be the third parliamentary election in as many years and would further deepen the political crisis.

Underlining the bitterness that has prevented Yushchenko and Tymoshenko from forming a lasting alliance, they sparred over the use of a government plane.

Yushchenko's Tu-134 jet, en route to Lviv, had to make an emergency landing at Kiev's airport shortly after takeoff due to a problem with the tail, and the president boarded a backup jet. Tymoshenko claimed that plane had been meant to take her to Moscow -- where she was angling for Russian mercy on looming gas price increases -- and she had to scramble for another jet.

Tymoshenko refused to greet the president when she ran into him at the airport -- a snub Yushchenko's spokeswoman, Irina Vannikova, called a "violation of all the norms of protocol and human ethics."

The two camps cannot even agree on the deadline for the formation of a new coalition.

Tymoshenko has said it is Friday, while Yushchenko spokeswoman Larisa Mudrak has said it is Oct. 16.

Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk said Thursday that annulment of the legislation that shattered the coalition was a positive step toward reviving it, but warned that an early vote was still a strong possibility.

"It's fifty-fifty," Yatsenyuk told a group of foreign reporters. "Today's developments provide just one thing: the possibility of again talking about returning to the old format of the coalition."

Eurasia Daily Monitor

October 1, 2008


RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE SEEKS TO DESTABILIZE CRIMEA

On September 29 the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) protested against an appeal made by the Russian delegation to the OSCE about the Crimea. “Methods and dirty technology created in the ’90s of the last century are being used to destabilize the situation in the ARK [Autonomous Republic of Crimea] by fomenting separatist movements in the territories of the former USSR... Such actions cannot be regarded as anything other than gross interference in the internal affairs of another state,” the MFA said (www.mfa.gov.ua, September 29).

That Ukrainian-Russian relations are poor and deteriorating is increasingly obvious from mutual accusations, counter-accusations, and insinuations. Russian political technologist Sergei Markov, a Unified Russia deputy, described Ukrainian-Russian relations to all intents and purposes as non-existent (www.pravda.com.ua, September 24).

Even in the area of Soviet history the Ukrainian and Russian sides have diametrically opposite views. The Russian Foreign Ministry gloated over Ukraine’s failure to find support for a resolution at the UN to recognize the 1933 artificial famine as “genocide” conducted against Ukrainians. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry issued a strongly worded rebuttal. Writing in September’s Prospect magazine Arkady Ostrovsky said, “an old fashioned nationalism, in neo-Stalinist costume, has become the most powerful force in Russian society” (www.prospect-magazine.co.uk).

Foreign Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko has officially accused Russia of seeking to destabilize the autonomous republic of the Crimea. It is undesirable that “the Russian consulate in Simferopol distributes passports” (EDM, September 15). Meanwhile, Russian politicians, such as Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov, travel to Ukraine and call for uniting the Crimea to Russia (Fokus, no.38, September 19).

Ohryzko also complained that Russia was attempting to block Ukraine’s entry into NATO by using, among others things, the Crimean card. Russia also disrespected Ukraine’s sovereignty (Fokus, no.38, September 19).

At a well-publicized press conference on September 25, the Security Service (SBU) provided extensive details of attempts by Russian intelligence to hire Ukrainian citizens to participate in conflicts in the Caucasus. The SBU gave details about recent attempts to hire Ukrainians for the August Georgian conflict. In August and September the SBU collected intelligence on many attempts by Russian intelligence to dispatch Ukrainians to the conflict. Ukrainians were offered $200 to $500 per day if they accepted the proposal. Candidates approached by Russian intelligence should have “specific training, including in the field of subversive activity.” Russian intelligence targeted those with existing connections to the Ukrainian military, including reservists (www.mfa.gov.ua, September 29).

The SBU warned Russia that it was carefully observing these approaches and was initiating counter-measures (www.sbu.gov.ua). “Every attempt at recruiting Ukrainian citizens in foreign games will receive a harsh rebuff,” the SBU warned. Russian intelligence had established and supported “extremist organizations” in Tiraspol, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia; but “We will never permit such activity on our territory,” the SBU stated. Following the Georgian-Russian war, Ukraine purchased its first unmanned drone from the Israeli Ministry of Defense (www.pravda.com.ua, August 29).

Senior Russian military officers have alleged that Ukrainians fought on the Georgian side during the August conflict. Such claims about “Ukrainian nationalists” are nothing new. In the first and second Russian interventions into Chechnya in 1995 and 2000, Russian officials and media alleged that numerous “Ukrainian nationalists” were fighting with the Chechens. The allegations revived Soviet ideological tirades against western Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists.”

The nationalist group most often accused of training recruits for battle against Russia is the extreme right UNA-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian Peoples Self Defense Organization). Russia’s intelligence on Ukrainian nationalists is, in fact, outdated, as the UNA-UNSO disintegrated in the late 1990s into at least three groups.

One wing of UNA-UNSO that remained committed to its nationalist ideology aligned with the radical opposition Yulia Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT) and Socialist Party in the “Kuchmagate” crisis. The radical opposition led the protests by Ukraine Without Kuchma and Arise Ukraine! from 2000 to 2003. UNA-UNSO members also acted as paramilitary stewards during the orange revolution. The UNA-UNSO was accused of organizing the March 2001 riots in Kyiv (in reality, this was apparently a provocation by undercover Interior Ministry personnel to discredit the anti-Kuchma opposition), and 20 senior UNA-UNSO leaders were charged and imprisoned. Following their release, many of the nationalist wing of the UNA-UNSO, such as Andriy Shkil, joined the BYuT. Shkil is still a BYuT deputy.

The other two wings of the UNA-UNSO were co-opted by Russian intelligence. They continue to be available for provocations by Russian intelligence in attempts to portray Ukraine’s orange leaders (like their Georgian rose revolution counterparts) as “anti-Russian extremists.”

The two co-opted former wings of the UNA-UNSO played a highly provocative role in attempts to discredit the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko in the 2004 presidential elections. Political technologists close to Russia’s presidential administration (i.e., Markov and Gleb Pavlovsky) worked for the candidate supported by Russia, Viktor Yanukovych. They sought to portray Yushchenko as a rabid “anti-Russian, Ukrainian nationalist” to reduce his popularity in Russophone eastern Ukraine (see EDM, June 29 and September 23, 2004, May 13, 2005).

One of the two co-opted UNA-UNSO groups, led by Dmytro Korchynsky, was renamed Bratstvo (Brotherhood). Bratstvo and the Progressive Socialist Party are the only two Ukrainian parties in the Highest Council of the International Eurasian Movement and the Eurasian Youth Movement. Both of these organizations are devoted to the Eurasianist ideologist Aleksandr G. Dugin who has ingratiated himself with the Putin regime (see Andreas Umland’s detailed analysis in www.pravda.com.ua, July 20, 2007).

The SBU has also unveiled Russian intelligence’s attempts to recruit Ukrainians who would “testify” for money that they had undergone “subversive training” in UNA-UNSO bases in western Ukraine with the aim of undertaking “terrorist” attacks alongside Chechens in Russia. Recruited Tatars were also paid to speak on Russian television about the existence of alleged training camps for Islamic terrorists in the Crimea. The aim in both cases, the SBU believes, was to show that Ukraine was a host to training camps for religious and nationalist extremists.

Russia’s accusations are doubly ironic. First, the UNA-UNSO wing with solid nationalist credentials joined the BYuT in 2001-2002. Tymoshenko meanwhile has been accused of “treason” by the presidential secretariat based on an unfounded allegation that she has “done a deal” with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Second, the remainder of the former UNA-UNSO (i.e., Bratstvo) has long worked for Russian intelligence.

--Taras Kuzio



IS YUSHCHENKO’S UKRAINE READY FOR A NATO MAP?

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko paid two visits to the United States at the end of September. Among the main goals of his visits was to confirm Ukraine’s hope to secure an Action Plan for NATO Membership (MAP) ahead of the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting scheduled for December. Yushchenko failed to secure a MAP for Ukraine at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April, and he will probably fail again. Ukraine has hardly moved any closer toward this goal since April.

Speaking in an interview ahead of his first visit, Yushchenko expressed his disappointment at not receiving a MAP thus far. “Everyone needs to understand that everything Ukraine needed to do to obtain a positive answer [on NATO], if we speak openly and honestly, it has done that,” he said. “We need to get a signal from the alliance itself that we are respected, that we are valued,” Yushchenko added (The Washington Times, September 18).

Meeting with Jewish leaders in New York, Yushchenko claimed that Ukraine had fulfilled all conditions for NATO’s MAP. “I do not know what else my country should do to put an end to discussions on this issue,” he said. Yushchenko urged NATO to “expand the area of security further east” in the wake of the Russia-Georgia conflict.

The lack of popular support for NATO membership has been one of the strongest arguments in Europe against a MAP for Ukraine, especially in France and Germany. Yushchenko admitted that this was a problem as there “have been discussions in Ukrainian society”; but he promised that Ukraine would hold a referendum on NATO entry in due course, as the pro-Russian opposition demanded. Yushchenko argued that “there are increasingly more supporters of the membership each month, and increasingly fewer opponents” (UNIAN, September 23).

The most recent opinion polls have indicated that Yushchenko was not altogether wrong about popular support. A poll by the Sotsiovymir pollster revealed that popular support for NATO membership grew by some 10 percent over the past several months to 31 percent in early September (UNIAN, September 19). This was a very high figure for Ukraine, where popular support for NATO entry usually hovered around 20 to 25 percent.

Figures obtained by a different, arguably more pro-Russian, pollster, Sofia, were less positive, but they confirmed the trend. According to Sofia, which conducted its poll from September 9 to 17, popular support for NATO membership grew to 23.7 percent from 21.4 percent in May (Interfax, September 24).

The positive popular opinion trend may be temporary, prompted by Russia’s actions in Georgia. Ukraine has hardly made any progress in most other respects since the Bucharest NATO summit. Internationally, Russia’s opposition remains one of the main obstacles to Ukraine’s MAP, and Yushchenko has done little to assuage Russia’s misapprehension. His reaction to the events in Georgia, for example, was viewed in Moscow as overly hostile (see EDM, August 15).

Most recently Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Russian ultranationalist leader who often acts as the Kremlin’s unofficial spokesman, warned that “if someone attempts to drag Ukraine into NATO and the people start to protest against this and they are harassed…then Russia will have the right to defend its citizens in Ukraine.” He added that “it would be ideal for both Georgia and Ukraine to remain neutral” (Ukraina TV, September 22).

Domestically, Yushchenko’s pro-NATO efforts have failed. His Our Ukraine party, which is backed by hardly more than 10 to 14 percent of Ukrainians, has been the only consistent supporter of a MAP and NATO membership among the leading parties. The party of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been less enthusiastic about NATO, as Tymoshenko apparently fears that a decisively pro-NATO course would prompt Russia to charge Ukraine more for gas. If the opposition Party of Regions, which has always been wary of NATO, emerges winner in the current political turmoil prompted by the demise of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition (see EDM, September 17), domestic support for NATO will be even weaker.

Yushchenko’s NATO awareness campaign has been a flop. Several tenders to select a PR firm to organize pro-NATO events in two-thirds of Ukrainian towns have produced no result, as the government allotted a very small sum for this, the equivalent of $100,000, said the acting head of the Foreign Ministry’s NATO information department, Vladyslava Bondarenko. So far the Tymoshenko government has spent just one third of the dismal $2 million earmarked in the state budget for advertising NATO, a Ukrainian business daily reported (Delo, September 30).

Finally, the Ukrainian army may not be quite up to NATO standards. Yushchenko recalled at a recent meeting of his National Security and Defense Council that Ukraine spends the least of all CIS countries on its army’s needs, only 1 percent of GDP. “Experts say that when the critical level of funding is 1 percent, that is when the armed forces start to get ruined,” he said. According to Yushchenko, only 21 of Ukraine’s 112 fighters and only four of its 26 warships are fully operational (UT1, September 26).

--Pavel Korduban







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