[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WSJ; AP; WoE; AC

[Deychak, Orest]

Wall Street Journal 

World News: World Watch

UKRAINE

Moscow Backs Tymoshenko In Her Bid for Presidency

The Kremlin has formed an alliance with a former foe, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, designed to help her become the next president and help Russia rein in Ukraine's drive toward the West.

Ms. Tymoshenko and the Kremlin have put aside years of mutual suspicion to unite against Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, the force behind Kiev's ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the premier's rival.

The new warmth was on show on last week when Ms. Tymoshenko -- who two years ago accused Russia of extorting cash from Ukraine in a row over gas -- had a cordial meeting with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin followed by unscheduled, late-night talks with President Dmitry Medvedev. Both sides are focused on the next presidential vote, which must take place no later than January 2010. 

 

 

AP

Ukraine president seeks coalition by Tuesday 

6 October 2008

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko is making a last-minute call for lawmakers to form a governing coalition and avoid snap elections.

But Yushchenko also signaled in a statement Monday that he does not trust his estranged Orange Revolution partner Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to revive their shattered pro-Western alliance and indicated he is keen on calling the early vote.

He has set Tuesday as the deadline for a new coalition to be formed.

Yushchenko and Tymoshenko led the 2004 pro-democracy protest that propelled him to the presidency, but then quickly became bitter rivals.

Yushchenko pulled out of the coalition last month after Tymoshenko sided with the opposition to trim his powers and over contacts with Russia.

 

Window on Eurasia: Ethnic Russians in Ukraine Re-identifying as Ukrainians 

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, October 6 -More than three million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine have re-identified themselves as Ukrainians since 1991, nearly a thousand times the number of Ukrainians who may have dual citizenship in the Russian Federation, a ratio that appears to be increasing and is of increasing concern to Moscow. 

            On the one hand, this pattern suggests that ethnic Russians in Ukraine increasingly identify themselves with that country and its titular nation, an attitude that makes it more difficult for Moscow to play this ethnic card against Kyiv. And on the other, it points to the weakness of Russian ethnic identity more generally, something few Russian nationalists want to admit.

            In an interview posted on Moscow's Politcom.ru at the end of last week, Nikolai Shul'ga, deputy director of the Kyiv Institute of Sociology and head of the Foundation for the Support of Russian Culture noted that the number of people in Ukraine identifying themselves as Russians fell from 11.3 million in 1989 to 8 million in 2001 (www.politcom.ru/article.php?id=6969).

            Emigration explains only a few hundred thousand of that 3.3 million decline, he said. Most of it reflects "ethnic conformism," a feeling on the part of many there that it is "more suitable" to declare oneself an ethnic Ukrainian, even if one speaks Russian and feels himself part of Russian culture.

             Indeed, he continued, what is happening in Ukraine is a separation of language and national self-identification, with the number of Ukrainians who declared Russian to be their native language actually increased by more than a million between the 1989 Soviet and 2001Ukrainian censuses. 

            There are at least three reasons for this: First, some of the Russians who had re-identified as Ukrainians nonetheless declared Russian as their native language. Second, the two censuses asked questions about identity and language in a different order, with language first in the former and identity first in the second, an order that by itself may have contributed to this change.

            And third - and this may be the most important finding for both Ukraine and the Russian Federation - the changes between the two censuses suggest that for many but far from all people in Ukraine, national identity and native language are not nearly as tightly linked as many have assumed in the past. 

            For Kyiv, this means that national identity in Ukraine is increasingly strong, with people retaining their Ukrainian national identity even if they continue or decide to begin to speak Russian, a pattern few Ukrainian nationalists find acceptable but one that points to the success rather than the failure of Ukrainian statehood. 

            And for Moscow, this pattern means that promoting Russian language in Ukraine as the Russian government and its allies continue to try to do - most recently by a new website directed at Russian speakers in Ukraine (www.rus.in.ua) - may not have the identity or political consequences that the Russian government would like.

            Asked whether he believed that the number in Ukraine of those who identify themselves as ethnic Russians will continue to fall, even if the use of Russian continues to be widespread, Shul'ga said that over the next several years "the number of Russians and Russian speakers will decline significantly."

            Meanwhile, another report last week calls attention to another aspect of the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian identity.  Next year marks the centenary of completion of the tsarist program to resettle Ukrainians (and others) in the Russian Far East in order to strengthen the central Russian government's control of that region (odnarodyna.ru/articles/4/305.html).

            The Ukrainians who were moved there called their place of settlement "zeleniy klin" ['the green triangle"] and were able to maintain not only their language but even their identity well into the 20th century despite the efforts of the Soviet authorities to russianize and russify them.

            The identity of this several hundred thousand-strong community played a key role in the defeat of the White Russian forces in the Far East during the Russian Civil War because the Whites unlike the Reds refused to promise to respect the right of the Ukrainian nation to self-determination. 

            Soviet researchers, émigré historians like Ivan Svit, and American scholars like John Stephan pointed out that many residents in the Far East retained their Ukrainian identity even when under pressure from the Soviet authorities they learned Russian and declared themselves to be ethnic Russians.

            (In the mid-1980s, in a move few now recall, the United States broadcast to the region from Japan in Ukrainian, the only time in the history of US international broadcasting to the Soviet Union when the US broadcast to a region in a language different than the one the Soviet government declared was the language of the titular nationality.)

            And in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some in the Ukrainian parliament called for the recognition of the Zeleniy klin as Eastern Ukraine, a proposal that went nowhere but did call attention to the millions of people in the Russian Federation who continued to define themselves as Ukrainians even if they had to declare something else.

            Now, this anniversary of the formation of the Green Triangle is likely to call the attention not only of many in Moscow and Kyiv but of analysts in the West that Ukrainian national identity is stronger than many have thought and that Russian national identity for many, except when supported by a strong state, may very well be weaker.

 

The Atlantic Council 

www.acus.org

Can Europe Survive Germany?

Alexander Motyl | October 02, 2008

 

If Europe ever dies, Germany will have killed it.

 

The community of values that Europe is supposed to be-one that claims to embody democracy and human rights and always gives preference to soft power over hard-can survive only as long as its largest state shares those values.

 

Russia is the test that Germany failed. As Vladimir Putin steered his country in an unabashedly authoritarian and neo-imperialist direction, Germany showered him with praise. When Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called Putin a "true democrat" at the height of Ukraine's Orange Revolution in late 2004, he effectively declared democratic Ukraine's Western aspirations incompatible with Germany's relations with an authoritarian Russia and thereby repudiated democracy.

 

Last spring's German declaration of solidarity with Putin's opposition to Ukraine's and Georgia's possible NATO membership also revealed the triumph of hard-nosed geopolitics over democratic values and soft power.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's endorsement of the logic of Putin's opposition-that foreign-policy decisions made by Ukraine's democratically elected political elites are undemocratic while only those endorsed in popular opinion polls by its population are democratic-was a direct repudiation of Ukraine's democratic institutions and a backhand endorsement of Putin's dismantling of democracy in Russia. Her September 10th designation of Russia's invasion of Georgia as a mere "controversy"

that should not overshadow Germany's "shared interests" with Russia went even further than Schröder in sacrificing non-Russian democracy to Russian dictatorship.

 

Germany's indifference to democratic values is a puzzle. After all, Germany should know better. It devastated Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland in two world wars; it perpetrated the Holocaust along with a variety of other genocides against Roma and Slavs in Eastern Europe; and it was responsible for the deaths of almost 2 million Ukrainians in World War I and 8 million in World War II. (As Erich Koch, Hitler's ruthless Reichskommissar of Ukraine, said, "I will pump every last thing out of this country. I did not come here to spread bliss.) One would have expected Germany to be especially sensitive to the democratic aspirations and security concerns of the peoples it came closest to annihilating. Instead, Germany has consistently preferred authoritarian Russia to its democratic non-Russian neighbors.

 

Gas goes some way in explaining Berlin's preferential option for the Kremlin, but not quite. After all, the Eastern Europeans most critical of Russia-such as Poland and the Baltic states-are far more dependent on Russian gas than Germany. Lucrative pipeline deals and other commercial ties also don't do the trick: economic logic should dictate a closer alliance with the United States, Germany's largest trading partner, but instead German policy makers are frequently more anti-American in their rhetoric and policy than anti-Russian.

 

A closer look at history may help explain Germany's anomalous behavior. In 1922, Weimar Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia,thereby paving the way for extensive economic and military cooperation that isolated, and helped destabilize, the fledgling states of East Central Europe. In 1938, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to the division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Germany willingly accepted Soviet hegemony in the satellite states (and even snubbed the Solidarity movement), in exchange for rapprochement with East Germany. The Schröder-Putin pipeline deal of late 2005 and Merkel's endorsement of the logic of Putin's opposition to Ukraine's and Georgia's integration into Euro-Atlantic structures continue this pattern.

 

In all five instances, radically different German regimes consistently pursued the same foreign policy goal. Whether unstable and democratic as in 1922, powerful and totalitarian as in 1938, stable and democratic as during the Cold War, or powerful and democratic as today-German elites, whether Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, or Nazis, forged alliances with an authoritarian Russia at the expense of their democratic neighbors in Eastern Europe. This overarching vision of Germany's interests is unabashedly geopolitical, pointing to a possible reassertion in today's Germany of the Realpolitik political culture that dominated German foreign policy after unification in 1871 and that produced the disasters of the two world wars.

 

It's hard to see how Europe-whether as an ethical community or as the European Union-can survive Germany's return to great-power thinking and politics. A truly democratic club of countries cannot unconditionally prefer authoritarianism to democracy in all its dealings with its eastern neighbors. A truly functioning EU-whether as a club of equals or as a super-state-cannot exist if its largest member is committed to its own interests above all others. (It was Schröder, after all, who in the run-up to the Iraq War declared that he would ignore a UN resolution to support the U.S. invasion.)

 

Since the problem is political culture, any effective solution must focus on it as well. The Holocaust points the way to just how German elites might be swayed to think differently about politics. The shame of six million dead Jews has kept Germany honest in its dealings with Israel. The shame of the millions of Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians who were killed in two world wars may be the only way to remind Berlin that it cannot just ignore the values and interests of the countries that lie east of Germany and west of Russia in its ruthless pursuit of self-interest.

And the ethical community that is supposed to be Europe could only benefit from a recognition that human rights also exist outside the European Union's current borders.

 

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark.

 

 

 

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