[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: KP; EDM; CT

[Deychak, Orest]

Kyiv Post

Editorial

Destructive force

 

April 9, 2009

The Party of Regions is a destructive force in Ukraine, historically and
today.

 

Despite having nearly 40 percent of the seats in Ukraine's parliament,
the Party of Regions remains a destructive force in national politics.
The party's miserable failings make us fervently hope that its leader,
ex-Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych, doesn't get anywhere near the
presidency. He has demonstrated, time and again, that he lacks the
character and ability to run this great nation.

"I would prefer that the Party of the Regions did not act according to
the principles of Somali pirates, who do their black deeds oblivious to
the crisis in the world and in the country," Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko said of the Yanukovych-led bunch. While we have plenty of
misgivings about Tymoshenko, the prime minister is right about the
harmful role of the Regions Party.

This collection of self-serving politicians, in the middle of an
economic crisis, would rather block the work of parliament rather than
constructively offer anti-crisis legislation or compromise in good faith
with proposals on the table.

Party leaders further display their irresponsibility by organizing
rallies and protests, the latest of which took place on April 3, when an
estimated 10,000 people took to the streets of Kyiv. Some demonstrators,
we have been reliably told, were paid Hr 20 per hour to attend.

People justifiably point to the failures of Tymoshenko and President
Victor Yushchenko. But the truth, as we see it, is that Yanukovych's
bunch is as bad or worse.

His party's role in the voter fraud that led to the 2004 Orange
Revolution during the last presidential election has never been
adequately explored. Far from being a force to shed light on corruption
and crimes hobbling the nation's break from the Leonid Kuchma era, the
Regions Party seems to do everything in its power to make sure a
prosecutor general and other law enforcement officials are in place who
will ensure that misdeeds never see justice's light.

Rather than push for consensus and social healing on thorny issues -
such as Ukraine's attitude towards NATO, the European Union and its
complicated World War II history - the Regions Party seems bent on
inflaming tensions.

Ukraine badly needs to unlock Western aid, starting with unfreezing the
International Monetary Fund's $16.4 billion in loans. The money is
essential to supporting the nation's wobbly currency.

Instead of leading, Yanukovych grandstands by forcing votes on the
resignation of the government or giving Tymoshenko a "last chance" by
April 14 to present an anti-crisis program.

Yanukovych, a Soviet-style hack, offers plenty of criticism but always
comes up short in offering meaningful solutions. It's probably because
he doesn't have any ideas, except to keep attending to the needs of
eastern industrial barons.

Doing nothing offers Yanukovych and other politicians the luxury of
posturing as outsiders to the misrule that the nation is enduring. While
it may keep his popularity ratings from collapsing, voters should not be
fooled. With great power comes great responsibility. There is nothing in
Yanukovych's record to warrant voters giving him any more of either.

Eurasia Daily Monitor

April 8, 2009

Russian "National Identity" and the Ukraine-EU Pipeline Deal

Ukraine's gas pipeline deal with the EU on March 23 led to an avalanche
of Russian outrage that had less to do with the agreement, but exposed
the Kremlin's use of Russian national identity. Russia apparently felt
'betrayed' by Europe and Ukraine. Russian state-controlled media
attacked its exclusion from the negotiations, maintaining that without
Russia the modernization of the pipelines would not be viable, cast
doubt on the viability of the plans and vilified the $5 to 7 billion
promised by the EU as far too little. On March 23 Rossiya TV said the EU
had forgotten that the pipelines are "mere junk without gas."

Far more was involved than a show of anger over Moscow's exclusion from
the deal. On March 25 Rossiyskaya Gazeta claimed, "Europe does not want
to see our country [as part of Europe] and sometimes does not even want
to listen to it." While Komsomolskaya Pravda noted that, "Europe wants
to control our gas all by itself, so to speak. Russia has been assigned
the role of a docile gas supplier, an appendix which possesses natural
resources." Elsewhere, the Russian media was no less critical,
describing the EU and Ukraine as adopting a "disrespectful attitude
towards [Russia's] interests." A report on Center TVInternational on
March 28 concluded that, "Our European partners are incapable of being
loyal on either geopolitical or economic issues" (Trud, Center TV
International, March 25, 28).

The March pipeline deal also revealed the immaturity of Ukrainian
domestic politics. Since mid-2008 Tymoshenko has been savagely attacked
in Ukraine by the president and his secretariat because the prime
minister was allegedly doing the bidding of Putin in return for Russian
support in the presidential elections. They demanded the prosecutor's
office institute criminal charges of "treason" against her, which the
prosecutor found insufficient evidence to warrant.

Fedor Lukyanov, editor of the Russia in Global Affairs journal, pointed
out that one reason for Putin's over-reaction was that he felt
"betrayed" by Tymoshenko (Vremya Novostey, March 25). Putin was
committed to the January gas agreement signed with the Ukrainian prime
minister as the basis, "for building a political and energy
partnership." As a former FSB officer Putin knows that duplicity is
central to the post-Soviet psyche. Tymoshenko explained the deal as
protecting national interests and that she did not "betray" Russia.
Instead Ukraine "has decently and clearly protected its main gas transit
pipeline" (Ukrayinska Pravda, March 24). On March 29 Tymoshenko told
Ukraine's 1+1 TV, "One needs courage to defend Ukraine's national
interests and I have never backed the strategic aims of other countries
to by-pass Ukraine with alternative pipelines and thereby leave our gas
transit system without gas, without transit fees, without at a minimum
$3 billion dollars each year for Ukraine's economy."

In February 2007, Tymoshenko mobilized 430 deputies to vote for a law
that banned the sale, lease or rent of Ukraine's gas pipelines. The move
was a response to a threat by the Viktor Yanukovych government to create
a Ukrainian-Russian consortium for the pipelines. Tymoshenko pointed out
that, "I have always defended the gas transit system from dishonest
privatization, from dishonest consortiums and knew that in doing so
Ukraine is protected from being a geopolitical object of energy supplies
to a direct partner and player" (1+1 TV, March 29).

Deputy Prime Minister Hryhoriy Nemyria (Tymoshenko's unofficial "foreign
minister" on her visits to the West) explained that Ukrainian
politicians were wrong to portray Ukraine's relations with Russia as a
zero-sum game against its relations with the West. In fact, "the absence
of a deep strategic analysis has made Ukrainian politicians uninterested
in Europe, the USA and Russia" (Ukrayinska Pravda, April 2).

On March 26 a discussion between Ukraine's Ambassador to Russia
Kostyantyn Hryshchenko, shadow foreign minister in the pro-Russian Party
of Regions, and Russia's representative to NATO Dmitriy Rogozin on NTV
showed that Russia's over-reaction was a product of its inability to see
Ukraine as a fully fledged independent state. In addition, the pipeline
deal was evidence that Ukraine was continuing to distance itself from
Russia. Rogozin, like most Russians, regards the Orange Revolution as
Ukraine, "embarking on a course of splitting the East Slav world."
Russia had not criticized Ukraine for seeking EU membership until now
because it had always been seen this as an unrealistic objective (unlike
NATO membership which Moscow thought was imminent after Yushchenko's
election). Hryshchenko stated that Ukraine seeks good relations with
Russia. NTV refuted this, saying it is not perceived in Moscow and said
it was a "tragedy for Russia" that Ukraine, "does not want to be with us
and instead they want to be in NATO, which means that our former
neighbors and our fraternal countries do not believe in Russia, do not
believe in its course and do not want to be part of it."

Ukraine's integration into the EU rather than into NATO (whose current
expansion drive is stalled), might be raising fears in Moscow following
Kyiv's pipeline agreement and an imminent free trade agreement with the
EU. These steps make Ukraine appear as a more realistic candidate for EU
membership. Ironically, Tymoshenko and Nemyria might be more of a threat
to Russia's interests than Yushchenko as they both emphasize Ukraine's
priority as integration into the EU, which unlike possible NATO
membership has popular support within Ukraine.

--Taras Kuzio 

Chicago Tribune

Live! Movies

Doctor's impulse to heal takes him to help out in Ukraine 

By Michael Phillips, TRIBUNE CRITIC 

10 April 2009

Chicagoland Final

3

'The English Surgeon' ****

Commissioned by BBC2's "Storyville" series, "The English Surgeon"
reacquaints you with an underrated human impulse, the one that says:
"Surely I can do something to help." London neurosurgeon Dr. Henry Marsh
has acted on that impulse for years. In 1992 the man with the owlish
specs visited a state hospital in Ukraine to give a series of lectures.
What he found there was "like being in a horror film," he later told one
reporter. Doctors labored under miserable conditions with makeshift
equipment and a criminal lack of funding. Patients afflicted with brain
tumors -- successfully resolved via early diagnosis and proper treatment
in Britain -- were, in Ukraine, subject to often fatal delays.

Marsh's Ukrainian friend and ally, neurosurgeon Igor Kurilets, runs a
Kiev neurology clinic. Marsh has made annual sojourns there, and it's on
one of these trips we become intimate with Marsh's methods, hopes,
doubts and expertise. "The English Surgeon" begins with Marsh at home in
England, constructing a wooden box built for medical equipment no longer
needed in the British system. A brain perforator, for example --
basically a drill bit -- is typically used once in England and then
discarded. In Kiev the same perforator will be used for 10 years.

Marsh and Petrovich deal with many patients; the film focuses on one in
particular, Marian Dolishny, a resident of Western Ukraine with a
life-threatening tumor. The operating room footage is spectacularly
stomach-churning but calmly matter-of-fact, showing Marsh wielding a
cordless drill and, at one point, appearing to floss the brain of
Dolishny (!), who remains awake during the entire operation. (!!)

In this business, especially in this country, some live; some die. "The
English Surgeon" deals with Marsh's visit to the mother of a patient he
could not save years ago, and whose death has haunted him since. The
surgeon likens hospitals to prisons; both, he says, are places "where a
small number of people are doing nasty things to a large number of
people." And yet the "blood sport" of brain surgery, in Marsh's words,
yields the occasional miracle. Exceptionally well-crafted, this doc may
appeal most to those who have a doctor in the family. But I can't
imagine anyone seeing it dispassionately.

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