[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WT; NYT; Reuters; FT

[Deychak, Orest]

The Washington Times

www.washingtontimes.com


Thursday, April 16, 2009 


Ukraine's Orange Revolution fades into disillusion


Natalia A. Feduschak, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

BUCHACH, Ukraine | Volodymyr Mushak voted for Viktor Yushchenko in
Ukraine's highly contested presidential race in 2004. He is not sure he
would do so again. 

"I don't see the result of his work," said Mr. Mushak, who teaches
business and economics at a local institute in this historic town in
western Ukraine. "As for parliament, they made Ukraine into mud." 

Sentiments like these can be heard all over the country. Four years
after the Orange Revolution propelled Mr. Yushchenko and a team of
Western-oriented reformers to power, Ukraine is in a quagmire and Mr.
Yushchenko - once the darling of the George W. Bush administration - has
approval ratings of 3.5 percent. 

Gross domestic product shriveled by 25 percent to 30 percent in the
first two months of 2009, Mr. Yushchenko has acknowledged. In the
industrial east, factory closings have strangled output and led to
massive job cuts. In the agricultural west, anxious farmers are unsure
how they can revive declining fortunes. 

Numerous polls show Ukrainians increasingly distrust their leaders and
are tired of the infighting that has dominated the country's politics.
Most of all, they are unhappy with their president. 

"Admit your mistakes of the last 4 1/2 years," said Viktor Yanukovych,
Mr. Yushchenko's opponent in 2004 and now leader of the opposition. "We
need to tell the truth about what happened to our country, what state
the country is in," he recently told a late-night television audience. 

Mr. Yushchenko's supporters say democracy has been consolidated during
his tenure. 

Raisa Bohatyrova, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense
Council, told editors and reporters of The Washington Times on Wednesday
that Mr. Yushchenko made "enormous efforts to revive the Ukrainian
identity, is a champion of free press and free speech" and had
"encouraged the growth of civil society." 

Public expectations in 2004 were too high, she said, and people expected
"immediate positive results. ... It's very hard and can't take place
overnight." 

She faulted a constitution that does not adequately separate powers
between the president and parliament as well as global economic events
beyond Ukraine's control. 

Opponents say Mr. Yushchenko has not shown strong leadership. They blame
him for frequent public denunciation of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko,
his one-time Orange Revolution ally, as the two have struggled for
power. 

They also say he has not been aggressive enough in stopping the steep
economic decline. 

In a recent address to parliament, Mr. Yushchenko said Ukraine had lost
its foreign markets, particularly for steel and chemicals, and 60
percent of its exports in the wake of the global economic crisis. 

"We were ill-prepared to confront the crisis, and its first blow was
painful and difficult. ... The consequence of this was a slowdown in
[gross domestic product] growth in 2008 to 2.1 percent ... and a
destructive fall of 25 [percent] to 30 percent according to figures from
January to February 2009," he said. 

Ukraine is in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund to
receive a second tranche of a $16.5 billion loan to stabilize its
economy. 

Ukraine's next presidential elections initially were scheduled for Jan.
17, but parliament recently voted to move the date to Oct. 25. 

Mr. Yushchenko has said he would support a presidential vote in October
if parliamentary elections were held simultaneously. 

"I will be taking part in both elections," he told the Kommersant
Ukraina daily on Wednesday. "When I look at the ratings, it does not
mean that I have to reach for some heart medication. ... I know that
behind me are millions of people who share my values." 

The president's approval rating is 3.5 percent, according to a March
survey conducted by the Razumkov Center, a Kiev-based think tank. Mr.
Yanukovych led the pack of expected contenders with about 17 percent of
the vote, while Mrs. Tymoshenko came in a close second with almost 16
percent. 

Arseniy Yatseniuk, 34, a former speaker of parliament who many here say
could surge in popularity, now places third with 12 percent. Volodymyr
Lytvyn, the current parliament speaker, had 5.9 percent. 

Mrs. Bohatyrova said there could be "totally different faces by the time
of the election," but she did not give details. 

Some analysts caution against holding simultaneous presidential and
parliamentary elections. 

"It opens up the possibility for falsification and wrongdoing," said
Tanya Boyko of Opora, a nonprofit group that monitors elections. "It
will be impossible to ensure open and transparent elections." 

Despite his unhappiness with Mr. Yushchenko, Mr. Mushak, the teacher,
said he is skeptical about an October vote. 

"For the upper echelons of power, the early elections are a good idea
because they are fighting for the presidential chair. But today we don't
see young progressive leaders. The establishment will never let them
into power," said Mr. Mushak, who headed Buchach's election commission
in 2004. 

Mr. Mushak said he is concerned that Ukrainian politicians are merely
playing musical chairs, with each one taking their turn at the helm but
not instituting significant reforms. "We don't want to play their
political games, because they don't do anything." 

Victoria Vasylenko, 30, a Kiev-based lawyer, agreed. 

"It can't continue this way," he said. "Ukraine needs leaders who will
think about the people, and with these leaders, we will go to Europe.
With each day, we lose more and more." 

c Barbara Slavin contributed to this report from Washington. 

The New York Times

www.nytimes.com

 

April 13, 2009


A Wild Cossack Rides Into a Cultural Battle 


By ELLEN BARRY

MOSCOW - Russia's latest action hero galloped onto movie screens here
this month, slicing up Polish noblemen like so many cabbages. 

Taras Bulba, the 15th-century Cossack immortalized in Nikolai Gogol's
novel by that name, disdains peace talks as "womanish" and awes his men
with speeches about the Russian soul. When Polish soldiers finally burn
him at the stake, he roars out his faith in the Russian czar even as
flames lick at his mustache. 

A lush $20 million film adaptation of the book was rolled out at a
jam-packed premiere in Moscow on April 1, complete with rows of faux
Cossacks on horseback. Vladimir V. Bortko's movie, financed in part by
the Russian Ministry of Culture, is a work of sword-rattling patriotism
that moved some viewers in Moscow to tears. 

It is also a salvo in a culture war between Russia and Ukraine's
Western-leaning leadership. The film's heroes are Ukrainian Cossacks,
but they fight an enemy from the West and reserve their dying words for
"the Orthodox Russian land." 

Mr. Bortko aimed to show that "there is no separate Ukraine," as he put
it in an interview, and that "the Russian people are one." Filing out of
the premiere, audience members said they hoped it would increase
pro-Russian feeling in Ukraine.

"The political elite there will not like it," said Nikolai Varentsov,
28, a lawyer. "But there are certain ideas that unite us and must be
shown. For regular people in Ukraine, this film will be understood." 

The tension between Russia and Ukraine, which grew during a winter
standoff over natural gas payments, has now shifted to the cultural
arena. Both countries marked the 200th birthday of Gogol, who was born
in Ukraine but wrote in Russian and is considered central to the Russian
literary canon. 

On April 1, Gogol's birthday, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin hailed
him as "an outstanding Russian writer." Meanwhile, at a ceremony at
Gogol's birthplace, President Viktor A. Yushchenko of Ukraine declared
him unambiguously Ukrainian.

"I think all the arguments about where he belongs are pointless and even
humiliating to some extent," Mr. Yushchenko said, according to the
Interfax-Ukraine news service. "He no doubt belongs in Ukraine. Gogol
wrote in Russian, but he thought and felt in Ukrainian." 

There has been a vigorous tug of war over Taras Bulba, a character who
combines the outsize proportions of Paul Bunyan with the speechifying of
Henry V. 

Gogol himself set the stage for the fight, devoting lyrical passages to
praise of Russia and its people. Ukrainian scholars, translating the
book, replaced references to Russia with Ukraine or other phrases,
arguing that it better reflected Gogol's original manuscript, which he
expanded and rewrote into the text most readers know. 

Three days before the premiere, Ukrainian state television broadcast the
first Ukrainian-language film adaptation, produced hastily on a budget
of less than $500,000. 

But there was no way it could compete with the Russian epic, the
culmination of three years of work by Mr. Bortko, who is admired for
faithful adaptations of Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" and Mikhail Bulgakov's
"Heart of a Dog." Much of it was filmed by the Dniepr River in southern
Ukraine, where horsemen shrink to black dots on the rippling steppe.
Inside the encampment where Cossacks mustered four centuries ago, a
thousand extras gorge themselves on brandy and war, crimson pants
billowing.

At the heart of the film is great Russia. In the opening scene, Bulba,
played by the extraordinary Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, rallies his
soldiers with a speech that was committed to memory by generations of
Soviet schoolchildren: "No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves
is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has
given, all that is within you."

Bad reviews began coming in from Kiev, Ukraine's capital, well before
the film opened. 

"Russian history is short of heroes, and they are borrowing others',"
sniped Oleg Tyagnibok, the leader of the nationalist Freedom Party.
Writing for the Unian news agency, Ksenia Lesiv asked, "Israelis and
Palestinians - are they also one people?" And Volodymyr Voytenko, a
prominent Ukrainian film critic, said long stretches of Mr. Bortko's
film "resemble leaflets for Putin." 

"It's a very imperial film, that's what I'd like to say," said Mr.
Voytenko, who founded the film journal Kino-Kolo. "Everything else
follows from that fact."

Top Ukrainian officials did not attend the opening in Kiev on April 2.
But viewers who emerged from the first showing said they found Mr.
Bortko's message of pan-Slavic unity deeply moving. Yulia Velichko, 20,
a student, hesitated at the idea of rejoining the Russian fold, saying,
"We fought so hard for our independence." But her companion, Valery
Skuratov, was convinced.

"We should join Russia," he said. "We're closer to them than we are to
the Amerikozy," a mildly derogatory term for Americans.

Russians showed no such restraint. The premiere inspired viewers in
Krasnodar to shave their heads into Cossack haircuts, and early this
month Russian Fashion Week devoted an afternoon to a collection called
Cossacks in the City. 

At the film premiere in Moscow's Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000,
the audience applauded at Bulba's "Russian soul" speech, and then again
when the Cossacks thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to
drive out the Poles. Among those who felt exaltation was an
ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. 

"It's better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons," he told
Vesti-TV after the premiere. "Everyone who sees the film will understand
that Russians and Ukrainians are one people - and that the enemy is from
the West." 

Mr. Bortko, in an interview, said the state-owned Rossiya television
channel had commissioned him to make "Taras Bulba" because the conflict
with Kiev made it "politically topical." He shrugged off the suggestion
that Ukrainians might view the film as divisive, noting that he spent
the first 30 years of his life in Ukraine.

"I have more right to speak about Ukraine than 99 percent of those who
say otherwise," he said. Ukrainians and Russians, he said, "are like two
drops of mercury. When two drops of mercury are near each other, they
will unite. You've seen this. Exactly in the same way, our two peoples
are united." 

Anyway, he said: "I just filmed Gogol. I didn't make up a single
phrase." 

But as his blockbuster opened at more than 600 theaters across Russia
and Ukraine, that conversation was just beginning. In Nezavisimaya
Gazeta, a newspaper in Moscow that is often critical of the government,
Yekaterina Barabash noted small alterations that Mr. Bortko made to
Gogol's text, which she said served to transform a wild Cossack into a
respectable patriot, suitable for wide distribution.

"What can we do: exaggeration is one of the tokens of our time," she
wrote. "The cultivation of patriotism, which our government focuses on
now, is a token and part of our filmmaking industry. One hope: history
will show that such filmmaking does not live long. It will fall into
irrelevance, when times change. And Gogol - hooray! - will remain." 

David Stern contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.


 


Reuters


Ukraine's Yushchenko says to seek re-election


Wed Apr 15, 2009 

KIEV (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, his public image
in tatters after 4 1/2 years in office beset by constant bickering, said
in an interview published on Wednesday he intended to seek re-election.

Yushchenko also told the Kommersant Ukraina daily he would run for
parliament if an early election for the assembly was called at the same
time.

"I will be taking part in both elections. When I look at the ratings it
does not mean that I have to reach for some sort of heart medication and
change my mind," Yushchenko told the daily.

"I know that behind me are millions of people who share my values. If I
change my mind, these people will see that as a sign of weakness or
betrayal, a refusal to finish something that has been started."

Yushchenko enjoyed huge popularity after being swept to power in 2005 by
mass "Orange Revolution" protests, his standing boosted by worldwide
sympathy for having survived poisoning by dioxin which disfigured him
for a time.

He won the presidency after the Supreme Court ordered a re-run of the
election, Moscow-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovich having won the
initial vote which was judged rigged.

His poll rating stood at a huge 60 percent as he called for Ukraine to
move out of Moscow's shadow and work toward long-term membership of the
European Union and NATO.

But most Ukrainians now speak of Yushchenko with open derision after
constant quarrelling with the "orange" camp which proclaimed democratic
values during weeks of mass protests.

With his poll ratings now in single figures, he is widely viewed as a
figure on the way out of Ukrainian politics, with no chance of winning
re-election.

Most of the rows pitted him against Yulia Tymoshenko, his ally from the
revolution who was twice appointed prime minister. Each accuses the
other of hindering reforms and betraying the national interest.

Yanukovich, who has also twice served as prime minister, leads opinion
polls with more than 20 percent support. Following close behind is
Tymoshenko, who still enjoys widespread support despite irritation among
voters at the constant rows.

Both are almost certain to run in the presidential poll.

Parliament this month called a presidential election for October 25,
earlier than had been expected, but the president has challenged the
decision in the Constitutional Court.

Yushchenko's supporters and Yanukovich's Regions Party, favor holding an
early parliamentary election at the same time as the presidential
contest

Financial Times

www.ft.com

Tymoshenko bypasses parliament for IMF loan

By Roman Olearchyk

Published: April 14 2009 

Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian prime minister, said her government had
unilaterally adopted initiatives needed to unlock an International
Monetary Fund loan for her recession-battered country after MPs failed
to adopt conditions.

The development comes after months of tough talks with IMF officials and
amid heightened concerns that Ukraine may plunge deeper into financial
disarray without IMF support. Kiev's feuding lawmakers have, in recent
months, failed to adopt legislation needed to unfreeze a $16.4bn IMF
standby loan granted last autumn.

The first IMF tranche of $4.5bn granted last year helped to stabilise
Ukraine, one of the world's economies hardest hit by recession. But the
IMF has delayed additional disbursements amid relentless political
bickering and concerns over Kiev's fiscal prudence.

Speaking at an extraordinary cabinet meeting, Ms Tymoshenko accused her
bitter rival Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's president, of sabotaging plans
for parliament to adopt IMF-related legislation. Ms Tymoshenko said her
government had adopted the needed measures as cabinet resolutions hours
after parliament failed to do so. Ukrainian legal experts said it was
unclear if Kiev's government had such authority. 

Ms Tymoshenko said the resolutions were legal and binding. She slammed
Mr Yushchenko, saying: "The vote in parliament was consciously and
cynically sabotaged [by lawmakers] which are controlled by the
president."

Mr Yushchenko pointed the blame at Ms Tymoshenko, while his allies in
parliament publicly pledged not to support the government's initiatives.

Ms Tymoshenko's government is formally backed by a hairline majority in
parliament. Her foes, including other parties, have refused to back the
three IMF-related laws that are aimed at balancing the finances of
Ukraine's budget, pension fund and state gas company.

IMF representatives have in recent months urged Kiev's politicians to
consolidate behind a single anti-crisis strategy, but have not taken
sides with either political grouping. 

But sitting alongside Ms Tymoshenko at a press conference, Ceyla
Pazarbasioglu, IMF mission chief to Ukraine, said the IMF would closer
study the government resolutions adopted, and carefully added: "As the
prime minister said, perhaps this is the way to go given the political
circumstances."

Ms Pazarbasioglu said that "it is encouraging to see progress is being
made" in handling Ukraine's economic woes. But she could not say when
fresh IMF cash would make its way to Kiev.

Kiev's currency has stabilised in recent months after losing about 40
per cent of its value immediately after the global financial crisis
struck. Unemployment in this country of 46 million citizens has doubled
to about 1 million. Ukraine's banking system remains shaky after
citizens withdrew about a third of deposits and struggle to pay loans.

 

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