[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: FT(2); EDM; WoE; Economist

[Deychak, Orest]

Financial Times

www.ft.com

IMF to approve further $3bn Ukraine aid

By Roman Olearchyk in Kiev 

Published: July 11 2009 

An International Monetary Fund mission visiting Ukraine said yesterday it would recommend approval of a further $3.3bn in aid, while downgrading its annual growth forecast for one of the world's most recession-battered economies.

Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, IMF mission chief to Ukraine, said Kiev could expect the third tranche from a $16.4bn (€11.7bn, £10.1bn) standby loan granted last autumn within four weeks, pending approval by the fund's board.

The fresh cash also hangs on adoption of legislation to reform Ukraine's bank sector, a challenge given that the country's parliament has been paralysed in bitter political rivalries.

Referring to a disastrous 20-per-cent contraction in gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2009, Ms Pazarbasioglu said the fund had downgraded annual growth expectations for Ukraine from 8 per cent to 14 per cent. "These revisions mainly reflect the first quarter. Looking forward, we hope there will be a return to growth," she said, adding that government and central bank policies had "allowed the country to manage the crisis, bringing stability to its financial system".

The global economic recession has severely cut domestic consumption and demand for steel, Kiev's top export.

The country's finances are currently stretched to the limit. With a 40 per cent market share, European banks are watching Kiev closely after fuelling a lending boom that went bust, and fear that its troubles could spill over.

Russia has urged Brussels to help Ukraine finance natural gas payments, threatening to cut off flow - a move that could disrupt supplies to Europe - if Kiev's bills are not paid on time.

Yulia Tymoshenko, prime minister, said fresh IMF funds would help "minimise losses during the crisis period".

The IMF agreed to accept a larger budget deficit of 6 per cent rather than 4 per cent. "We have been flexible in this difficult period, and will support Ukraine as long as good policies continue to be implemented," Ms Pazarbasioglu said.

In return, Ms Tymoshenko agreed to "unpopular measures", cutting budget expenditure and balancing the finances of a cash-strapped state gas company by gradually raising tariffs on households each quarter, to market levels.

Politically, however, this is a risky move ahead of a January 2010 presidential election in which Ms Tymoshenko is a leading contender.

Referring to poisonous political rivalries that have complicated Ukraine's handling of the recession, Ms Pazarbasioglu called for "consensus".

Ukraine's currency plunged 40 per cent last autumn in the wake of the global financial crisis, rattling banks and other lenders.

The weaker currency has helped exporters and equalised Kiev's trade balance. However, unemployment has doubled, leaving 1m jobless.

Ukraine's 46m citizens are economically squeezed and disillusioned with their leadership, but have remained largely calm.

Financial Times

Russia’s free media find a haven in Ukraine

By Chrystia Freeland 

Published: July 11 2009 

Imagine Jeremy Paxman being forced by an authoritarian crackdown on the media to flee London for Dublin, and begin a new career as a prime-time presenter in Ireland. A decade ago, it would have been equally preposterous for Russians to conceive of Moscow’s TV news stars – who, thanks to the youth of their country’s democracy, tended to be more influential and admired than their western counterparts – having to abandon jobs in the Imperial City and seek work in one of the former Soviet republics.

The big problem with the Russian media seemed to be too much pluralism and too few standards, not too little freedom. And the country’s democracy, while chaotic and unruly, appeared to be one of the great accomplishments of the Yeltsin era. Moreover, even the most liberal, least chauvinist Muscovite would never have dreamed of exchanging the cosmopolitan opportunities of the capital for the backwater cities of the ex-Soviet Union.

That’s why I was a little surprised, a couple of months ago, as I settled into my seat for the hour-long flight from Moscow to Kiev, to see Yevgeny Kisiliev, the television anchor who was the face of the Yeltsin revolution, sitting across the aisle. And I was astonished when I learnt the purpose of his trip: Kisiliev, who had been Russia’s most influential TV journalist, was commuting to his new job as an anchor in Ukraine.

“Travelling to Ukraine is like going back in a time machine to the 1990s – they have real politics there,” Kisiliev told me enthusiastically. With his trademark thatch of thick, extravagantly boyish butterscotch hair and full moustache, Kisiliev still looked every bit the TV celebrity. And with his Hugo Boss glasses and chunky steel wristwatch, he met the dress code of a cabin filled with Gucci-clad women who looked like they were auditioning for a James Bond movie and their wannabe-oligarch boyfriends.

Kisiliev explained that on his weekly Moscow radio show – he has been forced off regular television – he could only interview political analysts, since the politicians themselves refuse to appear. Independent journalism has been so marginalised in Russia, he said, that “even the press secretaries don’t like to talk to us any more”. In Kiev, by contrast, politicians not only come on his show, they answer their own mobile phones. “Working in Ukraine allows me to be a true political journalist,” Kisiliev said. “In Russia, there is no open political debate any more. The authorities are hermetically sealed, we can just hypothesise about the discussion going on inside. I call it the black box. Here [in Ukraine] you have access to tonnes of information, to almost any politician.”

. . .

The story of the calculated and ruthless erosion of media freedom in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a familiar one – beginning with the exile and expropriation of the media tycoons and descending to the almost routine killings of journalists, including most famously Anna Politkovskaya. Ukraine, meanwhile, is known for an unexpectedly robust national insistence on democracy, which propelled the success of the Orange Revolution. And so while Russia has moved away from democracy, its neighbour – which many Russians claim as a cultural and historic twin – has moved towards it. That divergence is one big cause of the fraught relations between the world’s two largest Slavic nations – and it could be a key to whether Russia’s current soft authoritarianism is a relatively brief setback on the difficult road to democracy or the country’s new status quo.

Meanwhile, no one embodies the story of the divergent political paths of the two biggest former Soviet states more vividly than the journalists who reported on – and participated in – the rise of Russian democracy. And who now, as that democracy has collapsed, have found themselves forced to defect south, to Ukraine’s resurgent culture of pluralism.

Kisiliev’s weekly news show has only been on air since the beginning of the year, but when our flight landed in Kiev, I saw he had already made an impact: one of the border guards was a fan, and he whisked Kisiliev, his two producers and me, clinging to their coat-tails, to the front of the passport queue.

Uniformed officials in the former Soviet Union aren’t known to be either charmers or news junkies, so Kisiliev’s warm welcome began to answer one of my immediate questions about his new gig: how were Ukrainians responding to the appearance of Russia’s most famous TV newsman on their screens? Tension with Russia, after all, is the dominant fact of Ukrainian political life and, during a week in Ukraine this spring, I saw signs that at a popular level, too, Ukrainians were beginning to define themselves by their opposition to their former suzerain. My favourite example was the T-shirt I spotted on the flight from Kiev back to New York. Making a reference to the one-hour time difference between Ukraine and western Russia, it read: “Wake Up Ukraine! The Muscovite has already been up for an hour”.

Kisiliev says he and the owners of his new network had had the same reservations. “There were some doubts, fears that my arrival here would not be well-received. I do an analytical show, with commentary and opinion, and for a foreign journalist to do this, people worried it would look bad.”

Those worries were misplaced. For one thing, Kisiliev said, the Ukrainian political scene is “so open, it is not that hard to learn it”. Nor has language been much of a barrier. Most of the country is fluidly bilingual, especially in its public life. Kisiliev’s show, like debate in the Ukrainian parliament, is conducted in Ukrainian and Russian. He speaks Russian and his guests speak whichever language they prefer. When they opt for Ukrainian, he understands “90 to 95 per cent”; “I practise Ukrainian every day,” he said.

Nor are people suspicious that Kisiliev is in Kiev to advance Moscow’s political agenda. If his being forced off the airwaves by the Putin regime didn’t put paid to that possibility, hostile relations between his new station’s owners and the Russian government would: TVi, the start-up channel he appears on, is a private venture owned 50 per cent by Vladimir Gusinsky, the flamboyant Russian media oligarch who was forced into exile in 2001, and 50 per cent by Konstantin Kagalovsky, a fellow exile and former business partner of jailed oil baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

. . .

“Everyone here knows perfectly well that the current owners of the channel can in no way be seen as representatives of the Russian government,” Kisiliev explained. Kagalovsky agreed: “I haven’t been to Russia for five years. Gusinsky has criminal charges against him in Russia. No one will worry that this channel is advocating the Kremlin line.”

Later, when the mobile phone of one of the channel’s exiled Russian executives rang, I got a sense of how strong the team’s animosity towards Russia’s current rulers is. I noticed an image flash on to the phone’s screen, set to appear every time it rings – a photo of the Russian prime minister with the words “Fuck Putin!” superimposed on top.

I didn’t have a chance to examine Kisiliev’s mobile phone, but the story of his career over the past decade is also the story of Putin’s step-by-step suffocation of independent broadcasting in Russia. Kisiliev launched his flagship news analysis show, Itogi (Conclusions) on January 5 1992, 10 days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The programme, broadcast on NTV, reigned as Russia’s premier political TV show until early 2001, when Putin, a year into his presidency, began to tighten control over the airwaves.

Putin’s first target was NTV, an independent media company founded by Gusinsky. The Kremlin’s de facto expropriation of the group was accomplished via Gazprom, the state-controlled energy giant, and co-operative courts. On the weekend of April 14, after weeks of public struggle, the company’s new owners installed their own security guards at the station and Kisiliev and his colleagues were locked out. They initially found refuge at TV-6, a smaller channel owned by Russia’s remaining media tycoon, Boris Berezovsky. But by the beginning of 2002, TV-6 had also been closed down as the Kremlin turned its guns on Putin’s king-maker. 

Desperate to remain on air, Kisiliev and his team of NTV refugees continued to work at a reconstituted TV-6 (called TV-S), this time backed by a group of more compliant businessmen. Kisiliev now believes that the resurrected TV-6 was “a political project by the authorities to say, ‘See, there are no problems, the NTV journalists are still working’,” and, with hindsight, he regrets helping to build that Potemkin village. By June 2003, the new TV-6’s backers had stopped financing the station and “it quietly died”. 

Next Kisiliev became editor of the Moscow News newspaper, which had been purchased by oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. But Khodorkovsky was arrested on October 25 2003, having chosen to stay in Russia and fight accusations of fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion, rather than flee as Gusinsky and Berezovsky had done. (Still in jail, Khodorkovsky this summer faces fresh charges that could prolong his term.)

. . .

With two former employers in exile, and one imprisoned, Kisiliev spent a couple of years as a freelance print journalist. Eventually, he was invited to anchor a show on Ekho Moskvy, the Gusinsky-supported independent radio station that, along with a few small-circulation newspapers, the Kremlin tolerates. Marginalised in Moscow, Kisiliev found himself following the two owners of his new TV station to Ukraine. “They thought the media market would develop here and they could do journalism, which they can’t in Russia,” Kisiliev said. They also thought Ukraine’s intensely politicised culture, and the close connections between business and politics, offered an opportunity to make money.

Its owners hope TVi will be broadcast throughout Ukraine by the autumn, but at the moment it is available free to air only in half-a-dozen eastern and southern cities. For now, Kisiliev is able to build a national presence by making guest appearances on the television show of another Yeltsin-era Russian media star who has re-established himself in Kiev: Savik Shuster.

Shuster, whose family in Soviet times emigrated from Lithuania to Israel and then Canada, became a fixture on the Moscow media scene in the 1990s, working at Radio Liberty, which moved from the dissident fringes to the mainstream as the country flipped from authoritarianism to democracy.

When Gusinsky lost control of NTV, Shuster was offered a job by the channel’s new, Kremlin-backed owners and, ironically, it was he who replaced Kisiliev as the channel’s dominant political journalist. But after Putin was re-elected to a second presidential term, Shuster, like Kisiliev, found himself forced off the air. “They told me it was because the audience was too old,” Shuster recalled over espressos at Pantagruel, one of Kiev’s most popular Italian restaurants. He is dressed more like an archetypal intellectual than a TV personality, in black sweater, jeans and rimless, rectangular glasses. “I said that was a blatant lie – the truth was the Kremlin could no longer afford an open, live show.”

He lingered in Moscow for a year. Then came the Orange Revolution. When Ukraine’s democrats won that struggle, Shuster was amused to learn that his friend, Boris Nemtsov, a former provincial governor and deputy prime minister who had joined Russia’s rag-tag political opposition, had become an adviser to Viktor Yushchenko, the new Ukrainian president. “I decided to go and make some fun of him,” Shuster said. “I planned to say to him, ‘Boris, you finally found a place in politics, but it is in the wrong country!’ But when I came into his office, I saw he was in a very good mood and I said, ‘Boris, maybe I, too, should go to Ukraine’.”

A few months later, he was living in the Ukrainian capital, studying Ukrainian and working again as a broadcaster. Like Kisiliev, he was reminded by the mood in Ukraine of Russia during the Yeltsin era: “The atmosphere was very good. It resembled Moscow in the 1990s – a lot of energy, many smiles.” Shuster’s political talk shows became an instant hit. But in time, Shuster, who had become one of the country’s most influential broadcasters, started to feel “political pressure” from his new bosses. As in Russia in the chaotic 1990s, business and politics are closely intertwined in Ukraine: many of the country’s oligarchs own media companies, which they are not shy about using to advance their political and commercial interests. To ensure his independence, Shuster formed his own television production company and now sells his show with a “political non-interference clause” to a channel controlled by Rinat Akhmetov, the country’s richest man.

. . .

Shuster shares Kisiliev’s bemusement that the uneven progress of democratic change in the former Soviet Union has landed him in Kiev. “It really is funny,” he told me. “Sometimes I don’t believe it myself.”

The Russian media stars and media barons who have found themselves washed ashore in Ukraine have a perspective on the political evolution of the two Slavic states, and on their relationship, which is different not only from what you hear in Moscow, but also from conventional wisdom in Washington or Europe.

The Kremlin sees Ukraine’s diverse and messy political culture as an exploitable weakness – and many Ukrainians and their western supporters despairingly agree. But, in separate conversations, the Russian journalistic refugees all argued that Ukraine’s regional divisions were the essential underpinning of its democracy, and the chief reason the country had diverged from Russia’s neo-authoritarian path.

“I don’t idealise the Ukrainian political class,” Kisiliev told me. “There are as many cynical, corrupt politicians here who would spit on democratic values as in Russia. But Ukraine’s good fortune is that, because of history, culture and geography, Ukraine is divided into a few big regions, each of which has its own culture and politics. These are also the zones of influence of various financial groups. None of those groups has the financial or electoral power to monopolise power – which happened in Russia, where Gazprom and the St Petersburg Chekists [the cabal of former KGB officers associated with Putin] usurped all political power.”

Central to this view of diversity as a fuel for democracy is the exiles’ confidence that all of Ukraine’s elites – including the Russian-speaking eastern ones – are committed to Ukrainian statehood. “The idea of a pro-Russian line in Ukrainian politics is a myth – they are all pro-Ukrainian now,” Kagalovsky said. Yet in the Kremlin, that “myth” is at the heart of policy towards Ukraine. Moscow takes as its starting point the idea that the two countries occupy a connected, if not common, cultural and social space. From there it is a short step to the Putin regime’s conviction that the two countries’ political paths should likewise run in parallel.

Kiev’s Russian media exiles don’t deny the cultural commonalities – without them, their easy migration to Ukraine would not have been possible. But they believe that politically and socially, the two countries are growing apart. According to Igor Malashenko, who ran Gusinsky’s media empire at its height and is now a “senior counsellor” at TVi: “There’s been a continental divide in recent years and Ukraine and Russia have split – far more than they understand in Moscow.” Shuster concurs. In the Soviet era, he said, “in Kiev it was a dream to get to Moscow.” But, petro-wealth notwithstanding, he believes that the appeal of the Russian metropolis is dimming: “Putin’s politics is killing a lot of creativity and Moscow is becoming less attractive for Ukrainians.”

. . .

And what do ordinary Russians think about Ukraine? Malashenko, one of the masterminds of Boris Yeltsin’s re-election in 1996, who now divides his time between homes in New York and Spain, says most Russians don’t give Ukraine much thought one way or the other: “This [nostalgia for Ukraine] is mostly invented by official propagandists.” But he and the other Russians agreed Ukraine has become a focus of the Kremlin’s malevolent gaze. Shuster said: “They are always looking for an enemy number one, which is very ordinary for an authoritarian regime. Today that enemy is Ukraine.”

If you are Putin, that enmity makes sense. “If Ukraine succeeds as a democracy, then it shows that authoritarianism is not the only model,” says Shuster. And the Kremlin’s worries have a paranoid, geopolitical taint: according to Malashenko, it genuinely believes the Orange Revolution was a US-backed plot, not an indigenous uprising. “Their fear is that this CIA operation will be repeated in Russia. That is why Putin doesn’t see the Russian opposition as a real opposition, but rather as a fifth column.”

If Ukraine is the model the Kremlin most fears, isn’t the reappearance of Russia’s silenced TV news stars on television channels to the south – and on websites accessible to any Russian – magnifying their concerns? The Lithuanian-born Shuster, who has no business or personal connections left in Russia, thinks so. Putin, he says, is afraid of him and of Kisiliev, and “he should be”. Kisiliev, who still shuttles between Kiev and Moscow, is more cautious: “This programme isn’t an effort to jab a needle into the bottom of any Russian leader, despite my sceptical attitude towards many of them.”

Watching Kisiliev and Shuster at work in their well-appointed television studios, sparring with politicians, I do feel like I’m back in the chaotic and corrupt but also open and pluralistic Russia of the 1990s. And that tableau vivant makes it easier to imagine that today’s repressive Russian political order is just a detour on what once felt like an inevitable march towards European-style democracy: after all, these are Russian television stars working freely in Russian in a city an hour’s flight from Moscow.

This vision of Ukraine as representing an alternative, democratic path for Russia is the flipside of the Kremlin’s insistence on the cultural and historic bonds between the two states. But just as they deny the existence of a pro-Russian faction in Ukraine, these professional exiles are dubious about what for them would be the more welcome notion: that Ukrainian democracy foreshadows a change of course in Russia. “If there is a political transformation in Russia, it will not be towards democracy,” Shuster said. “They have lost the foundation for a democratic transformation. They have decided to build power by looking for supporters among the intolerant. I think a fascist dictatorship is more likely than Nemtsov or Kasparov or Kasyanov [the democratic opposition leaders] coming to power.”

. . .

When I raised the possibility of a revival of Russian democracy over lunch with Kisiliev and Malashenko the next day, their reaction was even more categorical. Malashenko is normally a courtly man, and he seemed to have settled into his nearly decade-long, affluent exile as if to the manor born: he has published books of his photography, walks several miles a day and tells me he takes great pleasure in planning family holidays in Europe. But when I listed the similarities between the Ukrainian middle-class protestors who won democracy in the Orange Revolution and their Russian cousins, and compared the fragilities of former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma’s soft authoritarianism with those of the Putin-Medvedev regime, Malashenko erupted. 

In 2000 and 2001, he said angrily, Vladimir Gusinsky felt Russian democracy could not be undermined, and persuaded Malashenko he could win the mounting confrontation with Putin; after all, Gusinsky had triumphed in a similar stand-off with the hardline faction in Yeltsin’s court in the mid-1990s. “I knew Gusinsky was wrong and I told him so,” Malashenko said now, “but I let him overrule me.” Malashenko wishes that he and Gusinsky had, like the more pliant oligarchs, found a way to do a deal with Putin and continue working in Russia, the country Malashenko loves best.

In Kiev, he shouted at me: “It is because I listened to people like you that we are living the life we are now living!” 

A television venture in democratic Ukraine, and homes in Manhattan and southern Spain, are no substitute, it seems, for the power, the money and the Machiavellian excitement of treading the corridors of the Kremlin. 

Chrystia Freeland is the FT’s US managing editor. 

 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

July 13, 2009

Ukrainian Reactions to the Obama-Medvedev Summit

U.S. President Barack Obama's first summit meeting in Moscow with Russian leaders did not warrant headlines in the Ukrainian media. The top story, understandably, continued to be the seemingly unending political crisis in the country, as a consequence of which, American-Russian summitry was buried in the middle pages of the printed media and merited 15 second reports on television news broadcasts.

Despite the low level of coverage, Ukrainian political leaders nervously but closely monitored events in Moscow and considered what the discussions meant for their country's future. Would the United States, Ukrainian analysts wondered, abandon its support for Ukrainian aspirations to join the E.U. and NATO or would Obama tell Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin that Moscow's quest to force Ukraine back into Moscow's sphere of influence was unacceptable?

This apprehension was evident in a comment by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko who stated on July 7: "Ukraine hopes that it will not become the third side, through which other countries will make compromises to reach their interests" (UNIAN Press Agency, July 8).

The Ukrainian ambassador to Russia, Konstantyn Hryshchenko, told the UNIAN press agency: "The principled position of our country...is that matters pertaining to Ukraine will be decided in Ukraine by Ukrainian political leaders who have a mandate from the people." He added, "There is concern that discussions do not take place over matters which could constitute a danger to our interests."

Nonetheless, many in the Ukrainian policy making establishment were heartened by Obama's support for Ukraine's sovereignty during his speech to the graduating class of the New Economic School in Moscow where he stated: "State sovereignty must be a cornerstone of international order...Just as all states should have the right to choose their leaders, states must have the right to borders that are secure, and to their own foreign policies ... That is why we must apply this principle to all nations - and that includes nations like Georgia and Ukraine" (UNIAN Press Agency, July 8).

Volodymyr Fesenko, the chairman of the Kyiv-based Penta Center for Applied Political Studies noted that while Ukraine was not on the agenda in Moscow, "There were soft warnings from the American president to his Russian colleagues that it is better not to create problems on its borders. There were hints that it is essential not to allow anarchy in neighboring countries and additional conflicts. It was a signal that America is not indifferent to this" (Kyiv Post, July 10).

Yuriy Shcherbak, Ukraine's former Ambassador to the United States welcomed Obama's defense of Ukraine's sovereignty. "It is a very essential signal," Shcherbak said. "Obama clearly showed that the United States will not treat positively Russia's attempts to dominate the post-Soviet space and, especially, to impose on Ukraine any of its models or demands. After this visit, if Russia wants to [improve its relationship] with the United States, it must operate more carefully in post-Soviet space," he continued.

Speaking about the upcoming visit of U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden to Kyiv, Shcherbak commented: "Hopefully [Biden] will explain to Ukrainian leaders what was going on in Moscow and clarify the position of the American government" (Kyiv Post, July 10).

Commenting on the forthcoming Biden visit, the Ukrainian internet publication Ukrayinska Pravda wrote on July 8: "The visit [by Biden] will be closely observed in Moscow. Russian experts are convinced that Biden will have to explain to Kyiv and Tbilisi ‘who is the master.' Without this there can be no resetting of Russian-American relations." This however, is the typical Russian point of view which has not changed for many years. "Will the Americans be able to formulate in two weeks a clear message to the post-Soviet space? Nonetheless, this message will in a large way determine how events evolve in the region," the report suggested.

The results of the Ukrainian presidential elections scheduled for early January 2010 might resolve the dilemma facing Washington, Moscow and Kyiv. If voters elect Viktor Yanukovych as their next president, the foreign policy agenda of Ukraine might be in for a monumental change. The pro-NATO forces in Ukraine will find themselves more isolated than they are now and a new team of pro-Russian policy makers will aim to steer the country closer to Moscow on such matters as NATO enlargement, energy policy and greater cooperation in CIS security arrangements.

Moscow however, will be very cautious in welcoming a new Ukrainian government into its fold. The Kremlin has learned hard lessons from its turbulent relationship with Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the President of Belarus who, by any yardstick, has been more pro-Russian than Yanukovych. Any precipitate move by the Kremlin to embrace a Yanukovych government might also incur the wrath of Washington and escalate a new Cold War, one which Russia is incapable of winning.

--Roman Kupchinsky

 

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Special Services Again Play the ‘Jewish Card’ against Ukraine, Kyiv Writer Says

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, July 9 – For entirely understandable reasons, there has been much speculation but little serious discussion about the specific role Moscow’s intelligence services have played in relations between Russia and the former Soviet republics in the internal politics of these states, and in the relationship between these countries and the outside world.

 

            A notable exception to this dearth of discussions is provided in an article by Moscow State University expert Aleksandr Karavayev entitled “Methods of Adopting Political Decisions and the Role of the Special Services in Russian Policy in the CIS” that was posted online this week (www.ia-centr.ru/expert/5181/).

 

            But an even more intriguing if necessarily more narrowly focused consideration of this question was offered by Moses Fishbein, a Jewish Ukrainian poet, in a commentary entitled “The Jewish Card in Russian Operations against Ukraine” that was published by the “Kyiv Post” ten days ago (www.kyivpost.com/opinion/44324).

 

            Karavayev begins his discussion by noting that under Vladimir Putin, officials from the special services rose to senior positions in the Russian government but that their rise did not in many cases always lead to an increase in the role of the institutions from which they came, at least with respect to Moscow’s dealings with the Commonwealth of Independent States.

 

            This “paradox,” he suggests, reflects the specific nature of that organization: It is a closed club of presidents, and relations among its members are more a reflection of personal friendships or antagonisms than about the interests of one or another country toward the others, something that the special services could affect.

 

            But despite that, Karavayev continues, it is worth asking whether the “methods and practices” of the Russian special services could be employed in a useful fashion on the territory of the CIS, specifically in Ukraine.  And he asks “do there exist untapped reserves of the FSB and SVR relative to Ukraine and in what continues could they be ‘made use of’?” 

 

            “For the foreseeable future,” the Moscow analyst says, “Russia will not see a ‘Ukrainian Nazarbayev,’ that is, a president who not just by style but in reality will be ready to work on integration projects with Russia. That means conflicts are inevitable. The difference will only be in their intensity.”

 

            In that situation, the special services can play a role and are certainly active, Karavayev implies when he writes that “for some unclear reasons, [Ukrainian President Viktor] Yushchenko has not expressed his opinion concerning the infiltration of the Russian special services in the organs of power of Ukraine at various levels, even though he understands this perfectly well.”

 

            But the Ukrainian leader “has refrained from launching a campaign of spy mania in Ukraine. Is that because to do so would be to play his last card? Or are there no forces” on which he could rely if he were to do so? Or – and this is a possibility Karavayev does not mention – is the penetration so great that calling attention to it would be an act of suicide?

 

            If Yushchenko is not willing to do so, Fishbein certainly is.  And in his article, he argues that “Russia’s special services are seeking to destabilize the situation in Ukraine, undermine its sovereignty and independence, create a negative image of this country, block its integration into [Western] structures, and turn Ukraine into a dependent and manipulated satellite.”

 

            The Jewish Ukrainian poet and translator and winner of the Vasyl Stus Prize focuses on the specific ways the Russian special services have been seeking to play “the Jewish card” in Ukraine, in the hope of “set[ing] the Ukrainians and Jews against each other,” blackening Ukraine’s reputation abroad, and undermining its chance to become a member of NATO.

 

            Fishbein takes as his point of departure Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s statement last January that Moscow’s desire to block the extension of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine “required precise and well-coordinated work on the part of all special security, defense and law enforcement structures and quite a high level of coordination among them.”

 

            “I must say straight away,” the Russian president said, “on the whole the Federal Security Service [FSB] successfully carried out all its tasks.”

 

            In making that statement, Fishbein argues, Medvedev not only declared that blocking Ukraine’s admission to NATO was “the work of Russian special services, the result of special operations that they had put into motion” but also acknowledged that “the Russian special services are conducting special ops against Ukraine, aimed at undermining its sovereignty.”

 

            That is “a brutal violation not just of international law,” the Ukrainian writer says. It is “also a brutal violation of Russian laws,” given that the latter do not authorize the FSB “to conduct such special operations” either generally or particularly against a neighboring country like Ukraine.

 

            According to Fishbein, the Russian special services continue their actions even now, with the number of people employed in FSB structures overseeing Ukraine up 150 percent, a trend that as the Ukrainian writer suggests “is reminiscent of the 1950s, when the underground Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was active in Ukraine.”

 

            Of particular concern to Fishbein is the way Moscow is using “the so-called ‘Jewish card’” against Ukraine. Instead of acknowledging as Fishbein has that there have been anti-Semites among Ukrainians as among other peoples but that most Ukrainians are outraged by and as opposed to anti-Semitism as anyone else, Russian writers often portray all Ukrainians and all Ukrainian history as blighted by that plague.

 

            Not surprisingly, given his outrage at Moscow’s falsification of Ukrainian history and of the Ukrainian people, Fishbein devotes most of his article to a discussion of the facts of the case, including denunciations of anti-Semitism by people Russian authors routinely classify as anti-Semites and outright falsification of the historical record in Ukraine by Moscow.

 

            But most interesting in the current context are the various examples he gives of  the ways in which the Russian special services “continue to play the ‘Jewish card’ in their special operations against Ukraine.” All are instructive, but one is particularly noteworthy because it exactly parallels the methods the KGB widely used in Soviet times. 

 

            In April 2008, Fishbein reports, the Russian news agency Regnum carried a report that “an Israeli historian named Yury Vilner had published a book entitled Andrii Yushchenko: The Person and the ‘Legend.’” Its research “proves that during the Second World War, the father of the president of Ukraine may have been a camp policeman and Nazi informer.”

 

            “Few people paid any attention to the stylistic shortcoming of the phrase ‘proves that … he may have been,’” or to other aspects of this work that subsequently was posted on the Internet.  As posted, Fishbein continues, it was dedicated “To the humanist Aron Shneer,” a researcher and scholar at Yad Vashem in Israel.

 

            Fishbein reports that he spoke with Shneer on the telephone but while the Israeli scholar had read  Vilner’s text on the Internet, he “had no idea who Yury Vilner was.”  And it quickly became apparent, Fishbein says, that “no one either in Israel or in Russia – or anywhere else for that matter – neither scholars nor journalists knew about the existence of this ‘Israeli.’”

 

            The Kyiv poet said that in an effort to find  out more, he looked at the ISBN number, which is “a unique numeric commercial identifier” for a book.  In the case of Vilner’s text, that number was 969-228-292-5.  Because the first three numbers identify the country of publication, Vilner’s book should have been published in Pakistan.

 

            But a search in the ISBN data bank showed that “such a book did not exist,” Fishbein continues. And that “means that the ISBN was fabricated, and hence the ‘book’ itself and its ‘author’ are fabrications created and launched into circulation by means of anti-Ukrainian special operations” intended to “create difficulties” for Ukraine.

 

            Few people have been as dogged as Fishbein in tracking down this and other Russian falsifications and slanders against Ukraine, but his work in this area deserves to be better known not only because it provides an answer to the question Karavayev posed but also because it explains why so many Ukrainians want to gain the protection of Western institutions like NATO. 

The Economist

Partners in crime

Jul 9th 2009
From Economist.com

Despite Russia's protests, Stalin was no less villainous than Hitler

IT IS depressing that it even needed to be discussed. On July 3rd in Vilnius the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the continent’s main outfit, passed a resolution equating Stalin and Hitler. It called for August 23rd to become an official day of remembrance for the millions who were repressed, murdered, deported, robbed and raped as a result of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. That deal, and the secret protocols that went with it, were a death sentence for the countries from the Baltic to the Black sea. The poisonous after-effects linger until today.

The resolution should have met with particularly thunderous applause from the Russian side. After all, Russians by most measures suffered particularly badly under Stalin. Following Lenin’s terrible legacy, he systematised the persecution of the country’s brightest and best. Anyone reading the classic memoirs of Stalinism, such as “Kolyma tales” by Varlam Shalamov, or Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Hope against hope”, or a modern history such as Anne Applebaum’s “Gulag”, is suffused with the horror of those years. It is hard to imagine anyone quibbling over their condemnation.

Some do counter that Stalin was, despite his excessive toughness, a great figure in Russian and Soviet history. (Modern Russian history textbooks make the same case.) But that ignores Stalin’s disastrous record as a political and military leader. His paranoia decapitated the Red Army leadership: the best generals were murdered or jailed. Also, Stalin ignored the plentiful warnings of Hitler’s planned surprise attack in June 1941. That nearly proved disastrous. 

By some counts Stalin should be seen as no less villainous than Hitler. He bears much of the blame for the war. It was the Soviet alliance with Hitler that gave the Nazi leader the confidence to attack Poland. Only Hitler’s blunders prevented the Nazis from winning the war in the East—and quite likely the whole show. It is also worth remembering that Stalinism was so repellent that it drove many Russians to fight on the Nazi side—including in the SS.

Plenty of other countries have much to be ashamed of in their wartime history. Britain’s bullying of Czechoslovakia to accept dismemberment at Nazi hands in 1938 is one good example; French collaboration with the occupation another. These are shameful, but they are not taboos. 

By contrast, the OSCE resolution prompted outrage from Russia. Indeed, under the new law criminalising the “falsification of history”, anyone who voted for it, discussed it or publicised it in Russia would risk a jail sentence of up to five years. Communism’s economic failure and political repression have made it hard for anyone to claim that the Soviet Union was the epitome of a new civilisation. The victory over Nazi Germany provides some moral weight, but does not excuse Stalinism. The heroism of the Soviet soldiers who repelled the Nazi invaders has been used both to sanitise the past and to distract attention from the sleaze and incompetence of Russia’s current rulers.

The debate will not change the world: the parliamentary assembly is just a talking shop on the sidelines of the 56-member OSCE. Its resolutions are not legally binding. But the news is welcome nonetheless. Russian propagandists love using historical slogans but hate discussions of historical facts. The debate in Vilnius makes it a bit harder to maintain that stance. 

 

Please let me know if you no longer wish to be included on this list.  Thanks. OD

 

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