[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: KP/Reuters; AP; NYT; EDM

[Deychak, Orest]

Kyiv Post/Reuters

Yanukovych rejects coalition with Tymoshenko's party

June 8, 2009

 

 (Reuters) - Ukraine's main opposition party backed out of creating a
coalition with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc on Sunday, leaving
unresolved a tense political situation that has crippled the country for
years.

 

Supporters of Tymoshenko, long at loggerheads with President Viktor
Yushchenko, held days of talks with former premier Viktor Yanukovych's
Regions Party on forming a coalition that would have changed the
constitution and elected Yanukovych president.

Altering the constitution to allow the president to be elected by
parliament, instead of directly by the people, would have given
Yanukovych the presidency and left Tymoshenko as prime minister.

But Yanukovych rejected the idea, saying he wanted to keep the system
where the people elect the president directly.

"The will of the people needs to be respected. That is why, I have
always been certain, leaders must entrust their fate to the people,"
Yanukovych said in a statement.

"I have always said and I will say it now, the president must be elected
by a direct general election. Especially now, when a new president will
have to deal with complex issues and possibly introduce unpopular
measures," he said.

A presidential election by popular vote needs to take place by January
next year. All three politicians have been touted to run, but
Yushchenko's support has dwindled into single digits. Yanukovych tops
the opinion polls, followed by Tymoshenko.

Ukraine has been gripped by political turmoil since the 2004 "Orange
Revolution" that swept pro-Western Yushchenko into power. Most of the
turmoil has centred on infighting between him and Tymoshenko, close
allies during the revolution.

Their power struggle has distracted them from the deep economic crisis
that has engulfed the former Soviet republic in the past six months and
put in jeopardy a $16.4 billion International Monetary Fund bailout
loan.

Tymoshenko's and Yushchenko's parties hold a shaky majority in
parliament in a coalition formed 18 months ago. Yushchenko has
overturned many government decisions while Tymoshenko's supporters have
began cleansing the government of his allies.

Sniping between the two has already brought down one government with her
as premier within seven months of taking office immediately after the
revolution. 

A government under Yanukovych followed but Tymoshenko regained power
after a parliamentary election in 2007.

Yanukovych was the Moscow-backed candidate in a 2004 presidential
election that was eventually won by Yushchenko in a re-run of a
fraudulent vote.  

 

AP

Ukrainian PM Tymoshenko will run for president 

8 June 2009

05:04

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko says she
will seek the presidency of the politically turbulent nation.

Tymoshenko announced her widely expected presidential bid on television
late Sunday. She promised that under her leadership the government would
be strong and not corrupt, and said Ukraine will be a beautiful European
country.

The election must be held by next January, but the date has not been
set.

Tymoshenko was a galvanizing figure in the 2004 Orange Revolution
protests that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power. The bitter
rivalry between Tymoshenko and her former ally has hampered efforts to
ease Ukraine's economic crisis.

Tymoshenko's strongest potential rival in the vote is Russia-leaning
opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych. 

 

 

The New York Times

Ukrainian Parliament Ousts Defense Minister 

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY 

6 June 2009

Late Edition - Final

9

MOSCOW -- Ukraine, which has been as hard hit by the financial crisis as
any major country in Europe, slid further into political disarray on
Friday when Parliament voted overwhelmingly to dismiss the defense
minister.

The move underscored the bitter rift between two former allies,
President Viktor A. Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko,
who were leaders of the Orange Revolution, which brought to power a
pro-Western government in 2005.

Ms. Tymoshenko orchestrated the parliamentary vote to oust the defense
minister, Yuri Yekhanurov, who had been nominated by the president and
had served in that role since December 2007. She accused Mr. Yekhanurov
of allowing corruption to flourish in the military, saying money had
been stolen from programs that bought food for soldiers and fuel.

President Yushchenko and Mr. Yekhanurov called the accusations false and
politically motivated, and denounced the vote.

With Mr. Yekhanurov's ouster, the posts of defense and foreign minister,
both of which are controlled by the president, are vacant. Parliament
ousted the foreign minister in March.

Ukraine has suffered constant political instability since the Orange
Revolution, with feuding among Mr. Yushchenko, Ms. Tymoshenko and the
leader of the pro-Russian faction in Parliament, Viktor F. Yanukovich, a
former prime minister.

The disputes have made it more difficult for Ukraine to grapple with the
financial crisis. At the same time, tensions between Ukraine and Russia
have grown over the export of Russian natural gas through Ukraine. On
Friday, after complaints by Russia that Ukraine was reneging on its
contracts to pay for gas, President Yushchenko announced that the bill
would be paid in full.

Meanwhile, there were reports this week that Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr.
Yanukovich were negotiating a proposal to share power and require the
president to be elected by Parliament. Currently, the president is
popularly chosen; the next election is likely to be held in January, and
all three leaders are expected to run.

President Yushchenko was considered a hero of the Orange Revolution, but
polls suggest that he is now widely disliked. On Friday, he met with
foreign ambassadors and asked for their support, while criticizing a
possible alliance between Ms. Tymoshenko and Mr. Yanukovich.

''All these initiatives are illegal,'' the president said, calling the
proposal to change the way the president is selected ''a constitutional
coup.''

Eurasia Daily Monitor

June 5, 2009

Ukrainian Intelligence Promotes Lustration in Ukraine

On May 11 in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza the Ukrainian Security
Service (SBU) chief Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, outlined how previously
secret documents from 1917-1991 were being released that will reveal
details about the "crimes of communism." Nalyvaychenko described the
opening of formerly secret documents and plans to proceed with
prosecutions as "the launch of a Ukrainian version of lustration." The
documents reveal Soviet crimes against Ukrainians fighting for
independence from 1917-1920, the 1933 artificial famine and the
nationalist partisan struggle from 1942 to the early 1950's.
Nalyvaychenko also revealed that the secret documents exposed crimes
committed against other nationals, including Poles living in Ukraine.
These began in 1937-38 and those whom the NKVD did not then murder were
later murdered in the Kharkiv prisons (and Katyn forest) in 1940.

The director of the SBU's archives Volodymyr Vyatovych revealed that the
SBU had already compiled 136 names of individuals involved in committing
crimes against humanity during the famine. These included NKVD officers,
senior members of the communist party and those who had signed
documents. The manner in which the crimes were organized was the basis
for the allegation that the famine was a pre-planned "genocide" against
Ukraine (Ukrayinska Pravda, May 28).

Russia has counter-attacked the claims of "genocide" by using the
argument that the famine was felt throughout the USSR and was an outcome
of collectivization and severe weather. This view has long been
prevalent within left-wing and pro-Soviet political and academic circles
in the West. Nalyvaychenko replied to these Russian counter-claims by
asserting that they had not studied the formerly secret documents made
publicly available by the SBU. The SBU had requested its Russian
counterparts to open secret Russian documents on Soviet repression, but
this had been rebutted.

"At first the Tsulag was established in Ukraine and then later the Gulag
that we all know about," Nalyvaychenko said. The Tsulag was established
in 1919 in Ukraine and included 18 locations. On May 21, the official
Day of Memory of Victims of Political Repressions, Yushchenko attended a
commemoration at one the most infamous of these in the Bykivnia forest
outside Kyiv. The area was established as a State Historical and
Memorial Preserve by a resolution adopted by the 2001 Yushchenko
government. The SBU had identified 14,000 names of the estimated 100,000
victims buried in Bykivnia.

Nalyvaychenko described how repressive Soviet agencies surrounded
Ukrainian oblasts to prevent food entering them. These same units were
also stationed on the Crimean border with Ukraine (then within the
Russian SFSR). Nalyvychenko's assurances that the SBU's work on Soviet
crimes was not directed against Russia will fall on deaf ears in Moscow,
especially following President Dmitry Medvedev's establishment of a
special commission to "counteract attempts to falsify history."
Nalyvaychenko revealed that a 226-page collection of materials showed
how in addition to the deaths caused by the famine many others were
shot, and these included "Russians, Germans, Jews and Ukrainians"
(www.radiosvoboda.org, May 28). The SBU has also investigated the 1944
deportation of 300,000 Crimean Tatars and criminal cases against the
Tatar nationalist Milly Firqa organization in the 1920's (Channel 5, May
18).

The SBU chief believed that it would only require a short period of time
to collect eye-witness accounts and launch criminal proceedings. These
would investigate the repeated "actions of criminal groups and the
crimes of repressive agencies in the first place against the civilian
population" (Ukrayinska Pravda, May 28). Soviet repression included mass
murder of the civilian population, mass deportations and placing the
children of those sentenced or murdered into orphanages.

Launching criminal charges and lustration within Ukraine might be more
difficult than placing this in the hands of the international courts.
Ukraine's judiciary and prosecutor's office are highly corrupt and have
not demonstrated sufficient competence in pursuing high profile cases,
such as investigating the organizers of journalist Georgi Gongadze's
murder or Yushchenko's poisoning. Parliament might also prove
unsupportive. Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych described the
SBU's lustration plans for launching criminal charges in relation to the
famine as "provocative and irresponsible" (Ukrayinska Pravda, May 27).
Yanukovych condemned attempts by Yushchenko to play the nationalist card
by using the famine to stay in power, potentially further dividing the
country and worsening relations with Russia.

President Yushchenko replied to such domestic critics as individuals
whose "dream is a gubernia where they would be uncontrolled lords," a
place "without Ukrainian culture and without the Ukrainian language"
(www.president.gov.ua, May 17). Nalyvaychenko replied to Yanukovych that
Soviet repression and the famine had been most severe in the Donbas and
Zaporizhzhia oblast, three regional strongholds. He pointed out that
since 2006, Ukrainian legislation asserts that the famine was an "act of
genocide against the Ukrainian people," prosecution for which falls
within the criminal code. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory had
compiled nearly 900,000 names of Ukrainians who died in the famine. The
SBU and the institute continued to work on the documents, collect
eye-witness statements and locate mass burial grounds. "In this criminal
case there is a serious possibility of success in court," Nalyvaychenko
said (Ukrayinska Pravda, June 3).

The lustration of former communist officials has not been the norm in
the majority of the 27 post-communist states. Different degrees of
lustration were undertaken in Germany and within ten Central Eastern and
Baltic states. The toughest lustration legislation was adopted in the
Czech Republic and Germany. It is noticeable, however, from this list of
countries that no CIS state including Georgia has undertaken lustration.
This could now change with Ukraine following Central-Eastern Europe in
launching the lustration of communist crimes against humanity.

The issues of nation building and historical memory have become a
personal crusade for President Yushchenko. At his Bykivnia speech,
Yushchenko called for the removal of all the communist "symbols of
murder" (www.president.gov.ua, May 17). Following the disintegration of
the USSR, Ukrainian democratization could never be divorced from nation
and state building. Yushchenko's crusade against Soviet crimes is
intimately bound up with its democratization and integration into
Europe. This explains Moscow's hostility as it is in the throes of
covering up Soviet crimes, and building an autocracy grounded in a
synthesis of nationalism and Soviet rule.

--Taras Kuzio

 

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