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The Washington Post

A Section

Ukraine-Russia Tensions Evident in Crimea; Kremlin Asserting Its Influence in Region 

Philip P. Pan 

Washington Post Foreign Service

6 October 2009

FINAL

A09

 

On maps, Crimea is Ukrainian territory, and this naval citadel on its southern coast is a Ukrainian city. But when court bailiffs tried to serve papers at a lighthouse here in August, they suddenly found themselves surrounded by armed troops from Russia's Black Sea Fleet who delivered them to police as if they were trespassing teenagers.

The humiliating episode underscored Russia's continuing influence in the storied peninsula on the Black Sea nearly two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union -- and the potential for trouble here ahead of Ukraine's first presidential vote since the 2005 Orange Revolution.

Huge crowds of protesters defied Moscow in that peaceful uprising and swept a pro-Western government into power. Now, the Kremlin is working to undo that defeat, ratcheting up pressure on this former Soviet republic to elect a leader more amenable to Russia's interests in January.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a letter in August demanding policy reversals from a new Ukrainian government, including an end to its bid to join NATO. He also introduced a bill authorizing the use of troops to protect Russian citizens and Russian speakers abroad, a measure that some interpreted as targeting Crimea.

A group of prominent Ukrainians, including the country's first president, responded with a letter urging President Obama to prevent a "possible military intervention" by Russia that would "bring back the division of Europe." Ukraine gave up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and other world powers, they noted.

If a crisis is ahead, it is likely to involve Crimea, a peninsula of rolling steppe and sandy beaches about the size of Maryland. The region was once part of Russia, and it is the only place in Ukraine where ethnic Russians are the majority. In the mid-1990s, it elected a secessionist leader who nearly sparked a civil war.

Crimea is also home to Russia's Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Sevastopol under a deal with Ukraine that expires in 2017. Russia wants to extend the lease, but Ukraine's current government insists it must go.

"It would be easy for Russia to inspire a crisis or conflict in Crimea if it continues to lose influence in Ukraine," said Grigory Perepelitsa, director of the Foreign Policy Institute in the Ukrainian Diplomatic Academy. "That's the message they're sending to any future president."

Russia's state-controlled media, widely available and popular in Crimea, have hammered the authorities in Kiev as irredeemably anti-Russian, and prominent Russian politicians have been calling for reunification with Crimea.

But five years of policies in Kiev aimed at drawing Ukraine closer to Europe and the United States and at promoting Ukrainian language and history have also alienated the region. Ukraine's president, Viktor Yushchenko, the hero of the Orange Revolution, won only 6 percent of the vote here.

"He tried to force his ideology on us, and he failed," said Valeriy Saratov, chairman of the Sevastopol city council. "We don't feel we were conquered by Russia, but by Europe. We fought the Italians, the Germans, the French, the British. . . . We would never take sides against Russia."

Vladimir Struchkov, a pro-Russia activist and leader of a parents' organization in Sevastopol, said residents are especially upset about a new regulation requiring students to take college entrance exams in Ukrainian, eliminating a Russian option.

While Kiev is playing identity politics, he argued, Moscow has been investing in Sevastopol, building schools, apartments and pools, repairing monuments and even opening a branch of Moscow State University.

The result has been a sharp shift in Crimean attitudes. In 2006, about 74 percent of Crimean residents regarded Ukraine as their motherland, but by last year, that figure had fallen to 40 percent, according to a survey by the Razumkov Center, a top research institute in Kiev.

Crimea became part of the Russian empire in 1783 after a long period of rule by Crimean Tatars, an indigenous Turkic people. During World War II, Germany captured the peninsula. After the war, the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin accused the Tatars of Nazi collaboration and ordered their mass deportation. The Communists then sought to resettle the peninsula with politically reliable families, mostly Russians with ties to the military or the party apparatus.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, these people suddenly found themselves living in Ukraine instead of Russia, because Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 in a move that had little impact at the time.

Today, about 60 percent of the region's 2.3 million residents are Russian and 25 percent are Ukrainian. But the two ethnic groups are thoroughly intertwined. Opinion polls show majorities of both want the Black Sea Fleet to stay and support reunification with Russia, though there is similar support for greater autonomy for Crimea within Ukraine.

Crimean Tatars, who were allowed to return in the 1980s, make up about 10 percent of the population and are largely opposed to a return to Russian rule.

Refat Chubarov, a leader of the main Crimean Tatar political organization, said Russian media have vilified his people as criminals, playing on fears of Islam and their efforts to reclaim lost homes. But even among the Tatars, frustration with Kiev is rising.

"We are the strongest supporters of Ukrainian sovereignty in Crimea," Chubarov said. "But the disappointment is growing because the authorities have not done enough to provide land and other compensation to returning families."

Volodymyr Pritula, a veteran journalist and political analyst in Crimea, said the Kremlin has been trying to provoke ethnic conflict in the region, both to undermine the Ukrainian government and provide an excuse for intervention.

Three years ago, Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president, offered to help resolve tensions in Crimea after a clash between Russians and Tatars and suggested that the Russian fleet should stay to "guarantee stability," Pritula noted.

In recent months, he added, the Kremlin has stepped up its activities, with Russian nationalist groups staging protests on Ukrainian holidays and media outlets resuming the attacks on Tatars after a pause last year.

Emotions have been running high since Russia's war last year with another pro-Western neighbor, Georgia. The Black Sea Fleet participated in the conflict, and Ukrainian officials infuriated Russia by suggesting its ships might not be allowed to return to Sevastopol.

Tensions flared again this summer when Ukrainian police stopped Russian trucks three times for transporting missiles in Sevastopol without advance notice. Then came the episode with the bailiffs at Kherson Lighthouse, one of dozens of navigational markers along the Crimean coast that both Ukraine and the Russian fleet claim to own.

Judges have tried to order the fleet to hand over various facilities before, with the Russians routinely refusing and bailiffs departing without incident. But this time, the fleet accused Ukraine of "penetrating the territory of a Russian military unit" and warned of "possible tragic consequences to such actions."

Vladimir Kazarin, the city's deputy mayor, said the bailiffs stepped past a gate because no sentries were posted but quickly found the commanding officer, who asked them to wait while he sought instructions. Five minutes later, he returned with the soldiers who detained the bailiffs.

"Relations with the fleet have generally been good," Kazarin said. "But this just shows that people in Moscow are trying to find any excuse for conflict."

http://www.washingtonpost.com <javascript:void(0)> 

Kyiv Post

Editorial

A fine mess

October 1, 2009 

The failed privatization of the Odesa Portside chemical plant is another reminder that the nation has a long way to go before transparency and state interests start to prevail.

The nation's ruling elite put on yet another embarrassing parade this week, offering more reasons why most of them should be replaced at the voters' next opportunity to do so. The latest evidence of a corrupt, bankrupt power structure came with the privatization fiasco involving the Odesa Portside Plant, a giant export-oriented fertilizer and chemical manufacturer strategically located on Ukraine's Black Sea coast.

The sale collapsed in farce on Sept. 29 during a live television auction. After overriding the objections of politicians who said that economic recession is not the time for government to be getting rid of assets, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko cancelled the sale - even though the winning bid came in at $624 million, above the $500 million set as the minimum bid. Tymoshenko accused the three bidders of collusion, but she may have been simply unsatisfied with the price. The top bidder was billionaire Igor Kolomoisky's Nortima company, which has promised to assert its ownership rights in court.

You would think that, 18 years after the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine would have learned how to properly privatize state-owned assets. It's not that difficult to sell a public asset for the maximum price under the best conditions to a private investor. To do that, the sale and requirements (such as minimum bid, investment obligations) for purchase should be widely publicized in advance and the auction should be transparent. These are simple steps to creating a competitive bidding environment.

But privatization has never worked that way in Ukraine - or almost never, the single exception being the 2005 sale of the giant steel mill Kryvoryzhstal to world steel leader, Mittal Steel (now ArcelorMittal), for a whopping $4.8 billion. Most industrial jewels - Soviet Ukraine's best factories and manufacturing plants - went to favored insiders for a fraction of their true worth. The well-connected few became billionaires not on the basis of the quality of their bids or their business acumen, but on the basis of their ability to exert influence on those in power. Much of the rest of the nation, meanwhile, languished in poverty - and still does. Unfortunately, ordinary people, so locked in their day-to-day struggle for survival, have not found the strength or unity to redress these monstrous economic injustices. This hijacking of national wealth to make a few fabulously rich still has damaging consequences today. The nation's economic potential has never been achieved, partly because of the way the Soviet assets were sold. All sense of fairness and justice has been lost in society as people watched their collective riches pilfered in one scheme after another.

 As this decade comes to a close, those in business and government power seats want the rest of us to forget what happened in the previous one. We won't, nor should anybody. And the Odesa Portside fiasco provided a timely reminder that there's still plenty of rot to clear. 

Eurasia Daily Monitor

October 1, 2009

Party of Regions Claims Tymoshenko Attacks Freedom of Speech: Déjà Vu?

The Pechersky district court in Kyiv on September 22 banned "any unfair advertisement" against Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. This prompted Viktor Yanukovych, her main rival in the run-up to the January 17 presidential election, to accuse Tymoshenko of infringing freedom of speech. Ironically, it was Yanukovych's team that was accused of this ahead of the previous election in 2004. The semi-official instructions to journalists on how to cover political events, imposed by the administration of the then President Leonid Kuchma, who viewed Yanukovych as his successor, sparked journalist protests in the fall of 2004, which were a core element of the Orange Revolution that brought Viktor Yushchenko to power as president and Tymoshenko as prime minister.

The court ruled on a lawsuit filed by Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party against an entrepreneur accused by the party of producing a video to compromise Tymoshenko. The court's wording was significant as it ruled that unfair advertisements against Tymoshenko are "anti-social in nature, discredits Tymoshenko, increases social tension and causes other negative consequences" (Ukrainska Pravda, September 24). A newspaper linked to Yanukovych's Party of Regions (PRU) admitted that the PRU was behind the video, which claimed that Tymoshenko does not deliver on her promises. The video reportedly mocked Tymoshenko's main campaign slogan "She Works," which is frequently used in her own advertisements (Segodnya, September 25).

The PRU's initial reaction came from the party's unofficial spokeswoman Hanna Herman who claimed that the verdict was "an unprecedented offensive against freedom of speech [which means that] censorship is returning to Ukraine" (Ukrainska Pravda, September 24). Yanukovych claimed that the ban on unfair advertisements against Tymoshenko meant that Ukraine was returning to totalitarianism. He repeated the allegation that is often leveled against Tymoshenko by her rivals that she indirectly controls the judiciary, thus violating the balance of power (www.partyofregions.org.ua, September 25). This allegation was prompted by the fact that the Supreme Court is chaired by Tymoshenko's ally Vasyl Onopenko.

PRU deputy Olena Lukash appealed against the court's ruling on September 25 (Kommersant-Ukraine, September 28). Nonetheless, it was Lukash who defended Yanukovych in the courts as his lawyer when the 2004 election results were disputed. The PRU also appealed to the international community, just like its opponents did five years ago. Yanukovych told the Yalta European Strategy international forum that the court had effectively "banned people from telling the truth" (ICTV, September 26). The PRU complained against the verdict to the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the Reporters without Borders human rights watchdog (www.partyofregions.org.ua, September 25, 28).

President Viktor Yushchenko and Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, whose bloc is part of the pro-Tymoshenko coalition, effectively sided with the PRU. Yushchenko's aide Maryna Stavniychuk suggested that the verdict banning unfair advertising against Tymoshenko "looked like an infringement of freedom of speech" (Ukrainski Novyny, September 25). According to Lytvyn: "This showed that the court has joined the presidential election campaign." Lytvyn also criticized Tymoshenko for spending too much on her advertising campaign and accused her of violating the law according to which political advertising is illegal until the official start of the election campaign on October 20 (TVI, September 27).

Actually the law is openly violated by many candidates including Yanukovych. Tymoshenko's team argued that her media campaign was not political but "social," meaning that they "foster [the government's] communication with the community" and that Ukrainian television had broadcast them for free (Ukrainska Pravda, July 8). Tymoshenko said that the "She Works" billboards were paid for by the Fatherland Party, and therefore they were also "social" (UNIAN, August 5). This prompted suspicions that Tymoshenko's team had used taxpayers' money. Yushchenko's ally people's deputy Andry Paruby officially requested that the prosecutor-general's office investigates the sources of financing of Tymoshenko's advertisements. He suggested that public money might have been used (Ukrainski Novyny, September 15).

Meanwhile, the PRU has not escaped accusations of violating freedom of speech. Savik Shuster, the anchorman of the "Shuster Live" political show on Ukrainian television, complained of pressure from the PRU over his September 25 broadcast, which featured Tymoshenko. Shuster apparently did not want to invite PRU deputies, who acted as Tymoshenko's main opponents in the show. He wanted Yanukovych to be her opponent in a broadcast debate, but he failed to appear; in place of their tongue-tied leader, the PRU reportedly imposed several PRU deputies as guests on the show and wanted the air time to be shared equally between them and Tymoshenko (Interfax-Ukraine, September 28; Segodnya, September 29).

Yanukovych's opponents might argue that the very fact that Shuster, who sympathizes with Tymoshenko, anchors a political show on a TV channel that belongs to the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov (a supporter of Yanukovych), shows that freedom of speech still exists in Ukraine. However, this is an achievement that the country owes to Yanukovych's opponents in the 2004 election. It remains to be seen whether the court-imposed ban on advertisements hostile to Tymoshenko is only an episode in the election campaign or a harbinger of what is to come if the international community does not pay more attention to the Ukrainian election and journalists do not display solidarity as they did in 2004.

--Pavel Korduban

 Wall Street Journal

World News: World Watch 

A12

October 2, 2009

UKRAINE

Naftogaz Looks to Redo

$1.6 Billion in Debt

Ukrainian state-controlled natural-gas company Naftogaz said it failed to redeem the principal on its $500 million Eurobond, but made the final coupon payment on the debt.

The company, now technically in default, is trying to restructure $1.6 billion in debt, including the $500 million bond, by persuading 75% of its bilateral lenders and bondholders to agree to swap their existing debt for new sovereign-backed bonds.

In January, a row over late payments and gas prices between Ukraine and Russia saw the latter cut off natural-gas supplies to Ukraine for two weeks, sparking supply shortages in a host of European countries that are dependent on Russian gas piped through Ukraine.

-- Alexander Kolyandr

 

Go to this link at you tube and discover how the internet grew better tomatoes in Ukraine: 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0tmJL_GIhQ

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