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Washington Post/Reuters

Ukraine, Russia PMs resolve gas dispute: Tymoshenko

By Denis Dyomkin
Reuters
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 9:31 AM 

SOPOT, Poland (Reuters) - Russia and Ukraine have resolved a long standing dispute over natural gas supplies, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said on Tuesday after meeting her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. 

Rows over gas supplies have dominated Russia's relations with Ukraine over recent years, leading last winter to the longest interruption to European Union supplies for decades. 

"We have removed all of the gas problems," Tymoshenko said after talks in Sopot, a resort on the Baltic coast in northern Poland. 

"We feel that all the crisis-like occurrences in this sphere have gone." 

Russia supplies a quarter of the European Union's gas and most of this goes through pipelines across Ukraine. The clashes over Ukraine's imports of Russian gas have repeatedly led to disruption of transit flows to Europe. 

The relationship between former Kremlin chief Putin and Tymoshenko, the most popular Ukrainian politician now holding office, is also being closely watched ahead of Ukraine's January 17 presidential election. 

"Our meeting was very important for Ukraine," Tymoshenko said with a smile. "Our next meeting will take place in October and we plan it in Ukraine. I invite you and your team." 

Tymoshenko's warmer ties with Russia over recent months have provoked speculation that Moscow may be backing her in the election to gain influence over the former Soviet republic. 

"We have again gone over the volumes of Russian gas consumed by Ukraine with Vladimir Vladimirovich (Putin) and the Russian prime minister's position is very important... that Ukraine will pay for all the gas it consumes." 

The statement, although not confirmed by Putin, means Russia has agreed to scrap an earlier clause under which Ukraine would be fined if it consumed less gas than agreed in January, when the two sides settled their dispute over volumes and gas prices. 

Kiev has long argued that it needs less gas because of a steep economic downturn. 

Putin said he was glad to see Tymoshenko again and added that they talked about energy and aviation. 

"We remain the biggest partners in the sphere of the economy and we always have something to speak about," said Putin. 

"Traditionally, attention is focused on energy but besides this, there are other areas of our cooperation," Putin said. 

(Writing by Simon Shuster and Guy Faulconbridge, editing by Anthony Barker) 

Foreign Policy

www.foreignpolicy.com

 

Russia the Bully

Moscow should have no problem finding friends in its own backyard -- but instead it's just getting lonelier. Here's why.

BY CHRISTIAN CARYL | AUGUST 31, 2009 

 

As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin might be tempted to remind his Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko when they meet this week, her country is a bit of a mess these days. Her ostensible boss, the once-adored President Viktor Yushchenko -- yes, the same guy who emerged from the Orange Revolution as a national hero a few years back -- has become the political equivalent of radioactive waste. With the national election just four months away, his popularity ratings are in the low single digits. Corruption is rife, the economy sagging. 

Now, just imagine that you're the man who once called the collapse of the Soviet Union <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4480745.stm>  "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century." To Putin and his friends at the pinnacle of the Russian political elite this must seem like a golden opportunity -- the perfect moment to administer the coup de grâce to a shaky rival. Perhaps that's why Putin's ostensible boss, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, recently fired off a torrent of invective <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/600/42/380524.htm>  at the Ukrainian government that stunned onlookers in Kiev and around the former Soviet Union. The list of grievances in the Russian president's letter was long: The Ukrainians are canoodling with the Europeans behind Russia's back. They're restricting Russian language instruction in the public schools and "distorting" the historical record in Ukrainian textbooks. They're blocking access to the base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet on the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. They've kicked out innocent Russian diplomats on the scandalous pretext of spying. And, just for good measure, he also accused them of supplying weapons to the Georgians in last year's war.

 

________________________________

Introducing Reality Check,
a new weekly column by
FP contributing writer
Christian Caryl. 

On one level it seems to be working. Candidate Viktor Yanukovych, the man usually described as the "pro-Russian" candidate in the 2004 presidential locations, is now way ahead of both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko in the polls. (The most recent surveys <http://en.for-ua.com/news/2009/08/10/150045.html>  put him with 22 percent of the vote, while Tymoshenko comes second with 11 percent.) When the Moscow-based Orthodox Patriarch Kirill I came for a visit at the end of July, he was mobbed by adoring believers <http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35402&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=7&cHash=9d5427dad9>  around the country -- and also made a point of allowing Yanukovych to bask in his reflected glory. Meanwhile, Ukrainian approval of NATO remains weak. A majority of Ukrainians consistently express greater distrust of the United States than of Russia.

So why isn't this a Russian success story? Because, at the same time, the idea of Ukrainian independence is going strong. The same polls that show all those encouraging sentiments about Russia also underline the point that Ukrainians -- even those who live in regions ethnically and geographically close to Russia -- are less inclined than ever give up their own state or their own policies. For example, one recent survey <http://www.kyivpost.com/nation/47354>  showed that 70.2 percent of Ukrainians had a favorable view of Russians -- but that only one in 10 of them wanted closer relations with Moscow. A mere 13.7 percent supported the idea of formulating joint foreign policy with the Russians, and only 9.3 percent liked the idea of a common currency. As a result, say some analysts, if Moscow's preferred candidate Yanukovych wins the presidential election in January 2010, his actual policies may turn out to be considerably less pro-Russian than the cliché would have it -- since, once in office, he'll be the defender of Ukrainian sovereignty. 

 

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"Yanukovych isn't quite the toady that his opponents make him out to be," notes Alexander Motyl, a Ukraine expert at Rutgers University. "I'd bet that he, like every Ukrainian president and PM since 1991, would adopt a moderately pro-Ukrainian and semi-pro-Russian position." If the object of the Kremlin's policies is to drive Ukraine back into the arms of Mother Russia, so far it's not working.

Ever since the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, Russia has been trying hard to reassert its influence over the other ex-Soviet republics -- countries the Russians often refer to in the aggregate as "the near abroad." Over the years this effort has become an increasingly frustrating one for Moscow, which is deeply concerned about the rising power (both real and imagined) of regional rivals like the United States, Western Europe, and China. Yet so far, despite its myriad advantages, the Kremlin has surprisingly little to show for its pains. Somehow the Russians still have trouble getting traction in their own backyard.

It doesn't have to be this way. There's a persistent myth that the republics of the former Soviet Union are inherently and fanatically anti-Russian, always ready to choose the path that doesn't have Moscow on it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Polls consistently show that people even in countries where tensions with Russia are high - like Ukraine and Georgia - actually want more cooperation with Russia <http://www.gallup.com/poll/122495/Georgians-Favor-Ongoing-Cooperation-Among-CIS-Countries.aspx> , not less. Most surveys also show that non-Russian ex-Soviets want to maintain linguistic, cultural and religious ties with Russia wherever possible. Militaries across the region still share weaponry, training, and doctrine with Russia. And, of course, there remains a thick web of economic and trade ties between Russia and the post-Soviet states -- especially when it comes to energy. A number of countries (including Georgia) depend to a remarkable degree on remittances transferred home from citizens working in Russia. (One recent study <http://www.ebrd.com/new/stories/2008/080326.htm>  by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, for example, found that in some ex-Soviet states these flows exceed bank deposits or foreign direct investment -- and most of that money is coming from Russia.) Yet Moscow has somehow done a persistently miserable job of transforming all of these potential advantages into good relations with its neighbors -- as even Russian scholars have sometimes seen fit to observe <http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/numbers/10/809.html> .

 

Moscow's tensions with the Baltic Republics, Georgia, and now, increasingly, Ukraine have already become the stuff of headlines <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/world/europe/28crimea.html?hpw> . But it may be some of the stories that haven't been getting much publicity that are the most instructive. Take, for example, Belarus, the country of 10 million people sandwiched between Russia and Poland and run by the redoubtable dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka. Lukashenka has been president since 1994, and for almost that entire time his country's closeness to Russia has been unsurpassed by any other country in the region; for years the two countries have seriously discussed the possibility of outright legal and economic "union." Yet over the past year Belarus has staged a remarkable reversal. Lukashenka ostentatiously discarded a set of senior officials identified with his years of human rights abuses and made dramatic overtures to the European Union <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/600/42/381416.htm> .

The reasons for the shift are straightforward. "After almost two decades of formal independence Belarus is gradually becoming truly independent," says Arkady Moshes of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. "It's drifting away from Russia." Energy is a big part of the equation. Its supplies of oil and natural gas have long been generously subsidized by Moscow, but Minsk hasn't failed to notice that Russia has been working hard to strike deals with other countries to build new transit pipelines that would bypass Belarus. "Lukashenka sees that the days of cheap energy are over," notes Moshes. And with that the prospect of closer economic and cultural ties to Europe suddenly begins to look much more enticing. The fact that Belarus is populated almost entirely by Russian-speakers, it turns out, is not enough to outweigh the relative attractions of the West.

Of course, one more recent event has probably helped to concentrate minds in the region as well -- Russia's small but victorious war with Georgia one year ago. For the past year the Kremlin has been busily lobbying members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the club of ex-Soviet republics with the closest ties to Russia, to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the two Russian-backed mini-states inside Georgia. Yet so far takers have been notably absent -- even among the authoritarian states of Central Asia, traditionally among Moscow's most stalwart backers. (The one country in the world aside from Russia that's been willing to extend recognition to the two statelets? Nicaragua.)

The case of one of Russia's other closest allies within the ex-Soviet club is equally instructive. Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, gave Moscow a jolt recently by announcing that his country wouldn't be taking part <http://en.trend.az/news/politics/foreign/1529147.html>  in exercises of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a security grouping that includes several Commonwealth countries. Karimov has also pulled his country out of a recent economic bloc, refused to participate in exercises of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which brings together Russia, China, and the Central Asian republics, and even allowed the U.S. military to use Uzbek facilities to transport supplies into Afghanistan (this after kicking the U.S. out of key bases in his country a few years back). Russia also recently signed a deal with adjacent Kyrgyzstan that will allow it to base forces in the strategically sensitive Ferghana Valley -- but without consulting the perennially paranoid Uzbeks <http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090806/155743807.html> , a typically ham-handed gesture Karimov is not likely to forgive any time soon.

Russia's ability to get in its own way remains a cause for much head-scratching in the region. "When they tried to stop NATO enlargement, whom did they discuss it with? The United States and Germany," notes <http://www.icds.ee/index.php?id=73&L=1&tx_ttnews%5btt_news%5d=302&tx_ttnews%5bbackPid%5d=63&cHash=a02f7243c1>  Kadri Liik, Director of the International Center for Defense Studies in Tallinn, Estonia. "But in fact the biggest driving force of NATO enlargement [was] the countries themselves. Russia tried to discuss these countries over their heads, and it backfired."

Something comparable is now happening again with energy. Moscow's apparent willingness to use energy supplies in its political disputes with some of its neighbors is now driving the European Union <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/12/the_great_pipeline_opera>  to seek greater diversification of supply and alternate pipeline routes. "Russia uses coercion more than attraction," says Moshes, the Helsinki-based analyst.

So is this just a symptom of poor policymaking -- or an expression of a deeper problem? Some worry that this tendency is deeply rooted in the present authoritarian government in Moscow -- one whose intense nationalism demands the constant search for enemies, external and internal, to legitimize its own actions. "That kind of regime cannot by definition enjoy 'normal' relations with its neighbors," notes Motyl, the Rutgers professor. Whatever the reason, one can only hope that Russia is able to find a way <http://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251464819&sr=8-1>  back to healthy relations with its former satellites -- for its own sake, one might add, as much as theirs.

 

The Economist

Sticks and stones

Aug 27th 2009 
>From Economist.com


Russia needs to play nice



NAUGHTY and tiresome children like insults (both overt and needling) as well as implausible and elaborate excuses. "He wouldn't give it to me and it was mine anyway and also I was going to give it back so I hit him". 

As your columnist's children grow up, the need to untangle their tantrums, feuds and nonsense is becoming pleasingly rare. Sadly, the same can't be said for some grownups.

Start with the needling. As Paul A. Goble, a foreign-affairs analyst, noted this week, Russia's president Dmitri Medvedev has pointedly used the preposition "na" [on], favoured during Soviet times, rather than the more recent "v" [in] when referring to Ukraine. That is the sort of thing that children do: habitually mispronounce someone's name in order to irritate them.

Mr Medvedev's prepositional condescension came during a scathing personal attack on the Ukrainian president in which he said Russia would not be sending another ambassador to Kiev (or Kyiv, as Ukrainians prefer it spelled). At a childish level, this is badmouthing a classmate and refusing to acknowledge his birthday.

The 70th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact on August 23rd provided more opportunities for what until recently would have been seen as extraordinary behaviour. The same day, a film called "The Secrets of Confidential Files", broadcast on Russia's Vesti national television channel (meaning it had official endorsement), said that the pact was a necessary response to Poland's signing of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1934. That is like a child explaining a playground scrap on the lines of "Bill was friends with Phil so when Phil beat Bill up I joined in too." Except that in this case the result was not a black eye and scraped knee, but the deaths of many millions of people.

This is not just nonsense, but revoltingly insensitive. It is rather as if German official media were casually blaming Jews for the Holocaust. And it is not a one-off. An article on the Russian defence ministry's website in June claimed that Poland's unreasonable behaviour towards Nazi Germany had justified Hitler's attack.

These and other insults come as Poland is awaiting a visit by Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to a ceremony in Gdansk on September 1st, marking the anniversary of the Nazi attack. Poland hopes that Mr Putin will at least express mild regret about the Soviet aggression against Poland on September 17th 1939. At events in Prague on the anniversary of the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, and in Budapest on the anniversary of the crushing of the 1956 uprising, Mr Putin managed that, soothing his hosts while not engaging in what many Russians would see as unseemly breast-beating. 

Poland hopes that the visit will bring some practical movement on what are tactfully known as "difficult issues" (diplo-speak, in this case, for mass murder). The biggest of these is the Katyn massacre. Paying compensation to the relatives of the 20,000 Polish officers and prisoners of war murdered in cold blood in 1940 is probably too much to ask. But it might be possible to reach agreement on, say, a joint documentation centre.

Even a chance of that modest prize comes at a high price. In order not to jeopardise Mr Putin's visit, Poland has to swallow hard when its history is traduced.

As last week's column pointed out, no country can look back on its history without shame, and modern Russia does not need to feel perpetually burdened by the crimes of the Soviet Union. But neither must it revel in them. Knowing how to end an argument by saying "sorry" nicely is a sign of a well brought-up child (and of a decent human being).




AP

Splinter church in Ukraine renews appeal for recognition, independence 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

31 August 2009

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - A breakaway Orthodox Christian church in Ukraine is pressing its call for recognition as a legitimate entity independent of the Moscow-based church that dominates the faith in the former Soviet Union, officials said Monday.

The appeal comes weeks after the head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, visited Ukraine and criticized splinter churches seeking independence.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church sent an official request last week to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of the 250 million world's Orthodox Christians. It said the church "is ready and strives" to come under Constantinople's jurisdiction as an independent group.

Spokesman Yevhen Zapletnyuk said the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church believes that winning recognition from Bartholomew would will help heal the rifts among Ukraine's Orthodox believers, many of whom want to come out of Moscow's shadow.

"We have extended a hand," Zapletnyuk told The Associated Press. "We believe this is the way to salvation."

Allegiance in Ukraine's predominant Orthodox Christian faith is split among three major churches. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and the larger Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate have lobbied Constantinople for recognition as legitimate and independent of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate, which is subordinate to Patriarch Kirill.

Ukraine's pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko has championed those efforts as part of a campaign to shed Russia's political, economic and cultural dominance over its neighbor and integrate with the West.

The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church has some 1,200 parishes and 700 priests in the nation of 47 million, according to the State Committee on National Religions.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev Patriarchate, which broke away after the 1991 Soviet collapse, claims 14 million parishioners and some 3,000 priests, and opinion polls show it is gaining popularity. The Russian-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church claims 28 million followers in Ukraine and more than 9,000 priests.

The Washington Post

HEALTH CARE

System Failure

"The English Surgeon"

(BBC/ITVS International)

The graphic brain surgery performed with a Bosch drill on a fully awake patient is not the most intense scene in this documentary about London neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and his volunteer work at a medical clinic in Ukraine. No, that would be the scene in which Marsh tells a tearful grandmother, "There is nothing to do but wait for the child to die." A close second is when Marsh consults with a beautiful 23-year-old about her brain tumor. He withholds the truth -- that the tumor will blind her and then kill her within two years -- until her mother can be with her at the clinic. Marsh blames these grim situations on the broken Ukrainian medical system, where doctors lack the supplies, trained staffs and drugs to carry out proper treatments. The poor citizens that Marsh serves cannot afford to pay $50 to $100 for a brain scan, so by the time their ills are diagnosed, it's too late. "The English Surgeon" airs Sept. 8 at 10 p.m. on PBS.

-- Rachel Saslow


(Note:  I would recommend checking your local PBS listings for the date and time .  OD) 


 


Open Democracy


Beware Russia's three tinderboxes 


By William Courtney, Denis Corboy, Kenneth Yalowitz

Created 2009-09-01 

Denis Corboy is director of the Caucasus Policy Institute at Kings College London and was European Commission ambassador to Georgia and Armenia. William Courtney was U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan and Georgia. Kenneth Yalowitz is director of the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College and was U.S. ambassador to Belarus and Georgia. 

The United States and Europe now face triple-barreled security challenges from Russia - its growing pressure on Georgia and Ukraine, and spiraling terrorism and repression in its Muslim-dominated North Caucasus region. Russia's muscular approach could ignite sparks in any one of the three confrontations, leading to  wider instability.  The West cannot stop Russia from harming itself, but it needs to prepare for and seek to avert dangerous Russian overreach.  The upcoming EU [1] and G20 [2] Summits should urgently address ways to do this. 

The most serious Russian challenges in the near abroad are directed at Georgia and Ukraine, two countries which seek EU and NATO membership [3] and have some form of democracy. 

Russia continues to stoke tensions along the cease fire line of the August 2008 war in Georgia and its separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow refuses to comply with the ceasefire and is slowly annexing these regions. Prime Minister Putin recently visited Abkhazia [3] and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to bolster military and border facilities. 

Russia is trying to provoke Ukrainian leaders, as they did Georgian leaders prior to the calamitous war against Georgia a year ago. On August 11, President Medvedev wrote Ukrainian President Yushchenko [4] and smugly predicted that "new times will come,"a clear reference to Ukraine's presidential elections in January. Medvedev accused Ukraine's government of "distorting" history regarding Stalin's artificial famine in the early 1930s [5], and "obstructing" Russia's Black Sea Fleet [6], based in Sevastopol, in Ukraine's Crimean region. The Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, a Kremlin favorite, recently provoked Ukrainians by asserting that they and Russians are "one and the same people." The Russians are also smarting over Ukraine's policies to promote use of Ukrainian language vice Russian. 

Russia's overbearing tactics are often unproductive.  Its neighbors refuse to recognize the "independence" of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.  Belarus and Uzbekistan have declined to join a regional "rapid reaction" force [7] to be based in Kyrgyzstan, and Belarus is seemingly more open to improved ties with the US and EU.  In April, Turkmenistan blamed Russia for a mysterious gas pipeline explosion and at long last pledged to ship gas through the planned, Western-backed Nabucco gas pipeline to Europe. 


For full article, see:  http://www.opendemocracy.net <http://www.opendemocracy.net> 


 

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