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

[Deychak, Orest]

The New York Times

WORLD BRIEFING EUROPE

Ukraine: Call To Russia For Extraditions 

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 

29 September 2009

Late Edition - Final

14

President Viktor A. Yushchenko has urged Russia to turn over three men
for questioning over his poisoning five years ago. Mr. Yushchenko said
in an interview broadcast Sunday night that the men were at the dinner
in 2004 during which he believes that he was poisoned with dioxin. Their
testimony, he said, was crucial to finishing the investigation. Mr.
Yushchenko fell gravely ill while campaigning against a Russia-backed
rival in 2004. The poisoning badly scarred his face. He has accused
Moscow of stalling the investigation by refusing extraditions in the
case or to provide Russian-made dioxin for testing. 

Reuters

September 29, 2009

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko promised on Tuesday to protect as
a sacred spot the site of a World War Two Nazi massacre of Jews after an
outcry over tentative plans to build a hotel complex nearby.

Some 150,000 people, mostly Jews but also including Ukrainians,
Russians, Poles and Gypsies, were shot by Nazi troops at Babi Yar, a
wooded ravine on the outskirts of the capital, Kiev, in a two-year
period from September 1941.

A decision earlier this month by the city council to build a hotel near
the memorial site over the next few years prompted an outcry from Jewish
groups worldwide and human rights groups.

Kiev mayor Leonid Chernovetsky has since stepped in and vetoed the
proposal, though the affair has left a sour taste with the city's
25,000-strong Jewish community.

"The Babi Yar memorial is sacred. The Ukrainian leadership will not
allow any defilement of the memory of our fellow citizens and will
ensure the proper protection of their place of perpetual rest,"
Yushchenko said in a statement marking the 68th anniversary of the start
of the massacre.

Over a two-day period from Sept. 29, 1941, a total of 33,771 Jews were
killed by Nazi troops and dumped into a huge pit, nearly half of them
children. The area where the killings took place is now sprawling
parkland which is not properly marked off and is the site of several
monuments to victims of the massacre whose remains lie there.

The city authorities had proposed building a complex of hotels across
Kiev, one of which would have run alongside the Babi Yar memorial park.

But they have denied there was any intention of putting up a hotel in
time to house football supporters during Euro-2012.

"Nobody is intending to erect buildings for Euro-2012 on human bones,"
Deputy Prime Minister Ivan Vasyunik said.

"To disturb the bones (of people) is a terrorist act for all Kiev people
and it is a terrible thing that such a thought even entered anyone's
head," David Melman, an aide to Ukraine's chief rabbi Moshe Asman, told
Reuters.

He said the nature of the killings was such that it was impossible to
say exactly where the remains of the Babi Yar victims lay and he
suggested that building plans should give the whole area a wide berth.

"It is not as if Kiev is so overbuilt that they cannot find another
place for hotels," he said.

 

AP

Ukraine cancels chemical plant sale 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

29 September 2009

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - The Ukrainian government auctioned off a key
chemical plant Tuesday but canceled the controversial sale just minutes
later, claiming the bidders conspired to drive the price down.

The Odessa Port plant is at the center of a rivalry between Ukraine's
leaders that has hampered effective economic policy. President Viktor
Yushchenko is locked in a power struggle with Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko, his ally in the 2004 Orange Revolution protests that led to
his election, and both are running for the presidency in January.

Tymoshenko wants to sell the plant this year, putting cash in her
government's coffers amid a devastating recession. Yushchenko argues the
country is not ready to sell the key plant and has issued an order
banning its sale.

The plant manufactures ammonium and other chemicals used to make
fertilizers, one of Ukraine's key export commodities.

The state property fund conducted a tender for the plant Tuesday despite
the order and protests from a Yushchenko representative at the auction
who said it was illegal. This was the third attempt to auction off the
plant in recent years, according to the fund.

A Ukrainian company, Nortima, won the tender with a bid of 5 billion
hryvna ($592 million or euro405 million), but the nation's top
privatization official said minutes later that the tender commission had
voted unanimously to annul the results because the price was too low.

The official -- acting State Property Fund chief Dmitry Parfenenko --
accused bidders of plotting to lower the value of the plant.

"Unfortunately, you have seen what kind of pressure is being exerted on
the state property fund, on the tender commission," Parfenenko said.
"All this was aimed at lowering the value of Odessa Port plant shares at
the end of the day."

He said a fair price for the plant specializing in ammonium production
would have been 10 billion hryvna ($1.2 billion; euro810 million). The
starting price at the tender was 4 billion hryvna ($475 million or
euro325 million).

Tymoshenko praised the decision to annul the sale, accusing "shadow
clans" of conspiring to drive down the price. Neither she nor Parfenenko
would provide details of the alleged plot.

Even though Yushchenko's representatives also supported the decision to
annul the sale, Parfenenko indicated that the president's attempts to
stall the tender in the first place have also served to lower its value.

Nortima officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

Analysts were puzzled by the authorities' move and said it hurt the
country's investment climate.

Marina Alexeyenkova, an analyst with Renaissance Capital Russia, said
the price offered Tuesday was fair, given that the chemicals market was
undergoing harsh times amid the global crisis.

"The price is in line with market conditions" Alexeyenkova said.

Tamara Levchenko, an analyst with the Kiev-based Dragon Capital
investment bank said that the authorities should have set a higher
starting price if they consider the final offer unfair. Levchenko said
the political battle around the plant is hurting Ukraine's image.

"All of this has a negative impact on Ukraine' investment portrait,"
Levchenko said.

Eurasia Daily Monitor 

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/edm/

 

September 28, 2009-Volume 6, Issue 177

Who Will Washington Support in the Ukrainian Elections? 


The Ukrainian media has started to debate who the United States might
support in the upcoming January 17, 2010 presidential elections. This
issue is closely related to the question of which "political
technologists" the presidential candidates will employ: American or
Russian. On August 31 Alyona Getmanchuk, the editor of the weekly
magazine Glavred, discussed "Washingtonski Stavky" -how the U.S.
administration looks upon the three main presidential candidates. 


Getmanchuk characterized Viktor Yanukovych, who leads in the polls, as
someone over whom Washington still has reservations, because of his
background in the Kuchma ancien regime, his low intellectual
capabilities, and his authoritarian and Soviet cultural attributes.
Washington also looks negatively at Yanukovych's support for separatism
in Georgia. Similarly, Getmanchuk found that "in the U.S. they do not
see in a President Yanukovych any threat to Ukrainian independence"
because no Ukrainian leader will willingly give up Ukrainian
sovereignty. This is a reference to the fact that Kuchma came to power
with "pro-Russian" slogans in 1994, but quickly became a Ukrainian
derzhavnyk. However, what this comparison of Yanukovych and Kuchma
ignores is that Yanukovych was born in Belarus and grew up in the highly
Sovietized Donetsk where he was twice imprisoned, and as the Donetsk
governor in 1997-2002 he oversaw the corrupt transition to a market
economy that created oligarchs. In the USSR, Kuchma was head of
Dnipropetrovsk's Pivdenmash (Yuzhmash), the world's largest producer of
nuclear weapons and, therefore, a member of Ukraine's communist
nomenklatura (Glavred, August 31). 


Getmanchuk analyzed Yulia Tymoshenko, who will most likely face
Yanukovych in the second round of the elections. Getmanchuk developed
the familiar canards about Tymoshenko's "populism" that dominated
Western coverage of her first government in 2005, but qualified this by
saying that she is no longer seen in Washington as a "populist." Any
analysis of Ukrainian party and presidential programs will show that
they all include "populist" promises, including Yushchenko's 2004
program. 


Getmanchuk pointed to one area where Washington might consider
Tymoshenko as positive: her role in reforming and tackling corruption in
the energy sector. Tymoshenko closed the corrupt gas intermediary
RosUkrEnergo, which resulted in 2009 becoming the first year that
Ukraine's gas trade is not managed by a corrupt intermediary. Tymoshenko
retains a larger number of skeptics than her supporters in Washington,
Getmanchuk believes, because of her alleged "authoritarian" tendencies,
and her unwillingness to compromise. However, like Yanukovych,
Washington's views of Tymoshenko, Getmanchuk suggested, are also in the
process of changing. 

 

Finally, she assessed Arseniy Yatseniuk (interestingly the analysis
ignores President Viktor Yushchenko who received a rapturous welcome
during his April 2005 visit to Washington where he was accorded the rare
privilege of speaking to both houses of congress). Getmanchuk wrote that
few in Washington know much about Yatseniuk, a factor that is unlikely
to change before the election. Washington's interest in Yatseniuk is in
decline, Getmanchuk believes, in a comparable way to the plateauing of
his support in Ukraine over the last four months after his meteoric rise
in the previous six. Yatseniuk's support in Ukraine and in the West has
grown as a consequence of domestic disillusionment with Yushchenko,
Tymoshenko and Yanukovych. One of his drawbacks, Getmanchuk believes, is
that Yatseniuk has little charisma, appears arrogant and little is known
about him or his policies (for example, it is now understood that he is
less pro-Western than at first it was assumed). Another factor
contributing to this declining interest is the widely held view that
Yatseniuk will fail to enter the second round. 


Getmanchuk's analysis is complicated by the fact that Yatseniuk is the
only main candidate using Russian "political technologists." The
Ukrainian team of consultants, led by Kyiv Mohyla Academy Professor
Rostyslav Pawlenko, was replaced by Russian consultants in June
(www.proua.com, July 3). These Russian consultants were involved in
preparing the anti-Yushchenko and anti-American propaganda in the 2004
elections for the Yanukovych campaign. They have also been blamed for
the hugely unpopular Yatseniuk billboards and campaign tents in the
center of most Ukrainian cities that use military camouflage colors to
portray an air of crisis (www.arseniy.org). 


Yanukovych, Tymoshenko, and Yushchenko use American election consultants
(information about which is easy to find because U.S. companies working
for foreign governments have to register with the Department of Justice
Foreign Agents Registration Unit (FARA). Yanukovych draws on political
consultants linked to the Republican Party, who unlike others working in
Ukraine have never registered with FARA. 


Yushchenko and Tymoshenko have drawn upon election consultants who have
worked for Democratic election campaigns including Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama. Tymoshenko's team hired AKPD Message and Media, who played
a central role in Obama's successful public relations campaign. This
undermined Yatseniuk believed by many (up to the culling of Ukrainian
consultants), to be "Ukraine's Obama" (see the picture of Yatseniuk as
"Ukraine's Obama?" on the front cover of the May issue of Business
Ukraine magazine). 
The AKPD contract became public knowledge with a lengthy analysis
entitled "King Makers for Tymoshenko" in Ukrayinska Pravda (September
2-3). One of the

first steps has been to re-fashion Tymoshenko on the internet
(www.tymoshenko.ua and www.blog.tymoshenko.ua) and to have input into
Tymoshenko's billboards, widely seen as the best produced by all of the
candidates that portray her competitors as arguing or undermining her,
while she as head of government is busily working to extricate Ukraine
from the impact of the global financial crisis. "They quarrel. She
works," one of the billboards declares (Ukrayinska Pravda, September
10). 


Tymoshenko has also managed to find support from Ukraine's most well
known rock bands, such as Druha Rika (who backed Yanukovych in 2004) and
Vopli Vidoplyasova -a famous band in Ukraine that supported Yushchenko
in 2004 and helped to popularize the Orange Revolution. The first of
many rock concerts was held on the Maidan on September 12 attended by
Tymoshenko and 50,000 spectators (Kyiv Post, September 17). 


In Ukraine, discussions of "Washington" wrongly lump together the
present administration, which officially will not support any candidate,
think tank experts and private consultants employed by Ukrainian
candidates or political parties. The Bush administration did not support
a Ukrainian candidate in the 2004 elections, unlike Russia whose then
President Vladimir Putin twice traveled to Ukraine to support
Yanukovych. 


Russian political consultants on loan from Putin, such as Gleb
Pavlovsky, worked for the Yanukovych campaign. U.S. political
consultants working for three Ukrainian candidates represent private
companies, not the Obama administration. Nonetheless, this distinction
appears lost on Ukrainian observers of U.S. foreign policy. 


--Taras Kuzio   

 

Window on Eurasia: 'Will Russia Hold the Far East?' Ukrainians Ask

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, September 28 - At a time when some commentators in
Moscow are talking about seizing parts of Ukraine, their counterparts in
Kyiv are asking whether Moscow can hold the Russian Far East,
highlighting the longstanding ties between Ukraine and that region and
recalling speculations during the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1960s. 

 

            To Ukrainians, the area between Vladivostok, Nakhodka and
Khabarovsk is known as the "green triangle" ("zelenyi klin") because
that is a region to which thousands of Ukrainians moved in the decades
before World War I to escape famine conditions at home, satisfy their
land hunger, and help the Russian Empire hold its conquests there.

 

            Ethnic Ukrainians in that region have played an important
role ever since, not only providing much of the agricultural workforce,
but attracting the attention of outside powers. During the Sino-Soviet
conflict of the late 1960s, Beijing sought to win them and Ukraine
itself to its side - or at least was famously criticized by Moscow for
supposedly doing so.

 

            Recently, Vitaly Kulik, the director of the Kyiv Center for
Research on Problems of Civil Society, presented a report in the
Ukrainian capital on the question "Will Russia Hold the Far East?"
(hvylya.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=256:2009-06-03-
10-53-01&catid=4:2009-04-12-12-01-18&Itemid=10).

 

            In his remarks, Kulik addressed the intricate
interrelationships of the attitudes of all residents in the Russian Far
East toward Moscow, the growing role of China and other outside
countries in its fate, and the specifically Ukrainian dimensions of
social, economic and political developments there.  

 

            According to Kulik, who recently visited the region,
residents of the Russian Far East are increasingly disconnected with the
rest of Russia and at the same time increasingly linked to other
countries.  "An entire generation of young residents of the Far East has
been born" who "have never been in Moscow but often have been in
Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo."

 

            For such people, he said, "Moscow does not mean anything."
Indeed, "the word 'russkiy' and the identification 'russkiy' are
conditional."  As a result, almost a third of the population in the Far
East wants to send its children beyond the borders of Russia so that the
latter can earn enough to have their parents join them. 

 

            Few have any interest in going to European Russia; many more
are intrigued with the possibility of living in China. And the Chinese
are exploiting with, with one Chinese writer insisting that "instability
in Russia and stability in Beijing will push the local population [in
the Far East] to make a choice in favor of Beijing."

 

            Moreover, and despite reports in the Russian media to the
contrary, Kulik insisted, few residents in what is now the Russian Far
East show much xenophobia toward the Chinese, most of whom when they
come work in rural areas where the Russian population is rapidly
declining rather than in the cities.

 

            "The population of Primorsky kray," he suggests, is "more
tolerant in all relations to other nationalities," one of the reasons is
that "if you scratch a resident of Vladivostok, you find a Ukrainian,
every second or third of which has relatives or some family ties with
Ukraine or Ukrainians."   

 

            For them like for the other residents of the Far East, "the
main problem now," officials there told Kulik, is not the Chinese but
rather the Tajiks and Azerbaijanis. The Chinese do not create any
serious difficulties, but the latter are viewed by most residents as
sources of drugs and organized crime.

 

            Because of Soviet assimilatory pressure, most people in the
Russian Far East with Ukrainian pasts now identify as Russians or as
Slavs, but "if in Moscow [such] assimilation is taking place quickly and
is nearly complete by the second generation, in the Far East, [such
people] remember that their grandfather was from Ukraine."

 

            This helps to give rise to certain now "latent separatist
attitudes," not as well-defined as a push for the creation of a Far
Eastern Republic - such calls have more or less disappeared, Kulik says
- but rather in a growing sense of opposition to Moscow in Vladivostok
that leads to "sabotaging" anything the central Russian government tries
to promote.

 

            That explains why, Kulik said, Moscow had to send in outside
OMON units when it wanted to crush demonstrations in Vladivostok
concerning tariffs on the import of foreign cars.  The local militia
simply was not ready or able to crack down on people from its own
community, he continued. 

 

            Such attitudes, both "anti-Moscow" and "anti-Kremlin" not
only "exist" but have become "very strong especially now after the
introduction [by the Russian central government] of these prohibitions
and the destruction of 'gray' business,'"  And as a result, Russian
identity has "already lost its importance for residents of the Far
East."

 

            Moscow has tried to counter this by "taking out the whip,"
but the result of that, Kulik insisted, has been to drive residents of
the Far East further away from it and make them more ready to cooperate
with China, the Koreas, Japan, and the United States, a very different
outcome than the central Russian government clearly hoped for.

 

            And he concludes that although "there are no more Ukrainian
accents" in the language spoken in the Russian Far East, there are many
people there who remain keenly interested in Ukraine and also in
developing ties with China, to the point that they appear ready to have
street signs there in Chinese as well as in Russian.

 

            That pattern may lack the drama of past declarations of a
Far Eastern Republic, Kulik implied, but this drifting away from Moscow
could accelerate still further as a result of any belligerent moves by
Russia against Ukraine or simply as a result of the very different
trajectories of the Russian and the Chinese states.

 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 25732 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20090929/ee0abe71/attachment.bin>