[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: NYT; Reuters; FT; my take on elections/ note

[Deychak, Orest]

The New York Times

Opposition Chief Is Named Victor of Ukrainian Vote 

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY 

15 February 2010

NYTF

Late Edition - Final

4

MOSCOW -- Ukraine's Central Election Commission certified Viktor F. Yanukovich as the winner of the Feb. 7 presidential election on Sunday, even as his opponent, Prime Minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko, vowed to challenge the decision in court.

The commission announced that Mr. Yanukovich, the opposition leader, had prevailed by 3.48 percentage points, or 887,909 votes.

On Saturday night, Ms. Tymoshenko said she would not concede and asserted that Mr. Yanukovich's campaign had used extensive fraud to steal the election. She pledged to overturn it through legal means, and not organize street protests, saying she did not want to cause more political instability.

European election monitors have described the voting as honest and fair. Prominent foreign leaders, including President Obama, have congratulated Mr. Yanukovich, suggesting that they do not believe that Ms. Tymoshenko has a strong case.

Over the weekend Mr. Yanukovich's aides described Ms. Tymoshenko's accusations as desperate. They contended that their side, in fact, had been the victim of malfeasance, saying that the Tymoshenko campaign had stuffed ballot boxes.

Despite losing the presidential race, Ms. Tymoshenko remains prime minister, and is rebuffing Mr. Yanukovich's demand that she resign. He can now try to assemble a coalition in Parliament to dismiss her or seek parliamentary elections.

In an interview with Russian television, Mr. Yanukovich dismissed speculation that he would reach a deal with Ms. Tymoshenko to keep her as prime minister. He said he hoped she would give up her post voluntarily.

Mr. Yanukovich offered an olive branch to supporters of Ms. Tymoshenko, as well as those of candidates in the first round of voting in January.

''The question is not about my personal ambitions,'' Mr. Yanukovich said, ''but about the fact that we now need to find ways to convince people who voted for Tymoshenko, as well as for other candidates, that the current authorities are capable of improving their lives.''

 

Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday fixed Feb. 25 for the inauguration of Victor Yanukovych as president. AP 


Kyiv Post


www.kyivpost.com <http://www.kyivpost.com> 

 


Update: Ukraine's Yanukovych to be sworn in on Feb. 25


February 16, 2010| Reuters 

Ukraine's parliament on Tuesday, Feb. 16, fixed Feb. 25 for the inauguration of Victor Yanukovych as president. 

Parliament seethed with intrigue as the two camps sought to outmanoeuvre each other -- she seeking to hold on to her power base as prime minister while his party tried to forge a new alliance to get her out.

With Tymoshenko maintaining Yanukovych is not legitimately elected and refusing to quit as prime minister, tension ran high and prospects for a quick return to stability appeared dim.

Uncertainty after a bitter campaign which resulted in a narrow win for Yanukovych on Feb. 7 is threatening any early economic recovery in the former Soviet state of 46 million.

Preliminary official figures on Tuesday showed the economy shrank 15 percent in 2009 -- the worst contraction in 15 years -- after growing 2.1 percent the previous year.

The stand-off, which outgoing President Victor Yushchenko scornfully called "a fight of two elephants", is delaying passage of the 2010 budget. It also threatens resumption of IMF lending under a $16.4 billion bail-out programme which was suspended last year.

LEGAL CHALLENGE

Supporters of Tymoshenko were due to lodge their challenge to the election result in a Kyiv high court on Tuesday. She says that electoral fraud by the Yanukovych camp -- which is denied by him -- robbed her of victory.

Major powers including the United States, Russia and the European Union have congratulated Yanukovych, a 59-year-old ex-mechanic from the Donbass mining region, on his victory.

Western governments have privately urged the charismatic 49-year-old Tymoshenko to accept defeat in the best interests of Ukraine. But though commentators say Tymoshenko is unlikely to succeed in her legal challenge, she did not appear on Tuesday to be ready to back down.

She met members of factions allied with her BYuT bloc, urging them to hold together to ensure a balanced power structure which was not "monopolised" by Yanukovych's Regions Party backers.

Parliamentary sources said Yanukovych's team were also active in horse-trading as they tried to forge a coalition that could produce an acceptable successor to Tymoshenko.

If the Yanukovych team succeeds, a vote of no confidence in Tymoshenko's government is likely to follow.

Most analysts believe Tymoshenko will end up as opposition leader but say it is hard to predict how long the conflict might last.

DANGERS FOR YULIA?

One analyst saw risks for Tymoshenko if she continued her defiance. "The clear danger in such a strategy is that she is tarnished as not being willing to accept the democratic choice of the people of Ukraine," Tim Ash of Royal Bank of Scotland wrote in a research note.

"She will have to weigh the pro and cons ... carefully, as the Tymoshenko brand, which is iconic, could be terminally damaged in the process," wrote Ash.

Yanukovych is expected to tilt Ukraine back towards Russia, its former imperial master, after five years of estrangement under the pro-Western Yushchenko.

Yanukovych, in an interview on Russian television at the weekend, said Kyiv may allow Moscow to station its Black Sea Fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol beyond a scheduled withdrawal in 2017.

He also said he would revive the idea of a gas consortium that would allow Moscow to co-manage Ukrainian pipelines.

At a parting news conference, Yushchenko said appointing Tymoshenko -- his ally in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought him to power -- as prime minister in 2007 had been his "greatest mistake". 

Financial Times

Putin should beware aftertaste from Kiev poll

By Stefan Wagstyl in London 

Published: February 15 2010 

For Vladimir Putin, the results of the Ukrainian presidential election are sweet. But the Russian prime minister should savour the success of Viktor Yanukovich with some care - there may yet be a strange aftertaste.

At first lick, there should be nothing to disturb Mr Putin. President Viktor Yushchenko, Kiev's pro-west champion, has been comprehensively beaten, losing in the first round with barely 5 per cent of the vote - a humiliation for the Nato-supporting Orange Revolution hero.

Mr Yanukovich, who overcame Yulia Tymoshenko in Sunday's final round, is the most Russia-friendly of the top candidates, even if his sympathies are outweighed by dependence on his real masters, Ukraine's industrial billionaires.

To add spice for Mr Putin, this is the same Mr Yanukovich, who lost in 2004 when he was Moscow's publicly backed candidate. The gaffe-prone former convict is not exactly the ex-KGB colonel's best mate. But he owes the Kremlin a few favours.

Mr Yanukovich's victory will probably not mark any dramatic Russia-oriented shift in foreign policy. The big change came in 2008, when Nato decided against extending membership to Ukraine (or Georgia) for fear of offending Russia. The point was rammed home during the Georgia war. For Mr Yushchenko, who had earlier discovered that the European Union did not want Ukraine as a member either, it was the end of a dream.

Subsequently, Kiev took a more balanced approach. With Mr Yushchenko in retreat, Ms Tymoshenko, as prime minister, developed relations with Mr Putin at the same time as promoting EU integration. With Mr Yanukovich there will be a bit more Russia in the mix but the two-track policy will remain in place.

Yet beneath the surface there are hidden dangers for Mr Putin. The most important challenge of the Orange Revolution was not the threat of Ukraine breaking away from Moscow and joining the west. This was unlikely, given the myriad ties between the two countries. And if events ever had moved in that direction, Russia had powerful tools at its disposal, such as fomenting separatism in Crimea.

What really disturbed Mr Putin was the Orange Revolution's potential political influence on Russia. It was a democratic challenge, albeit indirect, to his authoritarian structures. With protesters overthrowing leaders at around the same time in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan it was possible to believe liberalisation was sweeping the former Soviet Union - and that the ultimate target could be Russia.

In the event, the new regime in Kyrgyzstan proved little different from the old. In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, president, allowed himself to be drawn into a disastrous war. In Ukraine, as Mr Putin never ceased to point out, the Orange Revolution was followed by chaos. 

The circumstances of the Orange Revolution - the protests, the blatant foreign involvement by Russia and the west and the subsequent turmoil - made it easy for Moscow to portray democracy as a mess. But this time it could be different. If Mr Yanukovich can create a stability - a big if - and generate economic recovery - an even bigger if - it will be harder for Mr Putin to argue Russia has nothing to learn from Ukraine. 

This is not an issue for today. Even though Russians are angry with the recession, there are no threats to Mr Putin's grip on power. Recent demonstrations in the Kaliningrad region and sporadic protests elsewhere do not change the picture. And no one looks to Kiev for advice.

But who knows about the future? Mr Putin and his protégé, President Dmitry Medvedev, do not run a totalitarian state but an authoritarian system in which some argument is tolerated. Every so often, there is a note of real dissent. Last week, Sergei Mironov, speaker of the federation council (parliament's upper house), attacked the government's economic policies and was promptly slapped down by Mr Putin's United Russia party. He retorted: "Does United Russia think that opposition and criticism is dishonest? In a civilised society, this is the duty and aim of the opposition." Could Ukraine one day serve as an example of such a "civilised society", even in Russian eyes?

 

 

Ukrainian Elections, 2010 - an OSCE Observer's Perspective

Orest Deychakiwsky

 

I delivered a slightly modified and abbreviated version of the following at The Washington Group (TWG) conference on the Ukrainian presidential elections held on Saturday:

 

Even before Victor Yanukovich's win in the presidential election, there seemed to have been an early declaration of victory - not from either of the two remaining candidates- but from Moscow.  Sure, voters trounced incumbent President Victor Yushchenko out of office Jan. But viewing the Ukrainian elections through this perspective fails to give credit to the true victors of this winter's elections -- whether one likes the outcome or not - the Ukrainian people, who held "impressive" elections which met most OSCE and other international democratic standards.

 

When you get right down to it, the fact these election results (both rounds) were not preordained is a success in itself. The fact voters did not know who would win is a relatively rare concept in this part of the world and puts Ukraine in stark contrast with neighbors such as Russia and Belarus. Moreover, it is hard to imagine many post-Soviet countries removing an incumbent president.  

 

As an OSCE election observer in various OSCE countries, I've observed more than one sham election in other post-Soviet countries, including the bad ones that precipitated the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.  And these elections in Ukraine - as well as the three prior ones - December 2004, 2006, 2007 - compare very favorably to the vast majority of elections in the post-Soviet region, and even favorably with those in some new EU countries such as Bulgaria and Romania.  

 

International observers from the OSCE called the vote of "high quality" after the first round and "impressive" and "good, or even very good" after the second round, notwithstanding problem areas. An overwhelming 95 plus percent of the some 700 OSCE-led International Election Observation Mission observers in the first round and about 600 in the second round representing 45 countries assessed both the voting and the vote count as either good of very good - you can't do much better than that.  (These results were based on forms election observers filled out and faxed to OSCE in Kyiv throughout election day and after the vote count, and which statisticians analyzed before the preliminary statement was issued on the day after the elections, so there's a methodology here, so these are not just strictly subjective assessments).   The OSCE mission observed in more than 2,200 polling stations in every oblast in Ukraine and also observed several hundred vote counts during each round.  And most of the various international observers (and domestic non-partisan observer groups) reached more or less the same conclusions.

 

But more importantly than international observers in ensuring a clean election is that there were sufficient checks and balances domestically:  first and foremost, you had representation from the various candidates at the district electoral commissions and precinct election commissions - i.e. in each polling station, including an even number from both the frontrunners in the runoffs  just last week.  Moreover, you had party/candidate observers in the vast majority of polling stations, plus domestic non-partisan observers in a fair number - so sometimes you entered a polling station when voting was light and saw more observers than anyone else. In short, you had plenty of folks watching each other.  This certainly diminishes instances of fraud, although doesn't eradicate it completely, of course. 

 

I do think that the elections results reflected the will of the people.  At the same time, these elections were not perfect -- no doubt there was some cheating -- and I don't blame Yuliya Tymoshenko for contesting the results.  To do so is not inappropriate on her part if there is evidence of fraud.  On the other hand, there is the argument that Ukraine, hit hard by the global crisis, can't afford more months of infighting and political uncertainty.

 

Problems/shortcomings:

 

There were unclear provisions in the election law and last-minute court decisions contributed to Election Day confusion within the election commissions in some precincts.  This resulted in a relatively small number of people being denied the vote, or facing extra hassles (i.e. having to go to the court or the register maintenance bodies (RMBs) that maintain the voter lists or District Election Commission, instead of just having the precinct electoral commission decide by majority vote. Of course, it wasn't at all helpful that on the eve of the first round January 17th, a last minute court decision rejected almost immediately by the Central Election Commission (CEC) led to some confusion being applied to voters who wanted to be included on the voter lists on election day itself. (I saw this myself in several precincts in Kharkiv).  

 

OSCE observers - including my partners and me in both rounds (a Netherlands Senator in the first round in Kharkiv and Canadian MP in the second round in Odesa) - as well as Helsinki Commission colleagues deployed elsewhere - witnessed additional shortcomings - none of which would have affected the outcome in any significant way.  However, overall the voting and counts we witnessed were quite good.  Also, we didn't notice any monkey business with homebound voting ("po-domakh") which there were concerns regarding; no excessively high percentages of voters voting from home which would have raised a red flag.  However,  there was confusion as to what was required in order to vote from home based on the Kyiv Administrative Court of Appeals reversing an earlier decision and reintroducing a requirement that only voters with a medical certificate could be listed as homebound.  As with the question of inclusion on the voter lists, this happened on the eve of the election, followed by a CEC rejection. 

 

And in Kharkiv during the second round, we went to the district election commission to see the transfer of protocols from the precinct election commission at which we were observing the vote count, and saw some pretty intense procedural battles - based on different interpretations of the rules -- between the Tymoshenko and Yanukovich people.  Alas, this made for a very long night.  

 

There were also problems in between the two rounds - the issue of the head of the High Administrative Court being unresolved and politicized; claims about 1.5 million extra ballots to be printed illegally and attempts to replace the head of the ballot printing house and seize it, parliament removing Interior Minister Lutsenko who was subsequently reappointed as Acting Interior Minister.  But the one that got the most attention was the last minute amendment to the election law - only a few days before February 7 - basically saying that a quorum for members of an election commission to make a legally binding decision would not be required (something pushed through by Regions because of fears that Yuliya might pull her people off the commissions, thus depriving them of a quorum and disrupting the election).  This didn't happen, but it did poison the atmosphere. It's inappropriate to amend the election law between two rounds; to change the rules in the middle of the game.

 

The OSCE and others have rightly recommended that the unified election code be adopted before holding the next elections and that there needs to be greater clarity in the election law.  

  

But, bottom line, even with these and other violations and irregularities (including during the campaign), international observers reached the conclusion that there was no massive fraud and these violations were not systemic or systematic.  Also, violations were not, as in 2004, exclusively on one side.

 

What Next?

 

Of course, good elections alone do not make a democracy.  Ukraine has developed an open and pluralistic political system and media freedoms have expanded - among the positive legacies of the Orange Revolution many of whose promises remain unfulfilled.  Unfortunately, Ukraine has also witnessed poor governance, destructive and incessant infighting, pervasive corruption, and political instability -- in part due to no clear delineation of powers between the roles of prime minister and president.  This has led to policy paralysis.  

 

The new president and all of the political leadership - including the opposition (which will most likely be led by Yuliya Tymoshenko) will need to work with the IMF and others to resolutely further economic reforms, tackle corruption and an underdeveloped judiciary which have so debilitated rule of law in Ukraine, and stabilize a fractious political system.  Nothing would be more important to strengthen Ukraine's independence, especially its energy independence, reduce its vulnerability to outside pressures (i.e. Russia, which still views Ukraine as being part of its sphere of influence), and to further integration with the European Union, something that even the more Moscow-oriented Yanukovich asserts as a goal. 

 

I believe that Ukraine will neither become a total Russian puppet (although Tymoshenko would have been more decisively Euro-oriented) and won't revert to authoritarianism. After all, there is pluralism in Ukrainian politics and there will be a vigorous opposition.  And even the Regions party itself is not monolithic, and many of the oligarchs see their future in Europe, also, their businesses compete with Russian ones.  I think a major challenge is to develop a system that is not constantly paralyzed in disputes over the authority of the President, the Prime Minister, and parliament. 



Finally, he United States has a solid record of standing with the Ukrainian people over the decades in support of their struggle for freedom and democracy.  This broad support cuts across branches of government and party lines. Now is certainly not the time to give up on Ukraine, and I'm confident that we won't.  Ukraine does matter and it's crucial that we remain engaged with this strategically important country, a lynchpin to the security of Europe and a proven partner to the United States.

 

 

Note:  I encourage those who are questioning the OSCE and other international assessments of the elections to take the time and read the various numerous and detailed reports and documents regarding all phases of the elections - not just the press release.  Keep in mind that there will also be a final OSCE report issued, along with recommendations, probably next month.

http://www.osce.org/odihr/item_12_41433.html

Also check out the IRI, CVU, Opora websites for their assessments.

 

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