[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WP; WoE; DT; EDM

[Deychak, Orest]

The Washington Post

Financial

Paula J. Dobriansky, Thomson Reuters; Appreciation for family history inspires lifelong commitment to international affairs 

22 March 2010

WP

FINAL

A13

Throughout my career in international affairs, every day was a day in which my work affected people's lives abroad. Whether it was my tenure in government or in a private-sector job, all were connected, some way or another, in seeking to improve lives.

That passion began when I was a little girl.

My grandparents emigrated from Ukraine to the United States. My mother and father, both of Ukrainian descent, were educators and instilled in me a great desire for learning not just about our Ukrainian community but also about our history and values.

During my undergraduate studies, I did a program abroad where I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Rome. The embassy had been fielding many of the Soviet Jews and others who were emigrating from the then-Soviet Union. That experience fueled my great interest and passion in international affairs and politics. It gave me great exposure to other cultures and opportunity.

I decided to further my studies in the Soviet Union, looking specifically at the political and military relationship. I secured an internship in the White House at the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter's administration. I was very proactive and had a very keen knowledge of central-eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

At the end of the Carter administration, the NSC hired me full time as director of European and Soviet affairs. At the time, human rights issues in the former Soviet Union were front and center. We had to deal with a number of cases, including those involving people imprisoned for expressing themselves.

I became very attracted to the role of the United States Information Agency, because it had tools and instruments that could be used in reaching out to international audiences. You can have a really good policy, but if foreign audiences don't understand it, then your policies aren't going to have the desired effect.

So I eventually joined the USIA after the Senate confirmed me for a position there.

When the second Bush administration came in, there was a very specific need to institutionalize democratic strategies and promotion. I became an undersecretary of state for global affairs for eight years, long enough to be the longest tenured undersecretary of state in history.

My portfolio was focused on global issues such as democracy, labor, environment, human rights and trafficking in persons.

I have to say, when this opportunity arose at Thomson Reuters, it was very exciting for me. It's an extraordinary company with a dynamic leadership attuned to global change. I like that it puts a premium on transparency and fiscal responsibility.

Window on Eurasia: Moscow Seeks to Shut Down Ukrainian Cultural Autonomy Groups in Russia

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, March 19 – Even as the Russian government proclaims “a new era” in relations with Kyiv thanks to the election of “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovich and even as the new Ukrainian president announces plans to build a bridge linking Crimea and Kuban, Moscow is seeking to suppress the Federal National Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians in Russia.

            These various actions may seem contradictory to some, but in fact, they reflect a deeper and longstanding set of Russian attitudes, one that many in the West are loathe to admit or even share: the current Russian leadership and those in neighboring countries it can put pressure on do not view Ukrainians as a separate nation worthy of a separate state. 

            After the Soviet Union came apart, there were 11.4 million ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, something Moscow worked hard to ensure that the entire world knew and that the Russian government insisted the international community demand that Russian-language schools there be kept open.

            But at the same time, few people paid much attention to the equally important reality that there were three to five million ethnic Ukrainians living in the Russian Federation, for whom there were no Ukrainian-language schools or other native-language institutions and who even faced loss of work in the early 1990s if they sought to acquire Ukrainian citizenship.

            Although they received little support from Kyiv and none from the international community, the ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Federation took advantage of the freedoms of the 1990s to organize themselves not only in the heavily Ukrainian “Green Triangle” (“Zelenyi klin”) in the Far East but also in major industrial centers.

            By 1998, there were four ethnic Ukrainian national cultural autonomy organizations in the Russian Federation, and they came together to form the Federation of National Cultural Autonomies of Ukrainians (FNCAU) in the Russian Federation, a group that for the last 12 years has sought to protect their individual and collective rights under the Russian Constitution.

            If Moscow often points to the existence of national cultural autonomy organizations of some very small ethnic groups as evidence of Russian support for nationalities, the central Russian powers that be have never been especially happy about NCAs representing larger groups or those uniting the nationalities of neighboring countries.

            In mid-2009, Glavred’s Aleksandr Mikhelson reported yesterday, the government of Vladimir Putin signaled that it intended to shut down the FNCAU. Some Ukrainians expected that Moscow would reverse course following Yanukovich’s election, but instead, the Russian powers that be has “not slowed down” (glavred.info/archive/2010/03/18/140801-6.html).  

            Mikhelson documents Moscow’s persecution of the FNCAU over the last year. As a result of Russian government-required re-registration procedures, three of the nine regional organizations of the FNCAU were “excluded from the register of public organizations,” something one (in Krasnoyarsk) has now succeeded in overturning in court.

            Because of these legal travails -- which exacerbated the autonomy’s financial situation -- the FNCAU was not able to hold a congress in 2009 and elect a new leadership, even though such actions were required by the organization’s own statute. And as soon as the old leadership’s term expired, Russian officials invoked that to move against the group as a whole.

            But Moscow’s complaints against the group have become more hyperbolic in recent months. On the one hand, Russian officials now complain that the group should be banned because it continues to have on its official seal the words, “the Ukrainians of Russia,” rather just the FNCAU.

            And on the other, in early February of this year, the Russian justice ministry publicized a letter from a Moscow resident who demanded that the powers that be “take measures” against the FNCAU because its continued operation represented in his words “a threat to Russian statehood” because it is promoting “separatism.”

            Neither the author nor the justice ministry provided any evidence, but Russian officials don’t think any is needed, believing that “the Ukrainians of Russia don’t need Ukrainian language and culture” (www.glavred.info/archive/2009/04/29/104002-17.html), Mikhelson notes, whatever they say for international consumption.

             Hearings on the fate of the FNCAU are scheduled to take place at the end of this month, with the organization itself contesting what it says is the Russian justice ministry’s illegal action.  So far, Mikhelson says, the Ukrainian government has not taken a position on this or joined the suit, a failure that may create political problems in Kyiv.

            Members of the opposition, he says, are watching what Yanukovich will do.  And at least one deputy in the Rada is calling for that body’s foreign affairs committee to hold a hearing on what the Russian powers that be are trying to do, clearing hoping to force the new Ukrainian government to act lest it give more credence to charges that it is “unpatriotic.”

 

 

The following article is in Ukrainian, a Russian version is also available.  It discusses various aspects of Yanukovich’s highly probable visit to the U.S.next month and Deputy Secretary of State Dan Russell’s Helsinki Commission hearing testimony:

 

Dzerkalo Tyzhnya (Zerkalo Nedelyi)

Вантажити» чи перезавантажувати?

Автор: Тетяна СИЛІНА 

http://www.dt.ua/1000/1550/68890/ <http://www.dt.ua/1000/1550/68890/> 

[March 17th Helsinki Commission Congressional hearing on Ukraine: A press release, unofficial hearing transcript, statements by witnesses and video are available at www.csce.gov <http://www.csce.gov/> .  Please see the hearing page on our website: Click here to view <http://csce.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContentRecords.ViewDetail&ContentRecord_id=469&Region_id=0&Issue_id=0&ContentType=H,B&ContentRecordType=H&CFID=30216213&CFTOKEN=14395110> . ]

Eurasia Daily Monitor

March 18, 2010

Gas Lobby Takes Control of Ukraine’s Security Service

On March 11, the Ukrainian parliament appointed Prime Minister, Nikolai Azarov, and a new Security Service (SBU) Chairman, Valery Khoroshkovsky. As Ukrayinska Pravda (February 24) warned: “An additional bonus for the Liovochkin-Firtash group could be the appointment of Khoroshkovsky as the head of the SBU or interior minister, for which they are actively lobbying.” The Head of the Presidential Administration, Serhiy Liovochkin, has close ties to the gas lobby, formed while he served as a senior adviser to President Leonid Kuchma. Another representative, Yuriy Boyko, was appointed Minister of Fuel and Energy in the Azarov government.

An extensive Ukrayinska Pravda investigation (July 30, 2008) was entitled “Khoroshkovsky as a mask for Firtash?” Dmytro Firtash owns 45 percent of the opaque gas intermediary RosUkrEnergo (RUE), with 5 percent owned by another Ukrainian, Ivan Fursin, and 50 percent by Gazprom. RUE was established in 2004 by Kuchma and the then Russian President Vladimir Putin.

RUE was removed from the Ukrainian-Russian gas trade by the 2009 gas contract signed between Prime Ministers Yulia Tymoshenko and Putin. From 2004 to 2008, RUE had the support of not only the gas lobby in the Party of Regions, but also President Viktor Yushchenko whose brother, Our Ukraine deputy, Petro, is a gas trader.

Yushchenko intervened in the summer of 2005 to halt the arrest of Boyko for abuse of office when he headed Naftohaz. The arrest was ordered by the then-SBU Chairman, Oleksandr Turchynov, the head of Tymoshenko’s 2010 election campaign. The 2006 gas contract that reconfirmed RUE’s role was signed by the head of Our Ukraine, Yuriy Yekhanurov, a Yushchenko loyalist during the latter’s term as Prime Minister.

Khoroshkovsky’s appointment is controversial for three reasons:

First, it cements the gas lobby’s control of the Ukrainian president’s domestic and foreign policies.

Second, Khoroshkovsky is a billionaire and his appointment makes a mockery of the separation of business and politics. The Head of the Parliamentary Committee on National Security and Defense and former Defense Minister, Anatoliy Grytsenko, said that Yanukovych’s government appointments showed that he was disinterested in separating business and politics (Radio Svoboda, March 11).

It is doubtful, Grytsenko believes, that these billionaires would first and foremost defend state interests and undertake reforms. Ukrayinska Pravda (March 12, 13) ran two lengthy articles on the large number of oligarchs appointed to the Azarov government, presidential administration and security forces. Azarov responded to journalists’ questions on Khoroshkovsky by saying, “The state of his wallet should not be the basis for accusations leveled against him” (www.pravda.com.ua, March 11).

On March 4, 2009, First Deputy SBU Chairman Khoroshkovsky ordered an Alpha Spetsnaz unit to raid Naftohaz, in an operation that was widely condemned as directed against the Tymoshenko government. Khoroshkovsky was acting on behalf of Firtash, incensed that 11 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas in storage, worth $2 billion, that RUE claimed belonged to it, had been expropriated by Naftohaz and Gazprom.

Firtash is seeking shares in the revived proposal for a gas consortium as compensation for the gas (EDM, February 14). The consortium was first unveiled in 2002 by Kuchma and Putin.

Yushchenko, who has always been a critic of the 2009 gas contract, gave his support to the 2009 SBU raid. Parliament was incensed: 391 voted to establish an investigative commission and Grytsenko demanded Yushchenko replace Khoroshkovsky. First Deputy Prime Minister, Turchynov said, “We will not tolerate corrupt practices in the energy sector. The days of shadowy intermediaries are over” (www.pravda.com.ua, March 6, 2009).

Khoroshkovsky’s appointment ignored his rejection by a majority vote in parliament’s committee on national security and defense. Grytsenko said that the head of a law enforcement organ could not be a leading businessman, with media resources, as this was an obvious conflict of interest (www.grytsenko.com.ua, March 11). Grytsenko told parliament that the SBU chairman should be a “person who has a view of its perspective and development, who professionally understands the sphere and which does not lead to conflict in ethical and corporate standards.”

In addition to RUE, Khoroshkovsky and Firtash are business partners in Ukraine’s most viewed television channel, Inter. Khoroshkovsky is President of Evraz Holdings, and the head of the oversight board of the Ukrainian Independent TV-Corporation that owns Inter. Firtash owns 61 percent of the media corporation, according to Ukrayinska Pravda (July 30, 2008).

In the first half of the 2010 election campaign, Inter had given former parliamentary speaker, Arseniy Yatseniuk, wide visibility as a candidate. He was then seen as Tymoshenko’s main rival for the “Orange” vote and Inter’s coverage aimed to undermine Tymoshenko’s election.

Grytsenko had earlier condemned Yushchenko’s appointment of Khoroshkovsky as SBU First Deputy Chairman in January 2009. His appointment was widely seen as Yushchenko using the SBU against Tymoshenko who had removed Khoroshkovsky as head of the Customs Service where he had served in 2007-2009. Grytsenko has long been critical of the continued “politicization” of the SBU, whose practice of interfering in domestic politics under Kuchma did not end under Yushchenko. This practice could continue under Yanukovych, but with different nuances.

On the same day that he was appointed, Khoroshkovsky told journalists that the SBU would cut back on its work in the secret Soviet archives (www.pravda.com.ua, March 11). That same day, President Yanukovych issued decree 312 to remove Volodymyr Viartovych as the Director of the SBU’s Department of Archives (www.president.gov.ua, March 11). One of the first steps Yanukovych took when the archive was transferred to him was to remove the large 1933 famine (holodomor) section, established by his predecessor.

A court rejected a private complaint filed against the Donetsk newspaper, Rodnoe Pryazovie, for publishing an article on November 25, 2009 claiming that holodomor was not “genocide” against Ukrainians (www.pravda.com.ua, March 12). The complaint was based on an October 2006 law on the famine lobbied by Yushchenko, backed by the unveiling of SBU archives and voted through by Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko bloc and Socialist Party.

The Party of Regions and Communist Party did not vote for the 2006 law and their critical views of Yushchenko’s holodomor campaign as “genocide” is now official policy, as both factions are members of the ruling coalition underpinning the Azarov government. In August 2009, a letter from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Yushchenko strongly condemned Yushchenko’s international and domestic campaign to portray the holodomor as “genocide.”

Khoroshkovsky’s, Boyko’s, and Levochkin’s appointments testify to the fact that Yanukovych has sanctioned the gas lobby and RUE is back in business, signaling a possible resurgence in corruption.

--Taras Kuzio

 

 

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