Ukraine's Orange Blues

Hats off to the Regionnaires for pulling off the impossible! The Euro 2012 soccer games in Ukraine and Poland seemed like a sure bet. Infrastructure would be built, tourists would come, and Ukraine’s economy—and image—would get a boost. True, it was likely that the democratic opposition would take advantage of the games to publicize its plight, but that seemed like a potentially minor disruption of a public relations coup for President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions regime. 

What could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, everything—thanks to Regionnaire greed and incompetence.

At a recent meeting with David Kramer, the Executive Director of Freedom House, President Viktor Yanukovych “underlined” that the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2012 “will take place honestly and openly.”

Don’t believe him for a millisecond. It’s not just that Yanukovych has a decidedly casual relationship with the truth. It’s that he and his Party of Regions know three things that all Ukrainians also know: that absolutely everything depends on their winning the elections, that they will never win in fair and free elections, and that the only way they can square that particular circle is by cheating.

The Regionnaires must be getting desperate. When the vast majority of Ukraine’s population thinks of you as thugs, crooks, and vandals a few months before an election you can’t possibly win, there’s only one thing to do. No, not go straight, silly.

You go to Burson-Marsteller, of course, a self-styled “leading global public relations and communications firm” that has a special relationship with the world’s rogues. You pay B-M a ton of money and you hope they can remove your stench.

Andrew Rettman of the EUobserver broke the story on April 27th:

Robert Mack, a senior manager at Burson-Marsteller, told EUobserver: “Our brief is to help the Party of Regions communicate its activities as the governing party of Ukraine, as well as to help it explain better its position on the Yulia Tymoshenko case.” One of his staff said it was hired “several weeks ago.”

(Tip to Mr. Mack: a political party isn’t supposed to have a “position” on what the Yanukovych regime insists is a case for independent courts, but no matter.)

It had to come to this, of course. When thugs throw an innocent person in jail, how can they resist showing her who’s boss? How can they resist beating her up?

They can’t. And, in Viktor Yanukovych’s Ukraine, they didn’t.

It happened on Friday, April 20th, shortly after 9 p.m., and the victim of the Regionnaire assault was the recently incarcerated opposition leader and former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko. Here’s her description of the beating:

At around 21:00 my fellow prisoner was taken out of her cell and shortly thereafter three enormous men came into mine. They approached my bed, covered me with a bed sheet, and began to remove me from my bed, while applying brute force. Desperate and in pain, I began to defend myself, but received a hard punch in the gut. They twisted my hands and feet, and I was taken outside in the bed sheet. I thought that this was my end. The unbearable pain in my back and my fear led me to scream and call for help, but I received none. At some point I simply lost consciousness as a result of the terrible pain and came to in a hospital.

President Viktor Yanukovych has stepped into another scandal, this one over his assets. He declared his total income for 2011 as being 17,362,024 hryvnia, which, at 8.03 hryvnia to the dollar (the exchange rate on April 15th), comes out to $2,163,257.

Not bad enough for a populist president who claims to be one of the regular folk, but the real scandal concerns the source of Yanukovych’s money. A mere 757,615 hryvnia ($94,396) constitute his presidential salary, while 155,409 hryvnia come from dividends and interest. (He’s got 14,521,454 hryvnia stashed away in banks.) So what’s the source of the remaining 16,449,000 hryvnia ($2,049,497)?

Which Ukrainian political parties are extremist? Most people would point to the right-wing Svoboda party under the leadership of the charismatic demagogue, Oleh Tyahnybok. And they’d be right. Svoboda (or, ironically, “Freedom”) is xenophobic, radical, and anti-democratic: the three defining features of extremism.

But they’d be only partly right. No less xenophobic, no less radical, and no less anti-democratic are two other political groups—the Communist Party of Ukraine and the Party of Regions. Suffice to say that Ukraine’s Communists are still Stalinist and proud of it. As for the Regionnaires, two years of their rule have relegated Ukrainian language, culture, and identity to Bantustans, exacerbated tensions between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, intentionally promoted Russian chauvinism and Svoboda extremism, efficiently dismantled democracy, bequeathed the economy to rapacious corruptioneers, squeezed civil society, and eroded freedom of the press, speech, and assembly. If that isn’t extremism, I don’t know what is. Contrary to President Viktor Yanukovych’s assertions that he is a moderate, the fact is that he is an extremist par excellence.

Go see Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness, both because it’s an excellent film about the Holocaust in wartime Lviv and because it demonstrates just how deeply rooted some ethnic stereotypes can be.

The story is simple: an anti-Semitic Polish sewer worker and part-time crook, Poldek Socha, finds himself in the unexpected position of hiding a group of Jews in Lviv’s sewers. At first, he does so only for money. In time, he abandons his anti-Semitism and acts with altruism. The film ends with the liberation of Lviv by the Soviets and the emergence of the surviving Jews from the sewers. “These are my Jews!” Socha beams. “These are my Jews!”

In an interview, Holland emphasized what she thought was one of the film’s strong points: its avoidance of one-dimensional characterizations. Here’s what she says about Socha:

I recently came across the saddest commentary on Ukraine’s eastern provinces that I have ever encountered. It’s a video blog by one Stanislav Tsikalovsky from the city of Luhansk. The 34-year-old Tsikalovsky goes by the name of Proctologist. His slogan is: “Believe me, because madmen always speak the truth.”

The truth that recently caught the attention of some 30,000 Ukrainians came in a video Tsikalovsky made after a trip to Lviv, in western Ukraine. Here’s what he had to say:

Just when did people start referring to the inner circle around President Viktor Yanukovych as “The Family”? The term is now commonplace, but my impression is that it started entering the political vocabulary of Ukraine about six to twelve months ago, when son Oleksandr joined Viktor Senior and Viktor Junior to form a triumvirate of power holders and all three began promoting their buddies to positions of authority in the government or to positions of unbounded rapaciousness in the economy.

Little Viktor has long been active in the youth branch of the Party of Regions—call them the “Regionnairettes”—and has served as a dutiful member of Parliament, where he’s been filmed acting uprightly by voting on behalf of absent comrades (a constitutional infraction, by the way, but what the hell). His big brother, Oleksandr, is the dentist extraordinaire whose mastery of gums and teeth somehow propelled him to the ranks of Ukraine’s one hundred richest individuals at precisely the time that Big Viktor was president.

Ukrainians like to blame their country’s ills on “Moscow and the Muscovites,” but the UK’s highly respected Royal Institute of International Affairs (a.k.a. Chatham House) has just provided good grounds for thinking that their paranoia may be justified.

Take a look at the January 2012 briefing paper, “A Ghost in the Mirror: Russian Soft Power in Ukraine,” by two Kyiv-based analysts—Alexander Bogomolov and Oleksandr Lytvynenko. Bogomolov is president  of the Association of Middle East Studies, while Lytvynenko is director of research projects at the Foreign and Security Policy Council. Neither is a “nationalist hothead.” Both are sober establishment men.

Here are the bullet points of their argument:

Throwing opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in jail was profoundly dumb, but sentencing her minister of the interior, Yuri Lutsenko, to four years was jaw-achingly, eye-poppingly dumber. After all, Tymoshenko actually posed a threat to President Viktor Yanukovych. She almost beat him in the last presidential election, and she would almost certainly have crushed him in the next one. Worse, as a self-confident woman, she undermined his desperately fragile male ego. To be sure, jailing her also subverted Ukraine’s chances of moving toward Europe and exposed it to Russia’s predations—strategic considerations that most leaders would have acknowledged as trumping the frailty of their personalities—but at least her imprisonment served some of Yanukovych’s immediate interests.

In case you missed it, President Viktor Yanukovych gave a two-hour interview on Ukraine’s popular ICTV channel in February. You’ll be pleased to learn that Ukraine is in tip-top shape and that things will only get better.

And the president’s damned proud of his record.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not ashamed to look people in the eye. And before these elections”—meaning the parliamentary elections in October—“I will look people in the eye. I always did that and I will continue doing that.”

Personally, I don’t doubt Yanukovych for a minute. Heck, he’s president of Ukraine and Ukraine’s presidents always tell the truth.

As visitors to Ukraine know, the country’s automobile drivers are a menace to society. They drive too fast and too carelessly, they drink and drive and then drink some more, and they think they own the roads. That they rarely wear seatbelts goes without saying.

They’re also a menace to themselves. President Yanukovych’s close adviser Hanna Herman lost a son in a tragic car accident in 2009.

Take a walk in downtown Kyiv and you’re likely to find that there are as many cars on the sidewalks as there are people. All of them are going somewhere, but whereas most people are polite enough to let you pass, most drivers feel that it’s you who are imposing on them. A friend of mine once tried to sidestep an automobile that was bearing down on him on the sidewalk. He instinctively raised his arm and smacked the front windshield. It broke. The driver raised hell. My friend pleaded self-defense. So whom did the police arrest? My friend, of course. He got off only because he had a Canadian passport.

I wrote in a recent posting for this blog that Europe’s troubles and Russia’s turbulence herald an “unhappy new year” for Viktor Yanukovych and the Regionnaires. Let’s up the ante and ask what the European Union’s meltdown and Russia’s breakdown might mean for Ukraine. Both possibilities may still strike us as unlikely, but, in contrast to the conventional wisdom that ruled over the last decade, they’re no longer unimaginable. Indeed, one can easily imagine the EU’s transformation into a loose economic association without political aspirations or a tight political-economic entity under German leadership. And one can just as easily imagine Russia’s experiencing popular uprisings, coups d’etat, and regional secessionist movements that would make it a weak, brittle, and possibly even failed state.

The good news is that President Viktor Yanukovych has finally gotten around to firing some of the deadbeats in his Cabinet.

The bad news is that he’s replaced them with two individuals with absolutely no connection to or roots in Ukraine.

The worse news is that they’ve been placed in charge of the “power” agencies, the Ministry of Defense and the Security Service (SBU).

And, lest you think you can now take a breath, the worst news is that both guys have a record of violence as long as Yanukovych’s security entourage.

It started on February 3rd, when Yanukovych made Igor Kalinin the head of the SBU. Then, on February 8th, he made Dmitri Salamatin minister of defense.