Ukraine's Orange Blues

What ails Ukraine’s democratic opposition? Why do most Ukrainians, and especially those who detest the Yanukovych regime, continually gripe about the opposition’s fecklessness, weakness, and all-round lousiness?

I asked two friends in Ukraine for their views on the matter. One is a young journalist in Kyiv. The other is a middle-aged businessman in Lviv.

Here’s the journalist:

The opposition hasn’t thought anything through. Its statements are declarative and populist. It has no clear plan of action. Every party in the opposition has a somewhat different position and pursues its own interests. In a word, it’s the same as always: “where there are two Ukrainians, you’ll find three leaders.” It’s my impression that the primary goal of the opposition is to collect a few thousand people in front of some building. As to what should then be done, they have no idea. While people are protesting near the Parliament, taking off from work or studies, the oppositionists are lackadaisically walking about the parliament building. Obviously, the Regionnaires know how to take advantage of this.

Ukraine’s democrats are worried that a law “On the All-Ukrainian Referendum,” signed by President Yanukovych on November 27, 2012, may serve to prolong Regionnaire rule by means of underhanded changes to the Constitution. The fear is not unfounded. After all, everyone knows that Yanukovych and the Regionnaires face certain defeat in the 2015 presidential elections. Crushing the opposition by means of selective arrests and violence only goes so far. Falsifying election results can work only within a relatively narrow margin of, say, 3 to 4 percentage points. Instituting a military dictatorship is out of the question in light of Ukraine’s crummy armed forces. Changing the Constitution in Parliament requires a two-thirds majority, which the Regionnaires don’t have and won’t have. So why not change the country’s basic law by means of a referendum, thereby enabling “the people”—whom the Regionnaires generally regard condescendingly—to forge their own chains?

The spies have been in the news these last few months. On February 14th, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, spoke at an expanded board meeting of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Then, on March 25th, Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, addressed the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on the 21st anniversary of its founding. Putin’s website ran his entire speech; Yanukovych’s—only a brief excerpt.

Putin made three key points:

I recently spoke with Sam Patten, an international political consultant, about the run-up to Ukraine’s presidential election in 2015. Patten worked as a media consultant for former President Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party in 2007. He also helped opposition parties in Georgia defeat the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2012. Patten has also managed Eurasia programs for Freedom House and served as the Moscow-based country director for the International Republican Institute.

MOTYL: As many, including myself, have observed, things seem to be getting worse and worse on the Ukrainian political landscape. How do you see it today?

The Regionnaires are panicking. They know they’re in trouble and they don’t know what to do about it.

On February 28th, the Donetsk provincial leadership met with local leaders. One of them, the mayor of Kramatorsk, Hennadii Kostyukov, informed the assembled big shots of the following:

Young people use the Internet today. I am more than certain that in no other country, aside from Russia and us, do they write such filth about the first persons of the state … They sow mistrust in young people and thereby raise an entire generation of nihilists … This is very serious. The year 2015 is before us, and we’re losing time.

When, on April 4th, the Party of Regions responded to the opposition’s continued blockade of the parliamentary podium by leaving the Rada premises and setting up its own legislature on Bank Street, near the president’s office, it effectively created a condition of what the Bolsheviks once called “dual power.” Russia’s socialists did the exact same thing when, in the aftermath of the czar’s overthrow in the February Revolution of 1917, they established the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Petrograd. Lenin’s Bolsheviks used the Soviet to launch their own coup in November of that year.

If you’ve been following the ongoing banking crisis in Cyprus, I bet you’ve experienced a twinge of Schadenfreude upon learning that the Russian oligarch money stashed away in the island-state’s financial institutions may be hit the hardest.

For a president who regularly engages in snow jobs, you’d think Viktor Yanukovych would have been better equipped to handle the massive snow storm that descended on large parts of Western Ukraine and capital city Kyiv on March 22nd to 24th. Instead, he and his Regionnaire minions were once again caught unawares.

The snow came suddenly and unexpectedly, and it made streets, sidewalks, and roads virtually impassable, leading to huge traffic jams and the cancellation of virtually all flights in and out of many of Ukraine’s airports. Public transport was battered, and electricity supplies were affected in some parts of the country. Almost overnight, Ukraine and Ukrainians were snowed in.

Is the shale-gas deal President Viktor Yanukovych signed with Royal Dutch Shell on January 24th good news or bad news for Ukraine? 

Here, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, are some of the details:

Under the agreement, the Yuzivska shale-gas field in eastern Ukraine would be tapped using the controversial new technology of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Ukraine is believed to have an estimated 1.2 trillion cubic meters of shale-gas reserves, the third-largest such deposits in Europe. Ukrainian officials say Shell’s investments would likely be around $10 billion but could go as high as $50 billion. Environmental groups say chemicals used in the fracking process can threaten the health of surrounding communities, but the industry has aggressively challenged those claims.

The good or potentially good news is:

A behind-the-scenes powerbroker most people have never heard of has some interesting things to say about the Yanukovych regime and the Regionnaires in a recent interview. The 63-year-old Hennadi Moskal has occupied a variety of highly placed positions in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Security Service and has also served as governor of Luhansk and Zakarpattya provinces and as President Yushchenko’s permanent representative to the Crimea. In a word, Moskal knows both the “power ministries” and the country. He also happens to have been a parliamentary deputy for a few years, most recently having been elected in October 2012 on the democratic-opposition ticket.

Yevgenii Kuzmenko, of the Social Communication website Obkom, interviewed Moskal on January 29th. What, Kuzmenko asks, does Moskal think of the fact that President Yanukovych is appointing “his exclusive little soldiers” to positions of authority?

One of Ukraine’s best investigative journalists, Serhii Leshchenko, recently revealed a tidbit about President Yanukovych that shocked me. Read the following excerpt from his blog and see if you catch the jaw-dropping, eye-popping, mind-blowing part:

That Yanukovych doesn’t hear journalists is half the problem. He doesn’t hear his citizens. He wakes up in [his palatial estate outside Kyiv], which is surrounded by a six-meter-high fence and guarded, not by the Berkut special forces, but by an Anti-Aircraft Defense unit of Ukraine’s armed forces. He travels in a heavily guarded cortege along the Kyiv-Nova Petrivka highway…. Then he takes cordoned-off streets to get to [the presidential building], where he ends up in the closed bubble of the presidential administration…. His circle of associates is confined to his closest advisors, hunting friends, and his fawning subordinates. Every time Yanukovych goes out he is accompanied by an army of guards… There is no computer in Yanukovych’s office.

Here’s more evidence busting the myth of Ukrainian passivity and indifference.

The residents of Kremenchuk, a city of 230,000 southeast of Kyiv on the Dnipro River, and its environs are up in arms over oligarch Kostyantyn Zhevago’s plans to build the Bilaniv Mining and Enrichment Combine (HZK) on the Psol River in Kremenchuk District. According to Zhevago’s plans (pdf), about 12 villages comprising one fifth of the district’s territory would have to go to make room for the combine.

If you’ve ever been to Ukraine’s countryside, you may have noticed that many villages look like holdouts from the late nineteenth century. Dirt roads are the norm, water frequently has to be hauled from wells, and outhouses abound.

Don’t blame the villagers for that. Put the blame squarely on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party. Collectivization destroyed Soviet agriculture, while the forced starvation of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor, destroyed the Ukrainian peasantry. Nazi occupation policies during World War II only made things worse, while continued Soviet neglect of agriculture condemned the peasants to a nether existence up to the end of the Soviet Union. Collective farmers had a third-class status that some analysts even compared to modern-day serfdom.

A just-published report by Russia’s premier political analyst, Lilia Shevtsova, has important implications for the post-Soviet states in general and Ukraine in particular. Titled “Russia XXI: The Logic of Suicide and Rebirth,” the report was released by the Moscow Carnegie Center in January 2013. Shevtsova, who together with democratic reformer Grigory Yavlinsky shares the distinction of having been born and raised in the West Ukrainian city of Lviv, chairs the center’s Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Program and is the author of, among many other books, Putin’s Russia and Russia—Lost in Transition. When Shevtsova speaks, Western policymakers and academics listen—and post-Soviet dictators should listen.

An important new book by the distinguished University of Vienna linguist Michael Moser promises to be the definitive account of the anti-Ukrainian language policies of the Yanukovych regime. Entitled Language Policy and Discourse on Languages in Ukraine under President Viktor Janukovyč, 25 February 2010–28 October 2012, Moser’s monograph is slated for publication as part of the “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” series with Ibidem Press in Germany. Professor Moser is the author of eight books and a specialist on the Slavic languages in general and Ukrainian in particular.

The book begins with a short overview of the Ukrainian language’s historical development and treatment by both the Russian czarist and Soviet regimes. In particular, during the Soviet period: