Ukraine's Orange Blues

Leonid Brezhnev would have smiled when President Viktor Yanukovych made public his list of “The New Elite of the Nation” on December 29, 2012.

The 60 lucky individuals who made the list of the “presidential reserve cadres” are overwhelmingly local apparatchiks: directors, secretaries, heads, and deputy heads of the many bureaucratic agencies that misrule Ukraine. There are also two businessmen, one doctor, and one professor, although just what they’re doing there is anybody’s guess.

When arrogant thugs start talking the language of compromise and reason, you know they’re getting desperate. Look at the Soviet Communists. When they felt on top of the world, they insisted they’d “bury” the West. When they knew the jig was up, they discovered the pleasures of détente. Some fifteen years ago, when I visited Cuba as part of a cultural-educational group, our guide Ernesto insisted that the embarrassingly visible prostitution and black-marketeering we encountered on all of Havana’s streets were part of human nature. When he said, “We’re just like you,” I knew that Cuban communism was kaput. Most recently, North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un stated: “An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south.” There goes another socialist paradise.

While the Yanukovych regime’s likely disintegration (discussed last week in Part 1) is not tantamount to an institutional void, the destruction wrought by sultanism will place post-Yanukovych Ukraine in the extraordinary position of being a country without effective political institutions. Indeed, Ukraine will approximate a failed state. Under conditions such as these, the most important political actors will be the oligarchs, forces of coercion, civil society and opposition movements, and charismatic individuals.

The oligarchs, the military, the militia, and the security service will survive collapse intact, even if the regime’s downfall is accompanied by social upheaval and mass violence:

Although Ukraine may have to endure another three to eight years of Viktor Yanukovych’s misrule—until the presidential elections of 2015 or 2020—the end, fortunately, is in sight, and the challenges of post-Yanukovych reconstruction may be envisioned, at least in broad outlines. Following the extensive institutional destruction wrought by Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, Ukraine will have to be reconstructed from top to bottom. Mere reform will no longer be enough. Even “radical reform” may not quite accurately capture the magnitude of change that Ukraine will have to endure to emerge from the “Yanukovych Ruin” politically energized and rejuvenated, rather than enervated and ossified.

Last year ended with a series of portentous developments for the Yanukovych regime. And, more and more, it looks like the regime’s ready to break down or crack up. Consider the signs.

Dear Santa, Sorry for writing so late, but I’ve been as busy as a canary in a coal mine and haven’t had the time to get my personal life in order. And I gotta tell ya, Big Guy, this job stinks as bad as methane. Why didn’t anybody tell me back in 2004 or in 2010, huh? I mean, like, the wife couldda said, “No way, Jose, stick to your coal mines and don’t mess with no country that’s the size of France.” Heck, Santa, I don’t even know where France is! I figure it’s the size of Ukraine, which is pretty big, but is it as big as the Donbas? See what I gotta do in this freakin’ job? They got me learning geography and stuff and all I wanna do is ride my copter and shoot bison. Is that too much to ask, Santa? Is it? Course it ain’t! I figured this country would be, well, you know, sorta like a Lego set. You put the pieces together and then you take ’em apart and the wife and the boys would say, “Swell job, pops, where’d you learn engineering?” But no! The people here wanna play with my Legos! And now the Rada is full of guys tellin’ my boys how to run the show. Democracy used to be so easy.

The correlation of forces in the Ukrainian Parliament, the Rada, may have shifted. Not in terms of votes, of course, as the Regionnaires and their allies still have a majority of deputies.

But in terms of what really matters in the surreal world of Viktor Yanukovych’s Ukraine: fists.

With the election to the Rada of 38 deputies from the right-wing nationalist Svoboda party and of ex-boxer Vitaly Klitschko, head of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform, the Regionnaires have been transformed from a gang of thugs willing and able to spring a pogrom on the opposition to a bunch of mostly overweight and balding bullies who know they’ve more than met their match.

By now, everyone in the world knows about the Yanukovych regime’s embarrassing non-deal with Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa utility company. On November 26th, Vladyslav Kaskiv, the director of the Ukrainian state investment agency, and a man he believed to be Fenosa’s plenipotentiary, one Jordi Sarda Bonvehi, signed a document committing Fenosa to participate in a $1 billion project to build a liquefied natural gas plant near Odessa. The signing took place amid much fanfare and in the presence of a beaming Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Energy Minister Yuri Boyko.

This year has been exceptionally difficult for Ukraine’s economy, and 2013 is unlikely to be any better. Popular discontent with the inability of the Yanukovych regime to provide the population with decent living standards contributed greatly to the Regionnaires’ poor showing in the October parliamentary elections in which, despite significant fraud, they managed to scrounge up only 30 percent of the popular vote. As the economy goes into tailspin, popular opposition to the president and his rapacious party of power will grow and Viktor Yanukovych will face an unenviably stark if richly deserved choice: either to ignore reform and attempt to shore up his crumbling rule with force or to promote economic reform by loosening his hold on political power.

According to the SigmaBleyzer Private Equity Investment Firm and The Bleyzer Foundation in Kyiv, here’s the bad news (pdf):

Every November Ukraine commemorates the Holodomor, the famine and genocide of 1932 and 1933. Since 2010, President Viktor Yanukovych has marked the occasion with a formal address to the people. Read in isolation, none of them is terribly interesting. A comparative look at all three speeches, however, reveals some interesting shifts in tone and content that may illuminate Yanukovych’s own evolving thinking about the genocide and his regime.

But first a striking continuity. Yanukovych has never called the Holodomor a genocide. He’s called it a crime, a tragedy, and an Armageddon, but not genocide. Ironically, he does use the term Holodomor, which means “killing by means of hunger” and, in that sense, is virtually a synonym for genocide. There are indications that this reluctance to call a spade a spade may change.

Back in 2010, during his first encounter with Holodomor remembrance day, Yanukovych stated (this and subsequent citations are the translations provided on his website):

I bow to the memory of those innocently killed by the Holodomor.

A recent policy memo of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “The EU and Ukraine after the 2012 Elections” (pdf), is well worth reading. Its author is Andrew Wilson, senior policy fellow at the council, a reader in Ukrainian studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London, and the author of several highly regarded books on Ukraine.

Wilson begins by reminding us that “Relations between the EU and Ukraine are at an impasse. The last two years have been dominated by rows over the selective prosecution of regime opponents, in particular the conviction of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in October 2011, and an accelerating trend towards a more authoritarian and corrupt style of rule in Ukraine.”

So what should the EU do about Ukraine? The answer, in short, is to embrace its people and squeeze its ruling elites.

What, if anything, will President Obama’s policy toward Ukraine be?

His October 22nd foreign policy debate with Governor Mitt Romney may hold some clues. Naturally, you wouldn’t expect either debater to focus on Ukraine, but it’s still striking just how little attention was paid to Ukraine’s neighborhood—Europe and Russia.

Neither Obama nor Romney mentioned Europe or the European Union, even once. Ditto for Germany. France, the United Kingdom, and Poland got one mention apiece, but only in passing, while Greece got two, but only as a metaphor for a fate that needs to be avoided. Russia was mentioned ten times, mostly in the below exchange:

OBAMA: Governor Romney, I’m glad that you recognize that al-Qaeda is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda; you said Russia, and the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

What does the ultranationalist “Svoboda” Freedom Party’s 10.5 percent share of the party-list vote in Ukraine’s October 28th parliamentary elections mean? Is it the end of the world? Have Ukrainians embraced fascism and anti-Semitism? Or might there be somewhat less alarmist explanations for Svoboda’s showing?

There are three good explanations—and one shockingly bad one—for Svoboda’s rise from a minor regional party to a very minor national force. After all, let’s not forget that Svoboda received the fewest votes of the five parties that made it into the Parliament.

First, most Ukrainians certainly didn’t vote for Svoboda because they read its program. If they had, they would have noticed that Svoboda’s socioeconomic vision of Ukraine resembles that of the Republican Party for the United States and that its approach to ethnic relations is strikingly similar to official policy in the Baltic states. Nor did Ukrainians vote for Svoboda because they were familiar with its record of governance, which, according to one Lviv-based businessman’s private communication, has been abysmal:

The parliamentary elections are over and—surprise!—the Regionnaires won, as they and everybody else in Ukraine knew they would, despite the fact that they are deeply unpopular and would, in a fully fair and free election, have suffered an embarrassing defeat. But if you have the money, you can buy as many votes as you need, which the Regionnaires did with wild abandon. If you control the electoral committees, you can make sure the vote count is just right. And because half of the deputies were now elected in first-past-the-post majoritarian districts, the Regionnaires will be able to do what they do best: buy them and their votes at several million dollars a pop, which of course is pocket change for Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt party. With an estimated 188 deputies, the Regionnaires will have ten fewer deputies than they had before, but still hold a plurality of the total (450).

What will Viktor Yanukovych do after he falls from power?

That’s a question that should concern Ukraine’s current president, especially as Ukrainians are preparing to go to the polls on October 28th. After all, just about everyone in Ukraine hates him: from the regular folk to the intellectuals to the elites to his supposed supporters. It didn’t have to be that way. Even a half-hearted commitment to reform and good government would have won him accolades. Since it’s too late to save his ruined presidency, there’s nothing left to do but wait for it to end.