Ukraine's Orange Blues

One of the KGB’s master assassins reared his head in Kyiv this summer.

Bohdan Stashynsky killed two Ukrainian émigré nationalists in Munich in the late 1950s and then, after defecting to West Berlin in 1961 and being tried in Karlsruhe in 1962, he received an eight-year prison sentence, was released after four, and then proceeded to fall off the face of the earth. Now, at 80, the ex-assassin has apparently decided to set the record straight by telling his side of the story to journalist Natalya Prykhodko. As Prykhodko tells it, she’d been contacted by a retired officer of the Ukrainian Security Service who said Stashynsky “feared dying and taking some secrets to his grave. And why you? Because I vouched for you.”

I have some really swell news.

I finally managed to get my hands on Viktor Yanukovych’s bestselling book, Opportunity Ukraine. No one I know in Ukraine has ever laid his or her eyes on the volume, but I have it—my very own copy.

I’ll discuss the actual volume in subsequent blogs, but for the time being let me tell you how I found it.

It wasn’t easy. I scoured the bookstores of Kyiv and Lviv a few weeks ago, but to no avail. Silly me: why would an English-language book by its president be sold in Ukraine?

But surely it’d be available in Vienna, right? I mean, the publisher, Mandelbaum Verlag, is based in Vienna, and surely they’d have an interest in selling it there? Right?

Wrong.

I scoured the bookstores of Vienna, but with no luck. The city’s answer to Barnes & Noble, Morawa, didn’t even have the book in its computer system—which was a bad sign, of course, and led me to think I should just go straight to the source.

Funny you should ask, as a few weeks ago, in the immediate aftermath of the stupid Tymoshenko verdict and the subsequent cancellation of Viktor Yanukovych’s trip to Brussels, a raft of Regionnaires bristled at Europe’s supposed treatment of Ukrainians as “schoolchildren.”

“We’re equals,” the Regionnaires insisted, “and deserve to be treated as such.”
Disregard the underhanded way in which the Regionnaires claimed to stand for all Ukrainians. After all, whatever the Europeans did or said about Tymoshenko, they directed their comments at the Regionnaire government misruling Ukraine—and not at Ukrainians.

The more interesting question is: Are the Regionnaires schoolchildren? To my mind, that’s putting an all-too-flattering spin on a bunch of incompetent crooks who never made it through kindergarten. Still, the question is valid and deserves a response.
Underlying the Regionnaires’ rejection of the term is their view that they have nothing to learn from Europe. If they’re not schoolchildren, then Europe is no teacher, and if Europe is no teacher, then it has nothing to teach the Regionnaires. And that’s that.

Who’s right about the threat Russia poses to its neighbors—the distinguished American historian Richard Pipes or the distinguished Russian analyst Dmitri Trenin?

According to Pipes, the Russians “do pose a threat to their ex-republics. They have no problem with Central Asia, because those [states] are rather docile. But they can’t reconcile themselves to the loss of the three Baltic Republics [Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania] and Ukraine and Georgia. I feel fairly confident that if Georgia or the Ukraine were to join NATO, as they would like to, the Russians would invade and destroy their independence.”

According to Trenin, “Russia’s remarkable disinterest in its former empire has been paralleled by the other former Soviet republics distancing themselves from the former imperial center. Several have proclaimed a European vision or vocation. Others reaffirmed Muslim roots and focused on their neighborhoods. A couple have gone into isolation.”

The obtuseness of the Yanukovych regime appears to know no bounds. After a puppet court sentenced former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko to seven years in jail on October 11th, after that verdict provoked howls of protest from everybody—from Washington to Brussels to Moscow—the Yanukovych folks have just lodged new criminal charges against Tymoshenko, this time for her business activities back in the 1990s. In doing so, they have effectively thumbed their noses at Europe.

That leaves one option only on Ukraine’s international front—subservience to Russia and devolution into a third-world colonial hinterland doomed to underdevelopment and poverty. Integration into the Russian-led Customs Union will enable the Regionnaires to retain their wealth and power for a while, but when Vladimir Putin becomes president for life, the party will be over. He knows the Regionnaires are clowns and will treat them accordingly. They deserve Siberia. Unfortunately, Ukraine doesn’t deserve being consigned to the Stone Age. 

Ukraine has a new official Hero—Borys Bilash, a poet from Donetsk. Never heard of him? Not to worry. You’re not alone. Neither has anyone else. Except for President Viktor Yanukovych, that is. You see, Bilash is apparently his favorite poet.

A just-released study by the International Center for Future Research has some bad news for southeastern Ukraine. According to the center’s calculations, the quality of life is lowest in a coherent swath of territory running from south to east. Of Ukraine’s 27 provinces, Zaporizhzhya is 22nd, Mykolaiv is 23rd, Kherson is 24th, Luhansk is 25th, Donetsk is 26th, and Dnipropetrovsk is dead last. The two outliers are Kharkiv in the northeast, which is 2nd, and Chernihiv in the north, which is 21st.

As you’d expect, Kyiv City is at the top, while the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, with its tourism, comes in 3rd. Visitors to western Ukraine won’t be surprised to learn that it does quite well in the rankings: Ternopil Province is 4th, Lviv is 5th, Chernivtsi is 6th, Ivano-Frankivsk is 8th, Volyn is 10th, Zakarpattya is 11th, and Rivne is 13th.