#2
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)
www.ohchr.org
Ukraine: Reduction of hostilities but serious human rights concerns persist - UN report

GENEVA (9 December 2015) - In a conflict that has claimed more than 9,000 lives, the last few months have seen a significant reduction of hostilities in certain parts of eastern Ukraine, according to a UN Human Rights report released today. Serious human rights concerns persist, however, including continuing impunity, torture and an absence of the rule of law in the east, as well as a difficult humanitarian situation for those living in the affected areas and for those internally displaced.

The twelfth report by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine states that the "ceasefire within the ceasefire" of 26 August led to a considerable decrease in hostilities, particularly due to the withdrawal of certain heavy weapons by the Ukrainian military and the armed groups. Between 16 August and 15 November, the time period covered by the report, 47 civilians were killed and 131 injured. The total death toll since mid-April last year is at least 9,098, with another 20,732 injured. Total figures include civilians, Ukrainian armed forces and armed groups.

The new casualties resulted largely from explosive remnants of war and improvised explosive devices, "underscoring the urgent need for extensive mine clearance and mine awareness actions on both sides of the contact line," the report states. There remains, however, an inflow of ammunition, weaponry and fighters from the Russian Federation into the territories controlled by the armed groups, leaving the situation highly flammable.

The report also reveals that serious human rights abuses against people in the territories controlled by the self-proclaimed "Donetsk people's republic" and "Luhansk people's republic" continued, including killings, torture, ill-treatment, illegal detention and forced labour, lack of freedom of movement, assembly and expression. Local residents continue to remain without effective protection of their rights. "An estimated 2.9 million people living in the conflict area continued to face difficulties in exercising their economic and social rights, in particular access to quality medical care, accommodation, social services and benefits, as well as compensatory mechanisms for damaged, seized or looted property," the report notes, adding that the onset of winter and impediments to the work of humanitarian organisations could worsen the situation.

"The situation for an estimated 800,000 people living along both sides of the contact line has been particularly difficult," the report notes.

The limitations of the freedom of movement of civilians across the contact line, due to the requirements of the January 2015 temporary order issued by the Government, remained one of the major challenges for people living in the conflict-affected areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. As the reports notes, this is leading to an increased sense of isolation for many people, disrupting family and communal links.

The report also cites pervasive self-censorship and the inability of media professionals to exercise their freedom of expression in the east. Restrictions against media professionals by the Ukrainian Government also undermine freedom of expression.

The report also notes that "elements of the Security Service of Ukraine appear to enjoy a high degree of impunity, with rare investigations into allegations involving them." The report has documented cases of "enforced disappearance, arbitrary and incommunicado detention as well as torture and ill treatment of people suspected of trespassing against territorial integrity or terrorism or believed to be supporters of the self-proclaimed 'Donetsk people's republic' and 'Luhansk people's republic'."

Accountability has yet to be achieved for the killing of protestors and other human rights violations committed during the Maidan events in Kyiv between November 2013 to February 2014, the report notes. There has been no progress in ensuring accountability for the death of 48 people during the violence in Odesa in May 2014.

In the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the status of which is prescribed by UN General Assembly resolution 68/262, residents continue to be affected by the broad curtailment of their rights due to the application of a restrictive legal framework imposed upon them by the Russian Federation, the report states. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine continues to receive allegations of violations of the right to life, liberty, security and physical integrity, as well as fair trial rights and the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. The report also notes that the trade blockade of Crimea imposed by Ukrainian activists has led to human rights abuses, which were not properly addressed by law enforcement officers.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said the absence of the rule of law and legitimate authorities in territories controlled by armed groups, coupled with continuing presence of foreign fighters and sophisticated weaponry, have left people in hardship, with no real protection and no access to redress and justice.
"Civilians in the conflict-afflicted eastern parts of Ukraine end the year as they began it, in a very difficult humanitarian and human rights situation. Elderly people have no access to their life savings, people with disabilities have little assistance, and reduced access to healthcare has left many in dismal, precarious, even life-threatening situations," High Commissioner Zeid said.

"After more than 9,000 people have lost their lives, the reduction in hostilities, and thus in new casualties, is very welcome. I urge all sides to fully implement the Minsk Agreements and to actively work to ensure the application of the rule of law and international human rights norms everywhere in Ukraine."

The High Commissioner reminded all involved in the conflict, including those in control of certain areas of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, that they can be held criminally accountable for the human rights abuses committed in territories under their control. This applies in particular to those with command responsibility.

He noted some progress by the Government of Ukraine in implementing relevant provisions of the Minsk Agreements as well as launching of a National Human Rights Strategy and accepting the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for crimes committed after 20 February 2014. The High Commissioner also urged the authorities to ensure justice and accountability.

To read the full report, please visit:
http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/UA/12thOHCHRreportUkraine.pdf

For more information and media requests, please contact  Ravina Shamdasani (+41 22 917 9169 / rshamdasani@ohchr.org) or Cécile Pouilly (+41 22 917 9310 / cpouilly@ohchr.org)

[return to Contents] 

 #3
Kyiv Post
December 8, 2015
Residents of Stanytsia Luhanska try to adapt to Ukrainian rule
By Oksana Grytsenko

STANYTSIA LUHANSKA, Ukraine -- A young woman in traditional Ukrainian costume smiles from a billboard overlooking a square on which all buildings have bullet holes.

"Stanytsia Luhanska is Ukraine," reads the billboard.

But many in the small city of 12,000 people, located in the outskirts of Luhansk, the former provincial capital and now a stronghold of Russian-backed separatists, haven't warmed up to this fact
 
All the Ukrainian yellow-and-blue flags painted on the electric poles along the main road have been crossed out with white or red paint.Under a roof of the former gas station pierced with bullets, some 100 people are patiently standing in line waiting for a permission to cross the only checkpoint in the region, connecting the Ukrainian-controlled territory with the unrecognized separatist republic whose center is Luhansk..

"They led to this themselves when they were waving the Russian flags and asking: "(Russian President Vladimir) Putin, come here!" a border guard called Slavik, said pointing at the crowd. Slavik refused to give his last name as he was unauthorized to talk to the press.

Across the bridge, just about a mile from the checkpoint, there is separatist-controlled territory, marked with the Russian flag on a high building.

The shootings from the other side are still frequent.

In early November, George Tuka, who governs the Ukrainian-controlled part of the region, threatened to close the checkpoint if the shoutouts don't stop. The checkpoint was opened in mid-October.

Before that the locals bribed the soldiers to reach the other side. Some of them even risked their lives when crossing the mined fields.

So the residents are fearing the closing the checkpoint as almost everyone has a relative living on another side. Many young men from Stanytsia Luhanska fight on the separatists' side, the Ukrainian soldiers say.

There are two big tents at the square, where the officers of the emergency services, offer hot tea and biscuits for free.

But most people prefer standing in a cold outside.

Those, who come into the government-organized tent, hurry up to leave it quickly. The residents try to avoid talks about the war.

"We live our lives regardless of their fights," said Olga, a woman in her 30s, who refused to give her last name over safety issues.

She stands holding her bicycle loaded with two bags with food. She is heading to Luhansk where she lives with her children. Olga came to visit her relatives in Stanytsia Luhanska and to buy some milk products, which are much cheaper on the Ukrainian-controlled side. Olga said there are many people living in Luhansk now.

Schools work normal but have the Russian five-grade system instead of Ukrainian 12-grade one.

There are special offices in Luhansk for transferring money from Russia, but there's no way to get the Ukrainian payments, so the pensioners regularly travel to Ukraine-controlled Stanytsia-Luhanska to get them.

The Russian convoys arrive regularly, but Olga has never received any humanitarian help from them. There were some talks about the local elections planned for the February in Luhansk, based on the second Minsk deal, Olga said.

"But I haven't seen any election campaign so far," she added.

The soldiers stationed in Stanytsia Luhanska don't believe in Minsk peace deal, which presumes the local elections based on Ukrainian law, amnesty for the insurgents and Ukrainian control over the border with Russia.

"How do you imagine our guys, who lost so many friends in this war, may patrol the border together with the Russians against whom they fought?!" said Oxana Chorna, paramedic-driver of 28th brigade. Chorna, whose unit arrived in the town just a few weeks ago, accuses the local authorities and the civilian medics of pro-separatist moods.

"The local doctors recently hesitated to help our seriously wounded guy," she said. "It's appalling the officials didn't change at all after Ukraine liberated this town."

The civilians blame the Ukrainian troops of heavy shelling and looting.

There is a monument to the residents of Stanytsia Luhanska killed in this war located in the center of the town.

Elena Petrovna, a woman in her 60s, stands in a line for the second-hand clothes offered by a Christian charity in a tent by the border crossing checkpoint. She refused to give her last name saying she "wants to live."

She holds a big bag on a cart and remembers how she had to collect an old neighbor by pieces after he had been killed by Grad multiple launcher rocket system in August 2014.

"On Aug. 15 (2014) some 20 shells fell next to my backyard," she said. "I still live in a house covered with plastic film on the place of the windows."

The Ukrainian troops entered Stanytsia Luhanska on Aug. 18, 2014, after nearly two months of fights.

But the city remained the scene of shelling and regular armed clashes up to the end of summer.

In times of the heavy fights, many residents fled to Luhansk or to Russia.

Last winter the locals had to survive without heat, hiding from Grads in their basement.

Elena Petrovna said she had used the poplars growing on the edge of her garden for heating of her dwelling.

Now the sounds of explosions usually are caused by someone's stepping on the mines. Residents say it's nothing in comparison to what they experienced.

They are hoping for peace and for the checkpoint to Luhansk keep on working as normal. "I'm ready to serve to any king and kneel to any god if there's no more shelling," Elena Petrovna said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #4
LPR reports on escalation near contact line

LUHANSK. Dec 9 (Interfax) - Ukraine's government forces resumed daily shellings in the territory of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR), deputy chief of staff of the LPR people's militia Igor Yashchenko said.

"The situation in the zone of responsibility of the LPR people's militia, along the line of contact, became [even] more escalated over the past three days. Kyiv's armed forces again started to shell the territory of the republic and [the] positions of the people's militia, which is a gross violation of the ceasefire regime and the Minsk agreements," Yashchenko said at a briefing on Wednesday.

The LPR people's militia positions near Smile came under attack from an anti-aircraft system and an 82-mm mortar on Sunday, Yashchenko said. The Ukrainian forces shelled a dacha community near the Lenin Machine-building Plant, using automatic grenade launchers on the same day, he said.

Yashchenko reported that on Monday evening, the Ukrainian forces fired an automatic grenade launcher on the people' militia checkpoint near the town of Maryinka.

The press-center of the Donbas military operation pursued by the Ukrainian authorities, in turn, reported that the Ukrainian corps recorded almost 40 episodes of firing from the side of the militiamen over a single night.

 [return to Contents]

 
#5
Kyiv Post
December 8, 2015
Crimean residents turn away from Kyiv after blackout

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine - Weeks after the city was plunged into darkness when mysterious culprits blew up power lines supplying electricity from mainland Ukraine, many residents of Simferopol had turned their backs on Kyiv and were looking to Moscow.

"I don't know if the Ukrainians thought this (the blockade) would win us over and make us loyal to Kyiv, but if they did, they're pretty stupid," said Igor Plotnikov, a pensioner. "If before some residents were uncertain about the new authorities here and whether they should trust them, now they are only certain that the new authorities are more reliable than the ones in Kyiv."

On Dec. 8, Russia's Energy Ministry said power had been fully restored by the Ukrainian side, which for weeks it had accused of intentionally delaying repairs. Ukrainian authorities in the Kherson Oblast, where the power lines were first damaged on Nov. 21, said on the same day that supplies had only partially been restored, however, with three electricity lines still down.

The Russian state-run news stations now dominant in Crimea reported the news on Dec. 8 almost on loop, the phrase "energy restored to Crimea" repeated again and again.

The broadcasts left out the fact that a day earlier, Kremlin-backed Crimean leader Sergei Aksyonov had said the peninsula would never again use electricity supplies from Ukraine.

"We already rejected everything Ukrainian a long time ago. ... Electricity was the last thread tying us to Ukraine. And today we cut that thread completely and have no intention of supporting such relations ever again," Aksyonov was cited as saying by Russian media outlets.

For the most part, residents seemed to either trust Aksyonov's promises of full power supplies from Russia or to have grown accustomed to their new reality.

During the day, the only sign of electricity troubles in the city were signs on shop entrances boasting about the possession of generators or warning visitors that that they would be closing early. Other shops warned that they would not sell alcohol past 7 p.m., apparently encouraging people to obey an informal curfew.

Many businesses continued operating as if they were oblivious to the blackout, however, with hotels still charging guests full price even despite the lack of electricity.

Ironically, the only hotel offering guests uninterrupted power supplies on Dec. 7 was Hotel Ukraine. The bright lights of the hotel were like an oasis in a desert of pitch-black streets and dead trolley lines.

"They stopped running the trolley buses most of the time to preserve electricity," said Artem Simonovsky, a taxi driver not giving his last name. "Most of the street lights are out, so it's always black on many of the roads. A lot of areas have generators for residential buildings, but some people still only get four hours a day, with that time split up very inconveniently," he said, noting that some of his friends had electricity only in the wee hours of the morning when they were sleeping anyway.

"But Russia says they are going to have full power for us soon, and I believe them more than the Ukrainians now," he said.

The peninsula's shift toward Moscow - whether voluntary or forced - was evident on the main streets, with billboards featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin's portrait in some areas and signs proclaiming "the generous sponsorship" of the Russian president in areas under reconstruction.

Simonovsky said that despite the diplomatic tensions and Western sanctions that had come as a result of Russia's annexation of Crimea in February 2014, no one should be surprised that Crimean residents might be more loyal to Moscow now.

"It was the lesser of two evils," he said. "Kyiv just didn't give a crap about us; they made that clear from the beginning. They brought up our peninsula only when they wanted the West to feel sorry for them, but they did nothing for us. They never reached out to people in Crimea, and then this," he said. "What do they expect?"

 #6
n+1 Magazine (UK)
https://nplusonemag.com
Issue 24/Winter 2016
States of Shock
Shock therapy, take two
By Tony Wood
Deputy Editor, New Left Review

IT'S NOW TWO YEARS since the start of the Maidan protests in Ukraine, and the country remains in the grip of a severe crisis. The war in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces that began in April 2014, after groups of Russian-backed paramilitaries seized numerous police stations and town halls throughout the region, has so far claimed almost 8,000 lives and displaced as many as 1.4 million people. For now, a lasting peace is proving elusive: beyond the military standoff between the "People's Republics" and the Ukrainian army lies a political impasse over Ukraine's constitution. The "separatists," and behind them Russia, insist on "federalization"-that is, the granting of nearly independent status of the region-which Kyiv argues is an unacceptable surrender of its sovereignty. All this has been accompanied by a deepening economic downturn. Ukraine's already shrinking GDP has now contracted by almost a quarter since 2012, and the country's debt stands at more than $70 billion, though Kyiv negotiated a partial write-down with creditors in August 2015. Wage arrears have been accumulating and unemployment rising, while those who receive paychecks have seen their value sharply eroded: the hryvnia has slumped by a third against the dollar since last year, and inflation has breached 50 percent.

Amid this dual emergency, the government of President Petro Poroshenko has been pushing through a radical neoliberal restructuring. "It would be sad to waste this crisis and not make reforms," remarked Aivaras Abromavičius, the Lithuanian-born minister of economy and trade. Much of the program now underway was devised in consultation with the IMF, in exchange for a $40 billion bailout, and is laid out in successive Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) between Kyiv and the fund. The agenda being advanced is, in classic IMF fashion, aggressively Friedmanite, aiming for a drastic shrinkage in the size and regulatory power of the state, while at the same time opening up swaths of the public sector for private profit. The February 2015 MoU, for instance, envisaged an "expenditure-led consolidation that targets a smaller and more efficient government," as part of "deep and broad structural reforms to improve business climate, attract sizable domestic and foreign investment, and boost Ukraine's growth potential."

What does this actually mean, in concrete terms? No one who's seen the fund in action over the past forty years will find anything new here. There will be sweeping job cuts that will thin the ranks of the civil service by 20 percent. Much of that will be accomplished by shutting down several regulatory bodies. A planned "rationalization" in education will bring the eventual closure of three-fifths of the country's higher education institutions. Utility prices, including heating, in a country whose capital is farther north than Winnipeg, have already increased fourfold; further budgetary "consolidation" will be achieved by reforms to the pension system and by "reducing the social security contribution wedge" (that is, cutting unemployment and health benefits). The burden of these measures will fall disproportionately on the less well-off. Capital, on the other hand, is being offered all manner of handouts: the health-care sector will be steadily opened up to private financing, and in May the government announced a push to privatize 342 state-owned enterprises, including power plants, construction companies, mines, and the port of Odessa, one of the largest in the former USSR. Taxes on coal- and mineral-mining concerns will be reduced, since they "could be discouraging investments." Kyiv has also committed itself to primary budget surpluses, that is, no deficits, sucking demand out of the economy even as GDP contracts. Much of the dirty work of administering the austerity has been dumped on regional authorities-so there are obviously some kinds of decentralization the Poroshenko government likes.

Strangely, for a country of Ukraine's size, many of the people implementing the reforms are not from Ukraine. Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a native of Chicago, was a US Embassy staffer in Kyiv from 1992 to 2000; though of Ukrainian-American origin, she only acquired Ukrainian citizenship when she was appointed in December 2014. Economy Minister Abromavičius was naturalized at the same time, along with former Georgian health minister Alexander Kvitashvili. These recruits from two of neoliberalism's post-Soviet poster children were joined in February 2015 by perhaps Poroshenko's highest-profile appointee, former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Hounded out of Tbilisi in late 2013, he had then "commandeered his uncle's apartment in a tower on the Williamsburg waterfront," according to a New York Times profile, which made him sound like a hipster Ahmed Chalabi (apparently, "at the Smorgasburg food fair . . . Saakashvili motored in fluorescent green sneakers among bearded men with tattoos and women in revealing overalls"). Poroshenko somehow managed to lure him away, first making him head of his new international advisory council, then naming him governor of Odessa province in May. No role has yet been found, though, for the man who campaigned in successive Ukrainian elections as "Darth Vader," in full costume and flanked by Stormtroopers.

Western governments and institutions have not just helped to design the neoliberal overhaul of Ukraine's socioeconomic system, they have worked to accelerate and radicalize it. Each MoU has committed Kyiv to a series of "structural benchmarks"-dealines for certain legislation to be passed, a given number of functionaries to be made redundant, privatization plans to be drawn up, and so on. But by the spring of 2015, the pace was still too slow for some. In late April, US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt-he of the famous phone Geoffrey conversation with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria "Fu-k the EU" Nuland-said that "the Ukrainian people would like the process to move faster than this," adding, with a none-too-convincing attempt at altruism, "We would also like to see the process move faster, because the faster it moves the more quickly we will be able to help." At around the same time, the World Bank's local nuncio, Qimiao Fan, spoke understandingly of the "exogenous shocks" Ukraine had suffered, before pointing out that "faster and deeper reforms are the best antidote."

One needn't look too far for other examples of fiscal austerity and economic restructuring being applied in the midst of a catastrophic downturn. Greece is one obvious parallel, especially since one of the key institutions involved, the IMF, is the same as in Ukraine. But there are echoes, too, of the shock therapy imposed on Russia as the USSR collapsed. In today's Ukraine as in Yeltsin's Russia, the reform agenda draws heavily on the thinking of the Chicago School. Then as now, speed was deemed to be of the essence-a rapid, even traumatic dismantling of the country's former socioeconomic structures seen as essential to its future survival, lest the remnants of the past somehow regain their zombie-like grip on the present. And then, too, Western governments and financial institutions played a key role in devising the reforms.

There is also something uncannily familiar about the terminology and rhetoric being deployed. "Can a group of young reformers fix a broken country?" asked the New York Times on January 3. These words could have been written about more or less anywhere in the post-Soviet space in the early 1990s-or, for thatmatter, about countless other places since; if Vladimir Propp were still around to study the morphology of liberal internationalism, he would probably identify "young reformers" as one of its basic character functions.

Ukrainian politicians and Western pundits alike have also repeatedly drawn a contrast between a "new Ukraine" and an "old" one. For George Soros and Bernard-Henri Lévy, writing in the New York Times in January 2015, "the new Ukraine seeks to become the opposite of the old Ukraine, which was demoralized and riddled with corruption." In June, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk announced in the Washington Post that "Ukraine is fighting a war on two fronts"-not just "the one you see on television" (that is, against Russia), but also a "war against the Soviet past and the legacy of corruption and misrule that has held us back for so many years." For two decades, in part because of its internal political divisions, Ukraine had lagged behind the rest of the post-Soviet states in carrying out reforms; now it was going to make up for lost time. John Herbst, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, summed up most succinctly what is at stake in an April speech in Kyiv: "It is really reaction versus the future."

We have been here many times before: the imaginary clash between past and future incarnations of a given country is an especially well-worn trope, in which each of the terms is orbited by its cluster of ideologically changes sifnifiers-dreay/corrupt/bureaucratic/oligarchic/Communist/Baathist vs. vibrant/modern/entrepreneurial/capitalist/democratic, et cetera. But the Ukrainian version of this cliché has, for obvious reasons, become intertwined with the country's geopolitical situation, so that "old" and "new" are each also represented by external powers-the one by Russia, the other by the West. This was, of course, part of the emotive charge of the Maidan protests: the choice between the EU Association Agreement on the one hand and the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union on the other was often posed in "civilizational" and temporal terms, as an option for a "European" future over the atavism of the Soviet past. The annexation of Crimea and outbreak of conflict in eastern Ukraine only served to sharpen and entrench these metaphoric contrasts.

Since then Putin's Russia has become increasingly set in its role as heartland of dictatorship, while Ukraine represents, as per Timothy Snyder on the New York Review of Books's blog, the "Edge of Europe," and by the same token the "Edge of Democracy." Mikheil Saakashvili, writing in the Washington Post in late February, deployed a trusty cold war analogy to convey the same message, announcing that "Ukraine is today's West Berlin: the frontline in the defense of Western values against Russian revanchism."

These binary oppositions are obviously facile, and based on some embarrassingly wrongheaded assumptions: for instance, the idea that the EU could be said to stand for democracy, or that a government headed by one of Ukraine's richest men could mark a rupture with the oligarchic past. Yet there is another, more unsettling contradiction at work here. In today's conflict, Russia is held to stand for the "old," corrupt, oligarchic order. But Putinism itself is ultimately the product of a post-Soviet country's subjection to shock therapy and war-in other words, of precisely the combination of circumstances that are now supposed to bring about the "new" Ukraine.

IT SEEMS HARD TODAY to imagine Russia without Vladimir Putin, so closely have the fates and images of the two become intertwined, both inside the country and outside it. He has dominated the Russian political scene for a decade and a half now, and the whole modus operandi of the state bears his distinctive mark. The economy, too, has since the oil boom of the 2000s seemed a different kind of object from the tottering, chaotic structure of the 1990s. Yet although Putin is often thought to have overturned many of the policies of that era, he has in fact kept to the fundamental principles laid down during Yeltsin's neoliberal restructuring. Far from destroying the legacies of the 1990s, he is their legitimate heir.

For one thing, Putin didn't invent the hyperpresidentialism and contempt for the electoral process for which he has been rightly criticized: they were central to Boris Yeltsin's rule, and to the establishment of post-Soviet capitalism. The free-market reforms and privatizations of the early 1990s were forced through largely by executive decree, and many of the key laws were actually drafted by Western advisers. When the elected parliament disagreed, Yeltsin sent tanks to shell it into submission. He then rewrote the constitution, giving the president more poweers-this was duly approved in December 1993 by a rigged referendum. Voter fraud was again required to secure Yeltsin's reelection in 1996 against an uninspiring Communist candidate. In expressing his relief at the outcome, Anatoly Chubais-one of the "young reformers" of the day-was pretty frank about what had been at stake: "Russian democracy is irrevocable, private ownership in Russia is irrevocable, market reforms in the Russian state are irrevocable."

The priority given to market reforms over democracy was not a chance outcome of the Yeltsin presidency. It was rooted in an overriding commitment to the creation of private wealth, which was embraced as the foundation of the new capitalist system. Gaping inequalities were even to be encouraged as necessary by-products of this process; the wellbeing of the Russian population as a whole came a distant second. For all the undoubted differences between them, in this particular respect Putin has been true to his predecessor's legacy. Much has been made of Putin's apparent assault on oligarchic privilege, especially the dismantling of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos, after 2003. But picking on particular tycoons is one thing, attacking the very idea of private profit-making quite another. Putin has in fact furnished the country with several times more billionaires than Yeltsin did-largely thanks to the macroeconomic good fortune of historically high oil prices, although corruption may well account for some of the fortunes made by those in Putin's inner circle. While the individuals at the summits of wealth and power have changed over time, the underlying dynamic of elite enrichment that Yeltsin launched has been sustained under Putin.

Western commentators have also tended to attribute to Putin a desire to restore the state's dominance over the whole economy, seemingly reversing the entrepreneurial momentum of the 1990s. But again the contrast is overdrawn: Putin's statism has all along been selective, confined to particular sectors deemed strategic-natural resources above all. In the rest of the economy, his governments have worked to extend the reach of private capital rather than rein it in. His first administration, from 2000 to 2004, was perhaps his most energetically neoliberal, slashing corporate taxes and introducing a low, flat income tax, as well as rewriting the labor code to scale back workers' rights. But his second presidency, too, was marked by moves to increase the private sector's role in education, health, and housing, and by the conversion of several in-kind social benefits to cash payments-a "monetization" that was delayed and modified in the face of popular protests but carried through all the same. From 2008 to 2012, as prime minister to his own appointed successor, Dmitri Medvedev, Putin also oversaw the bailout of many of Russia's privately owned banks and large corporations with $50 billion of state funds, a socialization of losses that was in proportional terms only slightly smaller than the largesse granted to Wall Street. Since 2014, the combined effect of low oil prices and Western sanctions has sent an already slowing economy into recession, so it's hardly surprising that there should be some fiscal tightening. But the distribution of cutbacks speaks volumes about the Kremlin's priorities: it has reduced education, social, and health spending; closed hospitals; and tried to squeeze more "productivity" out of doctors. Though pensions have not yet been cut, they are lagging significantly behind inflation. Here as in Ukraine, in fact, a crisis is being seized as an opportunity to carry out more liberalization. The difference is that, in the Russian case, Western commentators are willing to see these cuts for what they are: a further onslaught against the most vulnerable so that a narrow elite can hold on to its winnings.

There is another unwanted family resemblance between Ukraine today and the state from whose geopolitical sway it is trying to escape. The springboard for Putin's rise to the presidency was the Second Chechen War, launched in August 1999 in response to an incursion into Dagestan by fighters led by the Chechen Islamist warlord Shamil Basayev. The first war, ranging the Russian army against bands of separatist fighters, had ended in 1996 in an ignominious stalemate, seen at the time as definitive proof of the decline of Russian power. A key part of Putin's popular appeal, first as prime minister leading the war effort and then as martial president, was his commitment to reversing the humiliation inflicted in the North Caucasus-famously summed up in his vow to "wipe out" Chechen separatists "in the shithouse." Though designed to end once and for all any aspirations to independence, Putin's war in Chechnya was labeled an "anti-terrorist operation." This is, of course, also what the Ukrainian government's effort to reclaim the Donbass is called. Warmly endorsed by the West, the assault on Chechnya was central to the consolidation of Putin's power after 2000, not only in terms of personnel-many of his early appointees were veterans of the conflict-but also in creating the elusive enemies and lurking sense of threat on which authoritarian tendencies thrive. Chechnya, too, was the proving ground for the prickly nationalism that Russia has increasingly expressed on the world stage. Though here again, the impact of shock therapy should not be forgotten: the humiliations Putin has sought to reverse are not only geopolitical, tied to the USSR's collapse; they are also social, stemming from the impoverishment, instability, and unemployment wrought by the transition to capitalism.

Putinism is in all these respects the product of the 1990s. But this is not to say that what came before that wasn't important. In many ways, Soviet political traditions and economic structures helped set the terms of Russia's response to the long post-Communist emergency. The same was true of the other countries of the former USSR: though they seemed to be headed in separate directions after 1991, their shared, recent past made their early experiences of capitalism and "democracy" more similar than they might care to admit. Rapid and crooked privatizations, swaggering oligarchs, and blunt assertions of presidential power became the norm across a whole swath of the former USSR. This notably set these countries apart from other ex-Communist states: Hungary and Poland carried out more gradual privatizations, for instance, and on the whole went through somewhat less tumultuous "transitions."

In Ukraine, privatization wasn't conducted with the same zeal as in Russia, and the fractiousness of Ukrainian politics prevented any single figure from consolidating power around himself to quite the extent Yeltsin or Putin did. The political struggles of the 2000s, from the Orange Revolution onward, not only reflected real divisions but demonstrated the impossibility of hyperpresidentialism along Russian lines in Ukraine. Yanukovych is often seen as a lesser version of Putin-a corrupt, brutal authoritarian who would gladly have done away with elections if he could. But to insist on this is to miss the fact that the country's political and cultural heterogeneity would have prevented him from even trying.

Still, Ukraine is very much part of the ex-Soviet story rather than the Eastern bloc narrative, and the past it shares with Russia, as a former component of the USSR, continues to shape its politics, its economy, its social and cultural life. Today's advocates of shock therapy in Ukraine look fondly to the example of Poland, suggesting that the country could just replicate that experience rather than the semi-criminal free-for-all that took place in Russia. But Poland and Ukraine have very different recent histories and much less in common than Ukraine has with the former Soviet countries. Shock therapy is supposed to wipe the slate clean, doing away with all vestiges of the past in order to give countries subjected to it a fresh start. But the post-Soviet experience showed that the past wasn't so easily shaken off: sudden, forced restructuring had similar effects across much of the ex-USSR in the 1990s, bringing forth parallel political responses and adaptations in everyday life. All this pointed insistently back to what these countries had previously had in common: not only the shared rule of the Communist Party and the planned economy it had set in place but the whole Soviet architecture of social life, manifested in everything from political discourse to shopping habits, from TV advertising to literary culture.

In other words, to paraphrase the old joke, if Ukraine wants to become Poland, it shouldn't start from here. In fact, the country a more fully neoliberalized Ukraine is most likely to end up resembling is not Poland but Russia-the very state currently held up as the symbol of oppression. The relevance of the Russian example was explicitly admitted, on the economic front at least, by Alexander Borovik, one of Saakashvili's advisers in Odessa: unveiling a package of proposed reforms in mid-September 2015, he noted that the bulk of them had already been carried out in Russia-so it was Kyiv that needed to catch up with Moscow. Politically, Poroshenko, with his bland smile and charisma-free speaking style, seems an unlikely candidate for the role of a Putin-type strongman, and for now, the country's politicians seem to be sticking to their disputatious habits rather than falling obediently into line. But the conflict in the Donbass may be helping to consolidate a more coherent nationalist consensus than has existed in Ukraine before, laying the groundwork for a possible authoritarian turn in the future. The spreading influence of the far right is one alarming symptom of this: organizations like Right Sector and Patriot of Ukraine have played a prominent role in the militias fighting in the east, and far-right slogans and concepts have been readily absorbed by the political mainstream in recent months. If Putin is the product of a Soviet past, war, and shock therapy, the "new" Ukraine now has all three of these ingredients, too-and might yet become a delayed echo of Putin's Russia.

But wasn't Ukraine's economy in need of reform? Didn't something have to be done about all the corruption, the inefficiency, the oligarchs who ran the show under Yanukovych? The reasonable answer to these questions might seem to be Yes-and who in their right mind would want things to just stay the way they were? It's worth remembering, though, that there is no such thing as reform in the abstract. One of the less obvious successes of neoliberal ideologues in recent decades has been their appropriation of this apparently neutral label to describe restructuring programs whose consequences are far from neutral. What have been blandly termed reforms have all along been deeply political processes, benefiting some social groups and interests a great deal more than others. The goal of the neoliberal brand of reform is to scale back the role of the state and boost the power of private enerprise-the theory being that creating wealth at the top of the income pyramid will unleash a virtuous circle of growth for everyone else too, bringing greater competition and all-around dynamism to the economy.

Since the 1980s, Western governments and agencies such as the IMF and World Bank have applied the neoliberal recipe to one country after another, from sub-Saharan Africa to Latin America to Eastern Europe, using loan conditions to force governments to deregulate their economies and crowbar the public sector open for private capital. In each case, a select handful of people did very well out of this, but for the vast majority of the population, the actual outcomes of these reforms ranged from bad to catastrophic. The retreat of the state left millions without jobs or basic services, gaps that private enterprise notably failed to fill. In sub-Saharan Africa, the IMF decreed cuts in government spending on agriculture, health, and education, which among other things increased these countries' reliance on food imports, amplified the effects of malnutrition, and reduced their capacity to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. Some states have never recovered from the dislocations that structural adjustment brought: the "reforms" carried out in Somalia in the 1980s, for example, destroyed its agriculture and helped pave the way for the disintegration of the 1990s. In Eastern Europe, the main upshot of neoliberal reforms was a dramatic spike in inequalities of all kinds, and nosediving public-health indicators.

The conventional wisdom these days is that the IMF is no longer imposing the same kind of dogmatic "conditionalities" on countries that borrow from it-having apparently learned that completely hollowing out the state is not such a great idea, especially if you ever want to get the money back. But to judge by the reforms the IMF is recommending for Ukraine, not all that much has changed-it's the same neoliberal orthodoxy all over again, which the fund has been able to impose mainly because Ukraine's situation is so dire. Over the past year or so, the pincers of war and debt have created a climate of emergency in which drastic measures have come to seem necessary. Yet the policies the Poroshenko government is currently implementing will do little to address Ukraine's most pressing needs. There is much high-sounding rhetoric about "transparency" and a crackdown on corruption but little sign of a shift in elite behavior. Ukrainian anticorruption activists claim that large chunks of IMF bailout money-as much as $1.8 billion-have been siphoned away into bank accounts in Cyprus. The drastic downsizing of the state envisaged in the MoUs is likely to create ever more gray areas where graft can flourish-as the  results of dozens of IMF and World Bank structural-adjustment programs have confirmed. Likewise, the experience of the Yeltsin administration would suggest that the government's shortage of revenues will hardly be made good through the privatization of state assets at fire-sale prices. Both these measures will, however, "improve the business climate"-that is, keep Western creditors happy.

The same is true of the cutbacks in government spending, which-as in Greece-seek fiscal rectitude at the expense of domestic demand and the country's social fabric. Even before the Maidan, Ukraine was one of poorest countries in Europe, with around a quarter of the population-morel thanten million people-living below the official poverty line; that figure will now have risen further. Before the fall of Yanukovych, much of the deprivation was concentrated in rural areas in the country's west; indeed, prolonged hardship was one source of antigovernment sentiment there in the fall of 2013. At the time, by contrast, Donetsk and Luhansk were on average less deprived than much of the country, but even so, the sense that local residents might be economically better off as part of Russia, where wages and pensions are higher, was one of the motives behind the anti-Maidan protests of 2014. In this context, economic austerity brings with it clear political hazards, aggravating existing discontents that have already helped topple one government and fuel a separatist movement.

By eroding the state's capacity to provide basic services, austerity poses longer-term threats, too. Ukraine's public-health indicators, for instance, are already among the worst in Europe-and they don't look great from a global perspective either. The country's male life expectancy is 66, which is marginally better than Pakistan's or Rwanda's but worse than Nepal's. The rate of prevalence of HIV/AIDS, at 466 per 100,000, is twice the European average, and considerably higher than, say, Brazil's or Senegal's; the figure for tuberculosis is similarly high-almost five times higher than Poland's but on a par with Uzbekistan's. The Ukrainian government was already funding efforts to slow the advance of such diseases only partly, relying on international donors to pick up the rest of the tab. Last year, however, almost half the TB-control budget was left unfunded by anyone. With the Poroshenko government slashing spending all around, it's hard to see things improving anytime soon. In fact, the push to privatize more of the health system, spearheaded by Kvitashvili, will if anything make it harder to coordinate urgent public-health efforts.

Are there alternative paths Ukraine could follow? Any post-Maidan regime would have faced a difficult economic situation, as well as Russian promptings and covert interventions in the east. It's important to recognize, though, that the Poroshenko government has itself helped to narrow the options available. The military escalation in the Donbass was far from inevitable, spurred not only by Russian maneuverings but by Kyiv's decision-with fulsome Western backing-to launch the Anti-Terrorist Operation in April 2014. Since then the war has resulted in thousands of casualties and proved a tremendous drain on the country's scarce resources: to military spending should be added the cost of losing control over Donetsk and Luhansk, which reportedly account for 16 percent of Ukrainian GDP. The outlines of a peace settlement have been clear for some time-something like federalization, balanced by guarantees of Ukraine's security. Kyiv has made grudging moves toward a more limited "decentralization," which have been met by violent protests from the far right. But the sooner these largely rhetorical gestures can be given actual political substance, the sooner the crux of the conflict can be dealt with and the war's manifold burdens lifted.

For all the damaging sacrifices austerity is imposing, Ukraine will still be saddled with painfully high debt levels for some time. The debt will in turn serve, in the long run, as a disciplinary mechanism to make sure the neoliberal reshaping of Ukraine's socioeconomic system continues. Here, it's not just Western hedge funds that are exerting the pressure but also the Kremlin. Ukraine owes Russia $3 billion, in the form of bonds that originally contained "cross-default" provisions-that is, a Ukrainian default would trigger immediate payment on all the country's other bonds. This seemingly suicidal clause may no longer apply in the wake of the August 2015 debt deal, but Putin's finance minister has been insisting on repayment of Ukraine's Russian debt in full this December-which may mean a large tranche of IMF money will head straight to Moscow (and from there, who knows, maybe to Cyprus as well).

Given its fervently pro-market leanings, it's not surprising that the Poroshenko government should be opposed on principle to bilking its Western creditors. But the debt crisis has nonetheless at times conjured the specter of wholesale default, prompting occasional nervous references to Argentina. And there were moments when it seemed possible the Maidan might turn into a revolt against the entire political and economic elite, along Argentine lines. Yet the targets of protest remained more narrowly defined: symptomatically, the slogan of late 2013 and early 2014, "Bandu get!"- "Out with the Gang!"-referred specifically to the Yanukovych regime. Since then, Poroshenko has been spared any Buenos Aires-style, saucepan-wielding popular upsurge; the giant borscht pots brought to Maidan to feed the protesters have been taken home rather than used as instruments of protest. This is partly because the confrontation with Russia has allowed the energies of the Maidan to be channeled through existing political parties (and volunteer armed battalions) rather than sweeping the entire setup away. But it's also because the Ukrainian forces with the greatest mobilizing capacity-especially the far right-havelittle interest in assaulting the edifice of oligarchic privilege that has dominated the country for so long, and which continues to decide its future.

In April 2015, as part of its effort to create a "unified" polity capable of both fighting the war against Russia and carrying through shock therapy, the Ukrainian parliament banned "Communist symbols and propaganda." One of the effects of this measure was to further delegitimize the idea of radical egalitarianism. At present, though, it's hard to identify groups or movements that might take up such contraband thinking and make it have practical consequences: the Ukrainian left, already small, was rapidly marginalized on the Maidan before splitting over the "Russian Spring" in the east, and remains weak and fragmented. Yet is it impossibly utopian to imagine that the very process of neoliberal restructuring could eventually generate another broad-based oppositional movement, drawn from among the disparate social groups that have emerged from the ruins of the Soviet-era working class and intelligentsia? In Ukraine as elsewhere, the advocates of a "new" country insist that what stands in their way is the remnants of the "old." But it may be that the society they are busily trying to create will prove more resistant to their designs than the one they seek to leave behind-the future  more radically stubborn, perhaps, than the receding past.

 [return to Contents]

#7
n+1 Magazine (UK)
https://nplusonemag.com
Issue 24/Winter 2016
Maidan and After
State of the Ukrainian Left
By Nina Potarskaya
Center for Social and Labor Research in Kyiv

IN THE TWO YEARS SINCE MAIDAN, Ukraine's nonparliamentary left has gone from infantilism to confusion to disarray to, finally, an attempt to research and analyze the current situation.

I work at the Center for Social and Labor Research in Kyiv, a small, nonprofit research center founded by a group of sociologists, economists, and political scientists in early 2013 to investigate socioeconomic problems in Ukraine. On the morning of November 21, 2013, when Viktor Yanukovych's prime minister, Nikolai Azarov, announced that his government was not going to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union, I sent out a press release about our findings that worker protests and strikes were on the rise in Ukraine. We are a small organization, well outside the political mainstream, and we do not expect our press releases to garner national attention, but this one drew even less attention than usual. The news cycle for the next few days focused on the protesters on Maidan and their demands that the government sign the Association Agreement with the EU.

At the time, we at the center were just beginning to analyze the conditions of the agreement. We were, overall, more critical than not of the agreement's demands for changes in Ukraine's labor and industry protections. At the same time, we more than welcomed the Maidan protesters' demands for an end to corruption and oligarchic rule.

That evening I went out into the square. I brought with me a poster I had made at home: I had painted the gold stars of the EU on a red background, to say that the only European union I wanted to join was a socialist one-one that offered membership on less humiliating terms than those currently being proposed to my country.

The first few days on the square, there weren't many people, mostly just students, journalists, and activists. The activists were clear about wanting to change the government and the entire system of neooligarchic rule, but most of the regular people who showed up genuinely believed in joining the EU and in visa-free movement through Europe. Visa-free movement was especially attractive to people from western Ukraine who traveled to Europe to work low-wage service jobs; these jobs paid poorly by European standards, but they were better than no jobs at all. But it wasn't just people from western Ukraine, and they weren't only there for economic reasons. The protest was joined by students who wanted to attend university in Europe; the middle class, which had the means to travel to Europe and wanted to do so more often; and human rights activists and journalists who believed in "European values" as an expression of human rights.

There was also always a strong right-wing presence on Maidan, initially consisting of activists from the well-established Svoboda Party and eventually joined by recruits from the newly founded Right Sector and other marginal right-wing groups. My "red EU" poster was sufficiently subtle that no one bothered me about it, but when I went out onto the square with the Left Opposition, the small socialist group of which I am a member, and tried to organize discussions or give talks (for one we invited Serhiy Zhadan, a writer who had recently been attacked by anti-Maidan protesters in Kharkiv), we were quickly confronted by several young toughs who claimed we were "provocateurs" and strongly suggested we leave. The first few times this happened, we did leave. The harassment stopped for two reasons: one was that, in mid-January, people started dying. After that, there was a lot less tension between us and the right on Maidan. The other thing that happened was that the women in our group formed a self-defense battalion, just as so many others on Maidan had done. We practiced self-defense, organized lectures, and showed some movies; two of the women took part in battles with police, but as a battalion we never called for violence. Our battalion earned enough attention from the press that from then on we were more or less immune to harassment from right-wing activists. The women's battalion was just about the only success of the left wing on Maidan; that was how we finally earned a space for ourselves there.

Our purpose at the protests was to understand the demands of the protesters and to try to formulate our own. After we'd stood up for ourselves, we managed to organize several discussions and lectures. Our leaflet "10 Demands for Social Change" was welcomed by some of the protesters-the mood on Maidan had become so radical by late January that some people felt our demands hadn't gone far enough. In the leaflet we spoke about giving power to the people and about direct democracy, about the nationalization of major industrial enterprises, increased taxation on wealth, an end to capital flight, the need for a strict division between business and government, the right to medicine and education, and the abolition of the special security forces, like Berkut, who were at that moment systematically beating up protesters. When our activists visited the "anti-Maidan" protests in eastern Ukraine, this same leaflet, minus the demand about Berkut, was also met with understanding. (To people in the east, terrified by Russian television propaganda about the bloody nationalist coup in Kyiv, the Berkut and other police seemed like their only defense.) Support for our program confirmed the results of our Center's research, the same ones I had sent out the morning that Maidan began: the mood of the populace all over Ukraine in 2013 was more rebellious than usual, and socioeconomic factors were the chief cause. It was these findings that allowed us not to lose our heads during the brief period of euphoria after the triumph of Maidan or succumb to the potential illusions (shared by some of our former comrades) about the utopian nature of the People's Republics being constructed in the east under the watchful eye of Russian agents. I knew that the real nature of people's protest was socioeconomic, and that neither of the new regimes had the interests of working people and the poor anywhere near the top of its agenda. Nevertheless, in both cases, I naively hoped for the best.

OF COURSE MY HOPES WERE DISAPPOINTED. A weakened Ukraine became yet another battlefield for two imperialisms. Under cover of protecting their fellow Russians or defending Ukraine's territorial integrity, Russia and the West both encouraged a slow-moving but violent conflict. Throughout 2014, the Left Opposition struggled to formulate our demands and our position. It was a terrible, terrifying year for many, and we were no exception. Yesterday's activists from the same side of the barricades went off to fight on different sides of the war. Some of them were captured and some were killed. Others wore themselves out trying to help the Ukrainian army: they collected money, transported armored vests and artillery. Meanwhile just a few small groups kept trying to agree on a united antiwar text. For my part, I decided I would not help anyone who had taken up arms; I would only help civilians fleeing the war with whatever I had: my apartment, my clothes, and the clothes of my children.

For almost a year I hosted families fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine; they were the ones who helped me understand the extent to which the war had been foisted on ordinary people by ceaseless propaganda from both sides and then presented as the natural order of things. Most people still couldn't understand how it had happened, how some serious but not intractable disagreements had led to "all this." Then, in late winter 2015, after the European-brokered cease-fire at Minsk had significantly decreased the intensity of the fighting, I traveled to the east to talk with the women who lived there. I believe women bear the brunt of any war, whether as civilians suffering bombardment, or as wives or mothers of soldiers dying at the front, or as those tasked with providing food and warmth under impossible circumstances.

In the east, women who had spent the past six months in and out of basements, watching their sons and brothers and husbands go off to the front, were now returning to "normal" life. In the rebel-held territories, this meant long lines for humanitarian aid from the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov and long days searching for affordable food in the grocery stores. In January the Ukrainian government had imposed a de facto embargo on the importation of goods and services into the occupied territories. Clearly intended as a harsh lesson to the people who lived under rebel rule, its net effect was to anger the residents and force them into the arms of Russia. Food and other goods that had, somehow or other, continued to make it to the territories from the rest of Ukraine now slowed to a trickle; they were partly replaced by Russian goods, but since these, too, had to cross a border and be subject to both official and unofficial tariffs, they were not exactly plentiful. The result was that food was becoming scarce.

Municipal services were also scarce. The government had "melted away" and only partly been replaced by a new one. In Donetsk, buildings damaged in the fighting of the past year remained mostly unrepaired, and the streets of this once uniquely clean (for Ukraine) city were littered with garbage. Too many people had left, and the government that remained was too busy fighting its war.

For ordinary residents, concerns were more mundane. In order to receive pensions and other government payments-an important source of livelihood for much of the population, especially the vulnerable population that had not had the resources to leave the territories where fighting was taking place-they had to travel into unoccupied Ukraine. Before the embargo, this had been simple enough. After it was imposed, people were often left standing in checkpoint lines for twelve hours or more.

I hope it doesn't strike anyone as pro-government propaganda if I say that in the government-controlled territories life was significantly better. There was food in the stores, and currency in the ATMs, and the men with guns were, on the whole, much less likely to detain you for no apparent reason. On my last visit to Donetsk I was detained and questioned for several hours by their MGB, or secret police. I was released, and plan to go back again, but it's hard to escape the feeling of paranoia that the rebel government labors under. In Ukrainian-controlled territory, things are more relaxed. And yet there, too, people have found themselves in a war zone, mostly against their will.

In the sociological questionnaire I distributed, I asked people who they thought was fighting whom, and what the demands of the warring sides were, as far as they understood. My respondents had various views, but more often than anything they expressed their surprise that people had taken up arms against one another; they spoke of the fact that simple people had no reason to fight, that it was the oligarchs and politicians who were fighting one another. People like them, they believed, had no influence on or say in the situation.

RUSSIA NO LONGER DENIES that it was responsible for seizing Crimea, nor does it deny that it has propped up the People's Republics, but the situation inside Ukraine remains complicated even though wartime is unfriendly to ambiguities. Even after the last Russian "volunteer" rides the last Russian tank off Ukrainian territory, the problems that allowed the regions of Ukraine to fight one another will persist. The policies of the current government toward the war's displaced persons, which make it extremely difficult for them to set up new lives in unoccupied Ukraine, are cruel and inhumane: the government is in effect trying to blame them for the war. Instead of supporting them materially and psychologically, it gives them populist slogans like "The East Is Ukraine," and "Crimea Is Ukraine." It takes away their right to vote, degrades them at checkpoints between occupied and non-occupied Ukraine, forces old men and women with children to stand in lines for days. The people who suffer the most from this war are the poor; those with means left the conflict zone long ago.

There is no good or bad side of this war to me. Amid the geopolitical wrangling over an area where the interests of Russia and the United States collide, it has been forgotten that Ukraine is also a country of forty-five million people, one quarter of whom live on less than $4 a day.

 

 [return to Contents]

#8
Sputnik
December 9, 2015
Putin Orders Government to File Lawsuit if Ukraine Fails to Pay $3Bln Debt

Vladimir Putin has ordered the government to file lawsuit if Ukraine fails to pay $3Bln debt.

The Russian President also reminded that Russia was ready to support Ukraine, share the risks with US, Europe and IMF.

"It has been four years  - more than enough to mitigate those risks somehow. I don't understand this. If so - I give my permission to sue them [Ukraine]", Putin ordered.

Moscow made an offer to restructure Kiev's $3-billion debt based on US, EU or other major global financial institution guarantees, despite the fact that Ukraine has failed to address the Russian authorities directly on the matter.
Ukraine's debt totals $70 billion, some $40 billion of which the country owes to international money lenders.

In November, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was ready to allow Ukraine to miss the end of year deadline, provided it paid back $1 billion annually between 2016 and 2018.


 

[return to Contents] 

 #9
IMF's dilemma: to help or not to help Ukraine, if Kiev defaults
By Tamara Zamyantina

MOSCOW, December 8. /TASS/. It is not ruled out that the IMF may play up to Ukraine and render it financial assistance after Kiev's possible default is declared, although the Fund's rules prohibit lending to countries with the unrepaid external debt. But the IMF may realize that indulgences for one country may give a bad example for other borrowers, experts polled by TASS say.

Ukraine's default may be declared, if Kiev fails to repay its $3 billion debt to Russia by December 20 or refuses to accept the restructuring terms offered by Moscow. The IMF has recognized Ukraine's debt to Russia as official Kiev's sovereign liabilities. However, the Ukrainian authorities have refused to pay, claiming that the Eurobonds purchased by Russia were a private rather than a government loan granted to then-President Viktor Yanukovych in 2013.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde at a G20 summit that Russia was offering Ukraine to repay its debt by installments over the next three years against the guarantees of the United States, the European Union or an international financial institution.

No such guarantees were provided and the Russian Finance Ministry announced on Saturday that Russia would file a lawsuit against Ukraine with an international court.

There were instances in world history when Western financial institutions changed the rules of the game in favor of their political proteges, said Andrei Klimov, deputy chairman of the Committee for International Affairs at the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia's parliament.

"The United States plays the role of the main violin in the IMF while the role of the second violin is played by the European Union. These are two basic sponsors of the Maidan - the symbol of a coup d'etat in Ukraine in 2014. It is not ruled out that for the sake of supporting the Kiev regime, which the West has brought to power, the IMF will revise the rules of the game and decide on providing Ukraine assistance even after a default is declared," Klimov said.

The senator said, however, that Ukraine might not get a new loan tranche from the IMF as the country had not yet approved its budget for 2016 over the absence of a coordinated tax reform draft. In his opinion, it is no coincidence that the visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden to Kiev on Monday preceded today's meeting of the IMF Board on Ukraine.

"It is obvious that Joe Biden wanted to understand the situation with corruption in the Ukrainian government and assess whether or not Washington's creatures might turn into political zeros in the near future. Meanwhile, the $190 million aid Biden promised to Kiev is a talk about nothing," the politician said.

According to Klimov, if the IMF decides to meet Ukraine halfway, some of the IMF member countries deprived of such privileged conditions offered to Kiev might resist this attempt, reshuffle cards and the United States "would have to take great efforts together with the European Union to push through their decision."

"Russia needs to file a lawsuit to an international court to clearly express its position on Ukraine's repayment of its sovereign debt. This will be a difficult litigation case. It is not known how long it will last. But Russia has no other way out," the senator said.

Professor of the World Economy Department at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry Yaroslav Lisovolik noted that the IMF's prevalent line was to give a possibility to the countries faced with the threat of a default on their foreign debt repayment to continue receiving the Fund's assistance.

"But a question, which arises, is how closely Ukraine follows the course set by the IMF's parameters for the budget deficit and the tax reform," Lisovolik noted.

"The countries' foreign debt payment discipline is important for the IMF. As for Ukraine, possible indulgences for it would have negative aspects. Where the payment discipline is undermined, problems emerge not only with the country's further observance of its financial obligations but also with the fulfillment of the IMF's lending terms," the expert said.

Director of the Institute of Globalization Problems Mikhail Delyagin said he had no doubts that the IMF would meet Ukraine halfway.

"The Fund will give Kiev a new loan tranche on one condition that Ukraine should not pay Russia a dollar under its $3 billion debt. Legally, everything will be formalized correctly but they will oblige Ukraine to pay only to western creditors for political reasons," Delyagin said.

 [return to Contents] 

 #10
Wall Street Journal
December 9, 2015
IMF Tweaks Lending Rules in Boost for Ukraine
Standoff over debt owed to Russia threatened bailout, Western aid
By IAN TALLEY

WASHINGTON-The International Monetary Fund tweaked its lending rules on Tuesday, paving the way for more emergency cash for Ukraine and undermining Russia's economic leverage over the former Soviet republic.

IMF rules previously prevented lending to countries with arrears to other nations, a policy that would have stalled the IMF's bailout for Ukraine if Kiev failed to pay the $3 billion debt it owes the Kremlin by the end of the year.

The Kremlin has rejected Ukraine's proposal to restructure the $3 billion bond. Kiev, meanwhile, said it can't afford to pay Moscow all it owes and rebuffed a Russian counteroffer that would have required Ukraine to pay the entire amount, but over a longer time frame.

That standoff threatened Ukraine's IMF bailout and other Western aid contingent on the fund's financing, including from the U.S. and Europe.

But now, the IMF rule change will allow lending to countries with sovereign arrears.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said the IMF decision was "hasty and biased," pointing to Moscow's proposal to delay repayment. He said negotiations with Kiev were no longer constructive, leaving Russia no other option "but to file a lawsuit to protect Russia's rights as the creditor."

"I'd like to remind that only Russia offered help to the Ukrainian economy and, two years ago, granted a loan to the country that had no access to external markets," Mr. Siluanov said.

Moscow bought the $3 billion bond issued in the last days of President Viktor Yanukovych's government in an attempt to prop up his pro-Russia administration. But a few weeks later, in early 2014, he was ousted by pro-democracy protesters who wanted closer ties with the European Union.

The new government took over an economy already in tatters after years of official corruption, bloated state budgets and mismanagement. But Russia's invasion of Crimea and a still-simmering conflict with Russian-backed separatists in the east helped push the economy into a severe, prolonged contraction.

The international bailout, led by the IMF, is key to U.S. and European efforts to support the former Soviet republic as it tries to integrate with the West, checking the Kremlin's push to reassert its influence in the region.

The IMF for years has been considering revising its lending-into-arrears policy, so the current move isn't exclusively targeted at Ukraine.

IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn't be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world. The fund had also already revised its lending policy for countries with arrears to private bondholders, in an effort to erode the power a minority of creditors could leverage over countries.

But the latest IMF revision was on course for a slow trajectory through the fund's dense bureaucratic and political machinery until the Ukraine-Russia impasse threatened to jeopardize the bailout. The fund then accelerated its timetable to consider the rule change, as reported by The Wall Street Journal in October.

Even with the fund's decision, Ukraine is facing bailout troubles. The IMF's latest tranche has been delayed for months amid battles over Ukraine's 2016 budget within Kiev's fragile coalition government.

IMF officials say they are waiting for the government to pass a budget that cuts the deficit further and reduces public debt to safer levels.

"In addition, we want to see progress toward putting the anticorruption prosecutors in place through a transparent and a credible process," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said last week.

 [return to Contents] 

 #11
Counterpunch.org
December 9, 2015
The IMF Joins the New Cold War
by MICHAEL HUDSON
Michael Hudson's new book, Killing the Host is published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet. He can be reached via his website, mh@michael-hudson.com

On December 8, the IMF's Chief Spokesman Gerry Rice sent a note saying:

"The IMF's Executive Board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors. We will provide details on the scope and rationale for this policy change in the next day or so."

Since 1947 when it really started operations, the World Bank has acted as a branch of the U.S. Defense Department, from its first major chairman John J. McCloy through Robert McNamara to Robert Zoellick and neocon Paul Wolfowitz. From the outset, it has promoted U.S. exports - especially farm exports - by steering Third World countries to produce plantation crops rather than feeding their own populations. (They are to import U.S. grain.) But it has felt obliged to wrap its U.S. export promotion and support for the dollar area in an ostensibly internationalist rhetoric, as if what's good for the United States is good for the world.

The IMF has now been drawn into the U.S. Cold War orbit. On Tuesday it made a radical decision to dismantle the condition that had integrated the global financial system for the past half century. In the past, it has been able to take thelead in organizing bailout packages for governments by getting other creditor nations - headed by the United States, Germany and Japan - to participate. The creditor leverage that the IMF has used is that if a nation is in financialarrears to any government, it cannot qualify for an IMF loan - and hence, for packages involving other governments.

This has been the system by which the dollarized global financial system has worked for half a century. The beneficiaries have been creditors in US dollars.

But on Tuesday, the IMF joined the New Cold War. It has been lending money to Ukraine despite the Fund's rules blocking it from lending to countries with no visible chance of 2KillingTheHost_Cover_rulepaying (the "No More Argentinas" rule from 2001). With IMF head Christine Lagarde made the last IMF loan to Ukraine in the spring, she expressed the hope that there would be peace. But President Porochenko immediately announced that he would use the proceeds to step up his nation's civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the East - the Donbass.

That is the region where most IMF exports have been made - mainly to Russia. This market is now lost for the foreseeable future. It may be a long break, because the country is run by the U.S.-backed junta put in place after the right-wing coup of winter 2014. Ukraine has refused to pay not only private-sector bondholders, but the Russian Government as well.

This should have blocked Ukraine from receiving further IMF aid. Refusal to pay for Ukrainian military belligerence in its New Cold War against  Russia would have been a major step forcing peace, and also forcing a clean-up of the country's endemic corruption.

Instead, the IMF is backing Ukrainian policy, its kleptocracy and its Right Sector leading the attacks that recently cut off Crimea's electricity. The only condition on which the IMF insists is continued austerity. Ukraine's currency, the hryvnia, has fallen by a third this years, pensions have been slashed (largely as a result of being inflated away), while corruption continues unabated.

Despite this the IMF announced its intention to extend new loans to finance Ukraine's dependency and payoffs to the oligarchs who are in control of its parliament and justice departments to block any real cleanup of corruption.

For over half a year there was a semi-public discussion with U.S. Treasury advisors and Cold Warriors about how to stiff Russia on the $3 billion owed by Ukraine to Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund. There was some talk of declaring this an "odious debt," but it was decided that this ploy might backfire against U.S. supported dictatorships.

In the end, the IMF simply lent Ukraine the money.

By doing so, it announced its new policy: "We only enforce debts owed in US dollars to US allies." This means that what was simmering as a Cold War against Russia has now turned into a full-blown division of the world into the Dollar Bloc (with its satellite Euro and other pro-U.S. currencies) and the BRICS or other countries not in the U.S. financial and military orbit.

What should Russia do? For that matter, what should China and other BRICS countries do? The IMF and U.S. neocons have sent the world a message: you don't have to honor debts to countries outside of the dollar area and its satellites.

Why then should these non-dollarized countries remain in the IMF - or the World Bank, for that matter? The IMF move effectively splits the global system in half,between the BRICS and the US-European neoliberalized financial system.

Should Russia withdraw from the IMF? Should other countries?

The mirror-image response would be for the new Asian Development Bank to announce  that countries that joined the ruble-yuan area did not have to pay US dollar or euro-denominated debts. That is implicitly where the IMF's break is leading.

 [return to Contents] 

 #12
Reuters
December 9, 2015
Russia Says Ukraine Won't Repay Debt Because 'They Are Crooks', Vows Court Action

MOSCOW/KIEV - Russian officials blasted the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday for changing its long-established lending rules to keep supporting Ukraine and called Kiev's authorities "crooks" who are unlikely to repay a $3 billion (£2 billion) debt to Moscow.

Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Ukraine has 10 days after the Moscow-held Eurobond falls due on Dec. 20 to either repay it or accept a restructuring deal proposed by President Vladimir Putin.

The IMF's change in rules to allow it to keep supporting countries if they fail to repay official creditors embroils the Fund deeper in the nearly two-year conflict between the two neighbours, with the Eurobond becoming its focal point.

The two-year Eurobond was taken out by the government of Moscow-backed ex-president Viktor Yanukovich just two months before he fled to Russia in the face of street protests over his policy swerve away from deeper integration into the European mainstream.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev accused the IMF of meddling and said the Fund's decision had no legal basis but had been taken for political reasons. He said he doubted Ukraine would redeem the note.

"I have the sense that they won't pay it back because they are crooks," Medvedev said in an interview on state television. "And our Western partners not only don't help but also interfere."

Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalia Yaresko called the IMF's decision "historic".

"It allows us to understand that if we are included in this policy and we unfortunately are not able to restructure the so-called Russian Eurobond, then the doors to IMF loan financing will not be closed to us," she told journalists.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the IMF had created a dangerous precedent.

"The precedent for us is absolutely not acceptable, and the main thing is that it is quite dangerous because we have created a dangerous precedent for permitting the non-payment of sovereign debts. The question is: what will happen after that?" Peskov told reporters.

WHAT NEXT?

Siluanov and Medvedev said that if Ukraine failed to redeem the Eurobond or to accept a recent Russian offer of softer repayment terms it would end up in a court.

"We will not put up with this. We will go to court," Medvedev said. "We will seek a default on the loan. We will fight for a default on all Ukraine loans."

Moscow initially wanted repayment in full and on time this month. But in an unexpected move Putin last month proposed that Kiev repay the note in $1 billion instalments, backed by Western guarantees, over the next three years, starting in 2016. Ukraine has not responded to the offer.

Ukraine, which reached an agreement with private creditors to restructure its sovereign and sovereign-guaranteed debt to plug a $15 billion funding gap under an IMF-led $40 billion bailout programme, has insisted the debt owed to Moscow is commercial.

Russia, which the West says continues to support separatist rebels in Ukraine's east, has said it is country-to-country official debt outside the scope of Kiev's deal with private creditors.

Ukraine says it cannot legally offer Russia a better deal than the terms agreed with its other creditors, but it also cannot spare the $3 billion from its budget. Its war-torn economy is expected to shrink 12 percent this year with a budget deficit of 4.1 percent of gross domestic product.

The country's foreign currency reserves are at $13 billion which is barely enough to cover three months of imports and way below the IMF target for end-2015.

Russia will have to file any claims in a London court as the Eurobond was drafted under British law.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk has said previously that Ukraine is prepared to go to court, but Yaresko said last month that she was open to talks with Russia.

Medvedev said that nobody believes in Ukraine's solvency.

"We appealed to our European partners and the American to help Ukraine but nobody would put their guarantees behind it," Medvedev said, referring to Putin's offer "That means that nobody believes in (Ukraine's) solvency. They washed their hands and said - let it pay on its own."

Asked to comment on Medvedev's statements, Yaresko said: "Political statements from another country are not my business."

 [return to Contents] 

 #13
Atlantic Council
December 8, 2015
The IMF Outfoxes Putin: Policy Change Means Ukraine Can Receive More Loans
BY ANDERS ÅSLUND
Anders Åslund is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and the author of "Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It."   

Today the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reversed its "policy on not lending into arrears." IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said in a statement that "the IMF's executive board met today and agreed to change the current policy on non-toleration of arrears to official creditors."

Historically, the IMF has refused to lend to any country that has not serviced its debt to any sovereign. The IMF staff started contemplating a rule change in the spring of 2013 because nontraditional creditors, such as China, had started providing developing countries with large loans. One issue was that these loans were issued on conditions out of line with IMF practice. China wasn't a member of the Paris Club, where loan restructuring is usually discussed, so it was time to update the rules.

The IMF intended to adopt a new policy in the spring of 2016, but the dispute over Russia's $3 billion loan to Ukraine has accelerated an otherwise slow decision-making process.

Russia's loan to Ukraine on December 20, 2013, was clearly political in its nature, aiming at the political survival of President Viktor Yanukovych. Some observers have considered it odious and argued that it should not be paid back. In addition, its nature was unclear since it was a Eurobond that could be traded and thus private in its form and not an official loan. Eventually, the IMF staff judged it to be an official loan.

This fall, Ukraine's private bondholders agreed to restructure the country's Eurobonds, reducing their face value 20 percent and postponing $15 billion in debt service. Ukraine invited Russia to participate in the debt talks, but the Kremlin declined. Instead, last month Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested that Russia should be paid back $1 billion a year in 2016-18. Putin's proposal would violate Ukraine's agreement with the private bondholders not to offer better conditions to any other creditor. Plus, Russia never made a formal proposal.

The IMF policy of not lending into arrears is not written into the IMF statues that is, its Articles of Agreement. It is simply a policy that the IMF Executive Board can alter with a simple majority. The West has such a majority on the board that the only question is how large that majority will be. After the vote, the IMF can continue to give Ukraine loans regardless of what Ukraine does about its credit from Russia, which falls due on December 20.

Ukraine will not and should not pay the $3 billion back to Russia on December 20. This is sound and good policy. With international currency reserves of only $13.1 billion, it would be irresponsible for Ukraine to pay, as payment could trigger a currency crisis. When the European Union compelled Ukraine to pay $3.1 billion of disputed arrears to Gazprom at the end of last year, it triggered a currency crisis. At some point in the future, Russia may raise the debt issue in some international arbitration court. Russia and Ukraine have many issues to resolve in court, including Russian war reparations to Ukraine.

The IMF's policy change does not mean that Ukraine will get more IMF funding now. The IMF mission to Ukraine in both September and November came back to Washington without result. The Ukrainian parliament must adopt a responsible tax policy and budget for 2016. It has not done so, and leading representatives from President Petro Poroshenko's Bloc are insisting on massive tax cuts but no more expenditure cuts that would cause a vast budget deficit that the IMF assesses at 9-10 percent of GDP that could not possibly be financed. Vice President Joe Biden has just spoken in Kyiv "about the vital importance of Ukraine following through on its IMF commitments," and that's good advice.

 [return to Contents] 

#14
http://newcoldwar.org
West Ukraine is now a permanent playground for NATO forces
By Ulrich Heyden, published in German on Telepolis, Nov 26, 2015, translated to English for New Cold War.org

On November 23, the launch of new military exercises took place at the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre, west of Lviv and near the Poland border in western Ukraine. Five Ukrainian battalions will train together with troops from NATO countries. According to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the exercises should continue "into 2017".

Guests at the opening ceremony were the Commander of U.S. Armed Forces in Europe Frederick Ben Hodges, Canadian Joint Operations Commander Rear Admiral Peter Ellis, and the ambassadors of the U.S., Canada and Lithuania, namely Geoffrey Pyatt, Roman Vashchuk and Marius Janukonis.

Participating in the long-term exercises include 2,800 soldiers from Ukraine, 1,500 soldiers from the US and 1,000 soldiers from countries participating in the NATO program 'Partnership for Peace'. U.S., Canadian, British and Lithuanian instructors will train the Ukrainian servicemen of five battalions. They will undergo training under NATO standards of defense, attack and mopup operations.

Out of the five participating Ukrainian battalions, only enlisted soldiers with war experience are receiving training.  Among these are 30 men who were honored with medals for "courage and heroism" for their efforts in Eastern Ukraine. The exercises will take place in an area which lies in a north-eastern direction between Lviv (Lemberg) and the Ukrainian-Polish border. It's a hilly area covering an area of 36,000 hectares, with meadows and beech and oak wood forests.

The Verkhovna Rada adopted a law on November 12 for the express purpose of these exercises allowing the presence of foreign troops in Ukraine for up to 61 days. According to Ukrainian law, the presence of foreign military forces in the country is prohibited.

Training with new U.S. radar equipment

The exercises will practice the use of two mobile radars, type AN/TPQ-36. These were gifted to President Petro Poroshenko from the United States at an official ceremony at Lviv airport on November 14.

The devices, which cost 15 million dollars each, are mounted on jeeps and can get a fix on enemy howitzers or missiles at a distance of up to 24 kilometers, even after only one enemy shot. In using the new radars, the Ukrainian military hope to have success against rebel forces in Eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine has so far received military aid totaling $260 million from the United States. This assistance includes training, the delivery of 230 Humvee jeeps in March 2015, and the two new radars units. Barack Obama refuses to supply Ukraine with military aircraft, notwithstanding insistence by the U.S. Congress.

There may be a hidden supply of special equipment arriving, however. The Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported in early October that within the past year, the U.S. arms manufacturer AMI Global Security delivered 22 sniper rifles type M107A1 using a Bulgarian company, Bulcomers KS Ltd. in Sofia. These were delivered to the Ukrainian National Guard. Also, two U.S. drones type KS-1 have been supplied to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry through a Bulgarian intermediate company. The news agency published copies of the delivery notes.

Poroshenko praises "new dimension"

Since 2013, the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre in Western Ukraine has developed into the most important area for joint maneuvers with NATO soldiers. From April to November 2015, in conjunction with the military exercise 'Fearless Guardian 2015', 750 Ukrainian National Guard members were trained by 300 soldiers of the 173rd U.S. Parachute Brigade. In the exercises, the Ukrainian soldiers learned how to fight house-to-house and interrogate prisoners.

When Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk attended Fearless Guardian 2015 along with U.S. Ambassador Geofrey Pyatt in June, he said that Ukrainian soldiers would also learn "to be strong personalities who can lead soldiers". President Poroshenko declared at the opening of Fearless Guardian 2015 in the presence of the U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt: "This is the first Ukrainian-American program at this level and it shows the transition of bilateral military cooperation into a fundamentally new dimension."

In a festive closing ceremony at the end of the exercises, Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs of the U.S. Department of Defense Elissa Slotkin said that the U.S. would continue to "assist Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression".

Spokesman of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, criticized the exercises because the internal conflict in Ukraine is not yet resolved and the Minsk ceasefire agreement has not yet been implemented. Even German soldiers were involved in Ukraine maneuvers. On July 20, 2015, the two-week 'Saber Guardian' maneuvers, part of Rapid Trident-2015', began at the International Peacekeeping and Security Centre (ISPC). Participating were 1,800 soldiers from 18 countries.

The two largest contingents in the maneuver were Ukraine with 800 soldiers and the U.S. with 500 soldiers. Others who participated in the exercise were from Canada, the Baltic States, Moldova, Romania, Germany, Britain and other NATO member-countries.

The Ukrainian-Canadian maneuver, Operation Unifier, began at the ISPC on September 14, 2015. It is scheduled to last until March 2017. Three-hundred trainers from Canada have started training the Ukrainian soldiers in medical assistance, defusing explosives, protecting block posts and soldier accompaniment The exercise was adapted to real war conditions, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

Poroshenko: NATO membership of Ukraine in seven years

A NATO membership of Ukraine probably won't be possible for another seven years, President Petro Poroshenko told a Nov 12, 2015 interview with Deutsche Welle English language service. He said, however, that Ukraine was preparing intensively for eventual membership.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said last year he saw no prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. Poroshenko told DW that this was "not Germany's opinion but Steinmeier's opinion".  No one knows "what the position of Germany will be in 2022", Poroshenko said.

Approval by Ukrainians of membership in NATO has grown from 16 percent in 2013 to 60 percent in 2015, Poroshenko told the DW interview.[1]

Notes by New Cold War.org:
[1] Polling by the International Republican Institute published in October 2015 reported that 48 per cent of Ukrainians polled (not including those in the territories of the people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk) favored the country joining NATO.


 

 [return to Contents] 

 #15
The National Interest
December 9, 2015
Book Review: 'Brothers Armed-Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine'
A detailed overview of the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, and the conflict.
By Dave Majumdar
Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for the National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.

The Obama administration's and Europe's approach to the Ukraine crisis has been comprehensively examined in the Western media. But the Russian perspective has not received as much attention. A valuable new book, Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine, which is edited by Colby Howard and Ruslan Pukhov at the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, helps to fill that gap. It provides a superbly detailed overview of the conflict from leading Russian experts about the Ukraine imbroglio.

It begins with an overview by Vasiliy Kashin, of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's transfer in 1954 of Crimea from what was then the Russian Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Much of the chapter is spent questioning the legality of the Khrushchev's decision. Kashin observes, "The question of whether the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine broke any of the Soviet Union's own laws is . . . a subject of much debate. Let us note, however, that in May 1992, the Supreme Council of the RSFSR gave its own answer to that question by declaring the 1954 decree that made the Crimea part of Ukraine null and void." He adds, "the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine was met with considerable skepticism among the general public even during the Soviet period."

The book also describes-in copious detail-the forces that an independent Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union after it collapsed. Almost every unit is described down to the composition of individual divisions and brigades. These descriptions include the number and types and subtypes of tanks, vehicles and artillery pieces for each unit. Air force and naval units are also minutely analyzed. Another chapter describes the post-Soviet decline of the Ukrainian military. According to Sergey Denisentsev, "It is hard to find any other example in human history of such a strong and capable army of a large state deteriorating so rapidly-and during peacetime no less-and to the extent that it now hardly qualifies as a cohesive armed forces [sic]."

The decline of the Russian forces in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse received a good deal of attention. Mikhail Barabanov, who is editor-in-chief of the Moscow Defense Brief, deftly describes the Soviet military system, which was designed to gear up to fight World War III, and the various attempts at reform. Barabanov also does an excellent job of discussing the 2008 Georgian campaign-which was a catalyst for Russian president Vladimir Putin's insistence on the radical reform of the Russian military. A subsequent chapter titled "Little, Green and Polite" by Alexey Nikolsky describes the creation of Russia's modern Special Operations Forces (SOF)-which have performed quite successfully in Ukraine. In contrast to GRU Spetsnaz forces whose specialty is deep reconnaissance, he writes, "the focus of SOF is closer to direction action."

The second half of the book devotes much attention to Russia's annexation of Crimea. Several authors suggest that Russia's military reforms since 2008 have been very successful. But Anton Lavrov notes that while Russian forces performed well, reforms are incomplete. According to him, "units involved in the Crimean operation . . . were able to commit only part of their strength; understaffing remains a problem across the Russian Armed Forces. Another problem is the cyclical nature of the Russian conscription system; for much of the time, many units largely consist of untrained conscripts who have only just been drafted." Barabanov reviews the performance of Ukraine's forces during the conflict. He suggests that the conflict has reached an impasse in which the "cost-to-benefit ratio seems especially poor for Moscow, since the benefit is in fact nonexistent."

Overall, the book provides a most impressive overview of both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries. Since Brothers Armed is written from the Russian perspective, Western readers-and especially Ukrainians-may not share its viewpoint or necessarily agree with the arguments put forth in the book. But at the most fundamental level, this work is certainly a treasure trove of information about Russian military forces and the Ukraine conflict. It should be closely read and studied by anyone interested in the crisis in Ukraine.

 [return to Contents] 

 #16
New York Times
December 9, 2015
In Ukraine, Joe Biden Pushes a Message of Democracy
By PETER BAKER

KIEV, Ukraine - Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. urged Ukrainian leaders on Tuesday to curb the power of the business moguls dominating society and to fulfill the promise of the popular revolution that pushed out a pro-Moscow government last year.

Addressing the Ukrainian Parliament, Mr. Biden sternly lectured lawmakers to put aside their own self-interests and to transform this former Soviet republic into a model of democratic change.

Citing the failure of the Orange Revolution of 2004 to deliver enduring change, he urged Ukrainians not to let this opportunity slip by as well.

"This is your moment," he told them. "This is your responsibility. Each of you - if you'll forgive me for speaking to you this way in your body - each of you has an obligation to seize the opportunity that the sacrifices made in the Maidan, the sacrifices of the Heavenly Hundred. Each of you has an obligation to answer the call of history and finally build a united, democratic Ukrainian nation that can stand the test of time."

By invoking the memory of the roughly 100 protesters killed during protests in Maidan Square last year, Mr. Biden hoped to infuse today's legislative battles with the moral imperative of the uprising, which led to a pro-Western government. Many in Ukraine worry that the new leaders have become so paralyzed by their own power struggles that they will squander the chance for change.

For Mr. Biden, who has made it his mission to nurse Ukraine through its transition, it was a classic performance from the lectern in the grand chamber of Parliament, known here as the Rada. At times, he shouted at the lawmakers, gesturing sharply. At other points, he practically whispered. At still other moments, he wagged his finger.

Citing John Adams, Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke and Daniel Webster, Mr. Biden talked about the United States' own struggles to build democracy. He also cited a quotation from an American politician he did not identify: "In your heart, you know it's right," he said. (The phrase is actually a variation of a slogan in an ad made for the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964.)

But it was not clear whether Mr. Biden's message really got through. Lawmakers, many listening to an interpreter through earphones, sat silently during the long lecture on corruption and applauded only when Mr. Biden assailed Russia for its intervention in Ukraine. The one standing ovation they gave Mr. Biden came when he said that Russia had infringed on Ukrainian sovereignty and that the United States would never recognize the annexation of Crimea.

"Russia has violated these ground rules and continues to violate them," he said. "Today, Russia's occupying sovereign Ukrainian territory. Let me be crystal clear: The United States does not, has not, never will recognize Russia's attempt to annex Crimea."

He added that he would tell the world about Nadiya V. Savchenko, the Ukrainian helicopter pilot being held in Russia; her picture was displayed on a poster on the lectern from which Mr. Biden spoke, with the slogan "Freedom for Nadiya Savchenko."

And the vice president committed to keeping American sanctions on Russia until Moscow complies with a cease-fire brokered in Minsk, Belarus. "There can be no sanctions relief unless and until Moscow meets all, all of its commitments under Minsk," Mr. Biden said.

But his main message to the Ukrainians was, in effect, to get their house in order. The day before, he had suggested that many in Europe were waiting for Ukraine to fail so that they would have an excuse not to continue confronting Russia.

With Ukraine's rapidly sinking economy, that time often seems close at hand.

The gross domestic product per capita, a broad measure of Ukrainians' well-being, will be just $1,600 per person this year, down from $3,900 in 2013. That was the year before the new government took power partly on the promise of bringing living standards closer to those in Europe.

Over all, Ukraine's gross domestic product is projected to shrink by 15 percent this year after falling 6.8 percent the year before, according to Standard & Poor's, the ratings agency. Much of the drop is attributable to a collapse in the value of the national currency, the hryvnia, and to uncertainty created by the conflict with Russia.

And Ukraine remains one of the world's most indebted countries, trailing only the Seychelles, according to one estimate.

"It's a struggle to see who will invest in this economy, who will commit to put in private capital," Charles Robertson, the London-based chief economist of Renaissance Capital, said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Biden called for an overhaul of the office of prosecutor general, change in the energy sector, transparency about official sources of income and other measures.

"If you fail, the experiment fails," he said. "It's no exaggeration to say the hopes of freedom-loving people the world over are with you."

But analysts said it was doubtful that the Ukrainian government, no matter how well intentioned, could stamp out corruption anytime soon.

"Ukraine has a fundamental problem," Mr. Robertson said. "You cannot put good people just on the top, and hope their good policies permeate through the old apparatus that has been there for something like a century. It's not going to happen in a year. It's probably going to take a generation."

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow.

 [return to Contents] 

 #17
Bloomberg
December 8, 2015
Biden Tells Ukraine to...Do Nothing
By Leonid Bershidsky

Vice President Joe Biden's visits to Ukraine always are keenly anticipated: He is considered the voice of the country's Western backers, the senior statesman who can resolve conflicts within the country's ruling elite and push it down the path of reform. This week, however, Biden apparently sent conflicting signals to his Ukrainian hosts.

Visiting Kiev on Monday and Tuesday, Biden made a rousing speech to parliament. His voice ringing with deep emotion, he called on legislators not to waste what could be their "last moment" to turn Ukraine into a free, prosperous country. The speech, however, followed a series of meetings in which the vice president, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt pushed a cautious line: Keep the much-maligned government in place and stick to the Minsk agreement with Russia to end the war in the east. The message: Apparently, the U.S. wants Ukraine to make as little trouble as possible.

Biden's visit, his fifth as vice president, coincides with a key date on the Ukrainian political calendar. On Dec. 11, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk's year-long immunity from dismissal will expire. That means his enemies, especially those on President Petro Poroshenko's team, will be able to try to get rid of him.

Last weekend, Mikheil Saakashvili, the governor of Odessa and former president of Georgia, made a sensational presentation at an anti-corruption forum he'd organized. He showed what he said was a chart of corruption schemes that cost Ukraine $5 billion a year -- only slightly less than the country receives in International Monetary Fund bailout loans. On the chart's edges were Ukraine's oligarchs, such as Rinat Akhmetov, the country's richest man, former Governor Igor Kolomoisky, and Dmitry Firtash, who is wanted by the U.S.  on corruption-related charges. Yatsenyuk was at the center of the chart.

There were notable absences: businessmen close to Poroshenko, who are also accused of using their proximity for enrichment -- legislators Igor Kononenko and Sergei Berezenko, as well as energy billionaire Konstantin Grigorishin. Saakashvili is Poroshenko's loyal ally, and some local commentators suggested that his accusations, aired right before the Biden visit, were part of the Odessa governor's bid for the prime minister's job.  Alexander Golubov wrote in an article for the Moscow Carnegie Center that Saakashvili "is hardly even hiding" his desire to succeed Yatsenyuk.

Saakashvili is no stranger to Washington politics, but his friends mostly are Republicans. The connections date to Saakashvili's tenure as Georgia's president, when George W. Bush was in the White House. Senator John McCain is an especially close ally.

Yatsenyuk has close ties to the Obama administration. During Ukraine's "Revolution of Dignity," Nuland and Pyatt discussed getting "Yats" into the new government in a telephone conversation that was intercepted and leaked, perhaps by Russian intelligence ("I didn't say it was inauthentic," was how a State Department spokesperson described it). "I think Yats is the guy who's got the economic experience, the governing experience," Nuland says on the recording. To Biden, and even to President Barack Obama, Yatsenyuk is as much of a negotiating partner as Poroshenko: They both have met with him on several occasions.

So Biden's message to Ukrainians was, don't rock the boat. On Monday, he met with a group of young legislators and civic activists, who asked him to push for changes to the cabinet and for the dismissal of the Poroshenko-appointed prosecutor general, seen as part of the thoroughly corrupt government system. Yet the legislator Svitlana Zalishchuk wrote on Facebook after the meeting: "It is obvious that our American partners don't see a way to ensure stability without preserving the status quo. The vice president's visit is meant to preserve the ruling coalition."

Although Yatsenyuk's political party is so unpopular that it wouldn't get into parliament if an election were held this week, it's an important part of the coalition. And if the prime minister loses his job, there is likely to be a snap election. The outcome would be hard to predict: Recent local elections empowered both the remnants of the pre-revolutionary regime and some dangerous extreme nationalists. The U.S. administration clearly doesn't want such turmoil: It wants the current parliament to pass laws making it possible to hold elections in areas held by pro-Russian rebels. Biden assured Ukrainian legislators of continued U.S. support against Russia, and got a standing ovation, but his real purpose was to convince the Ukrainian leaders to stick to the Minsk compromise with President Vladimir Putin, end the armed conflict and reintegrate the east of the country into Ukraine, even on terms favorable to Russia.

In his speech to parliament, Biden decried the "cancer" of corruption that's keeping Ukraine from becoming a successful democracy. In practical terms, however, his stability message means the preservation of a corrupt system of checks and balances in which cronies of  the president and prime minister divide up access to the still-ample opportunities to milk the hapless country dry.

"My personal opinion is that without a reset of our governance system, we won't break through,"  the legislator Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze wrote after meeting with Biden.

If the U.S. doesn't want such a "reset," however, things will go on as before. The current Ukrainian leadership doesn't have to do as Biden says, and it'll drag its feet on complying with the unpopular Minsk accord. But it cannot overtly disobey, either, because it's dependent on U.S. support both financially and in terms of holding back Putin. So Ukraine is in for a period of enforced stability, and that may be the last thing it needs.

 [return to Contents] 

 #18
Russia FM: Biden's remarks in Kiev maintain tension in Ukraine to put pressure on Russia

MOSCOW, December 9. /TASS/. The speech of US Vice President Joe Biden in Kiev shows that Washington is interested in exerting pressure on Russia through maintaining tension in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Italian media.

"When Joe Biden comes there and, in the propaganda frenzy, warms up the audiences from the rostrum saying that we will not go back on the need for Russia to fulfill all the requirements, and everyone applauds vigorously, I do not think this is a contribution to the solution of the Ukrainian crisis," he said. "It shows that the United States is interested in keeping Ukraine on its toes, and not for the sake of Ukraine, but in order to put pressure on Russia."

According to Russia's top diplomat, the partners in the European Union and the United States are sure that they found a good formula - the sanctions will be lifted only after Russia fully implements the Minsk accords. "Read the Minsk agreements, 99% of its provisions are things that the authorities in Kiev should do, and together with Donetsk and Luhansk for that matter," Lavrov said.

He referred to the Paris summit of the Normandy Four, during which the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine for several hours coordinated practical steps to implement the Minsk agreements.

"These steps lie in the fact that the Ukrainian government should enact a law on the special status of Donbas without any reservations, because now this law has been passed but suspended until the elections," he said.

"As for the elections in Donbas, this is envisaged by the Minsk agreements and confirmed in Paris: the Ukrainian government should coordinate the law on elections with Donbss, the Ukrainian government, or, rather President Poroshenko, should sign the law on amnesty passed by the Verkhovna Rada more than a year ago, and the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada should enshrine a special status for Donbass not for three years, as stipulated by the law that has been endorsed but not enacted, but on a permanent basis, the way it is envisaged in Minsk and to do so within the framework of the Constitution," Lavrov said.

"And where is Russia's role here? I do not see it," the Russian foreign minister said.

On Tuesday, US Vice President told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that Crimea as part of Russia "will not be accepted by us or by the international community."

 [return to Contents] 

#19
New York Times
December 9, 2015
Joe Biden, His Son and the Case Against a Ukrainian Oligarch
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON - When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country's leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine's rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president's anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine's ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.

Britain's Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company's chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.

But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general's office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma's owner by name in a speech in September.

"In the case of former Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, the U.K. authorities had seized $23 million in illicit assets that belonged to the Ukrainian people," Mr. Pyatt said. Officials at the prosecutor general's office, he added, were asked by the United Kingdom "to send documents supporting the seizure. Instead they sent letters to Zlochevsky's attorneys attesting that there was no case against him. As a result, the money was freed by the U.K. court, and shortly thereafter the money was moved to Cyprus."

Mr. Pyatt went on to call for an investigation into "the misconduct" of the prosecutors who wrote the letters. In his speech, the ambassador did not mention Hunter Biden's connection to Burisma.

But Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the involvement of the vice president's son with Mr. Zlochevsky's firm undermined the Obama administration's anticorruption message in Ukraine.

"Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message," Mr. Chow said. "But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues."

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the vice president, said Hunter Biden's business dealings had no impact on his father's policy positions in connection with Ukraine.

"Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer," she said. "The vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company. The vice president has pushed aggressively for years, both publicly with groups like the U.S.-Ukraine Business Forum and privately in meetings with Ukrainian leaders, for Ukraine to make every effort to investigate and prosecute corruption in accordance with the rule of law. It will once again be a key focus during his trip this week."

Ryan F. Toohey, a Burisma spokesman, said that Hunter Biden would not comment for this article.

It is not known how Mr. Biden came to the attention of the company. Announcing his appointment to the board, Alan Apter, a former Morgan Stanley investment banker who is chairman of Burisma, said, "The company's strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we're delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals."

Joining the board at the same time was one of Mr. Biden's American business partners, Devon Archer. Both are involved with Rosemont Seneca Partners, an American investment firm with offices in Washington.

Mr. Biden is the younger of the vice president's two sons. His brother, Beau, died of brain cancer in May. In the past, Hunter Biden attracted an unusual level of scrutiny and even controversy. In 2014, he was discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine use. He received a commission as an ensign in 2013, and he served as a public affairs officer.

Before his father was vice president, Mr. Biden also briefly served as president of a hedge fund group, Paradigm Companies, in which he was involved with one of his uncles, James Biden, the vice president's brother. That deal went sour amid lawsuits in 2007 and 2008 involving the Bidens and an erstwhile business partner. Mr. Biden, a graduate of Georgetown University and Yale Law School, also worked as a lobbyist before his father became vice president.

Burisma does not disclose the compensation of its board members because it is a privately held company, Mr. Toohey said Monday, but he added that the amount was "not out of the ordinary" for similar corporate board positions.

Asked about the British investigation, which is continuing, Mr. Toohey said, "Not only was the case dismissed and the company vindicated by the outcome, but it speaks volumes that all his legal costs were recouped."

In response to Mr. Pyatt's criticism of the Ukrainian handling of Mr. Zlochevsky's case, Mr. Toohey said that "strong corporate governance and transparency are priorities shared both by the United States and the leadership of Burisma. Burisma is working to bring the energy sector into the modern era, which is critical for a free and strong Ukraine."

Vice President Biden has played a leading role in American policy toward Ukraine as Washington seeks to counter Russian intervention in Eastern Ukraine. This week's visit was his fifth trip to Ukraine as vice president.

Ms. Bedingfield said Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine with his father. She also said that Ukrainian officials had never mentioned Hunter Biden's role with Burisma to the vice president during any of his visits.

"I've got to believe that somebody in the vice president's office has done some due diligence on this," said Steven Pifer, who was the American ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. "I should say that I hope that has happened. I would hope that they have done some kind of check, because I think the vice president has done a very good job of sending the anticorruption message in Ukraine, and you would hate to see something like this undercut that message."

 [return to Contents] 

#20
Facebook
December 7, 2015
Biden and Maidan
By Ivan Katchanovski
University of Ottawa

The US vice-president again visited the Maidan massacre memorial in Kyiv. The US government continues to attribute publicly the Maidan massacre to the previous government with no questions raised about failures of the official investigation and about various evidence of involvement of far right and oligarchic parties in this mass killing. The US media coverage of the Maidan massacre generally continues to follow the US government public stance on this crucial case of mass killing with no such questions asked and with no revelations of the Maidan massacre trial reported. http://www.radiosvoboda.org/media/video/27412131.html The US officials have de facto admitted that the official Ukrainian investigation, which attributed the Maidan massacre of the absolute majority of the protesters to Berkut policemen on the ground, was falsified and that the US government knows this. The US ambassador showed Biden that snipers were on surrounding buildings. But the NYT report and videos from this visit omit this crucial information and do not indicate which buildings the ambassador referred to: ""Imagine what it was like," Geoffrey R. Pyatt, the American ambassador, could be heard telling Mr. Biden. He pointed to surrounding buildings. "Snipers up on the buildings there." http://www.nytimes.com/.../joe-biden-says-us-is-still-backing...

 [return to Contents] 

 
#21
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
December 8, 2015
Joe Biden Says He Talks to Petro Poroshenko More Than His Own Wife
Petro and Joe are just like two peas in a pod. But with a blank cheque from Washington, Kiev has no incentive to tackle its corruption problems
By Enrico Braun

So what has Joe Biden been up to lately? Apparently not content with embarrassing himself and his country with his hopelessly haphazard verbosity at home, he's taking the Biden brand international.

His particular focus is on Ukraine. Joe just finished his umpteenth visit to the country, during which he harangued the Ukrainian regime's rump parliament on the need to fight corruption - a message which elicited zero applause from that collective of criminals and thieves.

But it was a moment of rare realism from a representative of the US leadership:

"Corruption siphons off resources. We know this. You know this," Biden told Ukrainian MPs.

Ukraine needs to make governance more transparent, an immediate measure since "corruption eats Ukraine like cancer," Biden said on Sunday, noting that however painful the looming reforms could be, they cannot be any backsliding on the issue.

"We saw oligarchs ousted from power, only for them to return," Biden said. "We understand how difficult some of the votes for reforms are but they are critical for putting Ukraine back on the right path," Biden said, as cited by ABC.

"As long as you continue to make progress in fighting corruption and build a future of opportunity for all Ukraine, the US will stand with you," US Vice President said.

Nevertheless he guaranteed another $190 million from Washington to help reform the country - money which will almost certainly either disappear into corrupt pockets or be fed into the Donbass boondoggle.
 
Biden also found time to highlight his near incestuous ties to the Maidan regime's leaders, stressing to the press that he's closer to President Poroshenko than to his own wife:

"It is true I've only been here four times in two years. But I think we may have logged close to 1,000 hours on the telephone. I think I tend to be more in direct conversation for longer periods of time with the president than with my wife. I think they both regret that. But it is important," Biden said at a joint briefing in Kiev on Monday.

Obviously a sign of a "sovereign, free, independent" Ukraine. The United States of America is the font of freedom - the more instruction you get from Washington, the freer you are.
 
Joe isn't the only Biden heavily invested in Ukraine. His son Hunter was last year appointed to the board of Burisma Holdings, a company connected with exploration for natural gas in separatist-controlled Donbass.
 
Having formally announced he won't seek Obama's job in 2016, and with Petro Poroshenko's popularity at dismal levels, maybe Joe is setting up for a run at the Ukrainian presidency. True, he's not a citizen of Ukraine - but that's no obstacle in a regime inundated with foreign influence. After all, it's a country that seems to love leaders with big mouths but little performance.

 [return to Contents] 

 #22
RIA Novosti
December 8, 2015
Ousted Ukrainian leader wants political comeback - interview to Russian media

Deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich has expressed his wish to return to politics. He said this in an interview with RIA Novosti (part of the state-owned International News Agency Rossiya Segodnya), excerpts from which were published on 8 December.

"I want to return to politics. Today... [ellipsis as received] I do everything in my power. Firstly, I provide a great deal of help to those who are being persecuted in Ukraine, who have, let's say, already left Ukraine. And not only for Russia. It goes without saying that in Russia I stay in touch with them. I help as much as I can," Yanukovich was quoted as saying.

Yanukovich added that he maintained contact with incumbent Ukrainian politicians. "Today many of them are not so shy and not so afraid as [they] used to be, to put it tentatively, a year ago. They feel comfortable when we meet up and discuss issues," he said.

Yanukovich was ousted in February 2014 following protests in Kiev in favour of Ukraine's stronger integration with the European Union.

A full interview will be published on 9-10 December on RIA's website, the agency says.

 [return to Contents]