Forget about negotiated splitting of the Ukraine. What NATO wants, starting with Sevastopol, is located in the wrong half.
Posted on 11/27/2004 4:04:00 PM PST by Allan
The political crisis in Ukraine is actually quite encouraging. A presidential election has obviously been stolen by an old-line ex-communist thug, and the people won't stand for it.
The demonstrations began soon after election results were posted last Sunday.
By yesterday, huge crowds of people and vehicles decorated with the orange of the leading opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, had surrounded the Cabinet office and most of the major administrative centres, demanding a proper recount of the polls; and Mr. Yushchenko had informally established an alternative government behind their lines.
His cop supporters were also burning tires and setting up roadblocks here and there.
The police were still trying to decide their loyalties.
Ukraine has been under the power of Leonid Kuchma, a retired Soviet missile designer who ruled as chief oligarch of the country's old Soviet industrial lords, and enforcer of their status quo.
They won two elections, the first quite legitimately, by promising to end the disorder and corruption that enveloped Ukraine after independence.
They delivered only a bigger and better organized disaster.
The opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, a former president of the national bank, served as prime minister from 1999.
His limited land ownership privatizations have been responible for most of Ukraine"s (faltering) economic recovery since then.
About two-fifths of the economy disappeared in the 1990s while the vast surviving ex-Soviet bureaucracy resisted and sabotaged all reforms except those which could be exploited to line their own pockets.
Mr. Yushchenko became Ukraine's most popular politician until sacked by President Kuchma in 2002 in what resembled a fit of envy.
He was replaced as prime minister by Mr.Kuchma's designated successor Viktor Yanukovich the man who won the "official" vote.
Mr.Yanukovich is the butt of jokes across the west of the country for his boorishness corruption and incompetence; a man who worked his way up the greasy pole as a communist apparatchik in Donetsk after the KGB erased his earlier criminal record as a 'petty thief.
The election campaign was very one-sided with even Yanukovich's slogans clumsily copied from those of the Yushchenko campaign.
This is not a question of dimpled chads; it is inconceivable that Yanukovich won the election except perhaps in the farther east.
The Ukraine itself tends to divide internally west and east.
The Soviet communists built up the more loyal east much of which remains Russian-speaking.
It continues to be an artifact of socialist industrialization which is to say economically dysfunctional and habitually passive towards thick-set strongmen.
Whereas Kievans and western Ukrainians think of themselves as Central Europeans. The damage that has been done to the Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be overlooked.
He invested more political capital than was wise by heavy-handedly supporting both President Kuchma in Ukraine and Alexandr Lukashenko the authoritarian president-for-life of Belarus - the two "Little Russias" from the old Soviet Union.
Ukrainian events remind Russians of how much fraud was involved in their own last election.
Mr. Putin prematurely congratulated Mr. Yanukovich on his "victory” then when the demonstrationserupted in Kiev called instead for evryone to await the final result.
He then congratulated Mr. Yanukovich again; then gave up that and started babbling about the need to respect the Ukrainian constitution.
President Putin had already awkwardly cashed out his large political investments in Georgia's Eduard Shevardnadze and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic.
As our sharpest Canadian Russia-observer Patrick Armstrong summarizes: Mr. Putin begins to look both interfering and inept burning bridges both East and West.
The rest of the international community is coming off well.
Starting with uncompromising statements of support for the demonstrators from Vaclav Havel in Prague and from the White House in Washington the idea that the fraudulent Ukrainian election was not only unacceptable but could be overturned quickly spread through the European capitals and now Kiev is filling up with European mediators running back and forth between the factions.
Is this interference in Ukrainian internal affairs?
You bet and let's hope we get more of the kind.
It would seem that the Kuchma legacy is going down in the person of Mr. Yanukovich, in that slow-motion way in which oversized statues descend from Eastern pedestals.
And when the dust clears it is likely Ukraine will have shifted decisively towards the West.
http://lugar.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm?id=228223
Lugar Statement on Ukraine Elections
Monday, November 22, 2004
Statement by U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman Richard Lugar, November 22, 2004, Kiev, Ukraine:
Excerpt:
I have been honored to serve as President George Bush’s representative during the November 21st run-off election in Ukraine.
-snip-
President Bush wrote in a letter which I carried to President Kuchma: “You play a central role in ensuring that Ukraine’s election is democratic and free of fraud and manipulation. A tarnished election, however, will lead us to review our relations with Ukraine.”
In thoughtful and careful representation of President Bush’s words, I visited with President Kuchma, Prime Minister Yanukovich and Speaker Lytvyn with explicit requests for them to terminate any further campaign violations. Despite the already recorded long list of egregious assaults on democracy in Ukraine, I said both publicly and privately that I had come to celebrate the building of strong democratic institutions in Ukraine.
It is now apparent that a concerted and forceful program of election day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities.
PING
bttt
Black Sea and the Sea of Azov
Russia's Black Sea fleet is still in Sevastopol. Now the issue of whether it could make it out to sea is a whole other issue.
I don't know either, but the Green is for Kerry and Red for Bush?
What may worry him about the Ukraine are ten million ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine... six million Ukrainian visitors to Russia every year.... one million Ukrainian guest workers in the underground Russian economy... unrest on the borders... but most of all:
Sevastopol?
All of that, plus, citrus orchards, mineral wealth, natural gas, oil (not that gas and oil are scarce in Russia, its more about control) and also, controling the East bank at the mouth of the Danube.
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