[Ohio UZO News] NYT; FT; WSJ (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

  <javascript:void(0)> 

ARTS, BRIEFLY

The Arts/Cultural Desk; SECTE

On Ukrainian Screens, Say It In Ukrainian 

By THE NEW YORK TIMES 

25 December 2007

Late Edition - Final

A Ukrainian court on Monday banned the screening or distribution of all foreign films that are not dubbed or subtitled in Ukrainian, Agence France-Presse reported. The constitutional court said foreign films could not be distributed or shown if ''they are not dubbed or post-synchronized or do not have the captioning data in the state language.'' The move follows a campaign calling for a boycott of foreign films dubbed into Russian or carrying Russian subtitles. Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with 47 million inhabitants, is split over the language issue. In a poll released on Monday about 42 percent of 1,800 respondents said Ukrainian should be the sole state language; 30 percent said Russian should be granted the same status. 

Financial Times

Ukraine PM has goodwill

By Roman Olearchyk in Kiev 

Published: December 24 2007 

Yulia Tymoshenko, the newly appointed prime -minister of Ukraine, has pledged that her pro-western governing coalition will seek to "harmonise" relations with Moscow

Many observers expected the charismatic 47-year old, who was appointed last week, to shake up bilateral relations between Kiev and Moscow. Relations between the countries have been strained since the Orange Revolution of 2004. The trigger, many thought, would be her plans to cut intermediaries out of the multi-billion-dollar natural gas trade between Ukraine, Russia and central Asian suppliers.

However, in a Financial Times interview, Ms Tymoshenko expressed confidence that the Kremlin was ready to adopt a more transparent gas supply arrangement with Kiev, whose vast pipeline system pumps the majority of Russian supplies to Europe. As proof, she pointed to public comments made on the issue in recent months by Dmitri Medvedev, the presidential favourite backed by Vladimir Putin, Russia's outgoing president.

"The leading presidential candidate in Russia, Mr Medvedev, publicly said that the Russian side is not set on any shadowy intermediaries. He said that they are ready to do away with these intermediaries," she said.

At stake is the position of Swiss-registered company RosUkrEnergo, which controls the supply of central Asian gas to Ukraine and significant sales to European markets. The company is owned equally by Russian gas group Gazprom and two Ukrainian businessmen, Dmytro Firtash and Ivan Fursin.

Ms Tymoshenko has called for direct gas supply agreements between Gazprom and Ukraine's state energy group, Naftogaz. US officials have backed her in criticising the role of intermediaries such as RosUkrEnergo, insisting they pose an energy security risk to Ukraine and Europe, which is itself dependent on Russia for more than a quarter of its gas needs.

While reasserting her resolve on the issue, Ms Tymoshenko pledged to seek pragmatic talks with Moscow to avoid a repeat of the 2006 gas price stand-off that disturbed supplies to Europe.

"I have not returned as premier to strain relations with Russia - this is not my intention. I will strive to establish a relationship of equal partnership," she said.

Ms Tymoshenko regained her position as the premier after a strong showing in snap elections held in September. A previous 2005 stint as prime minister was cut short after a falling out with Viktor Yushchenko, whose presidential candidacy she backed during the 2004 elections. The premier said her new governing coalition would strive to seek compromise with a strong opposition to consign to the past years of paralysis that have plagued Kiev's politics. She said her priorities would be to fight corruption and to adopt concrete reforms that would bring Kiev closer to its long-term goals of joining the European Union and the Nato military alliance.

Ms Tymoshenko's cabinet is working ahead of the new year to address an array of pressing problems. Topping the list is sky-high inflation, expected to finish the year at more than 15 per cent. Ms Tymoshenko is rushing to pass a budget for 2008 before the end of the year as well as attempting to prevent a technical default on Eurobonds issued to investors by Naftogaz.

"It is very difficult to bring in a completely new government just a week before the new year, evermore so considering that so many problems have piled up. We will probably break the Guinness World Records by adopting a new budget within several days," she said.

Ms Tymoshenko was quick to assign the blame for the problems her cabinet will face on the previous governing coalition led by Viktor Yanukovich.

She said sheaimed to have the budget passed this week as well as the swift adoption of state guarantees on debt obligations in order to reassure increasingly edgy investors with debt interests in Naftogaz.

However, with her coalition controlling only a hairline majority in parliament, the opposition, led by Mr Yanukovich, is a formidable force that could complicate such plans.

The Wall Street Journal

 

December 21, 2007

    

COMMENTARY

   

Ukraine's Second Chance

By ADRIAN KARATNYCKY and JAN NEUTZE

December 21, 2007

 

Travel south from Kiev along the arbored R-12 highway and you will see perhaps the most public symbols of Ukraine's rampant corruption: a wide array of luxurious estates that have sprung up in Koncha-Zaspa, a leafy suburb of the capital. Many of these multimillion-dollar homes belong to senior state officials with only modest salaries. Investigative journalists have compiled evidence suggesting quite a few of these mansions were bought with ill-gotten gains. This prompted President Viktor Yushchenko to demand in August that the public servants explain how they came to possess such lavish accommodations. But at the time his political opponents from the Party of Regions still ran the government, and they responded to his call for accountability with stony silence.

 

Ukraine's graft problems are hardly of recent vintage, though. It was the massive corruption during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma that helped spark the 2004 Orange Revolution. Public anger at large-scale vote buying and voter fraud swept Mr. Yushchenko and his camp, who promised to rid Ukraine of sleaze, to power. But political infighting brought down the Orange government under Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko in September 2005 and prevented any real progress on corruption.

 

Now she has a second chance, after Ukraine's Orange reformers re-elected her Tuesday to lead a new government. If the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team fails again, the Orange coalition's hold on power will prove tenuous. More importantly, corruption could reverse Ukraine's record of recent economic growth and even threaten its national security.

 

Transparency International's Global Corruption Perception Index ranks Ukraine 118th out of 180 states. A recent World Bank study on corruption and good governance shows that after the Orange Revolution, the country actually slipped from its lower-middle position and now has a worse record than nearly three-quarters of the countries surveyed.

 

Practically all sectors of Ukraine's government, business and civic life are affected by widespread corruption. Bribery and extortion are particularly common in Ukraine's judiciary, where favoritism rather than merit determines the appointment of judges. Evidence is routinely "lost" at Ukraine's courts and bribes can facilitate almost any desired ruling.

 

In a famous case involving the 2000 murder of journalist and anti-corruption crusader Heorhiy Gongadze, police destroyed evidence related to the case, including some that may have implicated a police unit that had been tailing Gongadze. In 2004, a judge summarily closed the case against a police general who had ordered the evidence destroyed in what press freedom groups and the International Union of Journalists denounced as a cover-up.

 

Similarly, corruption among politicians is rampant. Alleged vote buying of parliamentarians, who can hide behind extensive immunity rules, has in part been responsible for the political paralysis plaguing the country over the past two years.

 

Corruption has also serious consequences for Ukraine's national security, as much of the graft is concentrated in the energy sector. Ukrainian analysts and investigative reporters assert that massive bribery has played a key role in perpetuating Ukraine's overreliance on Russian gas. Such corruption, experts say, has halted or impaired Ukraine's efforts to promote internal energy exploration and diversification. The net effect has been to expose Ukraine to Russia's authoritarian influence. These views are corroborated by Western officials, including U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Kramer who at a talk earlier this month at Harvard University called on Ukraine to get rid of all "Middlemen companies" which he said "thrive on non-transparent arrangements ....[,]...fester in a corrupt environment...[and] serve no useful purpose." He specifically cited RosUkrEnergo, a Swiss-registered company that plays a dominant role in gas imports to Ukraine.

 

There are a number of key steps Ukraine's reunited Yushchenko-Tymoshenko tandem should take in the first 100 days of the new government:

€ Strengthen weak and contradictory anticorruption legislation and update government ethics codes that are currently ambiguous or absent altogether.

 

€ Establish a new judicial chamber, staffed by a new generation of judges untainted by sleaze.

 

€ Create an independent national investigative bureau to uncover and root out grand corruption.

 

€ Eliminate or reduce the scope of parliamentary immunity, which lawmakers have used to escape prosecution.

 

€ Increase transparency by obliging senior public officials and politicians to publish annual statements of assets and incomes.

 

Anticorruption campaigns must not become mechanisms of political retribution. Thus, prosecutions cannot only focus on the activities of members of the opposition. They must target officials from across the political spectrum, wherever the evidence leads.

 

But Ukraine is unlikely to win the battle alone. The U.S. and the EU need to step up their assistance in helping Ukraine face this challenge by quickly deploying teams of anti-corruption advisors to Kiev to work with the new government. If they do, the hopes and aspirations of the Orange Revolution will be realized and will contribute to the emergence of a mature and prosperous democracy.

 

Mr. Karatnycky is president of the Orange Circle and senior scholar at the Atlantic Council of the U.S. Mr. Neutze is program officer at the German Marshall Fund of the U.S. They are co-authors of the new Atlantic Council report "Corruption, Democracy, and Investment in Ukraine."

 

Wall Street Journal

(link to book excerpt 


'Child 44'


By Tom Rob Smith
December 21, 2007Chapter 1: Soviet Union

Ukraine
Village of Chervoy
25 January 1933

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119817910711642879.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20071227/9879719e/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1923 bytes
Desc: image001.gif
Url : http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20071227/9879719e/attachment.gif