[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: AP; FT; EDM (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

Associated Press

Ukraine wants Russian fleet out in 2017 

223 words

24 June 2008

English

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine insisted Tuesday the Russian Black Sea Fleet leave its Crimean base when a lease agreement expires in 2017.

The comments were likely to aggravate a dispute that has become a sore point in already strained relations between the two ex-Soviet republics.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Vasyl Kyrylych said the Russian navy will not remain in Sevastopol beyond 2017 and the issue is not a subject for discussion.

On Monday, a top Russian official suggested that Russia might pay more or find other means of compensation to remain in Sevastopol.

Under the 1997 fleet agreement, which allows the Russian navy to remain in Sevastopol through 2017, Russia pays an annual rent fee of US$93 million (euro60 million) by writing off Ukraine's national debt.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Karasin said Monday that Moscow was willing to be "constructive and flexible" in how it pays Ukraine.

The presence of the Russian navy in Sevaspotol is linked to tension over the Crimea, which was ceded to Ukraine during the Soviet era and became part of the independent Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Tensions over the naval base simmered this year after Ukraine requested a roadmap to NATO -- a move strongly opposed by Russia.

 

Financial Times

Business Education

Ukraine gets fresh impetus

By Kester Eddy 

Published: June 23 2008 

Iryna Tykhomyrova, the new president of the International Management Institute of Kiev (MIM), says Ukraine must enhance managerial awareness if it is to fulfil its potential on the global stage, writes Kester Eddy . She has pledged to develop MIM's faculty and facilities to support that goal.

While avoiding direct judgment on Ukraine's management class, Prof Tykhomyrova has also strongly hinted that communist-era thinking and associated autocratic leadership styles remain far too prevalent in the country, hampering broader development.

"Structural changes in the economy mean Ukraine's management must develop new attitudes to managing the workforce.

"Management and owners of Ukrainian business are understanding that their most valuable asset 'goes home every night', [but] I have to admit those changes are slower than we would want," she says.

Although MIM is located in the relatively comfortable, modernising Ukrainian capital, Prof Tykhomyrova is aware of poor conditions in the provinces, where appalling industrial safety in sectors such as coalmining has severely damaged Ukraine's international image.

"I was born in Donbass, the eastern Ukrainian coal mining area, and . . . as I still have some relatives living there, I know a lot first hand about the situation in the mines."

But this state of affairs, an inheritance of communism and the twin impacts of globalisation and a fast-growing economy, mean huge potential for business schools as companies fight to keep up.

"With the admission of Ukraine to the World Trade Organisation, our companies going public and international and a lack of international managerial expertise in Ukrainian business, [means] our responsibilities add up.

"It brings new opportunities for us," she says.

Eurasia Daily Monitor

www.jamestown.org/edm

June 24, 2008

THE RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN UKRAINE--RESURRECTING THE PAST

The Kremlin has once again raised the hoary issue of the rights of Russian language speakers in Ukraine, apparently as part of its campaign to make Russian the official lingua franca of the CIS and to apply more pressure on its neighbor during a time of strained relations.

The Russian Foreign Ministry, headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's loyalist, Sergei Lavrov, sent a note to Kyiv on June 16, saying that "Moscow proceeds from the fact that the question of the Russian language in Ukraine should take into account the legal rights and interests of millions of Ukrainian citizens who consider it [the Russian language] as their native one, which they use in everyday life" (Interfax, June 17).

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry calmly replied that Russia should take more interest in the provisions for the cultural and educational needs of Ukrainians with Russian passports in Russia. "I would advise [Russia] to worry about the functioning of the Ukrainian language in Russia and take an interest in the educational and cultural conditions for Ukrainians in Russia, and in the number of Ukrainian language schools in Moscow," Vasyl Kyrylych, the spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, told Interfax-Ukraine on June 17.

Russia's campaign to impose the Russian language once again on former Soviet republics began in 2003. Earlier the Kremlin's main concern was centered on the rights of ethnic Russian minorities in the Baltic States, but within a few years, as Russian nationalism--many claim it is chauvinism--became the quasi ideology of the Putin administration, the concept was broadened to include Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians and others.

Kyrylych said that 442,000 children studied in 1,500 schools in Ukraine with Russian as their main language of education and 31 universities educated Russian language teachers. Moreover, 2,343 media outlets were registered in Ukraine as Russian language outlets, Ukrainian libraries had 59 million titles in Russian and the Russian language could be heard on the streets throughout Ukraine."

The Russian complaint came at a time when both President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin are intensifying the campaign to promote Russian as a global language on par with English. On June 10 Medvedev called for Russia to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language (The Guardian, June 11).

Medvedev stated that 300 million people worldwide (mostly within the borders of the former Soviet Union) used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain name would be a key part of raising the importance of Russian as a language, a task he said was his personal priority as president.

To these ends, the Russian government created a web site (www.russian2007.ru) in both Russian and English to promote the Russian language (Reuters, July 2, 2007).

A day earlier, Putin, addressing the International Congress of Russian Press, pledged the government's support for the Russian language foreign press. Presumably, he did not have in mind Russian language newspapers in the United States, the Czech Republic or Canada, which appear to be well-funded and enjoy a stable readership among the émigré communities.

"Looking after the Russian language and expanding the influence of Russian culture are crucial social and political issues," Putin stated, adding, "We plan to provide every support for the Russian-language press, while respecting their right to independent coverage, including that of events taking place in Russia ... and respecting the legislation and sovereignty of the countries in which they work" (RIA Novosti, June 10).

The Putin-Lavrov campaign appears to be aimed more at former Soviet republics than Western or Israeli Russian émigrés, reputed by the Kremlin to be starved of Russian-language media.

A spokesman for the Kremlin-supported Institute of the CIS, Vladimir Zharikhin, told www.pravda.ru on June 11 not to politicize the issue of the Russian language in post-Soviet states. "This is a humanitarian mission, first and foremost. Studying the Russian language and culture is one of the ways to become a part of world culture," he said.

The political goals of the language offensive also seem to have little in common with the cultural values that the Kremlin associates with the Russian language. Instead, it appears that this policy is designed to destabilize democratically elected pro-Western governments in former Soviet republics intent upon re-establishing their national identity and languages after years of official Russification by communist Moscow. Across the former republics of the Soviet Union, only Belarus still recognizes Russian as a state language.

The timing of Moscow's linguistic protest coincides with the broader campaign against the Ukrainian government's plans to obtain a Membership Action Plan to join NATO in the future and to remove the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the Crimea.

The call for Russian to become a "second" official language in Ukraine is geared to support the pro-Russian "Party of the Regions," Putin's favorite Ukrainian party, headed by former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, and to encourage secessionist tendencies in the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine as leverage against the present government of Yulia Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko.

--Roman Kupchinsky


Eurasia Daily Monitor

June 23, 2008

 

HIGH-LEVEL NATO DELEGATION IN OUTREACH VISIT TO UKRAINE

NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer headed a delegation of the North Atlantic Council (NAC), the alliance's standing decision-making body in Brussels, comprising the 26 member countries' ambassadors, on a visit to Ukraine on June 16 and 17. The visit was the first high-level NATO-Ukraine consultation since NATO's Bucharest summit in April, where the alliance postponed a decision on Ukraine's application for a membership action plan (MAP) pending further high-level meetings.

This visit revitalized the "Intensified Dialogue on Ukraine's aspirations to membership and relevant reforms," a process launched in 2005 by NATO and Ukraine. This year's NAC visit was, however, the first since 2005, a hiatus reflecting the Ukrainian political forces' immersion in factional struggles to the detriment of national strategic priorities.

A meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC) in the ambassadorial 26 + 1 format discussed recent and planned steps to advance cooperation, which should strengthen the case for a Ukrainian MAP. With Ukraine's Foreign Affairs Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko and Defense Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov, the Commission took stock of Ukraine's important contributions of airlift capabilities to allied missions and significant participation in the NATO-led Kosovo Force, as well as token contributions to Operation Active Endeavor in the Mediterranean and NATO Training Mission Iraq. The Ukrainian side confirmed its recently expressed willingness to participate in the British-French Helicopter Initiative and in the alliance's Air Situation Data Exchange.

Furthermore, Ukraine now offered to participate in the NATO Response Force as the first partner country to do so and also to facilitate land transit through Ukraine for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF). The allies also welcomed Kyiv's consideration of the possibility of deploying additional personnel to ISAF. A meeting of the NUC at the defense ministers' level on June 13 had prepared the groundwork for political decisions on these issues (NUC communiqué, June 17).

These issues are additional to the NATO-Ukraine Annual Target Plans for security and defense sectors reforms, which aim at gradual downsizing and modernization amid severe budgetary constraints.

The allied delegation encouraged Ukraine to finance properly the 2008-2011 State Program to Inform Ukrainian Society about the alliance and about the government's own MAP aspirations. Previous programs to educate the Ukrainian public about NATO have suffered from financial and political neglect.

Speaking at Kyiv's Mohyla Academy and in a discussion organized by the Open Ukraine Foundation and Pinchuk Art Center, de Hoop Scheffer signaled in strongest terms that Russia was not entitled to influence decisions on a Ukrainian MAP or ultimate membership in the alliance: "It is crystal clear that any policy course Ukraine might wish to follow is strictly a sovereign decision by the Ukrainian government and finally the Ukrainian people." By the same token, "Decision-making in NATO is by the 26 allies and by them only. Any decision regarding Ukraine's application would not be subject to the influence of third countries." De Hoop Scheffer also "debunked the myths" that Ukrainian membership in the alliance would involve NATO bases on Ukrainian territory or Ukrainian soldiers being forced to participate in allied operations (NATO press release, June 18).

President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko each held talks and press briefings with de Hoop Scheffer in Kyiv. On that occasion and in a follow-up speech in Vynnytsya two days later, Yushchenko linked NATO membership aspirations with the most basic security of statehood: "We want to see Ukraine politically independent and its territory whole." "To preserve Ukraine permanently, it should be a member of the common security system. It is incumbent on our generation to ensure that Ukraine remains sovereign and independent" (Interfax-Ukraine, June 16, 19). For her part, Tymoshenko de-dramatized the internal Ukrainian debate on this issue by citing Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych's earlier endorsement of Ukrainian membership in NATO. Tymoshenko displayed a book published in 2004 in which Yanukovych, prime minister at that time, apparently envisaged Ukraine joining NATO by 2008 (Interfax-Ukraine, June 16).

On the second day of the visit, NATO ambassadors fanned out in groups to three regions of Ukraine for information and outreach events. In the eastern cities of Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv they were met, as on the first day in Kyiv, by fringe protest groups from the Communist and Progressive Socialist parties. The Party of Regions did not seem to be involved. The envoys merely commented that the freedom to protest was a sign of democracy in Ukraine (Channel Five TV, June 17).

NATO will next evaluate Ukraine's MAP application at ministerial meetings in December and early 2009, leading up to the alliance's April 2009 summit. Ukraine and supportive countries will have to work around four distinct challenges: lack of enthusiasm among Ukraine's populace (and opposition in some sensitive areas), politicians' involvement in seemingly permanent electioneering, Russian threats of reprisals against the Ukrainian state, and indirect Russian influence in certain European capitals, potentially distorting NATO debates and decisions.

 

--Vladimir Socor



 

 

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