[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: IHT; LAT; WSJ; AP

[Deychak, Orest]

  <http://www.iht.com> 

Seeking more freedom, Russians and others in region flock to Ukraine 

By Maria Danilova
The Associated Press 

Friday, May 9, 2008 

KIEV: A gloomy Vladimir Putin wears a Czarist crown, clutching a bag
full of dollars and a miniature television tower.

Filipp Pishchik says this and similar cartoons, depicting the former
president as a corrupt leader who stifles free speech, got him in
trouble with authorities and forced him to leave Moscow last year for
neighboring Ukraine.

"Ukraine is just great," said Pishchik, 37, a designer and architect.
"Here there is hope."

Since the 2004 Orange Revolution ushered in a vigorous, sometimes
chaotic democracy, Ukraine has become an island of freedom and tolerance
in an ex-Soviet bloc still dominated by authoritarian regimes, and
journalists, political activists, artists, and business professionals
have flocked here.

In Soviet times, a dissident wanting to live free had only the West to
look to. Getting there was hard, the culture alien, the language
foreign. Ukraine, however, is an easy visa-free destination for most,
Russian is spoken and speech is free.

Rights groups complain that Ukraine is stingy with granting asylum,
which guarantees the applicant's right to stay and work indefinitely.
Still, the influx vividly illustrates how far the country's path has
diverged from that of Russia, which by the time of the Orange Revolution
had already begun rolling back democratic reform.

The number of foreigners registered as living in this country of 46
million doubled to nearly 200,000 from 2003 to 2006, according to United
Nations statistics; that does not include the unregistered. The number
applying for political asylum rose to 2,300 last year from 1,800 in
2005.

Pishchik said he moved here after architecture magazines stopped
publishing his work, longtime clients left him - hinting they were
forced to do so by authorities - and he got threats from security
officials. The reason, he says, was the cartoons he displayed in
galleries and on Web sites.

Today, he lives in a spacious Kiev house loaded with exciting new
projects and is married to a Ukrainian artist.

"I tell all my friends that they all will end up here one day," Pishchik
says.

Similar stories abound in today's Ukraine.

Yuriy Svirko, a 33-year-old journalist from Belarus, decided he had had
enough of President Alexander Lukashenko's iron-fisted rule after he was
accused of attacking a presidential body guard and threatened with
arrest. (He says it was the guard who attacked him.)

Svirko arrived in Kiev right after the Orange mass movement overturned a
fraudulent election and brought reformist Viktor Yushchenko to the
presidency.

Ukraine today is awash in competitive elections, noisy street protests
and heated debates on TV shows and occasional fist fights in Parliament.
Opposition rallies are held under the windows of the president's office,
and many have forgotten a time when TV channels were state-controlled.

Savik Shuster had a TV political talk show in Russia until it was closed
in 2004 as the Kremlin tightened the screws on media. Now he's in Kiev,
hosting a similar program on a Ukrainian channel.

"In Ukraine, freedom of speech still exists," said Shuster, 55. But for
Russia today, "openness is like light for a vampire."

During the past two years, Belarusian expatriates have held an annual
"Belarusian Spring" festival, featuring fare banned back home - movies,
poetry readings, underground rock bands.

This year's festival kicked off with a dozen activists racing down
Kiev's main avenue on cross-country skis when snow was nowhere to be
seen. It was a poke at Lukashenko, a winter-sports fan who every year
makes government officials and professional athletes compete with him in
a ski competition which he always wins.

But rights groups say that while Ukraine is good at welcoming
professionals, it is still inhospitable to relatively unskilled
political refugees, granting only 3 percent of applications for
political asylum, compared with more than 30 percent in neighboring
Poland.

Ulugbek Zainabudinov, an Uzbek opposition activist, fled to Russia after
a bloody crackdown on an uprising in his country. But Russian
authorities began arresting the refugees at the Uzbek government's
request, so in 2006 he moved to Ukraine.

That year, Ukraine deported 11 other refugees back to Uzbekistan,
drawing harsh criticism from human rights groups. All the deportees have
been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, the groups say.

"The very idea of freedom exists here and it is developing," said
Zainabudinov said. "But I don't feel safe."

His asylum application has been turned down, and fearing deportation, he
is seeking refugee status in Western Europe.

Experts say Ukraine has neither the resources nor the political will to
take care of asylum-seekers. Natalia Prokopchuk of the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees said Ukraine also does a poor job of
helping asylum-seekers while their cases are being considered.

Natalia Naumenko, spokeswoman for the State Department on Migration,
counters that most applicants are illegal migrants caught en route to
Western Europe.

Dmytro Groisman of the Vinnytsia Rights Groups said the influx of
asylum-seekers does not prove that Ukraine has developed into a tolerant
and democratic society. Instead, he said, refugees simply had nowhere
else to go.

"When your apartment is on fire, you would jump anywhere - in the snow,
in the water, from the 6th floor," Groisman said. "People are running
where they can."

Olga Kudrina, 22, is one of the lucky few who received political asylum.
Sentenced to prison for unfurling a Putin-must-go banner near the
Kremlin, she fled to Ukraine and lives with her baby daughter in a tiny
apartment in Vinnytsia, 160 miles, or 257 kilometers, southwest of Kiev.

Two colleagues from her banned National Bolshevik Party share her
apartment in Vinnytsia and are seeking asylum.

One of them, Mikhail Gangan, 22, came here to escape arrest for breaking
into a government building in Moscow and demanding that Putin step down.

"You live calmer, better here," said Gangan. "You won't see as many cops
on the streets - you can walk down a street and not see a single one. In
Russia that cannot happen."

Los Angeles Times

DISPATCH FROM KIEV; Grass-roots forces square off against shadowy
developers 

Megan K. Stack 

Times Staff Writer

12 May 2008

A-3

KIEV, UKRAINE

There is a war raging in this graceful old city of colorful cathedrals,
lush parks and cobblestone byways. It's a clanging, banging fight that
threatens to slice up grassy gardens, overshadow the onion domes, break
the sleepy slopes of rolling hills.

An epidemic of quasi-legal construction and shadowy land grabs is
chewing on the ancient capital on the banks of the Dnieper River.
Roughly 60 "scandal construction zones," as the mayor's office calls
them, have turned Kiev's postage-stamp-sized downtown into a
free-for-all of spanking-new skyscrapers, shady land acquisitions,
grass-roots protests and fast-talking investors.

"We are witnessing the murder of a 1,000-year-old city," said Maryna
Solovjova, a lawyer who has fought to halt construction in the midst of
a UNESCO-protected hilltop in the heart of the city.

Who's responsible? Just about everybody blames the city government. But
the mayor's office accuses the former mayor and the courts. The prime
minister's bloc blames the city government, the president, the courts
and just about anybody else -- except themselves. The president
complains about the "rot and corruption" of the land deals, but appears
helpless.

The fight over Kiev is an apt symbol of the state of the country's
leadership. Some Ukrainians say the debasement of the capital city, the
spiritual heart of the nation, is a daily reminder that years of
revolution and a fierce fight for democracy have somehow failed to
deliver the clean government they had envisioned.

"It isn't just buildings. This is a social issue, and buildings are just
the visible part of the iceberg," said Artem Chapeye, a 26-year-old
activist who has joined raucous demonstrations to halt some of the
construction projects. "We were hoping for more democracy. But there's a
small group of people in charge, and they don't listen to anybody."

Priced out of downtown by ballooning rents and watching the picturesque
neighborhoods morph before their eyes, disgruntled residents describe a
feeling of helplessness to preserve the town they describe as Europe's
greenest capital.

With anger rising and land being gobbled up, an irate parliament called
for an early mayoral election this month.

As 79 candidates scrap for votes, some of the most controversial
building projects have been frozen without explanation, leading many
residents to mutter that the officials who claim innocence can evidently
halt the construction when it's politically convenient.

Take, for example, plans to build atop what is said to be a medieval
burial ground for plague victims. Or consider the idea of constructing a
luxury high-rise in the heart of "Landscape Alley," once the hilltop
home to the princes of Kievan Rus, and then distributing the apartments
free of charge to government bureaucrats.

Both projects were steaming forward, and both have now been halted.

Climb up to Landscape Alley, past the home of author Mikhail Bulgakov
and the turquoise spires of the church of St. Andrew. From the top of
the hill, the city spreads out below.

These days, yellow cranes rear up against the backdrop of fairy-tale
hills. The metallic clang and roar of drills and jackhammers slice
through birdsong in the morning air.

But at an abandoned construction site, graffiti spray-painted on a fence
announces: "The construction was stopped by the people of Kiev."

Like many of his peers, Chapeye took to the streets in 2004
demonstrations that captivated international imagination and ushered
President Viktor Yushchenko into power. Today, he and his friends use
that experience, with the help of the Internet, to stage demonstrations
against deals cut by people they helped elevate into office.

"The state itself is destroying the city, so we have to fight with our
own fists," Chapeye said. "The bulldozers come and we fight."

"Land is a bribe here," said Andriy Pavlovsky, a lawmaker with Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc. "The people in power in Kiev are
giving out land to their relatives, waiting for a couple of years so it
gets more expensive and then selling the land. There is a pyramid of
corruption. They bribe the police and especially the prosecutors, so
everybody comes out clean."

The mayor's office acknowledges that the city is being sliced to pieces,
but claims that bribes were paid and permits illegally obtained under
the previous mayor's administration. The city's attempts to halt the
construction have been flouted by the courts, city officials say. "It's
a wild situation," said Denys Komarnytsky, head of the mayor's bloc on
the City Council.

"The City Hall tells the investors they can't build anything in the
illegal construction areas," he said. "Then they go to the courts and
get the courts to deny the decision of City Hall."

Facts are short, innuendoes long -- and time may be running out.

"If the situation continues like this for another 10 years, we will lose
Kiev," said Vitaly Portnikov, a political commentator for Radio Liberty
in Kiev.

"The politicians play the fool," he said. "Their main goal is to
procrastinate until the construction is finished and nothing can be
changed. You can never find out who is really in charge and who is
really responsible."

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Bread Basket: In Ukraine, Tiny Plots Of Farmland Spur Big Bet 

By John W. Miller 

12 May 2008

A1

BILYI KAMIN, Ukraine -- The vast collectives that fed the Soviet Union
are now a patchwork of tiny gardens, fields and vacant lots. But
combined, they could help feed the world: Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine
have fertile yet untilled land the size of Idaho.

If someone could just stitch the land back together and create modern
farms, agronomists say, the vast spaces north and east of the Black Sea
could generate an extra 115 million metric tons of wheat per year -- 20%
of the world's current production.

Richard Spinks is trying to do just that. The 41-year-old Briton has
literally been going door-to-door, leasing small plots of land from
hundreds of thousands of poor farmers in western Ukraine. His company,
Landkom International PLC, has planted wheat, barley and rapeseed on a
combined 25,000 acres. Landkom expects to reap its first big harvest
this fall.

Such efforts could give a much-needed boost to global food supplies. For
decades, agribusiness companies relied on new seed and fertilizer
varieties to push yields higher. But as technology gains have slowed,
the search for additional arable land has intensified. That's created an
opening for entrepreneurs with visions of re-collectivizing the land in
former Communist countries and rebooting production.

The approach is also being tried in China, where much of the farmland is
divided into small plots controlled by village collectives. A handful of
farmers are trying to form larger and more efficient farms by cobbling
together pieces of land rented from absent neighbors.

In Ukraine, Mr. Spinks faces long odds. Property laws bar private land
sales, so companies must sign leases with individual land owners who
often pull out before the contract expires. Mr. Spinks says that, to
keep his lessors happy, he invests heavily in local infrastructure, and
has built roads, schools and orphanages. This past Easter, TV spots
wished viewers a happy holiday from Landkom.

Bilyi Kamin was once among the brightest stars in the Soviet
agricultural constellation. Some 500 miles west of Kiev, the village
regularly fetched accolades from Moscow for its crop yields. The land
here, as in most of Ukraine, is uniquely rich in humus, organic matter
that makes soil more fertile. Soviet planners depended on the Ukraine
for 40% of their empire's agricultural output.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, governments chopped up
the old state farms and distributed plots to their citizens. Lacking
capital to invest in the land, the new owners mostly planted small
vegetable plots or let their animals graze. Many title deeds were not
claimed because their owners were deceased or had emigrated. In all,
some 55 million acres of arable land in Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine
went uncultivated. The region, although still a major grain producer,
has continued to suffer from a lack of capital investment ever since.

Despite the election of a pro-Western government in Ukraine in 2004, an
influential business and political elite that takes its cues from Moscow
remains skeptical of Western investment. In turn, foreign investors find
themselves coping with a venal political system and courts that are
deeply corrupt. According to a "corruption perception index" compiled by
Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International, international business
people consider Ukraine among the most corrupt countries in the world,
below Uganda, Moldova and Cuba.

Critics of the land-leasing model say that when a local farmer breaks a
contract there is little legal recourse. Sphere Asset Management, a
Kiev-based hedge fund, recently started selling off the leases it holds
to 74,000 acres here. "We're regularly in litigation" with land owners,
says Yevgeniy Khata, Sphere's managing director.

The central government in Kiev is now considering a law to legalize land
sales. That could trigger a massive land rush and rapid price
escalation. Landkom's 15-year leases include a clause that would give it
first crack at purchasing land. But whether that would work in practice
is unclear.

A native of Kent, England, Mr. Spinks says he joined the Royal Air Force
when he was 16 and was sent to the Falkland Islands after Britain's war
with Argentina ended in 1982.

He picked up Russian, Spanish and Polish in the air force. After leaving
the military in 1987, he says he bounced around Europe for 14 years,
selling advertising for several media and publishing companies. In 2000
he met his current wife, who is Ukrainian. They have three children.

In 2001, Mr. Spinks took a job with British Seafood Group, a U.K.
processor and producer. He traveled through Russia, Ukraine and Eastern
Europe buying fish. He says it was a hard life. Archangelsk, a Russian
port city where he often worked, "was so depressing they played disco
music from the tops of lamp posts to prevent people from committing
suicide," he jokes.

Over a beer in Warsaw in November 2005, Mr. Spinks discussed the
biofuels boom with friends. Konrad Nowicki, a young Polish entrepreneur,
suggested leasing 250 acres in the Ukraine and growing rapeseed, which
is commonly used in Europe to make biodiesel for cars.

Together with a third partner they invested GBP 600,000 (about $1
million at the time) of their own money. Mr. Spinks formed Landkom and
began leasing land in western Ukraine in early 2006. He worked 18-hour
days, often sleeping in a tent next to his fields.

Mr. Spinks's quest brought him to the quiet village of Bilyi Kamin in
October 2006, where he set up Landkom's headquarters. The village's name
-- Ukrainian for "White Stone" -- comes from the surrounding chalky
hills.

The locals were initially skeptical of his land grab. Stalin seized land
in the 1930s to build collectives, eventually starving millions of
peasants. Hitler literally shipped Ukraine's coveted soil back to
Germany.

One evening, Landkom officials called a meeting of the village's 300
landowners. "We're here to help you develop," Landkom public-relations
director Yuri Pelenski, a British son of Ukrainian refugees, recalls
telling the crowd. He offered to lease everybody's land for around $14
an acre a year -- a standard price in Ukraine, but less than a tenth the
price in the U.K. More attractive, however, was the salary Landkom would
pay the farmers to help work the land: $400 a month, or twice the
national average base salary for manual labor.

Maria Petryshyn says she wasn't sure what to do at first. "I didn't want
to give up something I worked my whole life for," says Ms. Petryshyn,
who in 1973 was given a medal for local sugar beet production. In 1996,
she received a 2.5-acre plot from the government as part of a
privatization scheme.

In the end, she agreed to Landkom's offer. "I'm an old woman," says the
70-year-old Ms. Petryshyn. "I do not have a tractor or combines, and my
hands are worn out." Her $35 annual payment from Landkom supplements her
$100 monthly pension. Many of Ms. Petryshyn's neighbors, lured by the
promise of working their own land for Landkom for an additional fee,
also went along.

Landkom routinely lobbies local officials in an effort to get all
landowners in a village to sign leases. The company recently gave its
lessors in the town of Zolochiv $22,000 to refurbish an orphanage. It
then aired a TV commercial advertising its good will. "I didn't know
where the money came from until I saw a Landkom commercial with our
orphanage on TV," says Natalya Medvid, one of the six Catholic nuns
looking after the kids.

Doing business "would be harder for [Mr. Spinks] if he didn't do these
things for us," says Ivan Stefanishin, deputy governor of Lvivksa, the
oblast -- or province -- that includes Bilyi Kamin and Zolochiv. "An
investor has to be part of his environment, that's normal."

Still, there are holdouts. Andriy Duk, 42, farms 120 acres next to
Landkom's headquarters. He owns two tractors and one combine. "People in
Ukraine can make it on their own," he says.

Mr. Spinks also faces competition from a handful of multinational
companies using a similar model to bet on Ukrainian land. MK Group, a
Serbian conglomerate, farms 100,000 acres on leased land around Kiev and
is building a complex of silos and storage buildings with an $18 million
loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Another
dozen or so Ukrainian companies are also in the mix.

By February 2007, Landkom had leased 25,000 acres. Commodity prices were
rising. Eager to expand, Mr. Spinks hired London-based consultancy
Libertas Partners Group PLC, to help him find investors. Four investment
funds contributed a total of $12.9 million.

Last fall, Mr. Spinks set a goal of leasing just under one million acres
by 2015. To raise funds, the company sold a 44% stake on the London
Stock Exchange in November for $106 million. Since then, the company's
market value has grown to $386 million. Mr. Spinks's 5.8% stake is worth
$22.4 million.

Landkom, which has corporate subsidiaries in Cyprus, the U.K. and
Ukraine, says it pays Ukraine's regular corporate tax rate of 25%. A
Ukrainian government spokesman said he couldn't comment on individual
companies.

For now, Landkom can farm only a small percentage of its 165,000 acres
because preparing the land and buying equipment is time consuming and
costly. This year, Mr. Spinks expects his 25,000-acre harvest to net
about $400 per acre, depending on the crop and the yield. Next year, he
hopes to harvest four times as much. The biggest American farms rarely
exceed 10,000 acres.

Mr. Spinks plans to ship the wheat and rapeseed to processing plants in
eastern Ukraine or in Western Europe. He's currently negotiating
contracts with giant commodity traders including Glencore International
and Louis Dreyfus. Spokesmen for those companies confirmed they were in
talks with Landkom, but said they were waiting to conclude their
purchases.

With land and labor so cheap, Landkom figures it can make up for the
rising costs of seed, fertilizer and equipment, which has put pressure
on farming margins around the world. The price of fertilizer alone has
doubled in the past year. Mr. Spinks estimates he will see a 60% profit
margin.

He dismisses the notion that his lack of experience in farming will doom
his ambitions. "It's just like the fish business, you need to make sure
you have professionals who can supply the raw material," he says. He's
hired dozens of professional farmers and agronomists to make key
decisions on planting, harvesting and investing in equipment, he says.

Mr. Spinks says the company is investing $250,000 in Bilyi Kamin's old
collective headquarters to put in a modern command center that will
guide combines by satellite. It is building a bar room, sauna and gym to
lure Western managers, and a fireproof room to store its original
leases.

On a recent day, Mr. Spinks toured the fields around Bilyi Kamin in a
four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi Pajero. He chain-smoked and barked orders at
some of Landkom's 500 employees into his iPhone. He checked in with
villagers and employees.

Vassil Stebnitski, Bilyi Kamin's chief agronomist under Soviet rule --
now a Landkom field manager -- showed off a new German-made combine. "We
need their new technology," said the 54-year-old Mr. Stebnitski. "All we
had before was land and sky

AP

Moscow mayor barred entry to Ukraine for claiming its city belongs to
Russia 

12 May 2008

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine on Monday barred the powerful Moscow mayor
from entering the country in the future for reportedly suggesting that
it should cede a key city to Russia.

The move further strains already tense relations between the two
ex-Soviet neighbors, as Moscow bitterly opposes Kiev's push to join
NATO.

Ukraine's State Security Service said in its statement that Moscow Mayor
Yuri Luzhkov's comments were undermining national interests and the
country's territorial integrity. The agency also said it was looking
into allegations that Luzhkov was involved in money laundering in
Ukraine.

Russia's Foreign Ministry criticized the Ukrainian move as an
"unfriendly step," and added that Luzhkov was expressing the view shared
by many Russians.

"Yuri Luzhkov only expressed an opinion which conforms with the
viewpoint of the majority of Russians who have watched the breakup of
the Soviet Union with pain," the ministry said in a statement.

Speaking Sunday in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, Luzhkov was
reported by the Interfax news agency as saying that the city belonged to
Russia. A lease agreement with Ukraine allows Russia to use Sevastopol
as the main base for its Black Sea fleet until 2017.

The Crimean peninsula has long been part of the Russian empire and then
of Soviet Russia. In 1954, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev awarded the
Crimea to Soviet Ukraine, where he lived and ruled for many years.

After the 1991 Soviet collapse, the Crimea became part of an independent
Ukraine, causing a lot of discontent in Russia and among local
residents, many of whom are ethnic Russians.

Luzhkov, who has long angered Ukraine with similar statements,
reportedly claimed that Khrushchev never intended Sevastopol, a key port
where Russia's Navy had been based for centuries, to become part of
Ukraine and suggested the current arrangement should be reconsidered.

"This issue remains unresolved. We will resolve it within the framework
of the truth, state positions and the rights that Russia has to its
naval base -- Sevastopol," he was quoted as saying by Interfax.

Russia's Foreign Ministry said that Luzhkov's statements reflected
public dismay about the Soviet collapse.

 

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