[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine:FT (editorial); NYT; KP/AP; RFE/RL; Economist; OSCE

Tue May 27 13:57:50 EDT 2008

Financial Times (Editorial)

Cooling Kiev

Published: May 27 2008 

Policymakers seeking evidence of the dangers of inflation could do worse than visit Ukraine, where it stands at 30 per cent. No other country in Europe comes close. Its inflation rate ranks alongside Venezuela and Zimbabwe, among the highest in the world. This is not the company that Ukraine would like to keep as it joins the World Trade Organisation and pursues economic integration with the European Union. But unless Kiev acts urgently, it will run into serious economic trouble.

Ukraine has been particularly exposed to global increases in food and energy prices. Its food bills were inflated by a bad harvest last year while energy costs were driven up by gas price increases imposed by Russia, the dominant supplier.

With this year's harvest outlook good, consumers can expect some respite during the summer. As food represents 60 per cent of the consumption basket, overall inflation should also slow in the next few months. But this alone will not save the Ukrainian economy: energy costs will continue to rise as Russia seeks to double gas prices to around $400 per thousand cubic metres.

Also, about half Ukraine's inflation is due not to food and energy but domestic economic performance. Kiev is rightly proud of an economic surge that has seen output grow nearly 8 per cent a year since 2000. But until 2008 the authorities did little to slow the accompanying credit growth of around 50 per cent a year. And they did even less to limit public spending. Since before the 2004 Orange Revolution, successive governments have paid huge increases in public wages and social benefits. The overall budget deficit has been kept in check - but a torrent of money put directly into consumers' pockets.

The central bank has this year finally taken action, raising interest rates to 12 per cent, and restraining lending. But the effect of last week's move to revalue the currency against the much-depreciated US dollar is unclear, with central bank officials divided over the policy.

The onus now is on the government to cut public spending hard and reduce the deficit from a projected 2 per cent of GDP to around zero. Unfortunately, the political struggle that has hampered policy-making since 2004 still prevents coherent action. President Viktor Yushchenko blames Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister. She blames him, Both criticise opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich.

All three have their eyes on the 2010 presidential election. But none wants to push for the retrenchment urgently needed. Without action, that poll may not be worth winning.

New York Times

Russia and Ukraine Argue Over Crimean Naval Base 

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ 

24 May 2008

Late Edition - Final

MOSCOW -- They have bickered over NATO expansion, energy prices and how to commemorate a 1930s mass famine. Now, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a new dispute over a naval base in the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol.

The base lies in Crimea, a verdant, mountainous peninsula that was part of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Russia until Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine kept control of the region, but signed a lease allowing Russia to base its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2017.

This month, however, Moscow's mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, called for Russia to assume ownership of Sevastopol. In remarks delivered from the naval base on the 225th anniversary of the Black Sea Fleet's inception, the mayor said that Khrushchev had never intended to give Sevastopol to Ukraine and urged a review of the current arrangement.

Many Russians, and some of Crimea's ethnic Russian majority, would like to see Russia regain control of the region, particularly Sevastopol, a strategic port city that they consider integral to Russia's national security.

The statements rankled the government in Kiev, which, in response, banned Mr. Luzhkov from entering Ukraine, saying his comments threatened Ukraine's national interests.

Moscow, already annoyed by Kiev's Western-leaning policies and particularly angered by its drive to join NATO, vowed to retaliate.

''Regarding the Ukrainian decision to ban Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, from entering the territory of Ukraine, the Russian Foreign Ministry informs that Russia has been forced to take adequate measures against those Ukrainian politicians who, with their actions and words, do harm to the Russian Federation,'' the ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

Ukraine's deputy justice minister appears to be the first official to suffer retribution. After the minister, Evhen V. Kornichuk, suggested this month that Vladimir V. Putin, Russia's newly appointed prime minister, be banned from Ukraine as well, Moscow has made it clear that Mr. Kornichuk will not be welcome in Russia.

''Considering what Evhen Kornichuk said in his public address, we assume that he will not be planning to visit the Russian Federation,'' Andrei Nesterenko, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry could not confirm Friday whether Mr. Kornichuk had been officially banned nor whether more entry restrictions would follow.

Kyiv Post

Ukrainian president's visit focuses on past tragedy 

May 27 2008, 14:58

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday said he would support a bill in parliament recognizing the 1930s Ukrainian famine that killed millions of peasants as an act of genocide. 

OTTAWA (AP) - Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday said he would support a bill in parliament recognizing the 1930s Ukrainian famine that killed millions of peasants as an act of genocide. 

Harper made the pledge alongside Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko, who was granted the distinction of addressing a rare joint session of Canada's Senate and House of Commons. 

Historians agree that the 1932-33 famine was engineered by Soviet authorities under Josef Stalin to force peasants to give up their private plots of land and join collective farms. Some say Ukrainians were specifically targeted as an ethnic group. 

Authorities confiscated grain from village after village and prohibited residents from leaving, effectively condemning them to starvation. 

"In Canada we aren't afraid of history or of truth," Harper told Parliament. 

"This is why our government recognized the injustice to Ukrainians who were interned during the First World War. . . (And this bill) would provide legal recognition of what happened in Ukraine under the brutal communist dictatorship of Josef Stalin." 

Russian lawmakers passed a resolution in April saying that the famine should not be considered genocide and should not be used as a political tool. 

Yushchenko thanked Canada for its support over the years - starting with its quick recognition of the country's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. There are about 1.2 million Ukrainian immigrants in Canada. 

"I'm filled with very tender feelings to your country and to this land. For me as for millions of Ukrainians, this country and this land is sacred," Yushchenko said. 

The two leaders also held private meetings to discuss co-operation in the military effort in Afghanistan and potential Ukrainian membership in NATO. 

Harper has been a strong backer of Yushchenko's campaign to join the 26-member alliance, a prospect that has raised the hackles of Russia. 

He told the assembled Members of Parliament and senators that Ukraine already supports all of NATO's missions in one way or another - the only non-NATO country to do so. 

Canada's position on NATO echoes that of the United States, but other members, including France and Germany, have been more cautious.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Ukraine: Confounding 'Orange' Hopes, Eccentric Incumbent Set To Win In Early Mayoral Vote 

Incumbent Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskyy

(ITAR-TASS)

After an unusually long and heated campaign, Kyiv residents have chosen a mayor from among about 70 candidates on a list so long that the ballot paper measured about a meter in length.

Preliminary results put incumbent Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskyy clearly in the lead with almost 37 percent of ballots. The Chernovetskyy Bloc is also leading in the city council vote. 

His reelection would be a blow to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who secured a parliamentary vote in March to oust Chernovetskyy in connection with what she alleged were illegal land deals. 

The early results are also bad news for the fiery prime minister because her preferred candidate, Oleksandr Turchynov, trails Chernovetskyy with under 19 percent in a vote largely seen as a dress rehearsal for the next presidential election in early 2010. 

"The Kyiv elections are a serious electoral, psychological, symbolic defeat for Yulia Tymoshenko and her bloc," says Vadym Karasiov, who heads the Kyiv-based Global Strategic Institute, a think tank viewed as close to President Viktor Yushchenko. "She initiated the elections; she thought that in these elections she would get the capital's resources, Chernovetskyy would be removed, she would reformat the city council. As it turns out, having initiated the elections, she lost them and this means a lot of voters and many of the political elite will have doubts about the political possibilities of Yulia Tymoshenko." 

Karasiov adds that "her charisma is now going to be doubted because, so far, that charisma has never been doubted and it has never let her down." 

Other candidates linked to the democrats who swept to power during the 2005 Orange Revolution didn't fare much better, according to preliminary showings. 

Former world boxing champion Vitaliy Klychko of the pro-Western PORA-PRP group garnered almost 18 percent of the vote, while Mykola Katerynchuk, an ally of Yushchenko, is credited so far with just over 4 percent. 

The fact that Tymoshenko and Yushchenko backed different candidates highlights enduring divisions within the so-called Orange camp. The two former allies fell out shortly after coming to power, the dispute culminating with Yushchenko sacking Tymoshenko as prime minister in 2005. 

The president reinstated her in December after their respective parties won a slim majority in parliamentary elections, but the governing coalition remains fragile. Tymoshenko recently accused Yushchenko of seeking to weaken her standing ahead of next year's presidential election. 

Ihor Zhdanov, an independent political analyst, tells RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that pro-Orange forces could have won the vote had they put differences aside and fielded a single candidate. 

"The results of these elections simply confirmed Mr. Chernovetskyy's mayoralty. At the same time, two candidates from the democratic camp, Oleksandr Turchynov and Vitaliy Klychko, together received more votes than Chernovetskyy. What does this mean? It means that had the democratic camp had a single candidate, if people had been able to overcome their ambitions, then they would have had a victory and the mayor of Kyiv would be a representative of the democratic forces. This is the No. 1 conclusion of these elections: that politicians need to curb their ambitions, learn to agree and understand their responsibility to the voters." 

But for now, pro-Western forces will have to put up with Chernovetskyy for another mayoral term. 

A billionaire and former lawmaker, Chernovetskyy is known for his quirky behavior and often incoherent remarks. 

"Who is the mayor today?" he once posed aloud. "Me, it's definitely me. And was there someone before me? I don't remember. I don't think there was anyone." 

His political career is marked with controversy. Both he and his wife, for instance, avoided manslaughter convictions after killing two people in separate road accidents. 

Chernovetskyy has also raised eyebrows with proposals such as forcing subordinates to undergo lie-detector tests, or with his support for an evangelical church headed by a controversial African minister. 

In January, Chernovetskyy made the headlines with his scuffle with Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko, whom he accused of punching him in the face and groin after an argument. Lutsenko admitted slapping Chernovetskyy's face but claimed the mayor initiated the fight by kicking him in the knee. 

RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service contributed to this story 

Related Stories About Ukraine:

·  Kyiv Summit Seals Caspian Energy Project 

·  EU Official Says Political System Holds Kyiv Back 

·  Bush Backs Kyiv's NATO Bid Ahead Of Summit 

·  Gas Crisis Averted, But Underlying Problems Remain 

·  Yushchenko Seeks Energy Imports In Kazakhstan 

·  Gazprom Urges Kyiv To Resolve Gas Dispute 

The Economist

Europe.view 

Telling the Soviet story

May 22nd 2008 
>From Economist.com

A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

BEING burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow by nationalist hoodlums must count as a kind of Oscar if you are a Latvian filmmaker whose aim is to expose modern Russia's blindness to the criminal history of the Soviet Union. The ire of Young Russia's protest outside the Latvian embassy this week was directed at Edvins Snore, whose film "Soviet Story" is the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past. 

The film is gripping, audacious and uncompromising. Though it starts by telling the story of the murder of 7m Ukrainians in 1933, it is no mere catalogue of atrocities. The main aim of the film is to show the close connections-philosophical, political and organisational-between the Nazi and Soviet systems.

As Françoise Thom (one of many anti-communist luminaries appearing in the film) puts it: "Nazism was based on false biology; Marxism was based on false sociology". The Marxist dream of the "new man", for example, mirrored the Nazi idea of racial superiority. The Nazis murdered chiefly on racial grounds, while the Soviets concentrated on class. But mass murder is mass murder.

Those who keep a soft spot for Marxism may flinch to hear that the sage of Highgate referred to backward societies as Völkerabfälle (racial trash) who must "perish in the revolutionary holocaust". Or that the Nazi party in its early days idolised Lenin (Josef Goebbels said he was second only to Adolf Hitler in greatness).

Perhaps the best sequence in the film shows pairs of posters using almost identical designs: muscular workers strike heroic attitudes in support of the party and the state, blonde little girls beam, fists smash enemies, hammers break chains. Without the swastika and hammer and sickle as clues, it would be hard to know which is which.

The illustration of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is compelling: Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the "Jewish question" in occupied Poland.

Cooperation was based on a written agreement-complete with the signature of Lavrenty Beria, head of the notorious NKVD-which is shown in the film. "The NKVD will propose to the Soviet Government a programme to reduce the participation of Jews in state bodies and to prohibit Jews and Jewish offspring of mixed marriages from the areas of culture and education", reads a final, chilling sentence. Russia says the document is a fake.

Powerful archival footage shows Red Army officers drinking toasts with their counterparts from the SS in Berlin in December 1939. In 1940, the Soviet Union had become a huge supplier of grain and oil to the Nazi war machine, while it encouraged the Communist parties of western Europe to sabotage the anti-Nazi resistance.

"It is comforting to see Parisian workers talking to German soldiers as friends", a French communist publication gloated in July 1940. Vyacheslav Molotov, who was then the Soviet Union's foreign minister, called fighting Nazism a "crime". Along with similar pronouncements, that was published in every Soviet newspaper; such pages were hurriedly removed after Hitler's treachery. 

Something pretty similar happened in the West. Nazi war criminals are reviled; their Soviet counterparts are honoured veterans to this day. Any attempt to bring them to justice prompts angry protests from Russia. "Hands Off Our Granddads", was the slogan chanted by the protestors from Young Russia. A better question might be, "What exactly happened?" 

Mr Snore and his sponsors in the European Parliament have produced a sharply provocative work. Its tone, technique and composition may be open to criticism. But those who want to ban it should try refuting it first.

OSCE Project Co-ordinator in Ukraine

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OSCE Project Co-ordinator encourages dialogue, co-operation between Ukraine's Constitutional Court, government and international legal community

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