Kuchmagate

[steve_vlasenko]

Opinion poll shows only 6 per cent support for president
Ukraina moloda, 16 March 2001

A public opinion poll reveals that only 6.1 per cent of Ukrainians
would vote for President Leonid Kuchma if presidential elections were
held today, the newspaper Ukrayina Moloda reported on 16 March. The
poll was conducted between 26 February and 7 March among 2,037 people
by the Ukrainian Centre for Political and Economic Research. Prime
Minister Viktor Yushchenko heads the list of potential presidential
candidates with 23.7 per cent, followed by Communist Party leader
Petro Symonenko with 11.2 per cent, Socialist Party leader Oleksandr
Moroz with 4.1 per cent, Working Ukraine leader Serhiy Tyhypko with
1.3 per cent and First Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Council Viktor
Medvedchuk with 1.2 per cent.

Almost one third of those polled said they thought the arrest of
former Deputy Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko was because of the
authorities' desire to distract attention from the tapes scandal
(tapes which allegedly show corruption in high places and presidential
involvement in the disappearance of murdered opposition journalist
Heorhiy Honhadze). A further 19.8 per cent thought that her arrest
was because the authorities wanted to strike a blow at the
opposition. However, 20 per cent thought that it was simply a case of
criminal
charges.

Vlas

[steve_vlasenko]

Ukraine: Former deputy premier's release to boost opposition - protest leader Mar 27, 2001


Kiev, 27 March: The opposition will become much stronger after the release of the former deputy premier, Yuliya Tymoshenko, from detention. This statement was made in an interview with UNIAN by the Ukraine Without Kuchma protest coordinator, Yuriy Lutsenko, following Yuliya Tymoshenko's release from the Lukyanivskyy remand centre.

He added that "we can expect anything from criminal authorities: new charges or an appeal against the court ruling, which cannot be appealed against". [Omitted: UNIAN comments; court rules in favour of the appeal against Tymoshenko's arrest]

Source: UNIAN news agency, Kiev, in Ukrainian 1857 gmt 27 Mar 01

Vlas

[steve_vlasenko]

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Up to 5,000 opposition protesters rallied on Saturday in Kiev to condemn President Leonid Kuchma and honor the memory of those they call the victims of his regime.
Opposition protests have become routine in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine over the past three months, with Kuchma's political foes accusing him of involvement in the death of a critical journalist.
But though the opposition, an assortment of parties ranging from socialists to right-wing ultra-nationalists, has become increasingly vocal, its calls for Kuchma's ouster so far have failed to attract a widespread popular following.
In Saturday's protest, Kuchma's critics carried portraits of Heorhiy Gongadze, the slain journalist whose beheaded body was found last November, and others whom they called ``victims of the totalitarian regime.''
These included banker and politician Vadim Hetman, assassinated in an apparent contract killing in 1998, and nationalist leader Viacheslav Chornovil, who died in a car crash in 1999.
``Today is a joint day of mourning,'' Chornovil's son Taras, a legislator and opposition leader, told the gathering.
Some legislators have long demanded a new probe into Chornovil's death, claiming the crash that killed him was organized by police. Kuchma on Saturday ordered the chief prosecutor to conduct an additional investigation, his office reported.
And some observers said at the time of Hetman's death that it was a political killing, but no evidence was uncovered and no one has been convicted in the case.
The protesters included Gongadze's mother Lesia, who blamed ``Kuchma's regime'' for the deaths.
Opposition activists are backing their charges about Gongadze with recordings released by a fugitive Kuchma bodyguard, which purportedly document the president and his top aides angrily discussing measures to silence Gongadze. Kuchma and others strongly deny any role in the killing.
At the end of the rally on Kiev's central Sofiivska Square the protesters released two doves held in cages.
``Let their flight to the sky symbolize a victory of democracy in our country,'' said opposition leader Oleksandr Turchinov.

Vlas

[NORRYM]

By now, the whole Ukraine should be enveloped by mass protests. The opportunity to throw out the discredited government is passing by. The nation is in a lethargic, lazy lolling state.

The 50 million nation can muster only 5 thousand to march in the capital -- is a disgrace and a testimonial to the ominous 'DON'T CARE ATTITUDE'. Moscow cannot be blamed forever for the ideological sellout being committed by the general populace. The top is stripping Ukraine of its material riches at home, and of its GOOD NAME across the globe, while the bottom tends to their little GARDEN PLOTS, and waits for dollars from the relatives abroad.

The song 'Don't cry for me Argentina', should be adopted as our national anthem, with lyrics changed to 'Oh, do cry for Ukraine, forlorn by its people', as envisaged by Shevchenko.

emkay/04/09/01

[Tentmaker]

The devil doth cast his seeds of tare upon the fields of the laboring poor. Oh wretched being, sower of discord, why trouble ye the down-trodden?


Tentmaker
Ever a goodly shelterer
This being the 12th day
of the 4th month
of the year 2001
of the one Lord
May His Peace
Be upon thee

[steve_vlasenko]

Cold War Chills in Ukraine
Date: 12 April 2001
Washington Post. Jackson Diehl

Picture a country at a strategic crossroads where an unpopular and
unpleasant ruler is besieged by his opposition. He wants American
political support; in exchange, he promises to back U.S. strategic
interests in his region. He threatens to turn to Moscow if he is
spurned. The "realists" of the foreign-policy establishment want to
back him, but it's not easy: After all, there's pretty good evidence
tying him not just to large-scale corruption and electoral fraud but
to murder.

It sounds like the kind of Cold War dilemma the United States used to
face in what was called the Third World, but this is happening now,
in Europe, in Ukraine -- the center of a region where a smaller,
21st-century version of the contest for influence between Washington
and Moscow is quietly being played out. Ukraine is one of a
half-dozen unstable countries between Poland and the Caspian Sea that
are torn between the aspiration to join a prosperous and democratic
Europe and the undertow of their history as former Soviet republics
-- a pull recently reinforced by the rise of an ambitious Russian
president.

You'd think their choice would be easy, but as Ukraine shows, it
hasn't turned out that way. A decade after declaring independence,
Ukraine -- a country the size of France with a population of 49
million -- still is desperately poor, its economy hamstrung by
corruption and the monopolies of Russian-style oligarchs, its
political system dominated by former Communist apparatchiks. Since
last fall, President Leonid Kuchma, a former missile factory manager,
has faced mounting criminal allegations, including tape recordings
linking him to the murder of a journalist whose body was found
beheaded.

As an opposition coalition has mounted unprecedented street
demonstrations in the capital, Kiev, both sides have dispatched
emissaries to Washington to plead for support from the Bush
administration. Kuchma's foreign minister, Anatoliy Zlenko, was in
town last week, and his message was blunt: Ukraine's regime, he
volunteered, was inclined to believe that a one-superpower world led
by the United States "has a lot of advantages" and was even
sympathetic to the Bush administration's missile defense plans. "What
weighs more," he appealed to an audience at the Heritage foundation.
"America's national interest or confidence" in a government's
democratic credentials?

Should America make the wrong choice, Ukrainian officials are quick
to point out, an alternative is readily available. Russian President
Vladimir Putin traveled to Ukraine last month and literally embraced
Kuchma before offering a series of deals to tighten the economic and
military bonds between Ukraine and Russia. "The big problem," says
the Clinton administration's former ambassador to the region, Stephen
Sestanovich, "is that you have got a president who is facing a murder
rap and the Russians are prepared to hold their nose and offer him
friendship."

Similar dilemmas are to be found across the region. In Georgia and
Moldova, post-Communist governments have tried, and mostly failed, to
build democracy, free markets and ties to NATO and the European
Union; now, with Russia growing stronger, they are being tugged
backward. Moldova, rejected by the European Union, recently restored
to power a Communist Party that has proclaimed its intention to build
a new union with Russia; Georgia recently gave in to incessant
pressure from Moscow and renounced a plan to pursue integration with
NATO. Despite Zlenko's overtures to the Bush administration, Kuchma
complied with a Russian demand last fall that he fire his foreign
minister, Boris Tarasyuk, the most prominent pro-Western politician
in Ukraine.

Putin's aim is not to reestablish the Soviet Union but to draw such
countries as Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus and Azerbaijan back
into a Russian sphere of influence -- a zone where a phone call from
Moscow can cost the foreign minister his job or, as happened last
month, cancel a regional summit meeting. Rather than extend the zone
of European integration and Western influence, this band of countries
could drift into a separate, Russian-led camp -- magnifying Moscow's
leverage over both the EU and NATO.

Does the Bush administration care about all this? That it does is
vividly demonstrated by the fact that Secretary of State Colin
Powell, who has distanced himself from peace talks between the Arabs
and Israelis, is hosting a summit meeting in Key West, Fla., this
week for the presidents of Azerbaijan and Armenia, who hope to strike
a peace deal. Azerbaijan's president, Heydar Aliyev, is a classic
strongman who stifles opposition, steals elections, and is grooming a
son to succeed him; but his country also has large oil and gas
reserves and is prepared to allow the construction of a pipeline that
would carry Caspian Sea energy to the West by a route that bypasses
Russia.

Azerbaijan's beleaguered democrats don't get very far with either
party in Washington. "On the merits we are on Aliyev's side and
shouldn't be shy about it," says Sestanovich. Putin, after all, is
also working Aliyev hard.

Ukraine offers a harder test. There is no oil there, but much
geopolitical weight, and the chances that democracy could triumph
over the apparatchiks and oligarchs are considerably greater. Powell,
says a senior official at State, wants to "find a way to resolve this
in a way that strengthens Ukraine's democracy." That seems right, but
does that mean backing Kuchma, or his opposition? So far, there is no
clear answer to that.