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  • Too close for comfort

    The Australian, Australia
    Dec 4 2004

    Too close for comfort

    Peter Wilson in Kiev
    December 04, 2004

    IT was not what you would call a great public relations coup. Leonid
    Kuchma, the former manager of a Soviet missile factory, who has been
    one of Russia's most loyal allies during his decade as President of
    Ukraine, flew from the political crisis in his country early
    yesterday to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin at an airport near
    Moscow, in what looked like an anxious visit to report to head office
    for new instructions.

    The Russians have loomed as the shadowy but ominous presence behind
    Kuchma's regime during the past two weeks of confrontation on the
    streets of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities, with housewives,
    shop-owners and young anti-government activists all convinced that
    Russian special forces were already hiding in the city, or would soon
    appear if Kuchma's regime began to fall.

    But as the orange-clad protesters continued to rally in the streets,
    dancing to rock music as they celebrated the momentum of their
    campaign for fair elections, Kuchma decided he needed to huddle with
    Putin even if the television broadcasts of their meeting cast him as
    Moscow's puppet.

    Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko rubbed in the humiliating fact
    that Kuchma could get an audience with Putin easier than he could get
    into his own office - which has been blockaded by opposition
    activists. "The source of power is located in Ukraine - it's the
    Ukrainian people", not the Kremlin, chided Yushchenko.

    The visit reminded Ukrainians that while the anti-government campaign
    has mainly been a backlash against domestic corruption and economic
    mismanagement, it has also become a new fault line in East-West
    relations and will determine whether their 48 million-strong nation
    will look more to the West in the future or drift into a closer
    embrace of Russia.









    The worried look on Putin's face as he commiserated with Kuchma about
    the precarious situation in Ukraine testified that the unprecedented
    dispute there is also a turning point for Russia and his own
    international ambitions.

    Putin has reason to be worried. He has been embarrassed at home and
    abroad after rushing to congratulate Kuchma's hand-picked successor,
    Viktor Yanukovych, for "winning" an election that has been declared
    rigged by observers, Western governments, Ukraine's parliament and
    many of the Government's own backers.

    Putin now has the potential discomfort of having a real democracy on
    his doorstep as an uncomfortably relevant example of the sort of
    civil rights that his citizens are losing as he strengthens his
    already tight hold on Russia's media, business, political parties and
    regional governments.

    Growing in confidence at home and abroad, Putin has openly mourned
    the passing of the Soviet Union 13 years ago as "a national tragedy"
    for Russia and launched a new bid to reconstitute a "joint economic
    space" on the ashes of the USSR, taking in Russia, Ukraine,
    Kazahkstan and Belarus.

    He has already interfered in Georgia and Moldova by supporting
    ethnically Russian separatist movements, has smiled on rigged
    elections in Belarus, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and has reasserted
    Moscow's role in Central Asia's Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
    Uzbekistan, where there is solid evidence the Government has boiled
    at least one dissident alive.

    But of all the countries in Russia's "near abroad", Ukraine is easily
    the most important. It is the largest, having taken one-fifth of the
    USSR's population when it declared independence in 1991. It has the
    best farmland in Europe, it is a vital transit point for the
    pipelines that supply one-third of the European Union's oil and gas
    imports, and culturally it is more Russian than any of Moscow's
    neighbours. In fact Ukraine is the cradle of Russia's Orthodox Church
    and Slavic culture.

    Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Krushchev were Ukrainians,
    and Ukraine built the nation's heavy industries, staffed largely by
    Russians. Even today, manufacturing production lines straddle their
    border, as do thousands of extended families. The family ties are so
    strong that Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia after
    independence and allows Russia's Black Sea fleet into its port of
    Sevastopol.

    Russian is still the language that most Ukrainians speak at home, and
    if Yanukovych had become president he would have made it the second
    official language and introduced dual citizenship for millions, while
    rejecting Opposition calls for EU and NATO membership.

    "We have been brothers and cousins for three centuries," says Alla
    Sokolovskaya, a 30-year-old teacher from Kiev with a Russian mother
    and Ukrainian father.

    "We are one. Putin supports us because we are all Slavs, and we have
    to stand together against NATO, which looks more and more
    aggressive," she says as she stands in the snow at a pro-Yanukovych
    rally drowned out by the Yushchenko protests that crippled the
    capital.

    Until now, western Europe and the US have accepted Russia's role in
    Ukraine. The EU has never offered it membership, even though Ukraine
    is plainly more European than long-term aspirant Turkey.

    In 1991 US president George Herbert Bush visited Kiev and tried to
    persuade its leaders not to seek independence from the Soviet Union,
    in what was derided as his "Chicken Kiev" speech.

    One of the main drafters of that speech was a little-known expert on
    Soviet affairs named Condoleezza Rice, but as GeorgeW. Bush's next
    secretary of state, she is sure to take a rather different attitude
    on the need to maintain Ukrainian independence.

    It is not surprising that Russian leaders have been so sensitive
    about the sophisticated and well-funded US campaign of recent years
    to fund and train democracy activists prepared to take on
    authoritarian regimes in elections across eastern Europe.

    It is certainly not paranoia when the Russians claim Washington has
    been funding activists and election campaigns against Moscow's
    friends in places such as Serbia, Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine.

    Direct US funding of pro-Yushchenko campaigners is estimated to be
    more than $US10million ($12.9 million), and more money and skills
    have been provided by democracy foundations run by the main US
    political parties and donors such as billionaire George Soros.

    In one of their most provocative moves, the US and other Western
    embassies bankrolled the exit polls that provided a standard to judge
    the officially declared results.

    Putin was more open in his support for Yanukovych, twice visiting to
    campaign for him and sending his chief spin doctor to work in Kiev,
    where Yushchenko, whose American wife Katherine used to work for the
    State Department, was portrayed as a US puppet.

    The truth is that although Yushchenko is a pro-Western liberal
    economist and reformer, he has more in common with his rival than it
    appears. He served for two years in the job Yanukovych now holds,
    prime minister under Kuchma, before breaking away to oppose him. He
    is known as an opponent of corruption but, like Yanukovych, he has
    his own tight circle of wealthy business backers.

    There is little doubt the Government and its business allies, who
    have grown rich on the privatisation of state assets, stuffed ballot
    boxes, abused their control of most TV stations and even put
    invisible ink in pens used to mark ballots in some Opposition areas.
    Few observers doubt that Yushchenko would have won a fair vote.

    But while international attention has focused on the dubious turnout
    of 97 per cent in Yanukovych's home region, Russian-speaking Donetsk,
    where many booths somehow registered turnouts of more than 100 per
    cent, the rorts were not all one way.

    Yanukovych's implausible 96 per cent of the vote in Donetsk was
    almost matched in some regions in the west of the country by supposed
    votes of up to 94 per cent for his opponent.

    The explosive threat by the leaders of some Russian-speaking regions
    to break away from the nation if Yanukovych was not installed as
    president was backed by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzkhov, who attended a
    meeting of eastern Ukrainian leaders and denounced the Opposition as
    a "sabbath of witches" pretending to "represent the whole of the
    nation".

    That separatist threat soon melted in the face of a nationalist
    backlash across Ukraine and because of the realisation by the tycoons
    close to Kuchma, whose fortunes are largely based in the east, that
    it would not help their businesses if a reconstituted Iron Curtain
    was placed through the centre of Ukraine rather than the middle of
    Germany.

    Neither side went into the election campaign wanting to turn totally
    away from either Russia or the West, and the conflict in Iraq shows
    the complexity of the diplomatic balancing act that Ukraine has at
    times achieved.

    It was the usually pro-Moscow Kuchma who sent a solid contingent of
    troops to Iraq to improve his standing in Washington, with his
    protege Yanukovych vowing to extend their tour of duty while
    Yushchenko has promised to pull them out.

    The danger for Putin is that his high-profile and apparently
    unsuccessful intervention in Ukraine's political problems may have
    tipped its balance of opinion much further towards the West,
    especially if Yushchenko emerges as president - a prospect that is
    not yet guaranteed, but is increasingly likely.
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