Yushchenko vetoed a new version of the presidential election law, which was passed on July 24, but parliament overruled the decision on August 21. Commenting on the development, Ihor Popov, the Deputy Head of the Presidential Secretariat predicted that Yushchenko would appeal to the constitutional court against several provisions in the new law. He warned that the legitimacy of the election might be questioned if the court outlawed those provisions (Ukrainska Pravda, August 21).

Yushchenko appealed on September 15. His representative in the constitutional court Maryna Stavniychuk specified that he argued that the new law limits the rights of Ukrainians voting abroad, fails to ensure a transparent election process or offer mechanisms to improve voter lists, and does not provide for control of the process by courts (Ukrainska Pravda, September 15). Popov commented on the same day that if the constitutional court pronounced the provisions rejected by Yushchenko as unconstitutional, then the election could be disrupted. He urged parliament to urgently correct those provisions. If it did so, Popov said, the election would be held “in an organized and normal manner.” He suggested that parliament’s failure to smoothly pass the 2010 state budget also threatened the election, because there would be no money to organize the process (Channel 5, September 15). Parliament may fail to pass the budget by the end of the year, due to a blockade of the session hall organized by the opposition Party of Regions (PRU) (EDM, September 16).

Popov’s statement prompted an angry reaction from Tymoshenko’s key ally, First Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Turchynov. He accused Yushchenko of trying to disrupt the election by both blocking the budget in parliament (Turchynov apparently suspects that Yushchenko backs parliament’s blockade by the PRU) and appealing against the new law. “This is his last chance to cling to power,” explained Turchynov. He warned that if the court rejected the new law, all the election schedules and deadlines would be disrupted (Channel 5, September 17). Tymoshenko echoed Turchynov’s views the following day, warning about two possible scenarios to postpone the election, which she claimed were being prepared by Yushchenko’s team. According to the first scenario, the court would dump the new election law, consequently preventing an election. While the second scenario involved, “the economy being brought to collapse” through weakening the national currency and “a state of emergency should be imposed.” Tymoshenko recalled that no election may be held during a state of emergency (Dnipropetrovsk Regional TV, September 18).

The Central Electoral Commission (TsVK), the constitutional court and Yushchenko’s team flatly dismissed the allegations by Turchynov and Tymoshenko. TsVK Deputy Head Andry Mahera said that parliament’s failure to pass next year’s budget would not affect the election process, since there are enough funds provided for the election in the 2009 budget to start the process (Interfax-Ukraine, September 18). Andry Stryzhak, the Chairman of the constitutional court said that even if the court pronounced the entire election law as unconstitutional, the election would be held according to the existing law. Stavniychuk, for her part, dismissed the possibility of imposing a state of emergency. She noted that the president would constitutionally require parliamentary approval, and that the parliament is dominated by the supporters of Tymoshenko and Yanukovych who would not agree to postpone the election (Kommersant-Ukraine, September 21). Yushchenko’s secretariat head Vira Ulyanchenko recalled that Yushchenko had not appealed against the entire law, but only several of its provisions, meaning that no court verdict could possibly disrupt the election (ICTV, September 20).

The PRU, whose leader Viktor Yanukovych is likely to be Tymoshenko’s main rival in the election, reacted calmly. Parliamentary Deputy Speaker Oleksandr Lavrynovych, who is a PRU senior member, suggested that Yushchenko’s appeal would not affect the election. He agreed with Ulyanchenko that Yushchenko appealed only against several provisions in the election law, so the court could not pronounce the entire law as unconstitutional (www.liga.net, September 21). Popov again suggested that parliament should urgently amend the law, in order to meet Yushchenko’s demands. In this case, he said, Yushchenko would recall his appeal from the court (Segodnya, September 21). Yanukovych’s unofficial spokeswoman Hanna Herman said that Yushchenko was not in a position to set conditions as his political influence is waning. “The presidential election will take place in any case,” she predicted (Channel 5, September 21).

Yushchenko recently signed an agreement for Zurabov to visit Kiev, but the new Russian ambassador still had to deliver his credentials before taking the position. Kommersant daily even wrote about a joke among Ukrainian diplomats who said that Zurabov “would be passed on to the next president.”

Read more

Now it seems that the joke has come true, and Moscow will try to mend ties with Kiev only after Ukrainians elect a new leader. “Dmitry Medvedev, in a videoblog, has reset the relations with Viktor Yushchenko,” Vremya Novostey daily wrote.

“The Russian leadership has made a principal decision to strain relations with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who is preparing to run for a second term in the presidential election in January,” the paper said.

“The Kremlin has never expressed its complaints against Yushchenko in so concentrated and tough a manner,” the daily said. “This approach is in the interests of any other presidential hopeful in Ukraine.”

Medvedev no longer considers Yushchenko the president and Moscow calls the Ukrainian policies “openly anti-Russian,” Kommersant daily wrote. “The Georgian scheme” is being used – “no relations with Mr. Yushchenko until the power changes in Kiev,” the paper said.

“Thus, Moscow has not only entered the presidential campaign in Ukraine, as in 2004, but has indicated clearly who should lose in this competition,” Kommersant wrote. However, the paper believes one of the reasons behind Medvedev’s decision could be the “latest actions of the Ukrainian president in the gas sphere, which is extremely sensitive for Moscow.”

Another daily, Vedomosti, believes that “a new gas war” is too minor a reason for such extensive statements. The paper called the argument between Russia and Ukraine “a quarrel of Siamese twins.”

“Russia depends on Ukraine not less than Ukraine on Russia,” the paper said in an editorial.

“What rational result Moscow would like to achieve by its maneuver?” Vedomosti asks. If Russia has entered the Ukrainian presidential election, as in 2004, then “this support will not add votes to traditionally pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich,” the daily said.

At the same time “Yushchenko’s extraordinarily low rating” may go up, the paper stressed. However, Russia may “be playing some smart game in favor of [Ukrainian Prime Minister] Yulia Tymoshenko, Vedomosti assumed.

“Russia with Ukraine and Russia without Ukraine are two different forces,” the paper stressed. “Quarreling with Ukraine, Russia is losing weight, not gaining it,” the daily added. “Attempts to exert pressure (it does not matter whether in the gas sphere or psychological one) force Ukrainian politicians to insist more on confrontation with Russia.”

At the same time, Business-FM radio quoted the president of the “Polity” Foundation, Vyacheslav Nikonov, as saying that Medvedev “is making a proposal of peace to Viktor Yushchenko.”

Peter Rutland, Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, believes there is a nexus of reasons behind Russia’s step. “President Medvedev’s announcement about delaying the dispatch of the new Russian ambassador to Kiev signals his frustration with recent actions by the Ukrainian government – the two-month delay in the approval of the new Russian ambassador, the expulsion of a Russian diplomat, and bans on some movement of Russian naval equipment in Sevastopol,” Rutland told RT.

“Then there is the July 31 loan agreement brokered by the European Commission, which Medvedev said was ‘absolutely incompatible’ with Russia’s prior arrangements with Naftohaz,” Rutland added.

The Kremlin’s decision “also comes against a broader backdrop of a deliberate use of nationalist rhetoric by President Yushchenko during what will almost certainly be the final six months of his presidency,” Rutland said.

The explanations of the Russian side are clear, Rutland said. “What is not so clear is what Medvedev hopes to gain by the announcement,” he added. “To some extent it will just provide more ammunition for Western critics, who argue that Russia is out to undermine Ukraine’s viability.”

“Yushchenko is politically dead, many leading positions in the Ukrainian government are empty (foreign affairs, defense, finance),” Rutland stressed. “In this context surely it would be more rational for Russia to adopt a hands-off approach. Diplomacy of empty gestures, such as refusing to send an ambassador, will achieve nothing.”

Perhaps the gesture was meant “to bolster Medvedev’s image as an assertive president before the domestic Russian audience,” Rutland said. He added, however, that it was “not a very good basis on which to conduct a nation’s foreign policy.”

Moscow’s decision seems “linked to two things: the departure of the controversial figure of [former ambassador Viktor] Chernomyrdin from Kiev and the Ukrainian presidential election campaign that is just beginning,” David Marples, a distinguished university professor at University of Alberta, said.

However, this does not seem to affect the presidential campaign much, “because Yushchenko is more unpopular in Ukraine than he is in Russia,” Marples told RT.

“It is a counter-productive move though because it only draws attention to the Ukrainian president and his position on Georgia, NATO, etc.,” Marples stressed. “And it gives the impression of Russian interference in the campaign, similar to that of then-President Vladimir Putin in 2004.

As for the efforts of both leaderships “to use history as a political tool,” Marples called them “reprehensible.”

The Ukrainian leader now has several options, analysts say. He could even “withdraw his ambassador from Moscow for a while,” Marples said.

Yushchenko also has an opportunity “to make independence and freedom from Russian intervention (especially in Crimea) as part of his election platform,” Marples added. “It was already a key element of his rhetoric, but now it appears to have more substance, which is why Medvedev’s move is, in my view, a political error.”

Some 44% of Russians polled by the Levada Center at the end of July said their attitude to Ukraine is “good or very good.” In July 2001, 71% of those surveyed thought the same. Now 47% of respondents said their opinions of Ukraine are “mainly bad or very bad.”

Meanwhile, readers of the Russian president’s blog in the internet are discussing Medvedev’s statement about the relations with Ukraine. Komsomolskaya Pravda daily wrote that “most people ask the president not to go too far because the Ukrainian government is not the entire Ukrainian people.”

Dmitry Medvedev’s decision to refrain from sending the Russian ambassador to Kiev has been interpreted by the media and analysts as Moscow’s rupture with the Ukrainian president.

Medvedev cited as the main reason behind his decision as “the openly anti-Russian stand” of the leadership in Kiev. In addition to this, new Russian ambassador Mihail Zurabov had been waiting for Ukrainian approval for some weeks.

Yushchenko recently signed an agreement for Zurabov to visit Kiev, but the new Russian ambassador still had to deliver his credentials before taking the position. Kommersant daily even wrote about a joke among Ukrainian diplomats who said that Zurabov “would be passed on to the next president.”

Read more

Now it seems that the joke has come true, and Moscow will try to mend ties with Kiev only after Ukrainians elect a new leader. “Dmitry Medvedev, in a videoblog, has reset the relations with Viktor Yushchenko,” Vremya Novostey daily wrote.

“The Russian leadership has made a principal decision to strain relations with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who is preparing to run for a second term in the presidential election in January,” the paper said.

“The Kremlin has never expressed its complaints against Yushchenko in so concentrated and tough a manner,” the daily said. “This approach is in the interests of any other presidential hopeful in Ukraine.”

Medvedev no longer considers Yushchenko the president and Moscow calls the Ukrainian policies “openly anti-Russian,” Kommersant daily wrote. “The Georgian scheme” is being used – “no relations with Mr. Yushchenko until the power changes in Kiev,” the paper said.

“Thus, Moscow has not only entered the presidential campaign in Ukraine, as in 2004, but has indicated clearly who should lose in this competition,” Kommersant wrote. However, the paper believes one of the reasons behind Medvedev’s decision could be the “latest actions of the Ukrainian president in the gas sphere, which is extremely sensitive for Moscow.”

Another daily, Vedomosti, believes that “a new gas war” is too minor a reason for such extensive statements. The paper called the argument between Russia and Ukraine “a quarrel of Siamese twins.”

“Russia depends on Ukraine not less than Ukraine on Russia,” the paper said in an editorial.

“What rational result Moscow would like to achieve by its maneuver?” Vedomosti asks. If Russia has entered the Ukrainian presidential election, as in 2004, then “this support will not add votes to traditionally pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich,” the daily said.

At the same time “Yushchenko’s extraordinarily low rating” may go up, the paper stressed. However, Russia may “be playing some smart game in favor of [Ukrainian Prime Minister] Yulia Tymoshenko, Vedomosti assumed.

“Russia with Ukraine and Russia without Ukraine are two different forces,” the paper stressed. “Quarreling with Ukraine, Russia is losing weight, not gaining it,” the daily added. “Attempts to exert pressure (it does not matter whether in the gas sphere or psychological one) force Ukrainian politicians to insist more on confrontation with Russia.”

At the same time, Business-FM radio quoted the president of the “Polity” Foundation, Vyacheslav Nikonov, as saying that Medvedev “is making a proposal of peace to Viktor Yushchenko.”

Peter Rutland, Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, believes there is a nexus of reasons behind Russia’s step. “President Medvedev’s announcement about delaying the dispatch of the new Russian ambassador to Kiev signals his frustration with recent actions by the Ukrainian government – the two-month delay in the approval of the new Russian ambassador, the expulsion of a Russian diplomat, and bans on some movement of Russian naval equipment in Sevastopol,” Rutland told RT.

“Then there is the July 31 loan agreement brokered by the European Commission, which Medvedev said was ‘absolutely incompatible’ with Russia’s prior arrangements with Naftohaz,” Rutland added.

The Kremlin’s decision “also comes against a broader backdrop of a deliberate use of nationalist rhetoric by President Yushchenko during what will almost certainly be the final six months of his presidency,” Rutland said.

The explanations of the Russian side are clear, Rutland said. “What is not so clear is what Medvedev hopes to gain by the announcement,” he added. “To some extent it will just provide more ammunition for Western critics, who argue that Russia is out to undermine Ukraine’s viability.”

“Yushchenko is politically dead, many leading positions in the Ukrainian government are empty (foreign affairs, defense, finance),” Rutland stressed. “In this context surely it would be more rational for Russia to adopt a hands-off approach. Diplomacy of empty gestures, such as refusing to send an ambassador, will achieve nothing.”

Perhaps the gesture was meant “to bolster Medvedev’s image as an assertive president before the domestic Russian audience,” Rutland said. He added, however, that it was “not a very good basis on which to conduct a nation’s foreign policy.”

Moscow’s decision seems “linked to two things: the departure of the controversial figure of [former ambassador Viktor] Chernomyrdin from Kiev and the Ukrainian presidential election campaign that is just beginning,” David Marples, a distinguished university professor at University of Alberta, said.

However, this does not seem to affect the presidential campaign much, “because Yushchenko is more unpopular in Ukraine than he is in Russia,” Marples told RT.

“It is a counter-productive move though because it only draws attention to the Ukrainian president and his position on Georgia, NATO, etc.,” Marples stressed. “And it gives the impression of Russian interference in the campaign, similar to that of then-President Vladimir Putin in 2004.

As for the efforts of both leaderships “to use history as a political tool,” Marples called them “reprehensible.”

The Ukrainian leader now has several options, analysts say. He could even “withdraw his ambassador from Moscow for a while,” Marples said.

Yushchenko also has an opportunity “to make independence and freedom from Russian intervention (especially in Crimea) as part of his election platform,” Marples added. “It was already a key element of his rhetoric, but now it appears to have more substance, which is why Medvedev’s move is, in my view, a political error.”

Some 44% of Russians polled by the Levada Center at the end of July said their attitude to Ukraine is “good or very good.” In July 2001, 71% of those surveyed thought the same. Now 47% of respondents said their opinions of Ukraine are “mainly bad or very bad.”

Meanwhile, readers of the Russian president’s blog in the internet are discussing Medvedev’s statement about the relations with Ukraine. Komsomolskaya Pravda daily wrote that “most people ask the president not to go too far because the Ukrainian government is not the entire Ukrainian people.”

On the other hand, we even have little old ladies, those who have been alive long enough to remember the brutality of the Stalin era, sagely opining on how “Ukrainians are being self-important and disrespectful” just because they wish to remember their dead, or how, honestly, Ukrainian lives don’t really matter in all this at all, considering that if the peasants had only laid down for daddy Stalin, they wouldn’t have “deserved” such punishment (I’m not kidding or exaggerating right now – the whitewashing of the Stalin era continues to this day).

I’m not going to say that the truth is in the middle. There is no truth. The only truth are millions of dead bodies, stacked on high from Ukraine, to Kuban, to Kazakhstan.

An authoritarian Russian government cannot simply look back at the Stalin period in particular and declare it to be terrible. That would go against the very nature of authoritarianism. This is why we have the present charade going on in regards to the Holodomor – it’s all “how DARE those uppity Ukrainians! What about the people starving along the Volga?” What about them, indeed? Those people were victims as well. Are Russians encouraged to remember them? Is the world?

Was the Holodomor a genocide? It was, if you expand the definition of what genocide means. Although Ukraine was targeted specifically due to Stalin’s desire to crush and destroy the merest thought of independence, it was a specific class – the peasants – who bore the brunt of the famine.

The peasants resisted unfair collectivization and paid for it dearly, with their lives and the lives of their children.

However, the ethnic element of Holodomor must also include tales of how many of the perpetrators – the ones who literally took the food out of the mouths of Ukrainian peasants – were ethnic Ukrainians sitting pretty in the lap of the regime. It seems perfectly logical. You don’t put a population as large as the Ukrainian population on its knees without many collaborators. So for all of the cries of “it was the Russians” (not stated officially but heard often nonetheless), I have to say that there was nothing so simple and clear-cut about the Stalin years. I mean, Stalin himself was Georgian. You don’t hear cries of “it was the Georgians” – not until it suddenly becomes politically expedient, anyway.

The Russian government, in its snide dismissals of the Holodomor legacy, cannot deny the very simple fact that it does not want to remember the Russians who died in the famines as well. Their bodies are only trotted out as a human flesh for the rhetorical cannons aimed against Ukraine.

Despite my dislike of Yuschenko – often so kindly described in the Western press as a “pro-Western” politician, when he is in fact a pro-Yuschenko politician – I have to admit that for all of his bluster, he has stopped short of the kinds of excesses that Russian public personae have committed when speaking about Ukraine. When Medvedev speaks of a “so-called Holodomor,” you can feel the hatred, that which journalist Dmitriy Gordon (himself a controversial figure) has described as “Russian superpower chauvinism,” rising up like bile.

I hate Russian superpower chauvinism, for social and personal reasons, not the least of which have to do with having a Russian mother and a father who declares himself Ukrainian (his own father’s Russian ethnicity having no importance to him in the matter).

The saddest thing in all of this – besides the millions of emaciated dead bodies, besides children being chased by raving cannibals – is the fact that Russia and Ukraine are still neighbours, they still have a shared history, they still have a future that’s going to see us closely entwined. And that future looks ugly, ugly enough so that children like me are being forced to choose sides, as if being forced to choose between two squabbling, divorced parents, whom they will never stop loving, no matter what.

Block of Yulia Tymoshenko and Ukraine’s Parliamentary government have become hostage to the President. Yushchenko is ready to sacrifice everything: language, security, European integration in order to cling on to power.

Last night Viktor Yushchenko sacrificed the idealism and faith of those that supported his election and the Orange revolution. His party Our Ukraine have betrayed that revolution and Ukraine’s quest for democratic values. They were the party that caused the collapse of the Orange coalition in 2006. Last night Vicktor Yushchenko hammered in the last nail in the Orange revolution’s coffin and democracy in Ukraine.

Victor Yushchenko would not listen or share the belief of a majority of Ukrainians who want honest and democratic government. He has clung on to the past and struggled to hold on to soviet presidential authoritarian rule as opposed to embracing European values and a system of Parliamentary democracy in line with other European States. He has put his own personal interests and lust for power ahead of the long term democratic interests of Ukraine