BRUSSELS, Belgium – Ukraine’s new administration pulled out the stops to win a better name for itself in the European Union capital ahead of the Oct. 31 local elections and the EU-Ukraine summit in November.
Rattled by what they see as a stream of hostile articles against President Viktor Yanukovych in the best-respected media in Brussels, such as the Financial Times, the new authorities are putting together a constellation of various supporters.
[Viktor] Yanukovych is a relatively frequent visitor to the EU capital.”
– Andrew Rettman.
Yanukovych is a relatively frequent visitor to the EU capital.
Public relations consultancy Glocal Communications is helping to organize off-the-record press meetings with high-level members of Yanukovych’s circle when they pass through Brussels.
The little-known firm is based well-away from the EU district in the city. It has not signed up to the European Commission’s lobbyist register and refused to disclose its list of clients when asked by this website.
Meanwhile, PR giant Burston Marsteller is working for Rinat Akhmetov, an energy-and-steel-sector billionaire who is also a member of parliament for the president’s Party of the Regions.
Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovich (L) and European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso are seated prior to their talks at the European Union headquarters in Brussels on March 1. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych visited Brussels on his first foreign trip, with European leaders hoping to hear that his pro-Russian reputation won’t reverse Kyiv’s turn to the West. (Andrei Mossienko)
Another PR major, Apco, is working for billionaire member of parliament Olexandr Feldman. (Read also Olexandr Feldman’s opinion ‘Politics in Ukraine often a very passionate affair; sometimes too passionate‘).
Feldman was on Yanukovych’s side before the president was ousted from power in the 2004 Orange Revolution. He then switched over to Yanukovych’s nemesis, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
With Yanukovych back in power, Feldman now says he is “independent.”
But the Apco-Feldman tandem is circulating and endorsing pro-Yanukovych op-eds to Brussels reporters, penned by Yanukovych members of parliament, such as Leonid Kozhara. (Read also Leonid Kozhara’s opinion ‘Avoid leaping to judgment about Yanukovych’s alleged authoritarian impulses‘).
Glocal Communications is also reaching out to media to attend debates with Feldman.
And Yanukovych-sympathetic analysts from Brussels-based think-tanks have encouraged members of the press to meet with the parliamentarians at intimate dinners, describing him as “objective” and “a philanthropist.”
In perhaps its biggest coup, the Party of the Regions on Oct. 14 signed a two-year cooperation deal with the center-left Socialists & Democrats group in the EU parliament.”
– Andrew Rettman.
In perhaps its biggest coup, the Party of the Regions on Oct. 14 signed a two-year cooperation deal with the center-left Socialists & Democrats group in the EU parliament.
Following the move, Socialists & Democrats vice president and Romanian center-left parliamentarian Adrian Severin lobbied to quash a vote on a Yanukovych-critical resolution in the EU assembly on Oct. 21.
On the other side, Tymoshenko is working with the small, Hampshire, United Kingdom-based lobbying firm Ridge Consulting.
Ridge Consulting arranges meetings for the press with high-level Tymoshenko supporters, such as former Deputy Prime Minister Hryhoriy Nemyria, in the EU capital and it sends out email alerts of alleged Yanukovych abuses of power.
Tymoshenko’s lobbying activity is concentrated in the center-right European People’s Party, however. Her faction, the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko, joined the group in 2007 and Tymoshenko attracts fierce loyalty from some senior European People’s Party euro-deputies.
The party adopted an anti-Yanukovych resolution on the very day of his visit to Brussels in September, thoroughly annoying Kyiv.
The party’s sister organizations, such as the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the conservative German think tank, are also helping Yanukovych critics, such as Taras Kuzio of the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation, to reach out to Brussels-based media.
The competing narratives paint a phantasmagoria of heroes, villains and monsters doing battle in the former Soviet country of 46 million people.”– Andrew Rettman.
The competing narratives paint a phantasmagoria of heroes, villains and monsters doing battle in the former Soviet country of 46 million people.
The pro-Yanukovych narrative says that Orange Revolution leaders Viktor Yushchenko and Tymoshenko are solely to blame for the political chaos of the past five years; that Tymoshenko is a messianic figure in a cult-like party; that Yanukovych is a pragmatist who can deliver stability and pro-EU reforms; and that the notion that he is anti-democratic is a lie believed by people who do not know what is really going on in Ukraine.
The pro-Tymoshenko narrative says he is a Kremlin stooge who will destroy Ukrainian independence; that the recent constitutional reforms handing him more power were carried out illegally; that his people in the Ukrainian secret services are strangling free speech and civil society; and that his friends in the gas business are crooks.
For their part, EU officials are trying to remain agnostic.
Brussels’ top decision-makers on the Ukraine dossier – EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy, EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and neighborhood commissioner Stefan Fuele – have said that Oct. 31’s election would be a test of Yanukovych’s democratic credentials and have ratcheted up warnings that he must respect free media and nongovernmental organizations.
“I don’t think people [in the EU] will care who is in power in Ukraine if they can’t heat their houses this winter.”
– A senior EU official.
The Yanukovych camp may be cheered to learn that Russian gas transit is more important than the romance of revolution and counter-revolution to some of the most influential behind-the-scenes figures in the EU capital, however.
“I don’t think people [in the EU] will care who is in power in Ukraine if they can’t heat their houses this winter,” a senior EU official told this website, referring to the 2009 Russia-Ukraine gas crisis.
Andrew Rettman’s opinion was first published on the EU Observer’s website.
