Outgoing president warns against getting close to Kremlin; calls Tymoshenko his ‘biggest mistake’ in five years.
In perhaps his final report to the nation as president, Victor Yushchenko during a televised press conference on Feb. 16 said he fought the good fight during his five-year term, but was betrayed and thwarted by those around him.
Now Yushchenko fears for the future of the nation under Victor Yanukovych, even though the outgoing president did everything to undermine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his former Orange Revolution ally who lost to Yanukovych by nearly 1 million votes.
“I was that little soldier who fought to implement my grandfathers’ and forefathers’ dream of Ukraine going its own independent way,” Yushchenko said. Only 1.3 million voters approved of Yushchenko’s course enough to vote for his re-election on Jan. 17, a far cry from the 15 million voters who swept him into office on Dec. 26, 2004.
Yushchenko, however, says he leaves office undeterred by low ratings and public boos. He is happy because, in his mind, he made progress on one of his most important aims. “One of the most difficult tasks for our nation is to raise a feeling of identity,” the president said. “If we don’t care about our history, language, and church and only care for sausage and lard, then we won’t have either.”
However, even some of these patriotic achievements had downsides. He elevated the issue of the Holodomor, the Stalin-ordered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932-33, perhaps to his everlasting credit. But he did so in a way that irritated Moscow with his talk of “genocide” against Ukrainians, as opposed to a shared victimization of Soviet peoples.
His critics also dismiss his focus on folk museums, archive digs and restorations of historic landmarks as unimportant in the face of a battered economy and rampant corruption. To this, he answers that people who rediscover their past treat their present differently. As an example, he mentioned Baturyn, a town in Chernihiv Oblast, which used to be the Cossack rulers’ capital in the 18th century. Yushchenko breathed new life into it by conjuring a grand open-air museum complex. “Last year 200,000 people visited Baturyn, and I am sure they left as patriots of Ukraine.”
Sheer patriotism, however, has not been widespread enough to dry the nation’s deep well of corruption, which many think got even deeper under Yushchenko. “I am often rebuked about corruption. But how about starting to fight this issue on an individual level?” Yushchenko retorted. “No, we avoid paying attention [to how we live ourselves].”
That statement would likely strike his critics as odd, since Yushchenko leaves office without having done much of anything to attack the nation’s corruption while arousing growing suspicions about his own propriety. In front of millions in 2004, he promised to put bandits in jail. Over the years, this message of hope became one of his signature marks of failure.
There were more inconsistencies – many would say hypocrisies – under this administration. Under Yushchenko, the infamous RosUkrEnergo middleman company associated with Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was made the monopolist importer of Russian natural gas, putting it in the center of the multi-billion-dollar trade. The president resisted Tymoshenko’s successful efforts to break this scheme widely seen as murky. Yushchenko’s failure to remove the RosUkrEnergo cast shadows over the president’s motives.
Yushchenko also campaigned to strip lawmakers of numerous benefits like luxurious flats, cars and free travel, but did not apply the same rules to himself. He entered office with six hectares of land and is leaving it with seven more. He also seemed to imply during his press conference that he would to add his presidential mansion in the posh Koncha-Zaspa suburb to his already impressive list of property, including a big estate just outside of the capital, an apartment in downtown Kyiv and a resort-style cabin in the Carpathian Mountains.
“I know that state officials of a certain level have this right. It all depends on the new president. If they say: [live] at the train station, I would be at the train station. If they say that by law, there is such a right [of keeping the estate], then I’ll accept it,” Yushchenko commented on his official residence in Koncha-Zaspa where he has lived since 2005.
In terms of making any meaningful changes to tame Ukraine’s bureaucracy, corruption and oligarch-capture economy, Yushchenko admitted inertia. But he has a fall gal: Tymoshenko was to blame for all the changes that didn’t happen. He didn’t spare her of any criticism at the press gathering.
“I didn’t say it before but today I have a moral right. My biggest mistake of five years was Tymoshenko,” Yushchenko said. “If we had a constructive person occupying this post, then those people who represented Maidan would have another five years in power.”
He even told a joke about his former Orange Revolution ally. “Do you know the difference between a field mouse and Mickey Mouse? It is PR.”
The same joke, some would say, could have been told on him. His presidency was marked by crony appointments of friends, relatives and classmates. “I took to parliament people under my wing that carried national democratic ideals with them. Now, I realize that it’s a problem because they valued their own position in politics above anything else,” he said, belatedly.
Returning to his theme that the nation is taking a wrong course, he said: “I am proud. I have no reasons to despair. I told you 200 times before that for me they [Tymoshenko and Yanukovych] are alike. They have been Russia’s best project in the last years. The nation has decided to take a break for five years. Let it be so. However, the last five years we spent in the new social and political structure. But people won’t understand it now, not yet.”
Given Yanukovych’s first statements about not joining NATO, about making Russian an official language and about the possibility of keeping Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea past its 2017 lease, Yushchenko clearly sees the nation moving back into Russia’s arms under his successor.
“It’s a project of how to lose the nation,” Yanukovych said. “I don’t want Victor Yanukovych to be the president of Donbas [Russian-speaking, eastern region of Ukraine] only.”
His immediate rescue plan – for himself, not the nation – includes forming a supervisory council for his favorite art project, museum Mystetsky Arsenal. Yushchenko said he would chair it, and issued a decree on the same day appointing himself its chief. He did not rule out his comeback as prime minister or head of National Bank of Ukraine, two of his previous jobs. Yet, given his passion for arts and history, he may have fit better in the culture ministry.
On Feb. 25, the expected inauguration day of the new president, he said he would like “to get out of sight” for 10 days. Then, he would come back in a new role. “I am the type of person who can’t do one thing at a time. I start 200-300 things at once,” he said. The nation, however, longed to see more of his projects finished, not merely started.
