Khoroshkovskiy returns to politics
Dec 13, 2006 at 22:46the latter came to power last summer, appears to be building up an executive counterweight in the country’s hitherto defunct National Security and Defense Council [NSDC].
Rather than relying on members of his largely discredited Orange team, which accompanied his rise to the presidency to the approval of the West and western Ukraine, Yushchenko is enlisting help from influential businessmen with solid connections to Russia and the country’s Russian-speaking east.
In a presidential decree dated Dec. 11, Yushchenko appointed Ukrainian Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy, who is best known for his close ties to Russian steel baron Aleksandr Abramov of Evraz Group and major Ukrainian television station Inter, first deputy secretary of the NSDC.
Khoroshkovskiy could use these ties, together with his significant experience in government, to bolster Yushchenko’s eastern front and possibly to improve his coverage in media.
Khoroshkovskiy once served as deputy head of former President Leonid Kuchma’s powerful presidential administration and, between 2002 and 2004, as the country’s minister of economy and European integration in the first Yanukovych government.
Unlike many of Ukraine’s politicians, Khoroshkovskiy, only 38, survived the experience politically unscathed, having quit his Cabinet position over a policy dispute with a top Yanukovych ally. Khoroshkovskiy left in protest to plans for joining an economic union with former Soviet states which he viewed as a risk to Kyiv’s western integration aspirations.
Yanukovych, whose fraud-marred bid for the presidency in 2004 was supported by the Kremlin, managed a political revival after last March’s parliamentary elections, during which his Regions party soundly defeated Yushchenko’s tattered Our Ukraine bloc.
Since then, the president has been steadily losing public approval and, more importantly executive power, largely on account of controversial constitutional reforms that had been foisted on him during a turning point in the 2004 Orange Revolution.
While still trying to get the reforms overturned, Yushchenko looks to be balancing his team of supporters with businessmen who know how to deal with Moscow and can counterbalance Yanukovych’s Regions party, which is backed by big business interests from Donetsk oblast.
In addition to having recently held the post of CEO of Evraz, Russia’s number two steelmaker, Khoroshkovskiy has several business interests in Ukraine, in addition to the controlling share in Inter.
Ukrainian political analysts see Khoroshkovskiy’s appointment as deputy security supreme, a body whose authority is wide open to interpretation, as a chance for the president to level the playing field with Yanukovych, who has challenged Yushchenko at home and abroad.
“He [Khoroshkovskiy] represents one more opportunity to establish contacts with Russian businessmen and politicians,” Yuliya Tyshchenko, an expert of the Independent Center of Political Research, said.
Despite having served under Kuchma, whose last years in office were stained by international and domestic scandals, Khoroshkovskiy is too young to be associated with those days, Tyshchenko said.
He belongs to the same generation of politicians as the deputy head of Yushchenko’s Secretariat, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and thus is viewed more positively.
Others see Khoroshkovskiy’s main attractiveness in his Russian connections.
“The president is trying to form his own parallel line of contacts with Russia’s business and politic elite. And Khoroshkovskiy is needed here,” according to Yuriy Yakymenko, a political expert at Ukraine’s Razumkov Center.
Another eastern savvy businessman recently appointed by Yushchenko to build up the NSDC is Vitaliy Hayduk, appointed as its head on Oct. 10.
Hayduk, 49, is one of the founders of the Industrial Union of Donbass, a powerful Ukrainian industrial group that rivals System Capital Management (SCM), largely accepted as the money bag for Yanukovych’s Regions Party.
Like Yanukovych and SCM owner Rinat Akhmetov, Hayduk has roots in Donetsk, having served as the deputy chairman of the Regional Council and then first deputy governor of the eastern region. Like Khoroshkovskiy, he briefly served under Yanukovych, a former governor of Donetsk. Also like his current deputy, Hayduk left a Cabinet position on a position of principle.The Donetsk industrialist quit his job under Yanukovych in protest to the government’s decision to reverse the flow of oil through Ukraine’s Odessa-Brody pipeline in favor of Moscow, which wanted to block attempts by Ukraine to use the pipeline to pump Caspian oil around Russia to Europe.