You're reading: Ukrainian-Americans reject meeting with Yanukovych

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych received a lukewarm welcome on his second trip to the United States as president.

Yanukovych spoke at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York on Sept. 22-23, but top American leaders appeared to have far less interest in him than on his previous visit in April.

During his spring visit, Yanukovych won international acclaim and a one-on-one meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at a nuclear security summit.

Obama praised Yanukovych at the time for agreeing to give up Ukraine’s stockpile of enriched uranium, essential for building nuclear bombs. This time, there was no Obama-Yanukovych meeting.

Moreover, a coalition of Ukrainian-Americans spurned Yanukovych’s offer to meet. Instead, about 200 of them took to the streets to vigorously protest the Ukrainian president’s policies since taking office on Feb. 25.

Some think Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is calling the shots with President Viktor Yanukovych.

Before the U.S. trip, the Yanukovych administration took pains to appease the America-based diaspora, which has mobilized regularly against the Ukrainian leader.

The issue which strongly turned Ukrainian-Americans against the Kremlin-friendly Yanukovych is his controversial gas-for-fleet deal with Moscow in April. Yanukovych received a 30 percent discount on Russian natural gas imports in exchange letting the Russian Black Sea Fleet remain based on the Crimean peninsula through at least 2042.

Yanukovych seemed to be trying in recent days to win over his American critics ahead of his trip to New York.

The web section on the Holodomor, the Josef Stalin-ordered famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians, had been removed from the official presidential website after Yanukovych’s inauguration in February. But it mysteriously re-appeared in an edited version – albeit without reference of the famine as an attempted genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Also, coming several days before the U.S. trip, Yanukovych sent a letter to the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America calling for dialogue. But, upset with what they view as his pro-Russian and anti-democratic policies, the congress responded to his overture by organizing street protests on his visit.

In the letter addressed to the UCCA, Yanukovych openly asked for support instead of criticism. He promised to declassify all the documents related to the Holodomor, to increase the funding of the Lviv museum “Turma na Lonskoho” (Prison on Lonsky Street) and to create public television free of political interference. But the UCCA rejected the letter as an empty promise and “insincere.”

In fact, some parts of the president’s letter upset diaspora leaders further.

“We understood that there is no sense to meet with Viktor Yanukovych. The president has not yet answered the list of grievances that the World Congress of Ukrainians presented to him at the meeting in June of this year despite his promise.”

– Tamara Olexy, Ukrainian Congress Committee of America head.

Askold Lozynskyj, a New York attorney and prominent member of Ukraine’s diaspora community, said: “Yanukovych promised to solve the roblems with ‘Turma na Lonskogo’ museum by transferring it under the supervision of the Institute of National Memory, which is headed by no other than Valeriy Soldatenko!”

Soldatenko is a Communist Party leader who has recently claimed that he never gave up his party membership card. He also denies the Holodomor was an act against Ukrainians and talks in a derogatory way about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which fought for Ukrainian national independence through the mid-20th century, and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Both movements are viewed by many in western Ukraine and abroad as pro-Ukrainian freedom fighters and heroes for their efforts to attain Ukrainian independence during World War II. But propaganda from the Soviet Union, an ally of Nazi Germany until attacked, painted these Ukrainian movements as Nazi collaborators.

Olexander Motryk, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, called Lozynskyj several days before Yanukovych’s visit and asked what the president could do to avoid the street protest. Lozynskyj answered: fire Soldatenko, Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk and recognize the Holodomor as genocide.

Instead of accepting Yanukovych’s invitation for a metting, Ukrainian-Americans took to the streets of New York with slogans, like “Ukraine’s sovereignty is not for sale,” “Russian fleet – out of Ukraine,” “Impeach Yanukovych,” “Worse than Kuchma,” “No slavery for Ukraine,” “Yanukovych – Judah of Ukraine,” “Yanukovych – anti-Ukrainian and anti-democratic dictator,” and “Stop KGB!”

“We understood that there is no sense to meet with Viktor Yanukovych,” says Ukrainian Congress Committee of America head Tamara Olexy.

“The president has not yet answered the list of grievances that the World Congress of Ukrainians presented to him at the meeting in June of this year despite his promise.”

Many analysts said that Yanukovych’s attempts to appease Ukrainian diaspora communities abroad derive from his administration’s worries of their influence on Western governments.

But influence aside, the mere fact that the Ukrainian president has to face a demonstration anywhere he goes in the West, generates critical public attention to how Ukraine is governed.

Olena Tregub is a freelance American journalist.