Ten months into the president’s first term of office, the nation’s courts and parliament have ceased functioning as independent checks on executive power.
Moreover, as ex-President Leonid Kuchma so aptly put it in a Feb. 7 conversation with U.S. Ambassador John F. Tefft, divulged this month by WikiLeaks: “The parties represented in the [Verkhovna] Rada compete to see who has the most MPs [members of parliament] with a criminal record.” It’s odd to hear such alarm bells from Kuchma, but sad, nonetheless, because lawmakers continue to enjoy undeserved legal immunity from prosecution.
As the Oct. 31 local elections showed, the nation is in danger of never having transparent and honest democratic contests again unless citizens fight for them. And how to fight? Even peaceful demonstrations are endangered, as the nation found out on Dec. 3 when police broke up the tent city protests on Independence Square in opposition to the original, draconian tax code floated by Yanukovych’s government.
We have a neutered news media, such as Inter, the national TV station controlled by Security Service of Ukraine chief Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, who arrogantly fails to acknowledge the huge conflicts in his official and private roles.
But the ultimate prize for cynicism this week went to Dmytro Firtash, the shady billionaire gas trader and industrial baron who wouldn’t even disclose his co-ownership in RosUkrEnergo until 2006 – two years into its existence. Firtash tried to portray Ukraine’s court-ordered return of 11 billion cubic meters of gas to RosUkrEnergo as a positive step for the nation. Widely seen as non-transparent, RosUkrEnergo operated as the exclusive gas intermediary between Ukraine and Russia from 2006-2008, until ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko wisely squeezed it out of the trade. The intermediary appeared to serve no other purpose other than to enrich the company’s owners by billions of dollars each year – and those who stood behind them – at the expense of the Ukrainian people and Russia’s Gazprom.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev himself has said there is no need for intermediaries between the two nations, while Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin famously cited the intermediary arrangement as providing slush funds that enriched private individuals and favored politicians. Putin also talked in 2009 about corruption reaching the highest levels of the Ukrainian government.
But now RosUkrEnergo is back in business. All the while, the state-run Naftogaz monopoly’ which should be profitable – teeters at the edge of insolvency as the government jacks up utility gas prices for households.
Meanwhile, the Yanukovych team seems destined to privatize the nation’s remaining state assets in the same old way – untransparently and uncompetitively – in sham sales that amount to legalized theft by insiders, who are busy also writing tax breaks and import preferences into legislation.
This is going to be a long winter.
