Prosecutors charged ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on May 24 with exceeding her authority in not only negotiating natural gas deals with Russia during the 2009 crisis, but in getting a bad price to boot – costing the nation $440 million in losses.
Let’s roll back the clock to those fateful three weeks in the winter of 2009, when Russia cut off gas to Europe in another price war with Ukraine.
Had the crisis gone on any longer, parts of Europe would have been in critical danger of freezing.
Ex-President Viktor Yushchenko and current President (then opposition leader) Viktor Yanukovych were not only no-shows in solving the crisis, there was evidence they played an obstructionist role.
How so? Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin may have had them in mind when he talked about interference in the gas talks to preserve the role of controversial intermediary RosUkrEnergo, co-owned by Russia’s Gazprom and Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash.
“Today’s situation highlights the high criminalization of its authorities,” Putin said on Jan. 8, 2009. “What (they) are fighting for today is not the gas price, but a chance to keep their middlemen in order to use the dividends obtained for personal ends and personal enrichment and in order to receive financial resources needed for their future political campaigns.”
Of course, with his nemesis Yushchenko safely out of power, Putin rarely resorts to such heated words today about corruption in Ukraine.
Whether Tymoshenko reached a bad deal or a good one, she doesn’t deserve to be charged criminally.
Tymoshenko is the only Ukrainian politician who showed any leadership back then.
She got the gas flowing again and, in a great public service, she got Putin to knock out RosUkrEnergo from the gas trade between the two nations.
As for price, Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, who rode to power on promises they can broker better deals with Russia, have given away too much to the Kremlin without getting any big discounts on the price of Russian gas.
Moreover, the administration has failed to get Kremlin concessions on the pipelines that bypass Ukraine’s gas-transit network, potentially costing this nation hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
A crime? No. Incompetence? It sure looks like it.
