This reminds of a less-known Ukrainian one-liner: “My pasemo zadnih,” which in hi-fi parlance translates into: “We are behind the behinders.”
I am referring, of course, to the recent gratuitous debate about a very stale topic: Should the European Union hold off the economic alignment talks with Ukraine – because of the ongoing political repression by its present government – while pressing the authorities in Kyiv to shape up?
Somehow it did not occur to serious people that Europe has been drowning in a financial crisis for some time now, and is not about to mess with peripheral (from its viewpoint) issues, such as Ukraine’s political or economic headaches. This should be fairly obvious. Apparently it is to President Viktor Yanukovych and his crew.
The European Union is in no rush to kick Ukraine’s president and get ahead of itself. Jose Barosso, EU Commission president, wrote placidly (per Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, August 20): “The success (in Ukraine)……..over 20 years of independence will be fixed in a new association agreement which will foresee a free trade zone”. Foresee? Neat hedging, if anyone expected a promise.
Hell will freeze over before the Yanukovych caboose will get anywhere close to the European Union.
Hell will freeze over before the Yanukovych caboose will get anywhere close to the European Union. Does Barosso have any illusions about halting the slide in Ukraine? Guess again. Barosso kicks the can down the road. This saves the face of Ukraine’s president when he exchanges niceties next time with Russia’s president. Even more important for Europe, this is a way not to rock the boat in the East when the bottom appears to be falling out of the EU.
The world order is changing in profound ways, writes Rana Foroohar in“The Decline and Fall of Europe” (Time magazine, August 22, 2011). The West is going through something much more ominous than the Great Recession: a second Great Contraction of growth after the first one – the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Europe will not be rescued this time by the United States, which itself is sinking deeper into an economic downward vortex and unemployment trauma. Several million families have lost their homes to foreclosures in each of the last three years, while the mac-mansions are doing quite well. At the same time, America is hammered by panic of fiscal insolvency, when huge spending is needed to repair the country’s shockingly neglected infrastructure. Curiously, my relatives from the Poltava region in Ukraine write that the nouveau riche live in “homes that look like museums.”
A timely editorial in the Kyiv Post (“Trouble Ahead ?,” August 15) pointed out a highly probable impact of the deepening global slump on Ukraine’s already depressed economy.
It would be foolhardy to presume that the government of Yanukovych would remain unscathed by economic debris. Hard times may or may not provide a magic way of getting rid of this regime — the one that weaseled its way in thanks to the economic problems faced by the previous government in free elections – but it would be a powerful catalyst.
Debating how Europe and the USA could at a critical moment help Ukraine to reclaim freedom from dictatorship would not be of much use.
The question to be addressed is how to facilitate practically a phase-out of the present regime, considering that its door-keepers would almost certainly rig any elections or falsify the results.
Prime Minister Mykola Azarov has already assured the world that there will be no revolution. His assurance should be taken as a warning that any attempted uprising will be crushed Soviet-style. Doubters should recall the Orange events in December 2004, when Viktor Yanukovych demanded from President Leonid Kuchma the use of force against the crowds at Maidan. The president refused.
Prime Minister Mykola Azarov has already assured the world that there will be no revolution. His assurance should be taken as a warning that any attempted uprising will be crushed Soviet-style. Doubters should recall the Orange events in December 2004, when Viktor Yanukovych demanded from President Leonid Kuchma the use of force against the crowds at Maidan. The president refused.
The ability of an authoritarian regime to suppress a popular upheaval depends on the latter’s sweep and intensity. The scope of social groundswell and the outrage provoked by the revived dictatorial ex-Soviet chimera can be of immense, seismic proportions. More than 85 percent of Ukraine’s population lives under a debilitating poverty line. Russian and Ukrainian speakers alike know that the regime’s power is not monolithic, and is based primarily on cronyism, graft, and bribery.
The Regions Party structures stand on top of a social minefield. Ukrainian democracy must identify itself with social concerns that would broaden its base and make it a pre-eminent force. It needs to be sensitive to progressive, popular currents and not be beholden to investors’ clubs. The alternative is to mire in a swamp of popular mistrust shared by most political groups.
Ukraine today is not what it was 20 years ago. It was much easier for Ukrainian national democrats to deal with Russia’s democratic regime of Boris Yeltsin in Moscow than today with the authoritarian regime of the Party of Regions, which is based within Ukraine’s territory and pretends to be Ukrainian.
Ukrainians need to brace themselves for a more demanding effort than was shown at the beginning of independence. The present regime has opted for confrontation, apparently expecting minimal resistance.
What it will confront depends on the ability of the opposition to master all the simmering discontent and contempt for the regime, including – yes – the vestiges of the years of economic victimization and deprivation from the imposed sanctification of private greed and corruption at the expense of public interest.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
