Yushchenko accuses the Coalition of ‘usurping power’

The President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, has issued a statement in which he called the recent attempts to form a constitutional majority ‘illegitimate’ and threatened to dissolve the Parliament.

By Ilya Khineyko

Barely a week ago, Ukraine’s ruling coalition, led by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych managed to score a few important points against the opposition and the President. On March 24, Arsenii Yatsenyuk became the new Foreign Minister of Ukraine after the Verkhovna Rada had successfully blocked the candidacy of Volodymyr Ohryzko. On the same day, Anatolii Kinakh, leader of the Party of Industrialists and Enterpreuners, crossed the floor to the anti-crisis coalition in the Parliament along with 11 another deputies. Persistent rumors suggested that more defections were coming, and some PofR deputies publicly mused that a constitutional majority might be formed by the end of this spring. Should that happen, the Yanukovych supporters in the Verkhovna Rada would gain enough votes to overcome the presidential veto and possibly start an impeachment procedure.

Yanukovych scores two important victories

Viktor Yushchenko nominates Arsenii Yatsenyuk after the ruling coalition blocked the candidacy of Valery Ohryzko. Meanwhile, Anatoly Kinakh switches sides and is appointed Minister of Economy in the Yanukovych government.

By Ilya Khineyko

Yet another round of the Ukrainian political imbroglio began on March 13 when Our Ukraine and the Tymoshenko Block agreed to present a joint list of seventeen demands to the anti-crisis coalition of the Party of Regions, the Socialists and the Communists. In particular, the opposition demanded to hold a referendum on the form of government in Ukraine and the creation of an independent constitutional commission. It also demanded some personal changes to be made in the government: for Verkhovna Rada to confirm the appointment of the candidacy of the Foreign Affairs Minister and a new chief of Security Services (SBU), as well as the resignations of the Minister of Internal Affairs and the Prosecutor General. If implemented such changes would have reversed the tide in the political evolution of Ukraine, which has seen the gradual erosion of the real powers of President Yushchenko since the collapse of the Orange coalition and Yanukovych’s appointment as Prime Minister. Although the compromise formula of political reform was only meant to curtail the unabridged power of the presidential office as it existed under Kuchma, Viktor Yanukovych has been able to exploit its ambiguous provisions to limit the real influence of the president even further, practically rendering the position a pure ceremonial one. For example, even though the political reform agreement would leave it to the president to determine the country’s foreign policy, Yanukovych has de-facto managed to bring under his control the most important aspect of it – relations with Russia. On February 22 the PR-controlled majority of the Verkhovna Rada refused to confirm the nomination of Volodymyr Ohryzko as Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Levchenko speaks again

After holding a press conference devoted to the language issue, Levchenko was assaulted by protesters and threatened with violence by a member of his own party.

By Ilya Khineyko

“Lately, Mykola Levchenko, has become one of the newsmakers in our country” wrote Anton Zikora from UNIAN. Indeed, the controversial statements by this previously little known official from the Donetsk city council and a very public rebuke from prominent figures in the Party of Regions have made headlines in the Ukrainian online media. After running an interview with Levchenko on March 6, UNIAN decided to provide him with another opportunity to express his views by holding a press conference on March 13.

Andrew Wilson. After the Orange Revolution: The Nature of Post-Soviet Democracy in Ukraine and Russia

Fifth Annual Stasiuk-Cambridge Lecture, University of Cambridge, 23 February 2007

Dear Women!

The Ukrainian media celebrates International Women’s Day.

By Ilya Khineyko

According to Aurora website the International Women’s Day (IWD) is “the global day connecting all women around the world and inspiring them to achieve their full potential.” Similarly, the Status of Women Canada website describes the IWD as providing “an opportunity to celebrate the progress made to advance women’s rights and to assess the challenges that remain.” Ukraine, along with a number of ex-USSR republics and a few post-socialist countries such as Macedonia and Vietnam, celebrates the Women’s Day on a state level, as an official statutory holiday. In the USSR, the IWD was introduced in 1921 in commemoration of a female workers’ strike that allegedly sparked the February Revolution of 1917. It became a statutory holiday in 1966, and the celebrations would typically include hailing the achievements of Soviet women with newspapers featuring interviews with a female tractor driver or a dairy farm worker.

Interview with Mykola Levchenko

By Ilya Khineyko

We’ve written before about a recent linguistic controversy in Ukraine. The man at the center of this scandal, Mykola, or Nikolay, the name he evidently prefers to go by, Levchenko, was interviewed by the prominent Ukrainian news agency, UNIAN. The remarkable thing about the interview is not Levchenko’s views on the language issue per se but an opportunity to get a glimpse into his Weltanschauung. Levchenko is a young man. Born in 1979, he was only 12 years old when Ukraine became independent and so he arguably belongs to the first post-Soviet generation of Ukrainians to whom the USSR was just a childhood memory. It is still debatable whether his views are just his idiosyncratic opinions or, using the title of a book familiar to any Russian-speaker, Levchenko is indeed a “Hero of our time”.

Tempest in the (linguistic) teapot?

A statement by a minor Donetsk official has become a subject of national controversy.

by Ilya Khineyko

The language issue is a perennial topic of Ukrainian politics. Ever since Ukraine adopted its current constitution in 1996, which made Ukrainian the sole official language of the country, the opponents of the current status quo have been trying to open up a debate on the status of the Russian language in Ukraine. It has been argued that the current lack of any formal provision regarding the status of Russian is discriminatory towards Russian-speakers who constitute – the estimates vary – up to 50% of the country’s total population and make up a majority in the East and South. The proponents of granting Russian the status of a second state or an official language have maintained that such a decision will be a step toward equality in the linguistic sphere. That is why a statement made by the secretary of Donetsk City Council, Mykola Levchenko, 29, has stirred a great deal of controversy and prompted a response from the influential figures of the Party of Regions, Hanna Herman and Taras Chornovil.