SEX AND SCANDALS ABOUND IN THE POST-SOVIET WORLD

David Marples

In the age of Internet and headline information about the private lives of national and international leaders, it is heartening to see that the independent states of the former USSR have not fallen behind. In fact in many ways Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus in particular are setting new trends, albeit in rather different ways.

Vladimir Putin has stepped down as president of Russia but he has not departed from the stage. He has not only agreed to become Prime Minister, but he has also accepted the leadership of the country’s largest political party, United Russia, even though he is not actually a member of it. He also declared last Aptil in a recent private conversation with President George W. Bush that Ukraine, Russia’s closest neighbor and trading partner, is not really a country, which provoked an official protest from Kyiv.

More interestingly, Putin for some time has colluded with the Russian media to establish himself as the leading sex symbol. He has been photographed frequently in military regalia as well as bare-chested and on horseback while on vacation in Tuva region of Siberia last year, and sporting a Marlborough hat. Clearly, however, he was taken aback by the antics of French president Nicholas Sarkozy, who suffered a painful divorce but rebounded to marry model Carla Bruni.

Last spring the newspaper Moskovski Korrespondent issued a story that Putin is about to divorce his wife of twenty-five years Lyudmila to marry Alina Kabayeva, a rhythmic gymnast who has twice won the world title, and was born the same year that the Putins wed. Kabaeva is half-Tatar and has been a member of the Russian Duma for United Russia since last year. Her displays as a gymnast include a remarkable routine with a ball that would leave David Beckham drooling.

When asked about the rumors, Putin denied them with a smile, remarking that Russian women are the most beautiful in the world and only Italian women bear comparison–his comments were made in the presence of another lothario, newly reelected Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, aged 71. Subsequently the owner of Moskovski Korrespondent, Aleksandr Lebedev, a billionaire former KGB agent–no work of fiction could concoct better descriptions–disbanded his newspaper and its editor resigned in protest. The deputy editor, however, has stood by his story.

Switch to Minsk, Belarus, where the US-styled “last dictator of Europe” Alyaksandr Lukashenka, 53, has been in power for the past 14 years. Lukashenka’s wife has never been seen in the capital and has a job as a dairy maid in his native province in the east of the country. However, Lukashenka has another family–the Belarusian people–who refer to him as “Bat’ka” or Little Father. The Little Father, it transpires, has a little son, a 4-year old conceived by his mistress who–if rumors are to be taken at face value–is being groomed as the great man’s successor.

A March issue of the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belorussii–literally it means ‘young Communist truth in Belarusian land’ but it neither advocates Communism nor espouses the truth–counters the adulation for Russia’s Putin by providing a large color portrait of Russian and Belarusian leaders. The headline reads “Lukashenka is 10 years older and 20 cms taller than [new Russian president Dmitry] Medvedev” and alongside each figure is listed his height: Medvedev, 168 cms, Lukashenka (towering) 188 cms, Putin 170 cms, and Belarusian Prime Minister Sidorsky 180 cms. Belarus may not have the ideal leader therefore, but at least he is bigger than anyone else.

Lukashenka, like Putin, is a devotee of sport and captains a hockey team that remains unbeaten in all competitions. During the games the president wears the number 1 shirt and no one to date has ever dared check him. Other players set up goals for him which he invariably misses. Such is his devotion to the game that he has had hockey rinks constructed in every venue in the country that he might visit. Last year he won a cycling competition, his hulking 250 lb frame huddled over the handlebars, because no competitor–they were all massed behind the frontrunner–dared overtake him.

Ukraine’s president Viktor Yushchenko might once have been a rival of Putin as a sex symbol but he was badly disfigured when his rivals tried to poison him in the 2004 presidential election campaign. He is now taking a back seat to his Prime Minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, 47, aka the princess of Ukraine. The offspring (possibly, since no one actually knows he truth) of a Russian mother and Armenian father, she has used her onetime husband’s name to good effect, adopting Ukrainian braids as her trademark.

Tymoshenko’s personal website contains over 6,300 photographs of herself in various poses. It also contains perhaps the most self-serving biography of any modern political leader, about her constant battles against corruption and how more or less single-handedly she took on the oligarchs, as well as leading the Orange Revolution against the discredited regime of former president Leonid Kuchma. In the process she somehow became a billionaire. The sale of Tymoshenko’s handbags alone could pay off Ukraine’s national debt.

Whatever one may say about Princess Yuliya, she can at least hold her eggs. During a 2004 election campaign speech, an egg splattered on her designer dress without her turning a hair. Not so former Prime Minister and Regions Party leader Viktor Yanukovych, the loutish former governor of Donetsk with a criminal record for manslaughter. Stepping off his campaign bus in Ivano-Frankivsk he keeled over as if he had been shot and was rushed to hospital. Subsequently a raw egg was revealed to have been the weapon. Not surprisingly he has never been associated with a rhythmic gymnast.

By comparison, Western leaders Bush, Harper, Brown, and co seem rather dull.

(An earlier version of this article was published in the EDMONTON JOURNAL)

RUSSIA AND UKRAINE DISPUTE OVER SEVASTOPOL

David Marples

At the entrance to Sevastopol harbor a giant monument commemorates the city’s attainment of “hero” status during the Second World War. Closer to the shore one sees a blue-yellow Ukrainian flag surrounded by the Russian tricolor, which flies from all the taller buildings. Sevastopol, it appears, has an identity crisis and is claimed by two countries: Ukraine, its present owner, and Russia, its former one.

The city was founded by Empress Catherine II in 1783 following Russia’s southern expansion and annexation of the Crimean peninsula. By the mid-19th century it was the site of the most serious European conflict in several decades, when Britain, France, and Turkey joined forces against Russia and laid siege to the great port for more than a year. In the nearby suburb of Balaklava, a suicidal British attack based on misunderstood orders is remembered as the “charge of the Light Brigade.”

Russia was defeated in this war, Sevastopol fell, and for the next fourteen years Russia was not allowed to construct any fortifications or bases in the area of the Black Sea. Under Alexander II, Russia eventually renounced this treaty.

During the Second World War, German and Romanian forces also laid siege to the port, which resisted staunchly. Stalin was to reward the city for its endurance but was incensed at what he perceived as collaboration by the Crimean Tatars and later in the war he deported them en masse to the east. Only in the 1980s were they permitted to return.

The history of the great port, in short, is one of violence and conflict. Virtually every corner has a monument or dedication to one of the wars it endured.

In 1954, to mark the 300th anniversary of the so-called Treaty of Friendship between Ukraine and Russia at Pereyaslav–the goal was to prevent Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack army from being overrun by the Poles–Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made Ukraine a gift of the Crimean peninsula. Ostensibly that gift also included Sevastopol. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, it also laid claim to the city as well as the Soviet Black Sea fleet. Russia demurred and serious conflict ensued.

In May 1997 that dispute was resolved temporarily by a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation between Russia and Ukraine that seemed comprehensive. The fleet by then was already divided–Russia had 83% of the warships–and the Russians agreed on a 20-year lease of three main harbors and two airstrips for a payment of about $100 million. The treaty stated expressly that Sevastopol belonged to Ukraine.

Many Russian leaders have never accepted the loss of Catherine’s port. In early June, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov demanded the withdrawal of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol from Ukraine and their transferal to Russia. His comments, which earned him a ban from traveling to Ukraine, followed a statement from the Russian parliament that Ukraine’s potential entry into NATO would terminate the 1997 Friendship Treaty. Ukraine is concerned also about territorial violations in exercises involving the sailors. The latter are also housed thanks to subsidies from Moscow.

On June 24, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, clearly following directions from President Viktor Yushchenko, declared that the lease on Sevastopol would not be renewed and the Russian Fleet must leave the city by May 29, 2017.

There is another dispute concerning the possible expansion of the Russian fleet. At its peak in the 1980s the Black Sea Fleet had over 630 warships and submarines with a maximum of 70,000 sailors and other personnel. Today the fleet is a shadow of its former self with 35 warships and 11,000 personnel. Russia would like to increase those figures respectively to 100 and 25,000, which it claims is permissible by the terms of the 1997 treaty. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, on the other hand, claims that no increase in warships is allowed.

From Ukraine’s perspective it is illogical to raise the size of the Russian fleet prior to its withdrawal in less than nine years’ time. Russia claims the fleet is vital to its national interests. It pays for the lease through the cancellation of Ukraine’s energy debts and would likely demand immediate payment were the fleet ejected. It has begun construction of a new naval base on the eastern seaboard at Novorossiisk but the location is less ideal and lacks the spacious harbors of Sevastopol.

The city itself is composed predominantly of ethnic Russians (over 70%) and is virtually 100% Russian speaking. It was a closed city during the Soviet period and close to a weapons base, the remains of which are visible on the hillside overlooking the port. In elections it has consistently backed the pro-Russian Regions Party led by Viktor Yanukovych.

The problem has no easy solution. Sevastopol is a cradle of Russian imperial ambitions and of Russian “military glory.” It was founded by Russia. But legally Crimea, though autonomous, is Ukrainian. And Ukraine’s strategic interests–at least as long as Yushchenko remains president–are with the West and NATO, membership of which is anticipated in the near future.

Under such circumstances, implicitly at least, the Russian Black Sea Fleet would form a part of a hostile military bloc and occupy the same port as the smaller Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet. Could it be evicted physically if the Russian government refuses to remove? While Ukraine remains outside NATO it seems unlikely. It seems equally implausible that the two countries would go to war over the status of the city and its fleet. But time is running out for a solution.

(This article appeared originally in the EDMONTON JOURNAL, 28 June 2008)