CHORNOBYL’S LEGACY IN UKRAINE: BEYOND THE UN REPORTS

David R. Marples

Introduction

The Chornobyl disaster of April 1986 continues to elicit debate. Twenty-five years later there is no consensus on its medical and social consequences but their impact continues to affect more than 2 million people in Ukraine and 1.8 million in Belarus who are officially listed as “victims.”

Why is this the case? Although several factors can be postulated, the chief among them is the near monopoly on public discourse of two closely linked UN agencies: the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Several UNSCEAR reports have been issued, the most recent of which appeared in 2008,1 while the IAEA has monitored the consequences of the disaster and safety of the Chornobyl plant since 1986, having first been invited to the Soviet Union a year earlier. That country was one of the founding members of the organization and its first civilian nuclear power station at Novovoronezh came into operation in 1964.

The World Health Organization (WHO), theoretically independent, has collaborated closely with the IAEA on Chornobyl issues and was partly responsible for the Chernobyl Forum Report issued prior to the 20th anniversary of the accident, which elicited angry responses, partly because of a press release that appeared to downgrade the health consequences of the disaster—an alternative version of the situation was presented by Greenpeace. Alongside the IAEA, UNSCEAR, and several other UN agencies, it also participates in the UN Action Plan on Chernobyl to 2016, a program for recovery of the affected areas. Nonetheless, the reports released by these agencies, and particularly UNSCEAR and the IAEA, have served partly to obfuscate the impact of the 1986 accident.

For example, Volume II, Annex D of the 2008 UNSCEAR Report focuses on health effects due to Chornobyl radiation. Suffice it to list two statements concerning overall casualties. The first notes that 19 ARS (sufferers of Acute Radiation Syndrome) survivors had died by 2006 but from different ailments “and usually [my italics] not associated with radiation exposure.” The second can be found in its General Conclusions:

To date, there has been no persuasive evidence of any other health effect in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure (p19).

The use of the adverb “usually” and adjective “persuasive” are typical devices of these pamphlets, which appear determined to assuage any remaining doubts readers might have had of problems other than those outlined in the Report, namely some 56 Chornobyl-related deaths to date, 6,000 thyroid gland cancers among those under 10 at the time of the accident, resulting in 15 deaths by 2005, and 4,000 future cancer deaths linked to radiation from the 1986 accident.

On April 21 in Kyiv, the IAEA participates in a conference on Chornobyl hosted by the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, who has already accepted Russia’s proposal to finance and complete two new reactors at the Khmelnytsky nuclear power plant (3 and 4, VVER-1000s) and to maintain until 2050 the 50% share of nuclear power in national production of electricity, a ratio that will require significant expansion.

Yanukovych has also stated his government’s intention to re-cultivate the contaminated agricultural lands, most likely with technical crops, following the example of his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka several years earlier. The point is that the two leaderships, UNSCEAR and the IAEA have a strong vested interest in the development and expansion of nuclear power. As in 1986 with the Soviet Union, the industry is also a key means of future integration of the three republics, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The Russian Federation is not only building the new nuclear power stations and new reactors in Belarus and Ukraine, it is also financing them. Energy development is thus a key form of cooperation between the Slavic states of the former Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government has yet to release its 25th anniversary Report. But it is still worth consulting the 20-year report on Chornobyl and its effects produced by Ukrainian scientists under the general editorship of Viktor Baloha, formerly chief of staff for President Viktor Yushchenko (cited hereafter as Ukraine Report), which have not been widely disseminated and have not penetrated the Western media.2

The Ukraine Report notes that in 2006, 2,293 villages and towns in Ukraine remained contaminated, with a population of around 2.6 million. (In the former Soviet Union overall, the number of “victims” has been estimated at 7.1 million.) It points out several critical errors that occurred after the disaster—unrelated to those conducting the rash experiment on an unstable graphite-moderated reactor on the night of April 25-26, 1986.

First, the accident was concealed from the public on orders from Moscow and specifically the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (sredmash), i.e. the ministry responsible for nuclear weapons, which had responsibility for the Chornobyl station, as the original purpose of the RBMK graphite-moderated reactors was linked to weapons production before they were modified to the civilian program. The ostensible reason for official silence, repeated ad nauseam by Soviet officials, was to prevent panic. Yet news of the evacuation of Pripyat (April 27) and Chornoby (May 6) soon filtered through Ukraine.

Second, information on health, radiation levels, and areas of fallout was officially classified. It would be three years before many residents of Ukraine discovered they were living on contaminated lands. Moreover, deaths and severe illnesses among cleanup workers were not attributed to high levels of radiation. Once the USSR Ministry of Defense took over the decontamination operation, it maintained a veil of silence concerning those who had fallen ill and died. Only the families of these reservists, and subsequently pioneers of Glasnost such as the magazine Ognonyok and the newspaper Moskovskie Novosti paid attention to this lack of information. In this way the death toll from radiation remained at 28 or 29, and overall short-term casualties from Chornobyl at 31, an astonishingly low figure for an accident of such magnitude.

Third, radiation fallout outside the evacuated zones proved more dangerous than anticipated. The migration of Cesium-137 through the soil was much higher in northwestern regions of Ukraine that lay outside the chornozem region or clay soil areas leading to the contamination of meat and milk in Rivne and Volyn especially. Cesium contaminated over 80% of Ukraine’s forests. Other pervasive and harmful radio-nuclides included Strontium-90, Iodine-131, and Plutonium-239. Some, like Iodine, had short half-lives before they began to decay—in this case 8 days; others, like Plutonium, could not be absorbed by the soil and had a half-life of 24,000 years.

Fourth, the close cooperation between the Ukrainian government and the scientific community, evident at the outset of the accident, disintegrated. There was a natural divide at 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the inheritance of a mammoth and highly expensive Chornobyl program by the new Ukrainian government, which quickly entered the throes of an acute financial and currency crisis. The Soviet government in late April and May 1986, it should be added, also rejected all outside aid other than that of UCLA’s Dr Robert Peter Gale, a protégé of Soviet friend Armand Hammer, the US industrialist, who carried out bone marrow transplants on the most severely affected firemen and first-aid workers. All but one of these patients died.

The Accident

Let us look at some of the events in more detail. The Chernobyl plant had been built in the 1970s based on graphite-moderated RBMK reactors following the prototype of this model of station at Leningrad. The reactors were built in twins, and unit 4 came on line in December 1983. The fifth and sixth units were incomplete at the time of the accident and located some distance from the earlier reactors. An experiment was conducted to see how long a spinning turbine would keep generating power during a period of shutdown before the emergency generators came into operation. It was the sort of issue that should have been resolved at the design stage, but nuclear power, like any other segment of Soviet industry, was on a tight schedule and certain steps were bypassed.

Even today, accounts of the events on the night of April 25-26 are not well known. Safety devices were dismantled in order to prevent the reactor shutting down, but an operator made an error that caused power to drop below the 30% needed for the experiment. The reactor went down to 1%, power began to rise because of coolant boiling, and at 1:23:40, he decided to drive in the emergency rods to shut down the reactor, which was by now very unstable. The subsequent power surge resulted in two explosions that blew the top off the reactor, scattering graphite and fuel, and starting more than 30 fires, including the asphalt roof. Fire crews came to the station from Pripyat and later from Kyiv, and firemen and first-aid workers were the main early casualties of the disaster. Of the 29 official deaths in the early stages, and using the Soviet measurement in rems (roentgen equivalent in man; one rem = 0.01 sieverts or 1 sievert = 100 rems), 21 had received so-called fourth-degree radiation levels of 600-1,600 rems, 7 between 400 and 600, and one between 200 and 400 rems.

The two explosions at the Chornobyl-4 reactor on April 26, 1986 led to the evacuation of people living in a 6-mile radius around the reactor. It was expanded to 18.5 miles after the situation became better known, and after the visit of two Politburo officials, Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev, to Chernobyl on May 2. Subsequently, some 116,000 people (90,784 from Ukraine) living in the expanded zone around the unit were evacuated. Initially, however, they moved in the same direction as the enormous radiation cloud that contaminated lands through rainfall, and many had to be re-evacuated. Many took their livestock with them, compounding problems if the family consumed milk contaminated with radioactive iodine.

There followed a sustained effort to cover the reactor and eventually to construct a “sarcophagus” or “Shelter” over the fourth complex. Cleanup workers or liquidators had to remove graphite from the reactor roof and then decontaminated the topsoil throughout the zone. Most sources concur that about 600,000 took part in this work, first on a volunteer basis and later using military reservists.

Units 1 and 2 reactors at the Chornobyl nuclear power station were restored to operation by the fall of 1986, and unit 3 by December 1987. Despite a litany of problems, and a belated decision by the IAEA to declare the station “dangerous” in 1994, the plant continued to operate until December 15, 2000, when it was closed on the orders of President Leonid Kuchma. In the interim a new town had been built for Chornobyl workers and their families at Slavutych (Chernihiv Oblast), some 40 miles east of the nuclear plant, with a rail connection to their workplace that crossed Belarusian territory.

Radioactive iodine, dispersed widely across north and western Ukraine and most of Belarus in the first days after the explosions, caused thyroid cancer to develop among several thousand children by 1989. About 3,400 children in Ukraine had surgery between 1989 and 2004. In the 21st century, the illness has not disappeared and there are regularly some 300-400 new cases each year. By 2004, 11 children had died (the figure in Belarus was 19).

Thyroid gland cancer was also 9 times higher among liquidators and 13 times higher among females who worked in the zone. In addition, the incidence of breast cancer among female liquidators was double that of the rest of Ukraine Adults living in contaminated areas have seen a 400% rise in thyroid cancer.

In addition to the cited 11 thyroid gland cancer deaths in Ukraine, 5 liquidators have died from leukemia. In addition, Ukraine reported 26,000 deaths of those who worked in the zone (a further 18,400 deaths have been reported among Russian liquidators). Also in Ukraine, 19,109 families in different areas of the country were receiving benefits in 2005 as a result of the loss of the family breadwinner “whose death is related to the Chornobyl accident” (Ukraine Report, p. 53).

Whether or not the evidence is “persuasive” enough for the contributors to the UNSCEAR Report, simple math shows that in addition to its official toll of 56 deaths, one has at the least a further 19,125 in Ukraine alone, along with an unspecified proportion of the 26,000 liquidators who have died prematurely. In Belarus the toll is likely to be at least as high. In addition one would need to calculate the impact in the area of high radiation fallout in Bryansk region of Russia, and in most areas of Europe—the latter are not even included in the calculations of the UN agencies, yet significant Plutonium fallout has been discovered as far away as Sweden.

Moreover, Chornobyl’s impact is not only reflected in the death toll. The level of illnesses among the families suffering from Chornobyl has long been cause for alarm. The proportion of healthy liquidators had fallen from 67.6% in 1988 to 7.2% by 2005. Among evacuees the healthy ratio declined from 67.7% to 22%. Mental health among evacuated women has declined sharply. The incidence of chronic diseases has increased significantly, especially those of the cardiovascular, digestive, and nervous systems.

Social problems linked to Chornobyl persist. In Slavutych, where 10,000 people lost jobs in 2000 because of the Chornobyl plant’s closure, 71% of the town’s 24,365 residents are categorized as accident victims. Over 53% of those who died in 2004 were between the ages of 18 and 59, and HIV, alcoholism, and drug addiction were reported as key problems, a bitter irony in what was originally intended to be a model town for the 21st century.

In the so-called Exclusion (18.5 mile radius) Zone around the Shelter, most of the so-called samosely (self-settlers, i.e. returned evacuees) are dying out. In 2007, there remained 314 scattered throughout 11 villages, with an average age of 63. In 1986 there were an estimated 1,200. Ten villages were bulldozed in the zone and others are in a state of decay. The 1986 disaster has destroyed settlements and patterns of life that date back to medieval times. Of those moved from the Exclusion Zone, only 3% were employed in 2003 (though some had retired by then).

Finally the remains of Chornobyl-4 are to be reburied under a new Shelter, according to a contract between Ukraine and the French company Novarka, a project estimated to cost $550 million to erect a roof that will be higher than both the Statue of Liberty (93 meters) and the Motherland monument that towers over Kyiv (102 meters). The goal is to keep the surrounding area safe for another 100 years, burying the damaged fuel from the fourth reactor unit. Twenty-eight countries have contributed to the cost of this edifice—it is well beyond the means of Ukraine’s budget—and the current structure has an estimated lifespan of 12 more years. Construction started last August and is supposed to be completed by 2013.

Chornobyl was a Soviet-era accident, but its legacy is still being felt in Ukraine and Belarus today. It began with an official cover-up and censorship of health information and radiation fallout. A quarter of a century on, it is still difficult to ascertain accurate information about its health effects in particular, mainly because of the close control over data of agencies that wish to minimize its impact and assure the public that outside those who suffered from ARS, it has had little discernible health consequences.

However, UNSCEAR and the IAEA hitherto have needed to produce materials only on significant Chornobyl anniversaries. After Fukushima, their task has been made much more difficult, as world attention is once again focused on problems linked to the “peaceful atom.” Arguments pro or anti-nuclear power aside, one can only hope that more profound attention is once again focused on the continuing ramifications of the 1986 tragedy.

This article appeared originally in The Ukrainian Weekly, 24 April 2011

Does Ukraine Have a Future?

David Marples

Ukraine is currently undergoing a crisis, according to several of its leading intellectuals. It is not an economic quandary, but rather one of self-perception and future path. Six years after the Orange Revolution had appeared to put an end to a neo-Soviet leadership, the country has yet to establish a national identity and a clear direction. One of its leading writers comments that although Ukraine is celebrating its 20th year of independence, it will cease to exist in 20 years’ time.

Are such statements credible? Why is there such a crisis of identity today?

In terms of politics, there is no question that the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych has reversed some of the gains made in 2004-05. Both Western analyst Alexander Motyl and Ukrainian writer Mykola Riabchuk have highlighted the cronyism and corruption of the Yanukovych team.

But it was author and poet Yuri Andrukhovych who expressed the “doomsday scenario” in an interview on the website http://www.polit.ua (Ukrainian Politics) on April 5. Noting that Ukraine is divided today between “Soviet Russians and Ukrainians,” he maintained that opponents of the country’s independence are as numerous as its supporters. In this situation normal development is impossible. Instead Ukraine is being dragged into what Andrukhovych calls “the Russian world” under the leadership of its East Ukrainian clan.

Writing on March 18 on the website “Current Politics in Ukraine” (http://ukraineanalysis.wordpress.com/), Riabchuk observes that the leading Ukrainian oligarchs are afraid of a pro-Western policy, open competition, and the rule of law and thus abandoned the more moderate and centrist position they had held under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) and opted instead to back the Russophile group that is currently in power, which relies on tight control and brutal crackdowns against opponents in the best of Soviet traditions.

Regarding the pro-Ukraine policies heralded by the Orange Revolution, Kyrylo Halushko, a sociologist from the Drahomaniv National University in Kyiv, speaking at the University of Alberta on April 7, commented that they were identified closely with the personal fortunes of President Viktor Yushchenko and thus disappeared from view once the latter”s popularity began to drop sharply. Thus national symbols such as Ivan Mazepa, Symon Petlyura, and the Famine-Holodomor of 1933 are barely recognized in contemporary school textbooks.

An additional problem has been the figure responsible for those textbooks, Dmytro Tabachnyk, Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science, Youth and Sports. In fact Tabachnyk, who has even been chided by Ukraine’s Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov for antagonizing teachers, symbolizes what critics perceive as the fundamentally anti-Ukrainian nature of the Yanukovych Cabinet.

How can Ukraine attain a national identity if its national leaders deny that one exists?

A study conducted several years ago by scholar Yaroslav Hrytsak contrasted popular opinion in two antithetical cities, namely Hrytsak’s native L’viv and Donetsk; one Ukrainian-speaking, Europe-oriented and pressing hard for recognition of nationalist heroes; the other Russian-speaking, Sovietized, and supportive of the Red Army heroes of the “Great Patriotic War.”

The point, however, is not that both identities exist—they surely do—but that they represent the extremities. Most Ukrainians are not interested in going back to the Soviet Union and the younger generation cannot even remember it.

Moreover, even the Yanukovych government wishes to join the Free Trade Area of the European Union. It is not yet confined within what Andrukhovych calls “the Russian space.” It has not even joined the Common Economic Space with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin arrivesvisited in Kyiv in April 2011, with a mission to coax Yanukovych to integrate the Ukrainian economy more closely with Moscow. Economic pressure is today’s substitute for the more forcible methods of the Soviet era. Already there is talk that the agreement on gas prices might be waived, and Ukraine could pay $US 350 per 1,000 cubic meters rather than its current $260.

Ukraine’s situation admittedly is troubling, but even the Donetsk group currently in control has its own priorities, and these are national by default. They have no wish to be subsumed to the interests of their larger neighbor.

Ultimately then, Ukraine may be defined not for what it is, but what it is not. And the key goal for Ukrainian intellectuals should be to find issues of common consent to identify what is Ukraine without alienating a large portion of the population. The recent past remains too divisive to be used as a basis.

The first task is to build up a strong opposition force that embraces democracy and the centrism of the Kuchma era without the corruption. The removal of Tabachnyk should be the first task. And focus should be on the parliamentary election set for October 28, 2012. Given the growing unpopularity of the government, there is a real opportunity to bring change.

The response to Andrukhovych is encapsulated by the title of Ukraine’s national anthem: Ukraine is not yet dead!

This article first appeared in the Edmonton Journal, 13 April 2011. Copyright David Marples.

Pandora’s Box and the Moscow Orchestra

Mykola Riabchuk

On February 25, on the first anniversary of his presidency, Viktor Yanukovych invited his three predecessors to his office to “discuss current issues and the future development of the Ukrainian state” http://www.president.gov.ua/news/19454.html. This brief item of information on the president’s official website was illustrated with a photo of the smiling participants at the meeting—Viktor Yushchenko on the left, Leonid Kravchuk on the right, and Leonid Kuchma across the round-table from the incumbent. None of them, with the exception probably of the host, realized that behind its cheerful façade, the meeting resembled one of those Byzantine banquets that would end with the poisoning, slaughtering, or impaling of the distinguished guests.

A month later, one of the participants of the meeting, ex-president Leonid Kuchma, may understand that metaphor. On March 24, he was summoned for interrogation to the prosecutor’s office charged with the abuse of power and implicated in the killing of investigative journalist Heorhy Gongadze back in September 2000. In Yanukovych’s Ukraine, where the judiciary is just a part of the executive fully subordinated to the president, and where the Prosecutor General is his bosom buddy (“a member of president’s team,” as he characterized himself proudly in public), hardly anyone believes that the case against Leonid Kuchma was launched without the direct blessing of Yanukovych.

Speculation revolves mostly around the question why Yanukovych has made this dubious step and what consequences may follow. The alleged reasons typically include Yanukovych’s desire to divert public attention from his domestic and international failures, to disprove accusations against his government about selective justice, and to intimidate opponents and mobilize supporters by proving that the president is tough but just.

Yulia Mostova highlights another reason why Yanukovych might want to prosecute Kuchma: revenge for the perceived humiliation during the Orange Revolution, when the incumbent refused to use force against the protesters and pass on the office to the president-elect, opting instead for negotiation and compromise that ended up with the repeated second round of the election and Yanukovych’s defeat. If the price of becoming the pick-up successor to Leonid Kuchma was 400 million thanks, as Mostova implies, the reasons for revenge might be even more serious http://www.dt.ua/articles/78263.

Remarkably, not a single expert or commentator expressed the opinion that Yanukovych was driven in his decision by some idealistic desire for justice or the practical need for house-cleaning. In view of all Yanukovych’s other deeds, it is really difficult to sell such a nice story to anyone, either at home or abroad. This does not preclude, however, a smart usage of all these arguments by some people around Yanukovych to persuade him to launch the case against Leonid Kuchma. This might well be in the interests of these people but is hardly in the interests of Yanukovych himself for the following reasons.

First, because the propaganda effect of this step, in terms of positive image-building for Yanukovych, is negligible. No one considers it an act of justice and proof of the equality of all Ukrainian citizens before the law. All the policies of Ukrainian authorities suggest the opposite from all regions and walks of life – every day and every hour.

Second, Kuchma can hardly be sentenced by any court, however “executive” they are in Ukraine, because all the people to whom he may have given a direct order (or “suggestion”) to kill Gongadze, are dead and would not be able to testify. And the records, presumably gathered from the tape recordings by Kuchma’s guard Mykola Melnychenko, even if accepted as evidence (that itself is very problematic), do not contain any direct order to carry out murder.

Third and most important, by initiating the murder case, Yanukovych very unwisely draws public attention to his own conversations with Kuchma recorded by Melnychenko, which are not just deplorable but definitely merit a criminal investigation (intimidation of judges, blackmail, bribery, large-scale corruption, etc). Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin, who mentioned Melnychenko’s records among the possible evidence against Kuchma, has inadvertently opened a Pandora’s box since this very evidence could be used against dozens of Ukrainian officials who discussed a variety of criminal plans with Kuchma. (Almost all are alive and well, and now follow their new master, Yanukovych). There is little surprise that opposition MP Yuri Hrymchak has already submitted an official request to the Prosecutor General demanding an investigation of many more episodes recorded by Melnychenko that testify to criminal conspiracy and activity of other members of Kuchma’s team, including current Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Yanukovych himself http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2011/03/25/6054029/.

And, finally, Yanukovych apparently has created the precedent of prosecuting ex-presidents that may eventually be applied against him (at least as a tool of psychological pressure and possible blackmail) http://www.dt.ua/articles/78776.

So, if the trial does not serve reliably Yanukovych’s personal interests and if the public interests are not, in principle, his concern, the question arises who is most likely to benefit from the dubious special operation and how?

Dr. Andrij Zhalko-Tytarenko, former head of the Ukrainian Space Agency and the former Ukrainian Director of the Science and Technology Center of Ukraine in Kyiv, considers the entire “Melnychenko affair” (“Kuchma-gate”) a provocation of the Russian secret services aimed at establishing full control over Leonid Kuchma. The theory is barely new since many experts have argued that Kuchma had no real reasons to physically destroy Gongadze and that he was merely framed by some powerful and influential enemies seeking to compromise him. The only weak element in this theory is the involvement of the leading Ukrainian police officers, including the late Minister of Interior Yury Kravchenko, in Gongadze’s abduction and killing. None would have dared to play into Russian hands without blessing from above—if not from Kuchma, at least from the minister who may have acted (or pretended to act) on Kuchma’s behalf. He could probably have done so only with a clear perspective to replace Kuchma as president, which seems very unlikely under those circumstances.

Zhalko-Tytarenko hypothesizes that the current re-launch of the Gongadze case is part of the Russian domestic power game. According to his theory, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev may be planning to run for a second term and needs to convince the two-time former president, Vladimir Putin, not to run. “If Kuchma will face murder charges (it is too late for abuse of power charges), he will have no choice but to provide all the names that he certainly knows from Ukrainian secret service reports.” This may hold a certain grain of truth provided that Melnychenko’s records contain, inter alia, some very unpleasant information for Mr. Putin discovered by the SBU about his connections with the notorious Semion Mogilevich and involvement in laundering drug money through the St.-Petersburg company SPAG http://www.ukrainianstudies.uottawa.ca/pdf/P_Koshiw_Danyliw07.pdf.

Zhalko-Tytarenko might be right about Medvedev’s sophistication and even ambitions but hardly about his real influence and use of independent resources to launch such a complicated manipulative game. Rather, the Russian element in the story is simpler and more traditional. The Kremlin people in Yanukovych’s team persuaded him to make one more self-defeating step—exactly in the same way they persuaded him to give ministerial posts to Messrs. Yezhel, Tabachnyk, and Khoroshkovsky, to promote the Russian church in Ukraine at the cost of all other denominations, to suppress the Ukrainian language, culture, and identity, to violate and manipulate the constitution, to make a Russian citizen the head of his bodyguards, to detain one of Angela Merkel’s men at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport on the eve of his own official visit to Germany, and to make many more stupid maneuvers that not a single professional politician would ever commit. The goal of the manipulators is clear: to undermine Yanukovych’s authority, to compromise him both domestically and internationally, and to render him another “Lukashenko,” ostracized by the West and completely dependent on Moscow.

Taras Chornovil, Yanukovych’s former insider, defines these people as the “Moscow Quartet”: Serhy Liovochkin, Valery Khoroshkovsky, Dmytro Firtash, and Yury Boyko. All are reportedly involved in murky gas deals with Russia, fully controlled by Putin and Mogilevich as Gazprom’s shadow owners. We can hardly obtain proof of these speculations but we are likely to see the results of this and many more «special operations” carried out by the “Moscow Orchestra” (rather than a humble “quartet”).

The Kuchma murder case will not end in the foreseeable future, but will rather be used to compromise (and probably to blackmail) the entire “elite,” including Yanukovych himself. This might be well a part of the strategy of “directed chaos” that includes also the creation of fake “nationalist” and “extremist” groups, planting bombs (the explosions at apartment blocks in Russia in 1999 that preceded Putin’s election provide a fitting precedent) and many more http://www.kyivpost.com/news/opinion/op_ed/detail/100803/. Back in 2004, the Moscow “political technologists” tried to implement such a strategy in Ukraine to promote the candidacy of Leonid Kuchma for a third presidential term. The “directed chaos,” however, veered out of their control and resulted in an authentic mass uprising, i.e. the Orange Revolution. Remarkably, one of the leading Moscow “technologists” of that time, Igor Shuvalov, serves today as an “adviser” to Serhy Liovochkin and, at the same time, to the leading Ukrainian TV channel “Inter” owned—inevitably—by SBU chief Valery Khoroshkovsky http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2011/04/1/6073286/.

Besides the clear political goal—to strengthen the authoritarian power of a rogue president completely dependent on Moscow—the team may pursue a more practical and palpable goal: to eliminate as many political-cum-economic players as possible from the forthcoming privatization of Ukraine’s last asset, its arable land (the protracted moratorium on its sale is expected to be lifted at the appropriate moment).

In a recent interview, Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist apparatchik and perhaps the smartest of all Ukrainian presidents, suggested that: “the system has already gnawed away Yanukovych’s legs and is approaching his belly.” So, he must “either destroy the system or concentrate all power in his hands and become a totalitarian leader” http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2011/04/4/6077221/. The latter, Kravchuk believes, is unlikely because Ukrainians would not accept it. He may be right but the problem is that Yanukovych is listening not to Ukraine’s first president, but rather to the Moscow Orchestra.