Moving West is ‘Lesser Evil’ for Ukraine

David Marples

On March 30, the EU and Ukraine initialed the text of a new agreement that includes a “deep and comprehensive free trade area.” Is Ukraine now moving irrevocably westward?

Of late, one finds many apocalyptic accounts about Ukraine: rampant corruption, likelihood of default on foreign loans, crackdowns on former leaders of the Orange administration such as Yulia Tymoshenko and Yuri Lutsenko, the manipulation of elections, and falling popularity for the ruling Regions Party and its president Viktor Yanukovych.

All these factors exist in part or fully, but the crucial question for Ukraine concerns foreign policy: does it move to the EU or become part of the Russian orbit? In the background to this debate is the key component of energy, and specifically payments for Russian gas and oil and whether Ukraine can come up with alternative strategies to its dependence on Moscow.

Evgeny Kurmashov, director of political programs at the Gorshenin Institute, surmises that in his third term Russia president Vladimir Putin will try to increase Russia’s political influence in neighboring states and integrate them into the Russian geopolitical sphere. The various means—the Customs Union, Eurasian Union, gas transit consortium, and CIS free trade zone—are all part of the same Kremlin puzzle.

Generally Ukrainian residents are reticent about a free trade agreement with Russia. A poll conducted among members of the parliament in March indicates that 45.4% of MPs oppose it, and only 21% support it without reservations. Analyst Yuri Matsiyevsky has observed that the reintegration of Ukraine into the post-Soviet space will block Ukraine’s move toward the EU. Yet Yanukovych continues to negotiate with the EU because, according to Matsiyevsky, the degree of antagonism toward it in eastern and southern regions is lower than the degree of rejection of cooperation with Russia in Western Ukraine. It is the “lesser evil” in other words.

Other reasons for a move to Brussels are evident. President Yanukovych and his government are seeking ways to avoid complying with the gas agreement signed by former Prime Minister Tymoshenko and Putin in early 2009 whereby Ukraine agreed to pay a base rate of $450 per thousand cubic meters, well above today’s world price. But the alternatives are problematic.

The exploration of shale gas in southern Ukraine is still being explored—it is prohibitively expensive to produce—but the most far-fetched scheme is one to re-export Russian gas from Germany to Ukraine through an agreement between Ukraine’s Naftohaz and the German company RWE, based in Essen.

Also, the attempt to replace Russian supplies of gas with those from Turkmenistan, following high-level talks between Ukraine and the Central Asian country, is premature. Until the completion of the Trans-Caspian pipeline, Turkmen gas can only reach Ukraine through Russia, thus supplies could be affected at any time.

Still, Ukraine is leaning toward the West, whatever the difficulties involved.

Its economic power structure essentially now comprises three main groups that have managed to prevent serious intrusions from Russian businessmen: these are influential Regions members Rinat Ahmetov and Borys Kolesnikov who control the metallurgy industry; the Rosukrenergo company, headed by Dmytro Firtash; and members of Yanukovych’s own family and friends, who are growing markedly in influence.

What these power bases have in common is a desire to trade with the EU and to avoid as far as possible economic takeovers by Russian oligarchs.

As for the Europeans, they have slowly brought Ukraine into the fold. In 2005, the EU and Ukraine signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Energy Cooperation that included an Action Plan. On 1 February 2011, Ukraine joined the Energy Community, and Ukraine has taken steps to improve the safety of its nuclear plants (especially in the wake of the Fukushima disaster), to integrate electricity and gas markets, and to improve safety and restructure the Ukrainian coal industry, which has been in decline since the 1980s.

Yet Ukraine is proving an awkward partner. The initialing of the association agreement was delayed because of the EU’s concern about the treatment of Tymoshenko. Ukraine, in short, has been behaving like Belarus, though thus far the EU has refrained from imposing sanctions.

Brussels is also concerned about the astounding scale of corruption in Ukraine, which has darkened a once promising economic outlook. Essentially the government is appeasing the population with higher wages and pensions while depleting foreign currency reserves and coming up with wild solutions to pay off enormous debts—around $15 billion to Russian and European banks, as well as the IMF—and to keep its domestic currency afloat.

A recent report from Kyiv by Zenon Zawada notes Prime Minister Mykola Azarov’s announcement on March 12 that he intended to pay back debt to the IMF by requesting another loan from the same agency—a comment later retracted, but revealing nevertheless of the far-fetched economic policies.

In these circumstances, the EU partner grows increasingly frustrated and the Russian side more hopeful; while the oligarchic clans are preoccupied with their internal struggle, a classic case of fiddling while Rome—in this case Kyiv—burns.

This article was first published in the Edmonton Journal, 31 March 2012.

What John Demjanjuk could have told us

Stephen Paskey

On March 17, John Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home. Demjanjuk spent 35 years of his life fighting charges that he served as a Nazi guard. In 2009, he was convicted in Germany as an accomplice to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland.

For three years, I served as lead attorney on the U.S. government’s deportation case against Demjanjuk. Five years later, I believe that the Demjanjuk case demonstrates not the triumph of law, but law’s limitations.

I do not mean to suggest that Demjanjuk was falsely accused. His service as a guard at Sobibor is beyond dispute. The key evidence consists of a wartime German identity card bearing his name, his photograph and unique biographic details: his date and place of birth, his father’s name, the color of his eyes, the scar on his back. Credible experts have repeatedly examined the card. In every detail, from the ink and paper used to the signatures of Nazi officials, the card is unmistakably genuine.

Demjanjuk’s service at Sobibor and other Nazi camps is confirmed by six Nazi documents gathered from archives in three countries. Any claim that the documents were forged and then scattered across Europe and the former Soviet Union as part of a Soviet plot to frame Demjanjuk is absurd. Even Demjanjuk’s own lawyers abandoned that claim. In the second U.S. trial, his lawyers argued instead that the man the documents depicted was either Demjanjuk’s cousin or someone who had stolen his identity.

Unlike the concentration camps, which were sites for Jewish slave labor, Sobibor existed for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews. As a Sobibor guard, Demjanjuk’s daily duties required that he march Jewish men, women, and children at gunpoint from trains to the gas chambers. His role was essential to the camp’s operation.

From a purely legal perspective, the German court correctly concluded that Demjanjuk was an accomplice to murder.

And yet, even if reasonable people accept that conclusion, they can disagree about whether the case against him was “just.” Demjanjuk long ago ceased to be a flesh-and-blood man in any public sense. Instead, he became a character in competing public narratives, a vehicle by which people of differing opinions argued about accountability for genocide.

For those who supported the prosecution, the Demjanjuk case proves that there is no statute of limitations for genocide, and that even the smallest cog is essential to the work of a genocidal machine. To some survivors and their families, the case provided a strong affirmation that their stories of suffering were important. To some prosecutors, the case became a contest of wills, a determined effort to prove the truth against one man’s stubborn denial.

Still others tell the story differently. To Demjanjuk’s family and supporters, the case represented an abuse of government power and a waste of government resources. And for many Ukrainians, the case involved a kind of “ethnic profiling.” There is a sense that Demjanjuk was a convenient scapegoat, that his role in the Holocaust did not justify a prosecution, and that someone who was not Ukrainian would have been treated differently.

All of this is a matter of ethics or opinion rather than fact. Neither side is entirely right or entirely wrong, and sometimes the lines are blurred. In the course of my work, I interviewed dozens of Holocaust survivors. A small but striking percentage told me that the prosecution of Nazi guards was pointless, that nothing could be gained from pursuing such men so many years after the fact.

And even for some who believe that Demjanjuk assisted in murder, the German prosecution is troubling. For decades, German prosecutors insisted that a man like Demjanjuk could not be convicted because he could not be tied to the murder of any specific person. As a result, thousands of German citizens who might have been prosecuted as accomplices to genocide were effectively given a full reprieve. Why, then, did the Germans choose to prosecute Demjanjuk at the last possible moment? And why a Ukrainian rather than a German citizen? Given Germany’s long history of neglect in similar cases, the criminal case against Demjanjuk was unjust and should not have gone forward.

I still believe that the U.S. government’s civil case against Demjanjuk accomplished some good. It deepened the public’s understanding of the Holocaust, and affirmed the U.S. government’s frequently shaky resolve to hold perpetrators accountable for atrocities. But in a deeper sense, the litigation accomplished little. Whatever good might have been done seems to be outweighed by questions we still cannot answer.

Whether Demjanjuk was “guilty” or “innocent” matters less than what we might have learned if Demjanjuk could speak freely about his experiences. He later became a husband and father, loved by his wife and children. How is it possible that such a man could do what Demjanjuk did, could close his eyes and heart to the suffering of the husbands, wives, sons, and daughters who were murdered with his assistance? What did he think about at night, knowing that hundreds of people had been murdered that day, and that more would be murdered tomorrow? And what, if anything, might have helped him refuse to participate?

In the trials against Demjanjuk, such questions were legally irrelevant. But if we truly wish to prevent future atrocities, we must learn the answers. Psychologists and moral theorists have been working on the issues, but we still understand far too little. The prosecution of John Demjanjuk ensured that he would tell us nothing. And now that Demjanjuk is dead, a critical piece of the truth has been buried with him, and we will never know.

From 1995 to 2007, Stephen Paskey served as a trial attorney with the United States Department of Justice. He currently teaches legal analysis, writing, and research at the SUNY Buffalo Law School in Buffalo, New York. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely his own. This article appeared originally in KYIV POST, 23 March 2012 and is republished here with the permission of the author.