... there is no need to build not only a cathedral but even a prayer house for the Uniates,...

Try "MP denies right of UGCC to build church in Odessa"

The entire issue of the Crimea is geopolitical and not religious. Power politics played for the highest stakes.

"In Odesa, where the vast majority of the residents are believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, there is such a small number of Greek Catholics that there is no need to build not only a cathedral but even a prayer house for the Uniates," stated Metropolitan Ahafanhel

As of March 2010, there are 10,000 Greek Catholics in Odesa

The statement reads that "the expected construction in Odesa, on the territory of the Prokhoriv Public Garden, of a cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the Uniates' attempt to aggressive expand in the Odesa region."

It disturbs me that a Bishop would use such a derogatory term like Uniates.

The Moscow Patriarchate, through Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, has been sending very positive messages lately to the Catholic Church. How can this be reconciled with the tension clearly still existing in Ukraine? And to what extent can the Moscow Patriarchate be seen as distinct from the national security state of Vladimir Putin?

This edifice might not have been built if the Orthodox and the Catholics got along better. Maybe nobody would have felt a need for it. These temples are expensive and the Mormon conventicle constructs them only in places where the money-savvy leadership in Salt Lake believes there will be enough patrons to justify the expense.

I think part of the problem is the UGCC is not seen as Ukrainian at all outside of the old Polish territories. A lady I know went home to see her family on the sea of Azov and when the subject of the UGCC came up they never once used the term Ukrainian but "Galitzian" for the UGCC. What surpised her even more was that they went on to say it was run by Canadians who had taken them over. In a way the UGCC is seen as not belonging, just like the returning Moslem Tartars who are mostly descendants of captured Ukrainian and Russian slaves anyway. Vested interests clearly want certain people to go away.

Sectarians? in Ukraine?

check out -
http://www.ldschurchtemples.com/temples/

learn all about the brand-new, SPANKIN'-new Mormon temple in Kyiv. Read it and weep.

To think it was dedicated on August 29, 2010, of all days. The liturgical commemoration of the beheading of St. John the Baptist is grim enough reason to observe the day with fasting - now we all have yet another reason to mourn.

... the taxes of all people of all confessions and none, if used toward religion by Yanukovych, seem to only go to the Moscow Patriarchate.

I again thank the Lord not to have converted to Orthodoxy.

Seeing as how this issue has nothing to do with theology, I'm not sure what this has to do with anything. Should Orthodox Christians congratulate themselves similarly if they became aware of sinful actions among the clergy or hierarchy of other churches?

So much for separation of church and state.

The relationship between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian government has not been the kind of symphonia that existed between the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire. Since the time of Peter the Great (and some would even say Ivan Grozny), the Church has been subordinated to the state (legally and factually true under the later Tsars and the Communists). If ever the myth of caesaropapism was correct, it would have to be in Russia. Many of us hoped that with the end of communism, the Russian Church would be able to free itself from the shackles of dependency on the Russian state, but while the shackles are now velvet rather than iron, they remain shackles nonetheless.

In my opinion, this is absolutely correct from Stuart and the description of the problem. The problem is magnified by the fact that the Russian State in this case is run by a K.G.B. (now called F.S.B.) autocrat in my opinion and in the opinion of many. The new issue of Foreign Affairs journal put out by the Council of Foreign Relations in the U.S. has an article on the Secret Police's role in the running of the Russian State called "K.G.B. 2.0" or Russia's New Nobility. What relationship should the Church take to a government run by an institution responsible for such repression and violence? Putin sees today's F.S.B. as a continuation of the Soviet Secret Police.

Should the Church support wholeheartedly the policies advocated by such a state. For instance, a Russian cabinet minister responsible for health in Russia just proclaimed that Russians should drink and smoke more, to help out the economy. For real. Has the Church no power to speak out against such inept and immoral advice from above? Or should the church itself become involved in the tobacco trade?

You are making assertions with no basis, and accusing the church of things it has not done.

Viktor Yanukovych: The First 100 Days
By Taras Kuzio

Attempting to see into President Viktor Yanukovych’s mindset is not easy, although there aremany clues from his social, economic, regional and political background. These factors wereignored by the majority of Western analysts and journalists writing about Ukraine.

No Reformer

Yanukovych’s presidency will not bring reform to Ukraine for two reasons.
Government. The make-up of the Yanukovych administration and government is not, as hepromised up to and during the 2010 election campaign, composed of technocrats and reformers but former Kuchma officials with disreputable pasts, those with Sovietophile leanings and half of the cabinet drawn from only one region (Donetsk). Four cabinet members, including the prime minister and one deputy prime minister, are of retirement age while another 15 ministers are in their late 50s. The formative years of Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov, at 62, and the majority of the cabinet ministers, were during the Leonid Brezhnev ‘era of stagnation’ in the 1970s.

This is the first of seventeen governments over two decades of Ukrainian independence with not a single woman cabinet minister. Indeed, both Yanukovych and Azarov have poured disdain on women and Yanukovych made an excuse to not attend a televised election debate with Tymoshenko because she, like all women, he believed, should ‘be in the kitchen’ and not in politics.

Following Yushchenko’s election a generational shift moved Ukraine’s ruling elites to the middle generation who are less tainted by Soviet rule and the Brezhnev era, having built their careers in the 1980s and 1990s. The Yanukovych era has taken Ukraine again to the Kuchma era when it was ruled by the older, far more neo-Soviet, generation who launched their careers in the 1970s. With that generational shift comes an ideological shift to fetishisation of an authoritarian ‘vertical of power’, ‘stability’ and nostalgia for Russia and the Soviet past.

Policies.

As the violent events in the Ukrainian parliament on 27 April during the ratification of the Black Sea Fleet base treaty showed, the administration’s policies will bring instability – not stability – to Ukraine. The undertaking of radical and unpopular reforms requires political stability and national consensus both of which are unlikely to appear Ukraine.

He Will Deliver Instability, Not Stability

President Yanuovych will be unable to bring stability to Ukraine for two reasons.
Regionalism. Ukraine’s regional divisions will prevent any political force from building a monopoly of power. The Party of Regions is unpopular in Kyiv and Central Ukraine, let alone in Western Ukraine. Ukraine, divided by language and historical legacies, could never develop a nationalism that would unite behind the Party of Regions. This is again different to Russia where Russian great power, anti-Western nationalism has mobilized around the Unified Russia party led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Democratic and nationalist opposition will inevitably grow to the administration.

Bribery.

Ukrainians cannot be bought off as Ukraine is not Russia where abundant deposits of
raw materials are exported and bring large amounts of income to the state budget. President Putin was fortunate in being able to buy off Russians by trading stability for democracy through record high oil and gas prices throughout most of this decade.

The Yanukovych Enigma

The ignoring of the factors that go to make up Yanukovych’s personality was because many Ukrainian and Western experts and analysts had convinced themselves during Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election campaign that Yanukovych had ‘changed’ over the last five years. A Financial Times (10 January 2010) editorial wrote, ‘Only a stable Ukraine can achieve economic reform and recovery. Ms Tymoshenko is the polar opposite of a stabilising force. Mr Yanukovich, for all his manifest faults, may prove the lesser evil’.

He has been using American political and election consultants and the spring 2009 Party of Regions congress that put forward his candidacy had all the hallmarks of a candidate’s launch in an American election campaign. The most optimistic vision of a ‘changed’ Yanukovych was given in the 8 February opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Reintroducing Viktor Yanukovych’.

Some of this mistaken optimism in Yanukovych was understandable after five years of wasted opportunities under President Yushchenko. Ukraine fatigue in the West emerged after years of political instability, constitutional crises, inter-elite fighting, and Ukraine (together with Iceland, Hungary and Latvia), experiencing Europe’s worst economic-financial recession, forcing the government to seek an emergency IMF Stand-by Agreement. An allegedly ‘changed’ Yanukovych, who was now touted as a new-born democrat, seemed to be like a breath of fresh air who promised to bring ‘stability’ and reforms to Ukraine.

Tymoshenko, in contrast, was depicted by the Western media as the ‘chameleon’ and ‘populist’ and was negatively associated with five years of ‘orange’ misrule. In the most interesting aspects of Ukraine’s election campaign it was Tymoshenko who was more often than not seen both in the West and in Ukraine as the greater threat to Ukraine’s young democracy than Yanukovych.

The first two months of Yanukovych’s presidency have shown how wrong were these views.

The spring 2009 congress that launched Yanukovych’s candidacy was ‘respectable and modern’, Ukrayinska Pravda (25 April 2010) reported. The 23 April congress that passed the leadership back to Prime Minister Azarov (who was the Party of Regions first leader in 2001-2003) was, in contrast, more similar to a ‘party-economic meeting in the Soviet tradition with delegates transforming themselves into live exponents of Lenin’s museum’. The congress was held in the former Lenin Museum, now Ukrainian House (Ukrayinska Pravda, 25 April 2010). A lack of discussion and criticism, unanimity of voting and Soviet style atmosphere was described by Ukrainian journalists as a ‘party congress from the Soviet era’ with the leadership question taking place ‘according to the best canons of a CPSU congress’. Gone was the 2009 American-style congress that had convinced so many domestic and Western analysts of Yanukovych’s transformation into a born-again democrat. In was the real Yanukovych now firmly ensconced in power.

It took Leonid Kuchma until his second term in office in November 2000, when the Kuchmagate crisis unfurled, for his reputation to be tarnished and for Ukraine be increasingly described as a semi-authoritarian political system. It took only two months before criticism began to appear of the emergence of threats to media pluralism and Ukraine slipping back to semi-authoritarianism.

Following Yanukovych’s speech to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) former co-rapporteur of the Monitoring Committee of the PACE on Ukraine Hanne Severinsen said, ‘In my opinion, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe should in no way halt its monitoring of Ukraine. On the contrary, even now, there are new grounds for the continuation of such monitoring’. Severinsen pointed to democratic regression in such areas as the presidential monopolization of power, infringements of the constitution, threats to media pluralism and ignoring of the rights of the opposition.

Yanukovych and Putin

If it is Yanukovych’s intention to establish an autocracy he is not taking his cues from Putin who transformed Russia into an authoritarian system in an evolutionary fashion over the four years of his first term in office (2000-2004). Western views of Russia only began to change towards the end of his first term and the erosion of Russia’s democracy was noted from 2005 onwards. The New York-based human rights think tank Freedom House downgraded Russia in 2005 from ‘partly free’ to ‘unfree’. In that same year Ukraine was upgraded from ‘partly free’ to ‘free’ which it has maintained throughout Yushchenko’s tumultuous five years in office.

During Putin’s first term in office he removed threats to the regime he sought to build in a piecemeal fashion by using ‘salami tactics’ against different societal groups such as the media, oligarchs, opposition and Chechen separatists. Putin’s evolutionary path is different to Yanukovych’s strategy; his first two months in office have shown that he is a revolutionary seeking to push his policies through in the shortest possible time frame with no regard for domestic or Western public opinion.

Why the Rush? Five Possible Explanations

Social.

Yanukovych’s way of approaching political power is a reflection of his lower working class roots, tough upbringing and former criminal past. Yanukovych grew up as an orphan on the streets of the USSR and spent two or three periods in jail. These prison sentences give the potential for blackmail to Russian leaders who have inherited Soviet files on him that would not have been difficult for a former KGB officer, such as Prime Minister Putin, to obtain. In the Soviet era, Yanukovych oversaw, as Donetsk governor, the wild capitalism of Ukraine’s transition to a market economy. Donetsk, together with the Crimea and Odesa, were the three most violent regions in the 1990s and are today Party of Regions strong holds.

Yanukovych’s social and criminal background inevitably influences his lack of finesse and inarticulateness (his gaffes are legendary), his emphasis upon achieving goals regardless of the means employed, even if this means ignoring legal niceties. Ihor Zhdanov explained that, ‘‘the slogan ‘everything and right now’ and the ‘aim justifies the means’ obviously have become the political credo of the new authorities team’ (Zerkalo Nedeli/Dserkalo Tyzhnia, 24-29 April 2010).

The ‘ends justify the means’ was as much influential in driving Yanukovych as a candidate in 2004, which led to Ukraine’s most fraudulent election campaign, as it is in 2010 after he came to power. It was always wrong to assume that Yanukovych circa 2004 is any different to Yanukovych circa 2010.

Kuchma, in contrast to Yanukovych, belonged to the Soviet nomenklatura; he was the director of the world’s largest military-industrial plant manufacturing nuclear weapons with a telephone direct line to the Soviet leader. Anecdotal evidence points to Kuchma never giving his full backing to Yanukovych as a candidate in the 2004 elections and that he was quite willing to dump him after the second round. Kuchma telephoned Putin, then on an official visit to Brazil, a day after the second round to ask for advice as to how to respond to the growing number of protestors on the streets of Kyiv that grew into the Orange Revolution. Putin replied that the choice was either to declare a state of emergency or to transfer power to Yanukovych. Kuchma’s
response was indicative: ‘How can I transfer power to him, Vladimir Vladimirovych? He is a Donetsk criminal!’ Kuchma had little faith in Yanukovych’s intellectual potential, was unsure about his close links to oligarchs and organized crime and saw him as a decoy to counter the opposition and railroad through constitutional reforms. These events are described in many places, including in Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

At 59, Yanukovych is unlikely to change his way of undertaking tasks and responsibilities from the way he has always been used to undertaking them in the USSR and in Ukraine. Putin’s ‘salami tactics’ and Kuchma’s playing off of Ukraine’s business and political elites, both using evolutionary methods, are very different approaches to Yanukovych’s revolutionary methods.

Ideological.

Yanukovych’s statements between elections, his election campaign rhetoric and
Party of Regions and his own candidate’s election programmes show him to be ideologically pro-Russian. But, these have been largely ignored by Western observers of Ukraine and have been dismissed in one of two ways.

1.Pragmatists and Kuchma’s Multi-Vectorism.

The first is to argue that the Party of Regions is controlled by ‘pragmatic’ oligarchs who desire to become bona fide businessmen, playing by the rules and who value integration into Europe over that of integration with Russia and the CIS. Paulius Kuncinas writing for the Oxford Business Group (3 March 2010) emphasized the
pragmatism of the Yanukovych team and his desire to ‘return to a more pragmatic phase of realpolitik’. Kuncinas stressed that, ‘there seems to be a genuine attempt among politicians from Donetsk to bridge the national divide and widen their popular mandate beyond their Russophile heartlands’. Adrian Karatnycky wrote a day after Yanukovych was elected that, ‘the oligarchs round Mr Yanukovych became economically transparent. They hired first-rate managers, rigorously paid their taxes, promoted sophisticated philanthropy, and became globalized in their tastes and manners. Just as importantly, they now see their future prosperity integrally linked to a reduction in corruption, the expansion of free market policies, lower taxes, fewer regulations, and Ukraine's eventual integration into the rich EU market’ (Wall Street Journal, 8 February).

Andrew Wilson writing for the European Couuncil on Foreign Relations believed that‘Yanukovych could turn out to be better for Europe than many expect. In fact, he might even become something like Ukraine’s Richard Nixon…’2 Wilson downplayed Yanukovych’s interest in national identity issues that are highly contentious in Ukraine.

Ukrainian analyst Mykola Riabchuk predicted that Yanukovych would return Ukraine to a Kuchma era multi-vector foreign policy as integration with Russia and the CIS is not ‘in the interests of Ukrainian business and the political class’ (www.eurozine.com, 4 March 2010).

Writing after the turbulent events of late April in parliament, Wilson still remained convinced that ‘Ukraine is back to playing the game it knows best: the balancing act between East and West’. Wilson argues, like many Western commentators, that Ukraine’s oligarchs cannot become russophiles or slavophiles because ‘They still want to protect their own ‘back yard’’ from Russian encroachments.

Yanukovych’s first two months in office point to little evidence of such optimism about the domination of ‘pragmatists’ in the Party of Regions over its ideological wing who will seek to foster national unity. The first 100 days in office points to ideologically driven pro-Russian domestic nationality and foreign policies. Indeed, while Yanukovych has camouflaged his views through the use of American political consultants and choreographed statements and comments, especially during election campaigns and foreign visits, Azarov has never hidden his Sovietophle and russophile views. While Yanukovych learnt the Ukrainian language in the 2004 election campaign Azarov has always ignored Ukrainian legislation refusing to learn the state language
for government positions he held in the Kuchma era or currently as prime minister.

2. Election programmes are not fulfilled.

The second argument is to believe that election statements and programmes have no value in Ukraine as they are meant to mobilize voters and are always ignored following elections. Kuchma’s 1994 election is always cited as evidence of this where he fought the elections in support of making Russian an ‘official language’ only to forget about this policy after he came to power. When asked by Radio Free Europe ‘Is there anything Viktor Yanukovych has surprised you with in these two months?’ former President Yushchenko said ‘One thing -- speed. He did what was written in his election slogans...’ In the first two months in office Yanukovych has shown that he is more than ready to implement his pro-Russian rhetoric in both the domestic and foreign domains. These include the re-writing of school textbooks, Soviet tirades against ‘Ukrainian nationalism’, preference for the monopolization of religious life by the Russian Orthodox Church, servility for Russian policies in the CIS and support for re-uniting major areas of the Ukrainian and Russian economies.

Yanukovych supported calls for extending the Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol long before the global financial crisis hit Ukraine’s economy in 2008 which casts doubt on the official justification for the 27 April 2010 treaty that Ukraine was forced to take this step because of its dire economic and financial situation. Yanukovych has long espoused antagonism towards the Georgian leadership and the GUAM (Georgia Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova) regional group and supported the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In all of these areas Yanukovych is showing himself to be different to former President Kuchma.

Revenge.

Yanukovych and the Donetsk clan have waited for five years for their chance to take their revenge against the ‘orangists’. Revenge in Western political systems is an unusual concept and Western observers of Ukraine have therefore failed to grasp this component of the mindset of the Yanukovych administration. Revenge is personally and ideologically driven.

1.Personal Revenge.

Yanukovych always felt personally humiliated after the second round of the
2004 elections through what he, and his supporters, was a deeply felt betrayal by Kyiv’s ruling elites who, fearful of the mass crowds in the Orange Revolution, did a deal at EU-brokered round-tables that facilitated Yushchenko’s election in the re-run second round on 26 December. Yanukovych and Eastern Ukrainians believe in a similar conspiracy theory to that found in Russia; namely, that Yushchenko’s election and the Orange Revolution was facilitated by Western forces (most notably the US and the Bush administration’s democracy promotion agenda). This mindset, whether in Eastern Ukraine or Russia, does not believe that the millions who participated in the Orange Revolution did so voluntarily and they therefore dismiss claims that the 17-day protests were a genuine popular protest. This conspiracy mindset has deep Soviet
roots that looked at dissident groups as Western-funded, rather than home-grown, phenomenon manipulated by Western intelligence agencies and émigré diaspora groups. Yanukovych believes he won the 2004 elections in a fair contest where there was no fraud and if there were ‘minor infringements’ then these took place on both sides which thereby cancelled each other out. Although the Supreme Court ruled on 3 December 2004 that there had been systematic fraud and demanded a re-run on 26 December there have never been criminal charges launched against the organizers of election fraud. This has always emboldened Yanukovych and his team that they had won the second round but were then ‘betrayed’. As Yanukovych repeatedly said, no criminal charges meant, in his view, that there was no election fraud.

Unfortunately, no Western governments took notice of Yanukovych’s views of the 2004 elections and Orange Revolution that flatly contradicted the optimism of him as a pragmatic new-born democrat. If true, Yanukovych the democrat would have admitted responsibility to election fraud and accepted the 2004 election results. That was never the case and in his view Yushchenko was always therefore an illegitimate president brought to power by American ‘political technology’.

2.Ideological.

Yanukovych’s election is also a fortuitous opportunity to take revenge on the
‘nationalists’ who allegedly ran Ukraine under Yushchenko. Similar ‘anti-nationalist’ sentiment was aired by the Kuchma campaign in the 1994 elections when it was directed against incumbent ‘nationalist’ Leonid Kravchuk. Dmytro Tabachnyk headed Kuchma’s 1994 election campaign and went on to become chief of staff of Kuchma’s presidential administration. The Kuchma regime revived Soviet-style anti-nationalist propaganda in the 2002 and 2004 elections as an ideological tool against the opposition to mobilize the Russophone vote against the ‘nationalist’ Our Ukraine and Yushchenko. Ukrainian surveys have long shown that negative voting (i.e. voting against a party or candidate rather than in favour of one) is highest in Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea.

Ideological revenge could explain why Tabachnyk is Minister of Education and Science in the Azarov government. Tabachnyk wrote last year that Galicians are not really ‘Ukrainians’, a position long held by only the most extreme Russian nationalists. Hostility to Western Ukrainians and diaspora Ukrainians (who mainly came from Western Ukraine) was a long staple of Soviet tirades against ‘bourgeois nationalism’. David Marples writes that Yanukovych’s, ‘appointment of Dmytro Tabachnyk as minister for science and education seemed calculated to inflame Western Ukrainians’ (Kyiv Post, 26 April).

Much of the desire for ideological revenge rests on the over-domination of nation-building issues in Yushchenko’s presidency. His January 2010 decree to honour Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Stepan Bandera crowned his presidency and provoked a counter-reaction from Eastern Ukraine that led to a higher vote for Yanukovych in the second round and the later over-turning of the decree in a Donetsk court. The timing of the decree was unfortunate, provocative and unnecessary.

The Azarov government is seeking to quickly move in many areas of ideological revenge. These include downplaying the 1933 holodomor as a Ukrainian genocide or even artificial famine that primarily affected Ukraine, removing quotas on using the Ukrainian language in film, television and other areas of culture, jointly re-writing history school textbooks with Russia, and introducing a more Sovietophile outlook on Ukrainian-Russian relations and Ukrainian history.

World War II is now to be officially described as the ‘Great Patriotic War’ and Russian troops participated in four parades in four Ukrainian cities on the 65th anniversary of the ending of the second world war. All of these steps constitute a counter-revolution not only against Yushchenko’s radical nation-building efforts but even against Kuchma’s more moderate nationality policies which were similar in content to his successor but were delivered with greater finesse.

Time Factor.

There is a time factor as Ukraine is a parliamentary republic (not presidential as was Russia when Putin came to power in March 2000). Ukraine will hold parliamentary elections in September 2012 and Yanukovych therefore needs to rapidly push through his domestic and foreign policies while he still has a window of opportunity. ‘Orange’ political forces won majorities in the March 2006 (i.e. Tymoshenko bloc [BYuT], Our Ukraine, Socialist Party) and September 2007 pre-term elections (i.e. BYuT, Our Ukraine) and could again win a majority in 2012 and in so doing take back control of the government. This would mean, for example, that in 2012 a new coalition could annul the new Black Sea Fleet agreement extending the Sevastopol base until 2042-2047.

Authoritarianism Through Conflict.

The most pessimistic reason could be that Yanukovych is seeking his own Putinesque way to autocratic consolidation. Yanukovych could be thinking that an autocracy is best built through conflict and confrontation where the opposition would be depicted as ‘destructive’ (a favourite Soviet phrase used repeatedly in Ukraine) and agents of
‘instability’. Yanukovych, in contrast, would be described as bringing ‘stability’ to Ukraine, increasing social welfare payments, keeping gas prices low for household utility bills and rebuilding the economy and thereby reducing unemployment. These were the ideological tenets found in Yanukovych’s 28 April appeal to Ukrainians in support of the Black Sea Fleet base treaty.

Putin built up Russia’s autocracy through conflict by reviving the Chechen separatist war and on the back of alleged terrorist attacks. In September 1999, terrorist explosions took place in four apartment blocks in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk killing 293 people and injuring 651.

The terrorist attacks were blamed on Chechen separatists but they seemed very much out of character and suspicion fell upon the Russian intelligence services after a similar bomb was found and defused in the Russian city of Ryazan on 23 September 1999. On the next day Federal Security Service Director Nikolai Patrushev announced that the Ryazan incident had been a ‘training exercise’.

The administrations policies undermine the national consensus on domestic and foreign policies makes little sense unless he has another agenda which could be to build a ‘managed democracy’. The model would be the close nexus of state-big business-politics-corruption found in his home region of Donetsk where the Party of Regions has monopoly power. Speaking to a conference on Ukraine at George Washington University in early April, University of Florida’s Paul D’Anieri did not see encouraging signs for democracy in Ukraine: ‘Will there be free and fair elections in 2015? It's early, but the signs aren't encouraging. Already it appears that Yanukovych seeks to eliminate political competition in Ukraine, and it is questionable whether there is any force powerful enough to stop him’.

The prosecutor-general’s office have launched criminal charges against the opposition for their the disturbances in parliament on 27 April when eggs were thrown, smoke bombs were let off and violence was extensive. Kuchma era criminal charges have also been revived against Tymoshenko. Criminal charges are also reportedly in the pipeline against members of the outgoing Tymoshenko government for alleged corruption (i.e. theft from the state budget). Is this the beginning of a clampdown on the opposition to pave the way for a Party of Regions sweep to a full take over of Ukraine’s political system in 2012?

This is damaging his born-again democratic credentials that American consultants have nurtured for the last five years, uniting the fractious opposition, leading to the most violent scenes ever in Ukraine’s parliament during the Black Sea Fleet treaty ratification, and deepening even further Ukraine’s regional divisions. Putin-style ‘salami tactics’, for example, would have moved slower and in the process encouraged further defections from the opposition to give the coalition a 300-constitutional majority by fall 2010. The Black Sea Fleet base treaty would not have been ratified by 236 votes without the support of sixteen BYuT and Our Ukraine defectors.

The extension of the Black Sea Fleet base inflamed Ukrainian and opposition opinion both because of how it was undertaken, the speed of the process (with only four working days between signing and ratification) and without parliamentary oversight or transparency. Three parliamentary committees on foreign policy and national security did not support the treaty.

Yanukovych might have been able to convince parliament to vote for a five year extension, as stipulated in Ukraine’s constitution, but not a thirty year transfer of Sevastopol to Russia. As Marples wrote in the Kyiv Post (26 April), ‘Yanukovych manifestly failed to negotiate on Ukraine's behalf. It is inconceivable why his starting point was not a five-year extension of the existing lease, which was stipulated as an option according to the 1997 agreement’.

Crossing further ‘red lines’ are inevitable. Yanukovych’s denial of the 1933 famine as a ‘genocide’ during his PACE speech on the same day as the Black Sea Fleet ratification was, ‘like pouring oil on an already simmering fire in Ukraine’s polarized politics’, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs David Kramer wrote in the Kyiv Post (28 April). The Party of Regions and Communist Party of Ukraine did not vote for the October 2006 law on the Ukrainian famine and have pledged to over-turn the law in parliament.

Conclusion

Is the Yanukovych administrations strategy to deliberately provoke violence and civil conflict in order to use this as an excuse for a crackdown on the opposition? Or, on the other hand, does the Yanukovych administration still does not understand that an explosion is possible by provoking violence and conflict unintentionally or, possibly, as part of an undisclosed game plan. The administration could be very well duped by its own failure to understand the popular and spontaneous (rather than organized and pre-planned) Orange Revolution or it could be simply counting on public apathy in politics that has led to a commonly held view of a ‘plague on all your houses’.

The Yanukovych administration could misjudge the popular mood by believing he will be faced by the apathetic 1990s in Ukraine rather than the mass opposition protests of 2000-2004. In mistakenly betting on apathy the authorities could unleash civil strife and political instability.

The 2004 Orange Revolution and Yushchenko’s election was meant to have transformed Ukraine but failed to do so. Today, many events look like déjà vu taken from Kuchma’s second term in office when Ukraine faced years of political instability. Yanukovych is already described as a ‘new dictator’ (shadow Prime Minister Serhiy Sobolyev) and the Yanukovych regime as a ‘return to Kuchmizm’ (Tymoshenko) and ‘totalitarianism’ (Yushchenko). Tymoshenko’s formation of Committee’s in Defence of Ukraine following the 26 April parliamentary riots bring back memories of her establishment of the Forum for National Salvation in February 2001 that united those in opposition to President Kuchma.

The first 100 days of the Yanukovych administration point to two conclusions. Before Ukraine can ever move forward it first needs to deal with its past and arrive at a consensus on national integration. National consensus cannot be imposed by either Lviv or Donetsk but has to be built around Kyiv. Peru, which experienced a similar tape scandal in the same year as Ukraine (2000), dealt with its scandal by indicting and eventually putting in prison the head of the intelligence services and other senior officials followed by former President Alberto Fujimoro after he returned from exile in Japan. Ukraine’s ruling elites have never been indicted for anything undertaken since the USSR disintegrated – the only ones to have gone to prison have been in Germany and the US.

Yushchenko failed to understand the need to deal with Ukraine’s past or how to integrate Ukraine and to follow through on pursuing criminal charges against the elites who had murdered journalists, abused their positions of power through massive corruption and theft of state property and organized mass election fraud. Today, Ukraine is feeling the consequences of the failure of the Yushchenko administration to deliver the promises of the Orange Revolution.

I am not sure what assertions I am making with no basis.

I apologize that politics enters into questions of religion and "Church News", but this is certainly the case in Russia as Stuart I believe has mentioned (caesaropapism). There is no clear border.

Should the Church support wholeheartedly the policies advocated by such a state. For instance, a Russian cabinet minister responsible for health in Russia just proclaimed that Russians should drink and smoke more, to help out the economy. For real. Has the Church no power to speak out against such inept and immoral advice from above? Or should the church itself become involved in the tobacco trade?

[quote]

You're more or less asserting the church is complicit in whatever the Russian government does that you feel is wrong (because there is no clear border between the two), and has no power to speak on issues or morality. It just follows along with whatever the government wishes.

You're painting an entire church with a broad brush.

I believe in freedom of religion; whether that's in Odessa, Kiev, New York or Riyadh. Suppression ennobles no one.

I have no idea why Yanukovych was so unacceptable to us in 2004, but his election now passes almost without note or concern. I disagree deeply with a number of things in regards to the Russian Federation. I disagree deeply with a number of things in regards to the United States. I place no faith in government to act in the interest of religion.

I would be wary of getting close to any side or party in Ukraine in regards to politics.

I believe in freedom of religion; whether that's in Odessa, Kiev, New York or Riyadh. Suppression ennobles no one.

First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.