GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS OF RUSSIA’S CONTROL OVER UKRAINE
Yuri Shymko
Toronto
As international leaders prepare to attend this year’s G8 and G20 Summits hosted by Canada, troubling events are emerging in Eastern Europe. Russia is steadily intensifying its economic and political stranglehold over its southern neighbour, Ukraine.
In November 2004, while in Kyiv as an international election observer, I witnessed the mass demonstrations of the Orange Revolution that brought a pro-Western President to power in Ukraine. After 13 years of nominal independence, Ukraine had finally wrestled itself away from Russia’s sphere of influence towards a fully sovereign democratic state eager to join Europe.
I never imagined that, barely six years later, the tide would take an extreme turn. Over the last month, thousands of people in both Canada and Ukraine have taken part in mass rallies condemning the most recent developments in Ukraine, where the policies of a newly elected pro-Russian President are paving the way towards the creation of a renewed Soviet Union and revamped Warsaw Pact.
Viktor Yanukovich, the Orange Revolution’s former leading adversary, essentially came to power this February having been elected by the descendents of those Russians who resettled the south-eastern regions of Ukraine after the native population of over six million was ethnically cleansed by the Holodomor, Stalin’s state enforced famine genocide of the 1930’s. It was Yanukovich’s pro-Russian Party of Regions that had abstained from a vote in Ukraine’s parliament in 2006 condemning Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainian people. Even today, Russia refuses to come to terms with its ethnocidal past by continually rebuffing its historic complicity in these crimes.
Edged on by Moscow, the policies of President Yanukovych, who obtained less than 50% of the vote in the second round of this year’s presidential elections, are moving Ukraine at an unprecedented speed back into Russia’s political, economic, military and cultural orb.
I share the outrage of the thousands of Ukrainian citizens who are responding to the call of Ukraine’s Joan of Arc, the charismatic former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose popularity is reminiscent of the late Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan. Tymoshenko has called on Yanukovych to stop usurping the state’s administrative resources towards the creation of a Putin-styled authoritarian regime and prevent the abdication of Ukraine’s national sovereignty.
The restoration of Russian hegemony over the entire region of the former Soviet republics not only threatens the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, it has serious global implications. The loss of Ukraine as a strategic cushion will tip the geopolitical balance of power between a resurgent authoritarian East and a dysfunctional democratic West. A former Soviet political prisoner and Ukrainian dissident, Sviatoslav Karavansky, recently wrote that by standing on the sidelines as mere indifferent spectators of the recent dramatic developments in Ukraine, the US and Europeans are in fact pushing Ukraine into the embrace of Russia.
Unless the members of the international community begin taking strong steps through direct dialogue and multilateral actions to challenge the undemocratic and unconstitutional policies of Yanukovych and protest Russia’s blatant interference in the domestic affairs of Ukraine, Western indifference may bring a heavy political cost.
Moscow is reasserting its imperial ambitions by actively promoting a Russian-dominated political union of former Soviet republics starting with Ukraine and Belarus. It has already begun negotiations for the creation of a Russian-led common market, a common customs union and possible common currency. But this is not all. Russian President Medvedev is now suggesting that Ukraine join the Russian version of NATO, namely the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) whose current 7 members include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
When Ukraine’s former pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko pressed for Ukraine’s membership in both NATO and the EU, his pleas fell on deaf ears, leaving Ukraine at the mercy of Russian political pressure and economic blackmail. I fear that Ukraine’s entry into CSTO will be rammed through Ukraine’s parliament the same way as the recent ratification to extend by another 25 years the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s presence in Ukraine.
As a former Canadian parliamentarian, I simply cannot fathom how the ratification of a 25 year extension of a major military treaty scheduled to expire in 7 years was passed in April by Ukraine’s parliament in exchange for allegedly cheaper Russian gas, without any parliamentary debate and in contradiction to the country’s own constitution which strictly forbids the stationing of foreign military bases on its territory. Add to this Russia’s recent announcement that its secret service, the FSB, plans to re-launch operations in Sevastopol, and the devastating consequences for European security become obvious.
Russia’s effective use of its vast oil and gas resources as the weapon of choice for economic blackmail was a major factor in gaining military security concessions from Ukraine. Just as food was used as a terror weapon to subdue Ukraine in the last century, Russia is using the energy weapon today to subvert Ukraine’s national security, forcing it to relinquish all of its nuclear fissionable material, its aircraft building industry and other strategic assets to Russia.
Moscow is now proposing that Russia’s state-owned energy corporation, Gazprom, take over Ukraine’s state energy company, Naftogaz, whose pipeline transports 80% of the natural gas to the countries of the European Union.
In his recent online article in the National Review, George Weigel warned that “if Naftogaz were to merge into Gazprom, the implications for Europe’s energy security and for a revanchist Russia’s capacity to work its will with impunity in the old Lenin/Stalin empire and beyond” would have grave consequences.
Derek Fraser, Canada’s former Ambassador to Ukraine, stated in a recent article from the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria that Ukraine’s current Cabinet “has a reputation for being Russophile, even Sovietophile and Ukrainophobe. The Vice Prime Minister for Security Affairs, the Minister of Defence and the Foreign Minister were appointed on the basis of Russian recommendations.” He went on to point out that “twelve of the 29 ministers in Ukraine’s Cabinet have criminal records.”
It is therefore not surprising that, with Moscow’s encouragement, among the new Ukrainian government’s first decisions was the closure of its Human Rights section by the Ministry of the Interior and the Security Service’s ban on access to its Archives on Soviet-era and KGB files. After first issuing presidential awards to Fidel Castro and his brother Raoul on March 27, President Yanukovych personally abolished the National Commission on Freedom of Speech and ordered a review of the continued operation of the Ukrainian National Memory Institute, a leading research agency studying past Soviet repressions.
Outraged Ukrainians recently learned that their Minister of Education, Dmytro Tabachnyk, justified the erection of monuments to Joseph Stalin as a prerogative of local municipalities. He abolished the standardized tests for university admissions, paving the way for state-controlled entrance rules fashioned by bribes and political favours, and ordered the rewriting of modern Ukrainian history textbooks in collaboration with Russian historians.
Reporters without Borders and the European Federation of Journalists recently protested the harassment of Ukrainian journalists and opposition politicians, the curtailment of freedom of speech, and attempts to ban public rallies. In fact, Ukraine’s two independent television channels— TVi and Channel 5— may lose their broadcast frequencies as government officials this week began using administrative courts and the nation’s media regulatory agency to squash the operations of the country’s independent media outlets. Ironically, the head of Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU), Valery Khoroshkovsky, co-owner of the pro-government group of channels, is said to be behind the crackdown on independent journalists.
In what appears to be a coordinated effort, this week Russia’s parliament voted to boost the powers of the FSB— the Russian successor to the Soviet KGB. The new law would allow the Russian security service to seize anyone it believes “are about to commit a crime or are creating the conditions for committing a crime”. New York-based Human Rights Watch and other human rights groups believe that the law is aimed at detaining opposition activists and independent journalists, bringing Russia one step closer to a police state.
And how has the West reacted to these troubling events? To date, Moscow has been given a free pass by the Obama administration in the hopes that Russia will press Iran to give-up its nuclear ambitions. Russia has been courting the US, by posing as an ally of the West in the fight against international terrorism. The position is ironic given Moscow’s track record of assassinating journalists in Moscow and poisoning its exiles in London.
With the US mired in Iraq and Afghanistan and the EU on the brink of fiscal implosion, Russia’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs has yet to be chastised by the international community. European and American indifference to the current developments in Eastern Europe may cost Ukraine its nascent democracy, its territorial integrity, and ultimately its national sovereignty. The loss of Ukraine as a strategic buffer state will have far-reaching global consequences.
Nineteen years ago over 90% of Ukraine’s population, irrespective of race, ethnicity or religion, voted to live within an independent, democratic state— a choice which the Russian ruling elite find difficult to accept to this day. Canada was the first Western country to recognize Ukraine’s independence. It has invested Canadian know-how and money to help Ukraine grow its democracy and establish a civil society guided by the force of law rather than the law of force.
As the host of this year’s G8 and G20 summits, Canada must take a clear and principled stand. The Russian government needs to hear that its energy blackmail and political interference in Ukraine will not be tolerated. Likewise, the Europeans must recognize that the failure to provide international guarantees to safeguard Ukraine’s democracy and independence may irreversibly destabilize the geo-political balance of power in the region for decades to come.
Yuri Shymko is a former Canadian Member of Parliament and Past President of the Ukrainian World Congress.
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