Ukraine and Russia: At the crossroads

Despite mutual distrust, Ukraine’s incoming pro-Western
administration is keen to mend fences with Moscow. Will Moscow
switch into a “sulking empire” mode?, writes Ivan
Kolos in an article published
by Transitions Online.

It’s hard to imagine what more Vladimir Putin could have done to
aid Ukraine’s hapless former prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, in
his quest for the presidency. Two undignified pre-election runs to
Kyiv to sing the praises of Yanukovych on national TV and endure
his bumbling offers of candy at a military parade. Generous
concessions on energy trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
New ultraliberal travel regulations making it easier for Ukrainians
to stay in Moscow than for Russians themselves. A mighty spat with
the West over its “meddling” in the Ukrainian election. Putin’s own
re-election earlier in the year had hardly required so much
sacrifice. Add to that the lease of Russia’s hulking propaganda
machine and the Kremlin’s own spin doctors to the Yanukovych HQ,
plus Putin’s hurried congratulations after Yanukovych’s
now-discredited victory in the invalidated 21 November poll, and
the magnitude of Moscow’s humiliation becomes painfully
obvious.

Humiliation is something the ex-KGB man in the Kremlin neither
forgives nor forgets, as Georgia’s President Mikheil Saakashvili,
Putin’s second-biggest foreign policy fiasco in recent years, has
doubtless explained to Viktor Yushchenko during their lengthy
Christmas get-together in the Ukrainian Carpathians. Angry
anti-Western rhetoric that has flared up on Russian television and
scathing tones in Putin’s own comments about the “Orange
Revolution” show the depth of ill feeling in Moscow. The Russian
president is clearly miffed by the impudent talk of “exporting” the
revolution to his own domain one day, and ideas of a Western plot
against Russia (events in Ukraine being its latest manifestation)
have ceased to be the prerogative of wild-eyed
nationalists. 

But luckily for Yushchenko, Ukraine is not Georgia. With its
population of almost 50 million and a large ethnic-Russian
minority, strategic Russian transit pipelines and booming economy
with sizable Russian investments, Ukraine is simply too important
for the Kremlin to try and make it an example of what happens when
Russia doesn’t get its way in its “near-abroad.” 

The year ahead 

Which is not to say that it won’t try to make life as difficult
as it can for Yushchenko and his new administration. Yanukovych
admits now that the chances of his high-court bid to invalidate the
election result are slim (he will have a week to appeal once final
results are announced on 9 January), but the battle for who really
rules in Ukraine is far from over. Even in its watered-down form,
the constitutional reform, which Yushchenko had to accept as part
of a deal to ensure a fair re-run of the election on 26 December,
will hand much of his powers to parliament (starting either in
September 2005 or January 2006, depending on the progress of other
reform packages). And while in the existing parliament a strong
pro-Yushchenko majority has already sprung up on the ruins of the
old pro-Kuchma coalition, the outcome of the March 2006
parliamentary election is not a foregone conclusion. Making the
Yushchenko administration look incompetent and undermining its
attempts to produce a tangible change for the better in the year
that remains until the next election could be one way for Moscow to
ensure an anti-Yushchenko majority in the legislature and stymie
his pro-Western ambitions. 

After months of openly campaigning for Yanukovych, Moscow seems
finally to have dumped its former protege, and the Kremlin is now
stressing that it is ready to work with whomever the Ukrainian
people choose as their president. At a carefully orchestrated
year-end press conference, Putin even recalled that he worked well
with Yushchenko when Yushchenko was Kuchma’s prime minister, in
2000-2001. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov went so far as
to declare that Russia wouldn’t mind if Ukraine decided to join
NATO one day – much to the surprise of both Ukraine and NATO, no
doubt. 

But the Kremlin has opportunities galore to get the new
Ukrainian government’s attention, should it wander too far in a
Westerly direction. Turkmenistan’s recent ultimatum to
energy-dependent Ukraine on gas prices could have been the first
warning shot across the bow. Kyiv has had to accept a 30 percent
price hike – orchestrated perhaps by Moscow, some analysts say –
after the Turkmens flipped off the gas tap in the last days of
December. But even if the gas ultimatum was just a whim of the
capricious Turkmen dictator, it has served as an exquisitely timed
reminder to Ukraine’s president-elect that almost all of Ukraine’s
gas needs are supplied either directly by Russia or through Russian
pipelines. And Gazprom’s recent move to raise prices for Belarus,
neutralizing Moscow’s earlier decision not to levy the VAT on gas
exports to that country, suggests that Kyiv could be in for a
similar surprise. 

To read the full text of the article, visit the Transitions Online website.