Duma Dep accuses Western Intelligence in Ukraine

[Moses]

A State Duma deputy has accused Western intelligence of financing Ukrainian liberal challenger Viktor Yushchenko’s campaign, and asked the Duma to address Ukraine’s parliament to ignore “provocations”.

Alexei Ostrovsky, from the nationalist LDPR party, said that a battle is going on in Ukraine “not for president, but for a NATO military base there,” the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

He asked the Duma to address Ukraine’s Rada, which is convening Tuesday to dispute election results handing victory to pro-Moscow Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, to ignore “provocations from Western special services”.

However, Duma deputies, led by a communist MP, rejected the initiative, saying it was too early to consider such an address. Only 48 deputies voted for the initiative, with a necessary minimum of 226 votes for it to pass.

CIS monitors had earlier called the Ukrainian elections “completely transparent”, after western monitors, including the United States, the EU, and OSCE, panned the elections on allegations of fraud, saying they did not meet democratic standards.

President Vladimir Putin, however, has congratulated Yanukovich — whom he endorsed — with victory despite the disputed results and challenger Yushchenko’s claims that he won.

www.mosnews.com/news/2004/11/23/dumaukraine.shtml

[Moses]

Ukraine Opposition Masses at President's Office

story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=1&u=/nm/20041123/ts_nm/ukraine_dc

 Top Stories - Reuters

By Yuri Kulikov

KIEV (Reuters) - Thousands of Ukrainian opposition supporters massed near the president's office Tuesday seeking to install their leader in power in defiance of election results they see as rigged by a pro-Moscow government.

Hours earlier, pro-Western opposition head Viktor Yushchenko had symbolically taken the oath of office as 200,000 rallied at parliament in driving snow and freezing temperatures. [Why didn't Gore do this? NED apparently has other opposition groups doing it]


The act carried no legal weight but marked a blunt challenge to the establishment figure who according to official results won the election, prime minister Viktor Yanukovich. It will also be viewed with deep concern by Yanukovich's Kremlin backers.


The crowd, chanting "Yushchenko! Yushchenko!," moved in a sea of orange opposition flags and banners toward the presidential offices, occupied by outgoing president Leonid Kuchma, and stopped at a cordon of riot police some distance from the building.


In scenes reminiscent of protests that brought the resignation of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze exactly a year ago, protesters standing in heavy late evening snow urged police to join the demonstration.


"I am asking you, the police, to be on the side of citizens of Ukraine!" said firebrand opposition deputy Yulia Tymoshenko.


She then crossed the cordon and talked with officers, assuring them there would be no attempt to storm the building.


"We are going to go to the presidential administration in a peaceful way, without breaking anything," Tymoshenko, a close Yushchenko aide, told the crowd as it set off for the office. "And either they will give up their power, or we will take it."


Yushchenko has accused authorities of staging mass fraud to deny him victory in Sunday's run-off.


Kuchma, who endorsed his prime minister in the election, broke two days of silence to urge both candidates to talk. He warned Western countries that their criticism of election procedures could stoke tension in Ukraine.


Russian President Vladimir Putin, a supporter of Yanukovich, called for a non-violent solution of the crisis within the framework of the law.


The crisis highlights the stark division in Ukraine between the western-leaning west of the country and the Russian-speaking industrial east that sympathizes with the pro-Moscow Yanukovich.


Yushchenko's dramatic gesture declaring himself president came after parliament's speaker hurriedly closed a tumultuous session to ensure that no constitutional rules were violated. No other decision was taken on the disputed election outcome.


Placing his hand on a bible as his allies in the chamber sang the national anthem, he read the oath, opened a window in the building and spoke to supporters outside.


SUPPORTERS TO PRESIDENT'S OFFICE, STADIUM


Yushchenko told parliament that Ukraine, convulsed by two days of protests backing him in Kiev and in nationalist western Ukraine, "is on the brink of civil conflict."


At a session boycotted by the prime minister's allies, he accused Kuchma and Yanukovich of direct responsibility for electoral fraud. Liberals had stood up one after the other in the chamber and urged Yushchenko to proceed with the oath.

 <br>

Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn had opened the debate by warning that Ukraine was "sliding toward the abyss.

"It is amoral and criminal to pretend nothing is happening in the country," he told deputies.

Kuchma's statement, his first since the run-off, proposed "consultations between participants in the election process."

Statements by the European Union and other countries critical of the vote "could lead to a deterioration of the situation in Ukraine."

U.S. and Western observers say the second round run-off presidential vote fell far short of international standards.

Washington warned of punitive measures if the Kiev leadership failed to investigate allegations of vote-rigging and the European Union described the vote as "fraudulent."

In Brussels, the European parliament's chief observer said Sunday's run-off defied common sense and had more in common with a North Korean election.

Economists said Ukraine, which has one of Europe's fastest-growing economies, could suffer a painful slump if the political split deepens.

Yanukovich has not declared victory. But he virtually assumed the mantle of president Monday by appearing on television beside the national flag to denounce Yushchenko and his supporters.

[Moses]

www.truthout.org/docs_04/112804A.shtml

 U.S. Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev
    By Ian Traynor
    The Guardian U.K.

    Friday 26 November 2004

    With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

    Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilized by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.

    But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes.

    Funded and organized by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organizations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

    Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.

    Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.

    That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.

    But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.

    The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.

    In the center of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.

    They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora, meaning high time. Otpor also had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in Serbia in 2000 - the two words "gotov je", meaning "he's finished", a reference to Milosevic. A logo of a black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful marketing.

    In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking clock, also signaling that the Kuchma regime's days are numbered.

    Stickers, spray paint and websites are the young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy mocking the regime have been hugely successful in puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful.

    Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr. Saakashvili traveled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organized the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs traveling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organized the overthrow from neighboring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.

    In recent weeks, several Serbs traveled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.

    The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.

    US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organize focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.

    The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.

    In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.

    In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.

    Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organizing and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

    Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.

    There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.

    Freedom House and the Democratic party's NDI helped fund and organize the "largest civil regional election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained observers. They also organized exit polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Mr. Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.

    The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.

    The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.

    In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organize mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.

    If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.

    The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.

 

[Moses]

Western Aggression
    By John Laughland
    The Spectator U.K.

    Friday 05 November 2004

How the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine's elections.

    A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.'

    It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by America as the country's next president: the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko supporters, druggy skinheads from Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth organization, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (Unso), a semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic.

    It is because of this ideological presupposition that Anglo-Saxon reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairytale about a struggle between a brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the present Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale are suppressed. Thus a story has been widely circulated that Yushchenko was poisoned during the electoral campaign, the fantasy being that the government was trying to bump him off. But no British or American news outlet has reported the interview by the chief physician of the Vienna clinic which treated Yushchenko for his unexplained illness. The clinic released a report declaring there to be no evidence of poisoning, after which, said the chief physician, he was subjected to such intimidation by Yushchenko's entourage - who wanted him to change the report - that he was forced to seek police protection.

    It has also been repeatedly alleged that foreign observers found the elections fraught with violations committed by the government. In fact, this is exclusively the view of highly politicized Western governmental organizations like the OSCE - a body which is notorious for the fraudulent nature of its own reports, and which in any case came to this conclusion before the poll had even taken place - and of bogus NGOs, such as the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a front organization exclusively funded by Western (mainly American) government bodies and think-tanks, and clearly allied with Yushchenko. Because they speak English, the political activists in such organizations can easily nobble Anglophone Western reporters.

    Contrary allegations - such as those of fraud committed by Yushchenko-supporting local authorities in western Ukraine, carefully detailed by Russian election observers but available only in Russian - go unreported. So too does evidence of crude intimidation made by Yushchenko supporters against election officials. The depiction is so skewed that Yushchenko is presented as a pro-Western free-marketeer, even though his fief in western Ukraine is an economic wasteland; while Yanukovych is presented as pro-Russian and statist, even though his electoral campaign is based on deregulation and the economy has been growing at an impressive clip. The cleanliness and prosperity of Kiev and other cities have improved noticeably.

    There is, however, one thing which separates the two main candidates, and which explains the West's determination to shoo in Yushchenko: Nato. Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining; Yushchenko is in favor. The West wants Ukraine in Nato to weaken Russia geopolitically and to have a new big client state for expensive Western weaponry, whose manufacturers fund so much of the US political process.

    Yanukovych has also promised to promote Russian back to the status of second state language. Since most Ukrainian citizens speak Russian, since Kiev is the historic birthplace of Christian Russia, and since the current legislation forces tens of millions of Russians to Ukrainianise their names, this is hardly unreasonable. The continued artificial imposition of Ukrainian as the state language - started under the Soviets and intensified after the fall of communism - will be a further factor in ripping Ukraine's Russophone citizens away from Russia proper. That is why the West wants it.

 

[Moses]

www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360297,00.html

Ukraine's postmodern coup d'etat

Yushchenko got the US nod, and money flooded in to his supporters

Jonathan Steele
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian

Oranges can often be bitter, and the mass street protests now going on in Ukraine may not be quite as sweet as their supporters claim.

For one thing the demonstrators do not reflect nationwide sentiments. Ukraine is riven by deep historical, religious and linguistic divisions. The crowds in the street include a large contingent from western Ukraine, which has never felt comfortable with rule from Kiev, let alone from people associated with eastern Ukraine, the home-base of Viktor Yanukovich, the disputed president-elect.

Their traditions are not always pleasant. Some protesters have been chanting nationalistic and secessionist songs from the anti-semitic years of the second world war.

Nor are we watching a struggle between freedom and authoritarianism as is romantically alleged. Viktor Yushchenko, who claims to have won Sunday's election, served as prime minister under the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma, and some of his backers are also linked to the brutal industrial clans who manipulated Ukraine's post-Soviet privatisation.

On some issues Yushchenko may be a better potential president than Yanukovich, but to suggest he would provide a sea-change in Ukrainian politics and economic management is naive. Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll.

Countless elections in the post-Soviet space have been manipulated to a degree which probably reversed the result, usually by unfair use of state television, and sometimes by direct ballot rigging. Boris Yeltsin's constitutional referendum in Russia in 1993 and his re-election in 1996 were early cases. Azerbaijan's presidential vote last year was also highly suspicious.


Yet after none of those polls did the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the main international observer body, or the US and other western governments, make the furious noise they are producing today. The decision to protest appears to depend mainly on realpolitik and whether the challengers or the incumbent are considered more "pro-western" or "pro-market".

In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the youth organisation, Pora, to various opposition websites. More provocatively, the US and other western embassies paid for exit polls, prompting Russia to do likewise, though apparently to a lesser extent.

The US's own election this month showed how wrong exit polls can be. But they provide a powerful mobilising effect, making it easier to persuade people to mount civil disobedience or seize public buildings on the grounds the election must have been stolen if the official results diverge.

Intervening in foreign elections, under the guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the run-up to the postmodern coup d'etat, the CIA-sponsored third world uprising of cold war days adapted to post-Soviet conditions. Instruments of democracy are used selectively to topple unpopular dictators, once a successor candidate or regime has been groomed.

In Ukraine's case this is playing with fire. Not only is the country geographically and culturally divided - a recipe for partition or even civil war - it is also an important neighbour to Russia. Putin has been clumsy, but to accuse Russia of imperialism because it shows close interest in adjoining states and the Russian-speaking minorities who live there is a wild exaggeration.

Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by the US, which refuses to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet republic to its side. The EU should have none of this. Many Ukrainians certainly want a more democratic system. Putin is not inherently against this, however authoritarian he is in his own country. What concerns him is instability, the threat of anti-Russian regimes on his borders, and American mischief.

The EU should therefore press for a compromise in Kiev, which might include power-sharing. More importantly, it should give Ukraine the option of future membership rather than the feeble "action plan" of cooperation currently on offer. This would set Ukraine on a surer path to irreversible reform than anything that either Yushchenko or Yanukovich may promise.

Sceptics wonder where the EU's enlargement will end, but Ukraine is undoubtedly a European nation in a way that the states of the Caucasus, of central Asia and of north Africa are not.

The EU must also make a public statement that it sees no value in Nato membership for Ukraine, and those EU members who belong to Nato will not support it. At a stroke this would calm Russia's legitimate fears and send a signal to Washington not to go on inflaming a purely European issue.

[e-mail]

[Moses]

The West closes its eyes to the truth in Ukraine
November 30, 2004

www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/The-West-closes-its-eyes-to-the-truth-in-Ukraine/2004/11/29/1101577415208.html

Did you know enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the Prime Minister, asks John Laughland.

There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the right stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. In the past week, two British newspapers - the anti-Iraq war Independent and the pro-Iraq war Telegraph - excitedly announced a "revolution" in Ukraine, while stateside, the right-wing Washington Times welcomed "the people versus the power".

Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or Ukraine now, the Western media regularly peddle the same fairytale about how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime, simply by attending a rock concert in a central square. Two million anti-war demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be "the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and government institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.

The Western imagination is now so gripped by its own mythology of popular revolution that we have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double standards in media reporting. Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in support of the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are rarely shown on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters are denigrated as having been "bussed in". The demonstrations in favour of Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.

Or again, we are told that a 96 per cent turnout in Donetsk, the home town of Viktor Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of more than 80 per cent in areas that support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores for Yushchenko of well over 90 per cent in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved in only two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54 per cent, the Western-backed President of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially polled 96.24 per cent of the vote in his country in January. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying that it "brought the country closer to meeting international standards".
We have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double standards in media reporting.

The blindness extends even to the posters that the "pro-democracy" group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents.

Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in Nazi-occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the Red Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed without comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of students having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister organisations in Serbia and Georgia - Pora is an organisation created and financed by Washington.

It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two members of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika. They were unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last year Yushchenko and his allies stood up for the Socialist party newspaper, Silski Visti, after it ran an anti-Semitic article claiming that Jews had invaded Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941.

On September 19, 2004, Yushchenko's ally, Alexander Moroz, told JTA-Global Jewish News: "I have defended Silski Visti and will continue to do so. I personally think the argument . . . citing 400,000 Jews in the SS is incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all the facts."

Yushchenko and Moroz, meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as evidence of the Government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other country, support for anti-Semites would be shocking; in this case, our media do not even mention it.

Voters in the United States, Britain and Australia have witnessed their governments lying brazenly about Iraq for more than a year in the run-up to war, and with impunity. This is an enormous dysfunction in our own so-called democratic system. Our tendency to paint political fantasies onto countries such as Ukraine that are tabula rasa for us, and to present the West as a fairy godmother swooping in to save the day, is not only a way to salve a guilty conscience about our own political shortcomings; it also blinds us to the reality of continued brazen Western intervention in the democratic politics of other countries.

John Laughland is a trustee of www.oscewatch.org and an associate of www.sandersresearch.com

[Moses]

[Moses]

November 29, 2004
The Yushchenko Mythos
Don't believe the U.S. government's fairy tale about what's happening in Ukraine
by Justin Raimondo
According to the U.S. government, and commentators on the left as well as the (neoconservative) right, the crisis in the Ukraine is a clear-cut case of "democracy" versus authoritarianism, "the people" versus "the oligarchs," and the forces of enlightened Europhilia up against the sinister specter of a resurgent Russia and a revivified KGB.

The only problem with this narrative is that it is unmitigated bunk.

Let's start with the central figures in this drama: the two Viktors – Yushchenko and Yanukovich. To begin with, you'll note that the former has a website in English, while the latter's site is only in the native Ukrainian and Russian. Yushchenko's audience is primarily the West, while Yanukovich is speaking to his own people. Right off the bat, the line of demarcation is drawn.

According to the conventional wisdom, Yanukovich is a dark demonic figure, a Soviet-type bureaucrat whose ties to Russia and the eastern power base of the ruling elite, automatically make him the bad guy. Besides that, we are told, Yanukovich is a man with a "criminal record," who served two jail terms. What they don't tell you is that Yanukovich was jailed by the Soviet regime on charges of robbery and assault. As the Los Angeles Times noted:

"A biography distributed on behalf of Yanukovich says that 'having suffered through a very tragic and tough childhood . . . the prime minister acknowledges regrettable youthful indiscretions, resulting in criminal charges that were eventually overturned by a Ukrainian court.'"

On the other hand, Yushchenko's indiscretions – which are not being reported in the Western media at all – were neither youthful nor the occasion for his public repentance. And if a youthful Yanukovich held up a Ukrainian gas station or knocked someone upside the head and took his wallet, Yushchenko was a key figure in a conspiracy to defraud the West of over $600 million.

The idea that Yushchenko is some kind of outsider, whose victory will cause the fresh winds of free-market reform to blow through the sealed chamber of corruption that is the Ukrainian economy is another Western fairy tale that has no basis in reality. Yushie is a key figure in the oligarchic system of "crony capitalism" that has enriched the few at the expense of the many since the fall of the USSR. He rose to power – as head of the Ukrainian central bank through a good deal of the 1990s, and then as prime minister in the thuggish Leonid Kuchma's government in 1999 – on account of the power of the oligarchs. These "entrepreneurs" who made their fortunes on the strength of their connections to the Communist apparatus control the commanding heights of the Ukrainian economy, and what is happening today in the Ukraine is a civil war involving the various oligarchic clans. As a Carnegie study of the Ukrainian political landscape by Anders Aslund puts it:

"In Russia, the financial-industrial groups provide financing to various parties and to the government. In Ukraine, the economic-political groups rather tend to own political parties. Lazarenko and Timoshenko created the parliamentary party Hromada, as a company party of the Unified Energy Systems. Vadim Rabinovich has reportedly 'bought' the Green Party. Surkis and Medevedchuk reportedly own the United Social Democratic Party. However, Bakai, Pinchuk and the Franchuks support Kuchma directly and possibly his party the National-Democratic Party. Characteristically, all these oligarchic parties are considered centrist, that is, always prepared to make a deal without any real ideology."

Yushchenko is a creature of this system, and his tenure at the National Bank of the Ukraine was marked by the corruption so characteristic of the political culture: a scandal involving falsification of the country's credit ledger – essentially lying to the International Monetary Fund about the quantity of Ukrainian cash reserves. As the Financial Times reports:

"Under his control, the bank was involved in a damaging row with the International Monetary Fund over the use of IMF loans to falsify the country's credit position - allowing some politicians, but not Mr Yushchenko, to benefit personally. He survived the ensuing scandal."

A PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) audit confirmed the suspicions of IMF officials that Western lenders have been systematically deceived by Yushchenko's NBU:

"By giving a misleading impression of the size of Ukraine's reserves, the NBU's reserve management practices may have allowed Ukraine to receive as many as three disbursements under the stand-by arrangement in effect at that time that it might not otherwise have been able to obtain. … The three disbursements in question that would have been affected by the transactions examined in the PwC report were based on October, November, and December 1997 figures. They total SDR 145 million (about US$200 million)."

What happened to all that money? Pavlo Lazarenko knows, and he hasn't been shy about telling us what he knows. But is anybody listening?

According to Lazarenko – formerly prime minister, and a key figure in the oligarchy – $613 million of the IMF's money was embezzled and then laundered in December 1997. Like many other Soviet era bureaucrats, Lazarenko took advantage of the extensive network of overseas secret accounts established by the nomenklatura once the old Soviet Union started to unravel. With state funds secreted abroad, the oligarchs bought up the remnants of the old state industries, and divided the economic assets among themselves. Lazarenko was the chief patron of one of Yushchenko's biggest supporters, Yuliya Timoshenko of the United Energy Systems of the Ukraine (UESU), who made fantastic profits at a time of economic recession. However, Ms. Timoshenko, and her fellow oligarchs, as Alexander's Gas & Oil Connections explains,

"Could realize these profits only with the help of state support. … The amount of money involved has been highlighted by the Lazarenko affair. According to a report by the Financial Times, Pavlo Lazarenko, who was Ukraine's prime minister in 1996-97, received at least $ 72 mm in bribe money from gas importer UESU. In return, Lazarenko helped UESU to become one of Ukraine's leading companies with an annual turnover of $ 10 billion."

"When Lazarenko was sacked as prime minister, his successor Valery Pustovoitenko started a comprehensive investigation into the business of UESU, which led to the first accusations. In December of 1998, Lazarenko was arrested in Switzerland on charges of money laundering. He fled to the United States, where he was again arrested and charged with the laundering of $ 114 mm received as bribe money during his time in office.

"This June, while still being held in the United States, Lazarenko was sentenced for money laundering in Switzerland. Yuliya Timoshenko, who was president of UESU when Lazarenko was prime minister, has so far avoided criminal prosecution. In 1997, she left the company and went into politics."

(continued)

[Moses]

Ms. Timoshenko went on to become a deputy prime minister, in 1999, with special authority over energy matters. Her husband, still a member of the board of UESU, was arrested on charges of embezzlement of state property. Ms. Timoshenko, too, was arrested, and – after much posing and posturing as a "political prisoner" – was freed.

It is entirely appropriate that the "gas princess," as Ms. Timoshenko is known, should become the La Passionaria of Ukraine's phony "velvet revolution." As she leaps atop the stage at the massive rallies taking place in the middle of Kiev, she speaks with Amazonian forcefulness and the authority of someone used to being obeyed, as The Australian reports: (“Gas Princess Fires up Crowd”)

"'Form a column and come with us to the presidency,' she shouted to a crowd on Wednesday. 'Once we arrive at the presidency, we won't leave until Yushchenko enters it as the new Ukrainian president and occupies his post.'"

The Lazarenko-Timoshenko wing of the oligarchy is naturally grateful to Yushie – after all, he fronted for them in bilking the IMF. Now they are paying him back with their fulsome support. This isn't the struggle of valiant pro-Western "democrats" versus sinister pro-Russian neo-communists: Timoshenko's histrionics represent a falling out among thieves.

In any case, from the Gas Princess to the Boadicea of the "democracy" movement in Ukraine is a fanciful transformation, at best, but Western propagandists are counting on the American public's ignorance of the Ukrainian scene to pull off one of the biggest frauds since the selling of convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi as the Iraqi George Washington.

Few remember now that one of the alleged economic benefits of the "cakewalk" war was supposed to have been a huge drop in the price of oil: Iraq would be pumping as much and as fast as required by Washington, and the profits were going to finance the reconstruction. Well, that didn't exactly work out, now did it? So our grand strategists in Washington have turned to the legendary Caspian "Silk Road" to oil riches, reviving the dream of a Trans-Caucasian oil pipeline that will fill the gas tanks of Europe, bring down prices rapidly – and hand over control of much of the world's hydrocarbons to U.S. corporate interests and their allies.

Forget all this melodramatic folderol about Ukraine's "orange revolution" – and follow the money. The mythologizing of the Ukrainian "democratic" opposition serves certain Western economic interests, as John Laughland has pointed out:

"Efforts are being redoubled to crank into action the various pipelines which are supposed to transport Caspian oil to Western markets. One of these is the Brody pipeline which runs between the Ukrainian town of that name and the Black Sea port of Odessa (a Russian city but also in Ukraine). The Brody pipeline was initially supposed to take US-controlled Caspian oil to Western markets, but it has instead been pumping Russia oil, something the Americans do not like.

"So the New World Order strategists are determined to put their man in control of Ukraine, at the presidential election on 31st October. Huge influence, and presumably money, is being pumped in to ensure a victory for Victor Yushchenko. Paul Wolfowitz said in Warsaw on 5th October that Ukraine should join NATO. Mark Brzezinski and Richard Holbrooke have rattled their sabers over Ukraine, and Anders Aslund, the architect of Yelstin's mass larceny, has eloquently outlined the West's strategic interest in that country.

"These national strategic interests are, as ever, supported by the private interests of the powerful people lobbying for this new anti-Putin policy. They include people like David Owen and Jacob Rothschild: the former is Yukos' representative in Britain, the latter put up much of Khodorkovsky's original money, and sits (together with Henry Kissinger) on the board of the Open Russia Foundation, a Yukos front. They also include Anders Aslund, one of the signatories of the AEI's Open Letter, who works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is funded by Yukos, Conoco Phillips – the strategic ally of Chevron, on whose board Condoleezza Rice sat for many years – has recently announced a "strategic alliance" with Lukoil, the second largest private oil company in the world, and Conoco Phillips is said to want a controlling stake in the Russian company. Before Khodorkovsky's arrest, indeed, it was said that he wanted to sell Yukos to an American company."

The bottom line is that our oligarchs have allied with a faction of Ukrainian oligarchs, who have agreed to add Ukraine to the European Union, sabotage the free trade zone recently established between the pro-Russian nations of the former Soviet Union, and, most important of all, join NATO. The Yushchenko-Timoshenko forces want to align with Georgia, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Moldova (the other nations in the GUUAM configuration of junior league NATO aspirants) in erecting a ring of iron around Putin and the former Soviet Union. U.S. troops are already in Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. How long before they are in Kiev, training "President" Yushchenko's NATO-ized military in the use of American equipment – and advising a spiffed-up Ukrainian military within striking distance of the Kremlin?

After all, as Jonathan Steele points out in the Guardian, American "advisors" have been directing and funding the entire Yushchenko operation, just as they did in the former Yugoslavia, with money pouring in not only from the U.S. Treasury but also from billionaire George Soros, who has his own interests in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. According to the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Research (UCPER), a poll of the mostly pro-Yushchenko Ukrainian NGOs reveals that foreign sponsors pick up 60 percent of the tab, including:

"'Vidrodzhenya' (Revival) sponsored by George Soros - 36.3%, 'Freedom House' (the U.S.) - 22.7%, 'Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative' - 22.7%, USAID - 22.7%, National Endowment for Democracy (the U.S.) - 18.2%, the World Bank - 13.6% (the total percentage exceeding 100%, since the respondents often named several sponsors)."

Ms. Timoshenko, who boasts of having a fleet of six jets at her disposal, no doubt picks up the rest.

We are being sold a bill of goods, and, upon close inspection, they turn out to be pretty darn shoddy. Yushchenko is no more the "democratic" savior of Ukraine than the Gas Princess is a paragon of idealism and Western-style "free-market" reform. Like Yushie, the Robber Baroness of crony capitalism is a symbol, not of "democracy," but of the gullibility of Western public opinion when faced with a slick public-relations campaign – and a compliant media that goes for attractive narratives which mesh neatly with their ideological presumptions.

(continued)

[Moses]

The complex web of lies that make up the Yushchenko mythos requires extensive debunking, and one could write a good-sized book on the subject, but a matter that needs to be cleared up at once is the story about Yushchenko's alleged "poisoning" – presumably at the hands of the KGB. The internet is filled with before-and-after pictures of the once-handsome Yushie: the sight of his puffy and ravaged face, pitted with unappetizing pustules, is not a pretty sight to see. But what is the evidence that he's been poisoned by the pro-Yanukovich forces? There is none. As the New York Times reported on September 29 :

"An Austrian hospital that recently treated Viktor A. Yushchenko, the Ukrainian presidential candidate and opposition leader, said Tuesday that accusations that he had been poisoned were baseless."

The hospital's announcement was the occasion for death threats directed at the team of doctors involved, and the staff wisely retreated to a position of official agnosticism on the question of what caused Yushchenko's transformation from a prince into a toad. After all, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who served on a commission investigating the incident, and who had publicly dismissed the idea of Yushchenko's "poisoning," had a land mine placed outside his home.

The "poisoning" of Yushchenko is a cock-and-bull story. As a news story in the Globe and Mail pointed out:

"The problem for conspiracy theorists is that a variety of standard laboratory tests should have turned up signs of such drugs in blood, hair or tissue samples in relatively short order."

Not that they are letting a few facts get in the way. Propaganda doesn't require facts – only a gullible public and constant repetition. If these techniques are all-too-familiar, then they ought to be: isn't this how we got bamboozled into the Iraqi quagmire, buying into a narrative of "heroic" "pro-democracy" dissidents pushing back the frontiers of liberty, with the U.S. by their side?

As the worst president ever once put it:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee – I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can't get fooled again."

The neocons are letting the Arab quagmire simmer, hoping that the Iraqi insurgency can be tamped down with the assistance of a Shi'ite majority government supported by the mainstream clerics and propped up by a growing indigenous military force acting in tandem with less-visible U.S. forces, a plan of dubious prospects. In any event, the Ukrainian events have given them the opportunity to move on another front while movement in the Iraqi theater is seemingly stalled.

The campaign against Vladimir Putin as the latest incarnation of Stalin has been going on for quite some time, its most recent crescendo having been reached with a neocon publicity campaign on behalf of "poor little Chechnya," as well as complaints about the uniformity of opinion in the Russian media – this, coming from the same crowd who regularly denounce the supposedly "antiwar" media as a "fifth column"! But fronting for the Chechens is another kind of hypocrisy altogether. That they are willing to bloc with Islamist terrorists allied with Osama bin Laden against Putin, and Russia, underscores their determination in pursuit of their latest victim. Russia is the latest front in what the more perfervid neocons call "World War IV," and Ukraine is the first battlefield, but not likely to be the last. John Laughland put it well:

"Chechnya borders Georgia, and Georgia, like Azerbaijan, is on the fast track to join NATO. There are already hundreds of US troops in Georgia, training the local forces. They are there for two reasons: first, to protect the US-built Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline; secondly – and this follows from the first – to assist Georgia in recuperating her two secessionist territories, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It will not do to have Russia anywhere close to the pipeline, and she has troops in both these areas. Pushing Russia comprehensively out of the Caucasus, and humiliating her, requires victory for the Chechens. An independent Chechnya may also be the prelude to the longer-term break-up of Russia herself: the CIA predicted that oil-rich Siberia might escape Moscow's control in its report, Global Trends 2015, published in April."

Russia, the Middle East, the Trans-Caucasus, and even China – there is no limit to the ambition of the neocons, which surpasses the dreams of Alexander – and the hubris of Icarus.

I might add that the true politics of the "liberal" opposition are revealed in their response to the prospect that the eastern pro-Yanukovich portion of the country (which is far richer, and more industrialized, than the western region) might secede. Already the Easterners – culturally and temperamentally close to our "red" states – are holding assemblies in major cities calling for autonomy. The reaction from Yushchenko:

"Those who are calling for separatism are committing crimes and will definitely receive severe punishment."

Thugs always revert to form. The prince becomes a toad – and, no, I seriously doubt that Yushie's physical deterioration has anything to do with a nefarious plot by Putin's KGB against his good looks. Instead, let me suggest an alternative theory, one not contradicted by expert medical testimony – and the account of a parliamentary inquiry – and it is this: perhaps the Faustian deal that Yushchenko made with the U.S. government has taken its toll, and, as in the dramatic climax of Oscar Wilde's famous tale, "The Picture of Dorian Grey," his sins are being visited on his once-handsome visage, ravaging it – and revealing his inner soul.

Just a theory, mind you.

(END)

[Moses]

U.S.-Russia Business Council. You need a password to find out who sits on their board of directors; I wonder what they have to hide. But their membership list is open and look at some of the luminaries on it:

www.usrbc.org/Member.asp


Baker Botts LLP
Barbour Griffith & Rogers, Inc. [Hayley Barbour's lobbying firm]
Bechtel Group, Inc.
BP
The Boeing Company
Carlyle Group
ChevronTexaco
Citigroup
ConocoPhillips
Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.
Exxon Mobil Corporation
Fluor Corporation [Woolsey's wife serves on the board of directors]
Halliburton Company
Hunt Oil Company
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Riggs Bank N.A.
Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP [isn't this Woolsey's law firm?]
Trident Group, L.L.C.
YUKOS Oil Company
Zell, Goldberg & Co. [isn't this Feith's law firm?]

[Moses]

As far as the public now knows, the Americans funded all this through a series of "cutouts" - primarily Freedom House and NED, the National Endowment for Democracy.

    NED is mostly a fiction. After Ramparts magazine, the New York Times, and Senator Frank Church's investigation exposed an earlier generation of front groups and foundations that passed money for the CIA, the Reagan Administration created NED to do the same thing, only with a show of openness about Congressional funding. Not to be too transparent, NED generally channels the money through a whole network of other groups, such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI).

    Freedom House has a more colorful past. Styling itself as a pro-democracy watchdog and human rights group, it is best remembered as one of the earliest defenders of the Vietnam War, which it portrayed as an effort to bring freedom and democracy to that troubled country[/b]. Where have we heard that again?

    Dominated at the time by pro-Cold War liberals and the State Department's favorite social democrats, the Freedom House crew regularly redbaited those of us who opposed American intervention in Southeast Asia, and later worked closely with the Contras in Nicaragua.

    A "senior scholar" at Freedom House and the grandson of Ukrainian immigrants to the U.S., Adrian Karatnycky proudly told the New York Sun how he helped organize a training camp for Ukrainians this past August.

    "Croatians, Romanians, Slovakians, and Serbians - leaders of the group that led civic opposition to Milosevic - taught Ukrainian kids how to 'control the temperature' of protesting crowds," he explained.

    Paid for by the American government, the training camp taught the Ukrainians how to confront government pressure and how to show that they were not "part of an evil Western conspiracy." The training also taught the Ukrainians how to establish connections with the government militia and how to conduct street theater, poking fun at Kuchma and other leaders to reduce people's fear of them.

    The results of this education, Mr. Karatnycky boasted, can be seen today on the streets of Kiev.

     "American Son-in-Law, Go Home!"

    Even more obvious, Washington's tightest link to the Orange Revolution is exactly where Yushchenko's most vocal critics said it was - through his bright, charming, and well-connected American wife Katherine Chumachenko.

    Born in Chicago to a family of Ukrainian émigrés, Kathy - as she was then known - got her M.B.A. from the fierce free marketers at the University of Chicago, became a well-known conservative activist, and worked in the Reagan White House, where she handled contacts with American groups of Eastern European origin. She also served in the State Department, at the Treasury, and on the staff of Congress's Joint Economic Committee.

    In 1991, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, Kathy created the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, whose announced mission was to promote Ukrainian democracy and free market reform. Kathy was the foundation's president, and then moved to Kiev as its in-country representative. As you might expect by now, U.S. funding came from NED and the Agency for International Development.

    Living in Ukraine, Kathy - now Katya - met and married Yushchenko, who was then head of the Central Bank and later Kuchma's Prime Minister. What a coup for Katya's American backers! Only Yushchenko and Kuchma fell out, and Washington had to play catch up with a classic destabilization campaign, which is how the CIA would view the Orange Revolution.

    Significantly, the first ten years of funding for Katya's U.S.-Ukraine Foundation was separate from the $65 million in U.S. spending quoted by the Associated Press. AP's figure does include money to bring Yushchenko to meet as-yet unnamed U.S. government officials.

   .... Hold in mind that Senator John Kerry and other leading Democrats have staunchly supported the National Endowment for Democracy and its covert interventions. Note, as well, that former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, whom many Dems wanted as the next Secretary of State, has just written a widely circulated celebration of Ukraine's Orange Revolution without once mentioning the American role in it.

    So, should we support the meddling we like? Or do we need to oppose and expose it all?

    Where do you stand? I should love to know your opinion.

   -- Steve Weissman
    RSVP: [e-mail].

[Moses]

 www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0412ukraine.html

The tense political situation in Ukraine may find a peaceful solution. But, at this critical juncture, efforts to maintain Ukraine as currently configured could turn out to be dangerously counterproductive. Ukraine should therefore seriously consider the option of working with all parties involved in its current crisis--including the European Union, Russia , and the United States--in taking possible steps toward its nonviolent dismemberment in a manner acceptable to its variegated population. The possibility of such a peaceful, democratic, and internationally acceptable geographical rearrangement of Ukraine should at least be put on the table before it is too late to prevent an unpredictable situation from falling out of control from increased regional, ethnic, economic, cultural, and linguistic conflicts.

Ukraine as it exists today is a failed state for several reasons. First, since its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has not succeeded in significantly improving the well-being of its population. Second, its ingrained political structures have not allowed democracy and a free press to develop. Third, as recent events demonstrate, it has clearly proved incapable of bridging the complex divide between its Russian-oriented, Orthodox eastern part and its westward-looking, Catholic area. Ukraine’s most significant achievement in the past decade was to dispose of its nuclear missiles, but this did more to ease tensions with Russia and the United States than to ameliorate the lives its ordinary citizens.

Regrettably, changing the ruling regime in Ukraine to a more European-oriented, democratic one is unlikely to provide a satisfactory, long-term solution to its enormous endemic problems. These stem in large part from the fact that the area, as a former Soviet republic with nearly 50 million people, is essentially a geopolitical construction of the USSR, not a country with sufficient national identity or self-governing experience in its history to develop as a viable economic and political entity. Ukrainian émigré nationalists will disagree with this view, but they cannot ignore the fact that prior to 1991 Ukraine--the name in its original meaning means borderland--in its entire past was "independent" for only a very short period after World War I. And it certainly was never a model of democracy, even if the Cossacks of the region earned a reputation for disregarding authority.

There are two options for the next ruling party in Ukraine. The leadership--be it composed of the current opposition or those struggling to remain in power--can try to keep the country geographically as it is. Perhaps this is possible, and provides the comforting panacea of not rocking the boat, on the surface at least. But, from a longer-term perspective, preserving Ukraine as it is could increase tensions between its ethnic groups and regions, as demands for autonomy from Russian-speaking areas already suggest. Dangerously, maintaining Ukraine as one unit at all costs could lead to greater internal conflicts leading to a bloody, Balkans-like dissolution of the country--and possible Russian intervention ostensibly to protect ethnic-Russian areas. One must not forget that modern Ukraine is not foreign to civil war, having experienced a horrid one less than a hundred years ago. In such a situation, democratic and economic reform would be all but impossible.

A second option for the Ukrainian leadership, whatever its political colors, would be the Czech and Slovak solution. After the end of Communist rule Czechoslovakia’s parliament decided to split Czechoslovakia in two--the Czech Republic and Slovakia--for a range of reasons, many of which were far from noble. But not a shot was fired during the separation, and although the “velvet divorce” has not turned the two sections of the former country into economic miracles, it has prevented tensions between them. As separate entities capable of keeping track of their own individual needs, they should play a role in NATO and the European Union more beneficial to their local populations than as smaller parts of a larger "Czechoslovakia."

There are no models for the future of Ukraine, only options. A peaceful division of the area would be a complicated, time-consuming process requiring extensive international involvement and patience. A reconfiguration process would face great challenges, including determining the exact nature of the new entities.

Three significant challenges would face such a process. One is to effectively discourage pre-21st century romantic notions of national identity. These images, often propagated by the Ukrainian diaspora, bear little resemblance to the country in which it does not live. This "long-distance nationalism" suggests that Ukraine as it now appears on the map is bound to play a unique role in world history because of its size and location. Two, Great-Russia imperialists, who hold expansionist illusions, would also have to be held in check. Finally, Poles who want a large buffer state between themselves and Russia would have to be reminded that the well-being of the people in Ukraine , not imaginary realpolitik, is what matters most.

If the tense political situation in Kiev gets worse and if the status quo--i.e., Ukraine as currently configured--is maintained, separatist political groups and nationalities could resort to violence. Given such dire possibilities, Ukrainian leaders should look beyond a priori concepts of how the continued existence of today’s Ukraine is in the best interests of its long-suffering population or international stability. All options, including the geopolitical reinvention of Ukraine itself, deserve consideration. This could lead to a real Ukraine --not the artificial prolongation of "the" Ukraine forced upon its people during Soviet times.

John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer, has served, among other places, in Czechoslovakia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at http://www.fpif.org). He compiles the "Public Diplomacy Press Review" (available at <http://www.uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php?/newsroom/johnbrown_main>).

 <br>

[Moses]

Ukraine's Latest Threat: Blue and White Rebellion
    By David Crouch
    The Guardian U.K.

    Monday 27 December 2004

    Voters in eastern Ukraine warned yesterday that they might mount a challenge to the country's new leadership if, as expected, their favorite son, Viktor Yanukovich, is defeated in the run-off presidential election.

    A month after orange-clad opposition protesters forced a repeat vote because of fraud in the first ballot, the eastern industrial heartland signaled that it would not accept defeat lying down, amid ominous murmurs of a blue-and-white "revolution" of its own.

    With members of Mr. Yanukovich's camp already talking about legal challenges to the result before it came in, the contender's campaign slogan "We will defend our choice" was starting to take on a new significance.

    The town of Yenakievo, 40km from the mining city of Donetsk, is where Mr. Yanukovich grew up and worked in the vast metalworks whose fuming smokestacks tower above a jumble of coalmines and shabby homes.

    Outside polling station number 37, a group of miners is discussing the tumultuous events of the past five weeks, which saw Mr. Yanukovich declare electoral victory only to be forced into a rerun against Viktor Yushchenko because of widespread fraud.

    Rumors catch on quickly here, and few are favorable towards the pro-western opposition leader. The latest word is that one of his local campaign officers has supposedly been caught offering bribes. The miners aren't surprised - it fits with the picture they already have of Mr. Yushchenko.

    "He destroyed the mines," says Sasha, 36. "When he was prime minister [1999-2001] we didn't get our wages or pensions; Yanukovich has raised both.

    "If Yushchenko wins he'll crush us. He wants to import Polish coal. We'll end up selling chickens."

    Igor, 29, is no more impressed. "When miners demonstrated in Kiev in 1998, where was Yushchenko then? Where were the free food and free blankets?" He said Mr. Yushchenko's second-in-command, Yuliya Timoshenko, had "said she'll surround Donetsk with barbed wire, she told us to hang ourselves from our blue-and-white scarves. There's no way we'll accept a Yushchenko government."

    Throughout the region Yushchenko supporters are a rarity, but in Yenakievo they are scared to come out. Local people have declined to fill the positions reserved for the opposition on the local electoral commissions, so Mr. Yushchenko has had to bus in hundreds of people from western Ukraine to take their places.

    Vera Kobilyanskaya, 46, a doctor from Rivno, is head of the Yushchenko campaign team in the town. She hasn't slept much: at 4am yesterday a large group of Yanukovich supporters held a meeting outside her hotel window, shouting "Yushchenko out!"

    "At the second round of voting in November there were a great many falsifications in Yenakievo," she says. "The prosecutor is investigating." At one polling station the voting figures were dictated and handed out in advance; the electoral commission simply signed a blank piece of paper on which the results were then inscribed. At another, the turnout was 105%; at a third, 15 dead people turned up on the electoral roll.

    "It's the same Yanukovich people in the electoral commissions from the second round," Ms. Kobilyanskaya says. "But we are going to stick it out, there are more of us this time and we are tough. I will never forgive what the government has done to this country."

    In Donetsk, Yanukovich supporters are defiant. The street protests in Kiev and western cities have set an example to the east. But political leaders in Donetsk have reacted angrily to accusations from the Yushchenko camp that Donetsk is arming itself to repel the new government.

    "This is pure lies, it is simply stoking up tension," says the Donetsk mayor, Oleksandr Lukianchenko. "Before the second round they said Russian spetsnaz [special forces troops] were defending the government; this turned out to be false. Now they have shown once again what methods the opposition are using to sow fear and confusion."

    On Lenin Square in the city center, young people enjoying the unseasonably mild weather are united in their support for Mr. Yanukovich. "If Yushchenko wins, there will be war," says Katya, 19, a student at Donetsk University of Economics.

    Anton, 27, a rail worker, says: "There will be mass demonstrations. Yushchenko's people are Mafiosi. But no one will have to pay us to come out and demonstrate, we will come of our own accord."

[Moses]

(JTA) - Yuschenko marks Chanukah
www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2004/12/13/news/world/aaa.txt

Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yuschenko appeared at Kiev's Central Synagogue on Thursday night to light Chanukah candles. Some 400 Jews packed the shul, known here as the Brodsky Synagogue, to welcome Yuschenko.... During his synagogue visit, Yuschenko sported a kipah, which Jewish leaders said no top Ukrainian political leader had ever done before. In an interview with JTA last Thursday night, he said if he wins the election he will make relations with Israel his special priority. "Under my presidency, the relations between Ukraine and the State of Israel will take a turn for the better," Yuschenko said.