The Guardian is alleging that the US embassy was assisting the Yushchenko campaign.

US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

Interfax reports that the eastern regions of the country (which are Yanukovich's base) are threatening to hold referendums on autonomy should Yushchenko come to power.

I suspect this will happen. There's already a precedent for regional autonomy in Ukraine (the Crimea), and federalism is a much less disruptive way of resolving regional differences than secession.

Federalism as an ideal might work that way, but one only needs to look at what Russia has done in the Caucasus to see that an autonomy bid, with under the table support from Moscow, is going to be dreadfully destabilizing to Eastern Europe. The one thing that Putin doesn't need is more options for dividing up his opponents and remaining the only player to unite regional leaders.

I found an interesting link that quotes an e-mail from an apparently well-informed Russian that describes the Russian reaction to the Ukrainian elections. Here is a link. I thought that the readers of this weblog would find the e-mail interesting and I therefore wanted to share it with you.

I wonder what Ukraine can really learn from the Czech-Slovak experience. The important thing about the "velvet divorce" is that it was a Slovak initiative, a happy convergence of Slovak nationalistic interest and Czech economic interest, arguably also serving the cultural interests of both parties.

It seems to me that if the Russophone east of Ukraine were to initiate the "divorce", you could well pull it off peacefully. If the result is to allow the east to drift back toward Russia and the west toward the EU, well, that could work well for all concerned. Supporting a divorce could even be a trust-building exercise for Russia and the West. Above all, it would serve the empire-building impulses of both Russia and the EU, by giving each a clearly defined sphere of influence.

Replace "secession" with "federalism" if you like. That can tide you over for a few years, as "Serbia and Montenegro" will attest.

Peace, Jarrett

The role former Soviet republics and satellites are playing in the Ukrainian drama is remarkable. Particularly Poland. Poland's intervention could be problematic given Polish/Ukranian history. So far, Poland seems to be playing it correctly. Walesa was given a hero's welcome in Kiev. The Polish press has been all over the story - and being clear as to whom they support. Gazeta Wyborcza has changed its masthead from red to orange to show solidarity with the Ukranian reformers. Poland's goal in all this is clear - they want the Ukraine to join the west. At some point, Russia will have to decide if it wants to fully become part of the west. If the Ukraine goes west, can Russia continue to try to follow its own path?

Has anyone seen this British Helsinki Human Rights Group report about the second round of elections? If this NGO is right, Yushchenko's party is hardly the flagbearer of freedom the Western media makes it out to be. And the second round was hardly a clean affair on either side. I don't know enough about the politics to be able to comment on this. Nor do I know anything about the credibility of the BHHRG. Can anyone help clarify?

Do you really think Russia will allow Ukraine's future to unfold without interference? I found an interesting article on the situation:

http://netwmd.com/articles/article796.html

Any comments?

How lucrative can those eastern Ukraine assets be?

This is not really a contest between liberal democratic forces and authoritarians aligned with Putin and his goons. This has more in common with Yeltsin v. the putschists in 1991: One incompetent thief with a marginal tendency toward political liberalization vs other, more brutal, still more incompetent thieves with no tendency toward political liberalization.

Of course we should support Yushchenko, just as we supported Yeltsin, but let's not harbor false hopes that Ukraine is on a path toward liberal democracy and economic transparency and prosperity. It is *extraordinarily* difficult to root out institutionalized corruption in large, heavily industrialized ex-Soviet nations. It may take Ukraine more than a generation to undo the damage wrought by ex-communist kleptocracy.

Ukraine's entire politics is poisoned. The country is one of, if not the, most corrupt, brutal and backward states in the northern hemisphere. And Yushchenko and his political partner Yulia Tymoshenko are up to their eyeballs in the kleptocracy that has reigned in that miserable country for 15 years.

Here's a portrait of Yulia based on in-depth reporting by Matt Brzezinski, Zbiggy's son-- as described in a surprisingly straight report from the Guardian:

Tymoshenko was born in 1960 in Dnipropetrovsk, one of the arsenals of Soviet totalitarianism, a Russian-speaking eastern city in a sea of Ukrainian-speaking villages. She trained as an economist. The city has a political heritage, and was the power base both of Leonid Brezhnev and of Ukraine's president for the past 10 years, Kuchma. Kuchma first arrived in Kiev pulling a long train of friends from Dnipropetrovsk behind him. Tymoshenko benefited from this connection through her acquaintance with Pavlo Lazarenko, who became Ukraine's prime minister in 1996.

Lazarenko claimed to have a plan that would solve Ukraine's perpetual energy crisis - the fact that factories were not able to pay for Russian gas. He set up a network of regional gas monopolies which supplied gas to companies in exchange for whatever those companies had to offer: cash, goods, or shares. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this system was a company set up and run by Tymoshenko, United Energy System.

NOTE: this is a tried and true Russian-Ukrainian method for ex-communist insider thieves to gain control of state assets worth billions and then milk them to the max, with money flowing back to politicians in charge of "regulating" the utility and millions flowing into Swiss accounts, London and Cote d'Azur real estate, etc.

These were heady times for the hungry young tycoon. According to Matthew Brzezinski's 2001 book Casino Moscow, which devotes a chapter to Tymoshenko entitled The Eleven Billion Dollar Woman, she was guarded by an entire platoon of ex-Soviet special forces bodyguards. She once sent a plane to collect Brzezinski from Moscow, fly him to Dnipropetrovsk to meet her for lunch, and drop him off back at Moscow in the evening. When Brzezinski said he didn't want to tie up the company plane, Tymoshenko said: "Don't worry. I have four of them."

According to Brzezinski, as a result of Lazarenko's patronage, "Tymoshenko gained control over nearly 20% of Ukraine's gross national product, an enviable position that probably no other private company in the world could boast."

Think about that, folks. 20% of a nation's GDP in the control of a thirty-something woman aligned with ex-communist kleptocrats. Does this really sound like a brave hero of liberal democracy to you?

Don't pop the champagne over the fall of the old regime and the establishment of a Tymoshenko-Yushchenko government. To put it in perspective it's as if Kleptocratic Klown Kofi Annan was driven out of his post and replaced by Bob Torricelli or Berlusconi: a start, OK, but I'd be very skeptical if real, fundamental change ensued. Maybe worth a Sierra Nevada. Definitely not worth the bubbly.

Of course it's thrilling to watch the now familiar spectacle of People Power unfold: hundreds of thousands massing in the streets, defying stalinist miner thugs bused in from the provinces by the regime. Young people ingeniously using new media and technology to organize and communicate resistance to the graying, hamhanded old sovki. Photogenic young leaders like Yulia Tymoshenko leading the crowds.

But there will be no liberal democracy in Ukraine so long as it is led by a thieving, thuggish young woman who used her connections with the sovki in the old regime to strong-arm her way to a fortune in the billions. Yulia Tymoshenko is not Ukraine's hope; she represents everything wrong with post-soviet Ukraine (and Russia).

We make far too much out of elections. The old elites are still in charge in Ukraine. If the Eleven Billion Dollar Woman gains power, we will not see much progress for another generation.

Instead we'll see more of the false-hopes-collapsing syndrome that we saw after the kleptocrat Collor in Brazil (stole ca. $4B) was undone, after the kleptocrat Salinas in Mexico (who stole hundreds of millions and was implicated in drug trafficking and a drug-related assassination carried out by a group with his brother at the center) was undone, and after the kleptocrat Yeltsin in Russia was undone. Yeltsin transferred 40% of Russia's GDP to seven thieving clans who, in control of the privatized Russian media, ensured his re-election in 1996.

Give me the drunken stalinist miners who actually produce something over the paper trading young, telegenic whores any day!

Tee hee!

But try again: there was never any "paper" traded in Tymoshenko's theft. It was done in best stalinist manner, through brute force.