Three recent news items deserve our attention.
First the good news. According to the Russia-based Sociological Service of the Anti-Corruption Fund the vast majority of residents of Odessa and Kharkiv provinces support Ukrainian statehood and oppose Vladimir Putin’s New Russia (Novorossiya) project. A telephone survey of 1,000 people conducted on September 8th to 17th revealed the following attitudes:
- 87 percent stated they want “their region to remain a part of Ukraine,” as opposed to 3 percent who opted for membership in Russia and 2 percent who preferred New Russia.
- 34 percent want “Ukraine’s future” to be “tied to Europe,” 17 percent want it to be tied to Russia, and 17 percent wanted Ukraine to be “independent.”
- 43 percent said they didn’t understand, accept, or want to comment on the term “Novorossiya”; 14 percent said it was “bad”; 9 percent called it “nonsense” or a “figment”; 2 percent said it was “criminal” or “illegal”; and 13 percent identified it as a term for those regions that want to join the Russian Federation.
- 50 percent have a negative attitude toward Putin; 12 percent have a positive attitude; those who tend to the positive and those who tend to the negative are both at 6 percent.
In a word, the Novorossiya project is dead in Ukraine, and Odessa and Kharkiv are firmly in the Ukrainian camp.
Now for the not-so-good news. As the Ukrainian Weekly’s Kyiv correspondent, Zenon Zawada, points out in an e-mail distributed to his friends and colleagues, the current self-styled “kamikaze” government of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsenii Yatseniuk hasn’t pushed through any reforms. Zawada poses several disturbing questions to Yatseniuk that both he and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko need to answer:
1. Why aren’t any constitutional reforms in the pipeline, as part of the Feb. 21 agreement to resolve the political crisis in Ukraine? (They were supposed to be *completed* by September.)
2. Why isn’t there a new election law, as agreed to in the Feb. 21 agreement and as promised by President Poroshenko?
3. Why hasn’t the investigation on the EuroMaidan crimes been completed? … Why haven’t there been any criminal convictions of the EuroMaidan’s persecutors?
4. Why is the National Guard being commanded by Stepan Poltorak, the head of the Kharkiv police academy who dispatched internal army soldiers to disperse the EuroMaidan?
5. Why do Russian banks continue to operate in Ukraine, financing the separatist groups?
6. Why did you claim a special fund will be created and supported by oligarchs and international donors to finance the Donbas self-governance zones if the Sept. 16 legislation create[d] a line-item from the state budget?
7. If the war continues for months or years, will you keep blaming it for the lack of reforms?
8. Why haven’t you begun any structural reforms at all, such as cutting unnecessary taxes (which you’ve been promising to do for the last several months) or restructuring and eliminating corrupt schemes from [the state energy firm] Naftogaz (rather than continuing to pour money into it with state-issued debt)?
War does excuse the Yatseniuk government of some of its initial reform inertia, but—when you consider that structural economic reform is the precondition of Ukraine’s ability to wage war and thus to survive—war cannot excuse it all. Indeed, the longer the war lasts, the lesser the excuse. The better than not-so-good news is that Poroshenko delivered a powerful speech on September 25th, in which he outlined a bold vision of simultaneous structural reforms that, if adopted, would amount to a “Big Bang.”
And now for the outrageous. Germany’s Foreign Ministry recently released an internal report that concluded that Russia “has under President Putin developed into an authoritarian state in almost every respect.” Most serious analysts detected the strong whiff of authoritarianism back when Putin and his cadre began speaking of “managed democracy” some 15 years ago. Hopefully, the stark reality check Putin provided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleared the vision of Germany’s policy elites. Better late than never, I suppose, though Germany’s economic entanglements and interdependencies will prejudice Berlin’s better judgment for years to come. At this rate Berlin will declare Putin’s aggression against Ukraine a “war” sometime in 2029.
The really outrageous news concerns another German entity, the tourist agency, Hansa Touristik GmbH. Here’s what the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group had to say about its recent antics:
On Sept 17 “Ocean Majesty,” a Greek luxury cruise liner operated by the German tourist agency Hansa Touristik GmbH flouted the international embargo and sailed from Sochi in Russia into the Crimea, arriving in Yalta at around 8.30 Kyiv time. While the FSB [the Russian Security Service] carried out an 11-hour search of the Mejlis [the Crimean Tatar Parliament] and men with machine guns raided a Mejlis member’s home, a major Crimean Tatar charity, and the Mejlis’s newspaper Avdet, 500 German tourists basked in the Yalta sunshine.
Shame on Hansa Touristik. Even greater shame on those 500 “ordinary” Germans, whose immoral behavior makes them complicit in Russia’s crimes against the Crimean Tatars.
