Financial Times: A Wasted Country
02/16/2001 | Broker
A Wasted Country
A Political Scandal in Ukraine Could Work to the Benefit of Russia
Charles Clover and Robert Cottrell
Last Updated: February 15 2001 20:24GMT
When a president talks of his own country's possible collapse, a crisis has come. Such is the case in Ukraine. The beleaguered Leonid Kuchma is likely to stay in office. But his troubles, triggered by a murder and bugging scandal, are overwhelming his capacity to govern. And that capacity was always feeble at best.
For more than a week, demonstrations to force Mr Kuchma's resignation have raged in Kiev, the capital. Gone is Ukraine's reputation as one of the sleepier of the former Soviet republics. The arrest of Yulia Timoshenko, an opposition leader and former deputy prime minister, shows the president's desperation. Ms Timoshenko, who used to run a big gas trading company, was charged on Tuesday with smuggling $1bn out of the country.
Mr Kuchma has declared this a "moment of truth". In an interview published on Wednesday, he said: "I consider that if this crisis were supported, especially from outside, it could lead to only one thing: the collapse of Ukraine."
The suggestion of "outside" influence is characteristically oblique. For years Ukraine has played on its vulnerability to Russian intervention to extract aid from the west. Yet it courts Russia with equal vigour. On Sunday Mr Kuchma welcomed Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, to Ukraine with every show of fraternal warmth.
Mr Putin, not a great man for warmth himself, insisted that the visit was strictly business. Ukraine and Russia signed agreements to co-operate in defence, space and energy. Some in Russia saw Mr Putin as offering his beleaguered counterpart a gesture of support. Others wondered if he was seeing how Russia might profit from Mr Kuchma's decline.
For all its poverty, Ukraine has great potential. Its size and population are similar to those of France and it was once the bread basket of the Soviet Union and home to much of the Union's arms industry. Oil and gas pipelines run across its territory carrying Russian energy exports to western Europe. Russians count Ukrainians among their closest Slavic cousins.
The crisis in Ukraine has moved far beyond its immediate cause: the disappearance - and probable murder - last year of Georgy Gongadze, an internet journalist and fierce critic of the president. A corpse believed to be that of Mr Gongadze was found buried at a crossroads with one arm sticking out of the ground. It had been burnt with acid to obscure identification but had been buried with Mr Gongadze's jewellery.
Mr Kuchma is linked to the scandal by a tape recording, apparently made in his offices last year, which was brought to public attention by Oleksander Moroz, leader of Ukraine's opposition socialist party, on November 28. A voice that sounds remarkably similar to Mr Kuchma's is heard ordering the interior minister of Ukraine to "deal with" Mr Gongadze.
There are other grounds for suspecting official involvement in Mr Gongadze's disappearance, if not necessarily the direct hand of Mr Kuchma. From the discovery of the body on November 3, the authorities dragged their feet on the investigation, made contradictory public statements and prohibited independent medical specialists from having access to the corpse.
Mr Kuchma has all but acknowledged that the voice on the tape is his own and that his office was probably bugged. He has explained away the profuse obscenities on the tape by referring to his "factory manager's vocabulary . . . If someone somewhere reports to me, then I may just let rip - I don't shirk from that." But he insists that the tape is a montage of several conversations, fabricated to incriminate him. Experts say computer technology would allow a conversation to be constructed out of fragments so as to be undetectable to analysis.
The affair raises two significant questions beyond the matter of the tape's authenticity: who bugged Mr Kuchma's office; and why?
Mykola Melnychenko, a security guard, claimed in December to have taped 300 hours of the president's conversations by placing a digital recorder under a couch. He fled to the Czech Republic days before the tapes were released. Mr Kuchma claims Mr Melnychenko could not possibly have done it alone. The bugging required "some kind of super-apparatus", he insists. "Not even our specialists can figure out how it was done." Last week he fired Leonid Derkach, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service - formerly the KGB - apparently as a scapegoat.
The question that some are asking is whether the person who made the tape recording killed Mr Gongadze. "I am operating from the [premise] that the conversation on the tape is authentic," says Olena Prytula, who worked with Mr Gongadze on his internet project and still edits it. "From there, one can draw two conclusions. The first is that the murder was done on the order of the president; the second is that whoever recorded the president then killed Gia [Gongadze]. I haven't excluded either version."
There are also chilling similarities with the disappearance of a journalist in Belarus last year, which many in Minsk blame on Russian or western interests.
If Mr Kuchma is right in claiming that his eavesdropper was acting as part of a wider conspiracy, the logic of Ukranian politics would suggest two immediate possibilities. The first would be Russia, scheming for a weak Ukraine that it could manipulate or undermine. "Kuchma is very vulnerable," says an official in the Ukraine administration. "At this time, if Putin reaches his hand out to help him, Kuchma cannot refuse . . . The scandal is certainly working for the benefit of Russia."
The other possibility would be the intelligence services of the west. They might, the theory goes, be worried by Mr Kuchma's closeness to Moscow. They would want to bring him down and replace him with a more pro-western president.
A third possibility is that a political opponent of Mr Kuchma's might have commissioned the tapes. Prosecutors are alleging, although perhaps opportunistically, that Ms Timoshenko may have been involved.
It may scarcely matter who bugged Mr Kuchma's office or whether the Gongadze tape was fabricated. Much damage has already been done. Even if Mr Kuchma can see off the accusations relating to Mr Gongadze, it is anyone's guess what else may emerge from the hundreds of hours of taped conversations still waiting to be transcribed. Selections released last month suggest - or are fabricated in order to suggest - Mr Kuchma's involvement in bribery and falsification of election results, expressed in a Nixonian torrent of swearing and racial epithets.
Unless Mr Kuchma can pull off a remarkable recovery, this is the endgame, of sorts, to a wasted decade for Ukraine. Courted by the west and by Russia, it had a unique chance to profit from the break-up of the Soviet Union. The west flooded it with aid and advice and Russia allowed it to run up huge debts, both of them in the hope of winning it politically from the other.
The money and the goodwill have been wasted in corruption, inefficiency and byzantine party politicking. Last year investigators found that in 1997-98 the central bank itself had made hundreds of millions of dollars in shady loans to offshore banks. The ultimate destination of the funds was never determined.
That many Ukrainians seem willing to accept at face value scandalous accusations of murder and cover-up by their own president tells much about the sort of government to which they have grown accustomed. As Mr Kuchma said last week: "Show me a Ukrainian politician who is without sin. Let him cast the first stone."
No politician has risen to the challenge. But Ukrainian voters may be forgiven if they feel like stepping into the breach.