05/31/2002 | Broker

Eastern Europe

Sour Slavs in the slow lane

May 30th 2002 | KIEV AND MINSK
From The Economist print edition


Russia's new ties with the West make the plight of Ukraine and Belarus look all the more gloomy

WHILE the Russian and American presidents declare ever warmer friendship between their countries, the western fringe of what was once the Slavic core of the Soviet Union, namely Belarus and Ukraine, seems destined for the time being to rot in a squalid mess of post-communist stagnation. Could that change, as Russia's president seeks to tilt his country more firmly in a new direction? Probably not while Belarus and Ukraine are run by such dire presidents.

Of the two, Belarus, with its 10m people, seems less likely to get a new leader in a hurry. Alexander Lukashenka was recently re-elected and is believed to be planning a referendum to change the constitution to let him rule on until 2015. In Ukraine, with nearly 50m people, President Leonid Kuchma looks shakier but shows no sign of bowing out soon. Plagued by scandal and gravely weakened since a general election in March, he is trying to find a safe successor to win the next contest for the presidency, due in 2004.

Mr Lukashenka is luckier. Opposition leaders in Belarus are a sorry lot who spend much time trying to coax money and attention from their western sponsors and make little effort to stir up the country's famously passive people. The president has been hurt by the country's economic woes; many Belarussians now receive their salaries and pensions late. But he is earthy and mercurial, and still the country's most popular politician. If he goes ahead with a referendum this summer, he looks set to win it. Mr Kuchma, by contrast, saw his own party win only 12% of the vote in Ukraine's recent general election, forcing him to assemble a parliamentary block from disparate clans and individuals. The biggest gains were by parties led by people who want to unseat him.

Still, Ukraine's opposition parties are divided too. The Communists think Mr Kuchma too liberal and pro-western. A centrist party led by Viktor Yushchenko, a prime minister sacked by Mr Kuchma last year, wants a lot more reform but might be prepared to compromise with Mr Kuchma to achieve it, whereas Yulia Timoshenko, a sprightly former energy tycoon who leads a more radical party, wants to fight Mr Kuchma head-on.

Besides, the job of president gives Mr Kuchma a formidable arsenal. Though political dirty tricks in Ukraine pale by the standards of Belarus, where several opponents of Mr Lukashenka have simply disappeared, Mr Kuchma's rivals face all sorts of bureaucratic and legal harassment.

This week Mr Kuchma succeeded in having his chief of staff made speaker of parliament, breaking a two-week deadlock. The question now is whether he can hang on to his prime minister, the efficient and loyal Anatoly Kinakh. In return, the different opposition parties can have other plum jobs, such as committee chairmanships or government ministries. A deal along these lines should keep Mr Kuchma's show on the road for now. The opposition parties are wary of taking too much responsibility just yet.

But that does not solve the problem of picking the next president. “The election shows there are only two potential candidates at the moment,” says a tycoon close to Mr Kuchma. “One is Mr Yushchenko. The other is whoever the Communists choose to put up. We must find a third.” That now looks hard, though the lesson from Russia, with Vladimir Putin's emergence from unknown bureaucrat to effective head of state in the space of two years, shows that post-communist politics can spring plenty of surprises.

Russia has so far tended to stand by the rulers of its neighbouring Slav states, no matter how unappetising. But might Mr Putin, now that he is so friendly with President George Bush, use Russia's power to point this pair of sluggish Slav countries in a more westerly direction? Russia's influence on both is big. In Ukraine, the Kremlin has so far backed Mr Kuchma and his friends, and has sounded nervous about the strongly pro-western Mr Yushchenko. During the election, Russia's state-controlled television, which is widely watched in Ukraine, tried, albeit in vain, to brand Mr Yushchenko an ultra-nationalist in hock to foreigners.

However, Mr Putin's own warming friendship with the West is changing the picture. Mr Kuchma and his friends now say that Ukraine's three strategic priorities are forging closer ties with NATO (with which it already has a special deal) and with the EU, and getting into the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the body that sets rules for global trade. If Russia were to switch its support to Mr Yushchenko, Mr Kuchma might be in trouble.



The bell tolls for Belarus
Messrs Putin and Lukashenka get on badly. Russia wants Belarus to liberalise its economy, largely so that Russian firms can buy up the country's main industrial assets. Mr Putin also wants Belarus to pay the full whack for the cheap energy it gets from Russia, and is refusing to give it any more easy credits. Russian diplomats no longer defend Belarus quite so staunchly. They talk a bit more to the opposition.

All this has nonetheless stopped short of trying to unseat Mr Lukashenka or backing western efforts to squeeze him out. So far Russia has broadly viewed Belarus as a loyal Slav ally and a buffer against the West. But when Russia joins the WTO, probably in a couple of years' time if it manages the necessary reforms, Belarus will face what a spokesman in Minsk, its capital, calls “very negative consequences”. Belarus is in no position to join the outfit, but would suffer gravely without its customs union with Russia.

For the time being, however, the squalor on Europe's eastern frontier poses a dismal prospect for the West. Both Ukraine and Belarus are weapons supermarkets for the worst sort of customer and provide transit for just about everything the West wants to keep at bay. The most conspicuous dignitaries in Belarus this year have been from Libya, Iran, Iraq and Syria. America complained publicly earlier this year about Belarussian sales of air-defence equipment to Iraq.

To no effect. Dozens of uninspected cargo aircraft have continued to fly this year from Minsk to Baghdad. Belarus's behaviour since September 11th has, in American eyes, been stunningly unhelpful. If Belarus-supplied weapons shoot down an American plane over Iraq, irritation could turn to fury.

For the European Union, disease, drugs and the smuggling of migrants and prostitutes from the western bits of the former Soviet Union are a running sore. Kaliningrad, the Russians' Baltic exclave for which the EU is currently trying to negotiate a special new status, has the highest incidence of AIDS in Europe. EU officials speak of a “green corridor” for smugglers that leads from Ukraine's notoriously corrupt port of Odessa to Riga in Latvia.

While Americans are delighted with their new friendship with Russia, western policy towards Ukraine and Belarus in the past ten years has been much less successful, though Ukraine has managed at least to maintain its independence without being badly hamstrung by Russia. But Belarus and Ukraine are worrying messes on Europe's eastern frontier. It would be an irony if it were Russia, their old imperial master, that had to start nudging them in the right direction. No sign of that—yet.