KIEV — The party of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, claimed victory Sunday in a parliamentary vote tainted by the jailing of the country’s top opposition leader.
Despite a strong showing of pro-Western opposition parties in the proportional portion of the vote, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was likely to retain its parliamentary majority as its candidates were expected to take the lead in individual races across the country.
With Yulia Tymoshenko, the former prime minister, in jail and widespread fears of election fraud, the West is paying close attention to the vote in the strategic former Soviet state, which lies between Russia and the European Union, and serves as a key conduit for transit of Russian energy supplies to many EU countries. An election deemed undemocratic by international observers could freeze Kiev’s ties with the West and push Ukraine toward Moscow....
They mean even further.
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"International monitors decry Ukraine election" by David M. Herszenhorn | New York Times, October 30, 2012
KIEV — International observers delivered scathing criticism Monday of Ukraine’s parliamentary election, saying the vote was heavily tilted in favor of President Viktor F. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions through the abuse of government resources, the dominance of media coverage, and the jailing of two prominent opposition leaders.
“Considering the abuse of power, and the excessive role of money in this election, democratic progress appears to have reversed in Ukraine,’’ said Walburga Habsburg Douglas, a Swedish lawmaker who led an observer mission for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly....
As an American the last ting I can criticize is money in politics. Our corrupt corpse of a political system is awash in it.
The election was closely watched as a gauge of developing democracy in this former Soviet republic of 45 million, once viewed as on a steady track toward integration with Europe after the Orange Revolution of 2004.
Whenever the press gives a catchy name to a revolution or movement you know it is a coup that has been instigated by some intelligence agency.
Framed in that context, the verdict by international observers was devastating....
Exit polls suggested the ruling party’s margin of victory was much smaller than it claimed.
Exit polls? Who believes in exit polls?
The precise balance of power in the Ukrainian Parliament will not be known for several weeks because half of the 450 seats will be filled by candidates who did not have to declare a party affiliation ahead of Sunday’s vote. They can choose later to align with a party.
The relatively strong showing by the ultranationalist, right-wing Freedom party, whose leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, is known for espousing anti-Semitic and racist views, had not been predicted in polls....
It never is. People are waking up even as the world media are singing the same old lullabies.
Support for the nationalists seemed in part to reflect a backlash against a law rammed through Parliament this year elevating the status of the Russian language, a move viewed by many as undercutting Ukrainian....
Well, there is a pretty bloody history between the two. Stalin wiped out millions.
But some voters said their support of the ultranationalists was also a protest against the ruling authorities.
The Yanukovych government had been bracing for criticism from international observers and went to great lengths to portray the balloting as free and fair, even installing Web cameras in more than 30,000 polling stations.
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"Fistfights, tear gas as Kiev tallies vote" Associated Press, November 03, 2012
KIEV — A clear example of widespread vote-rigging by the ruling party.
Happens in nearly every election in the world (except for places like Venezuela, Iran, and Palestine). The fact that the AmeriKan ignores its own stinking stall of rigged votes tells you a lot.
The disorderly count has touched off Ukraine’s penchant for violent political passions. As the count dragged on at one election commission in the capital, fistfights broke out, tear gas was fired, and an election official broke down in sobs. At another election commission in Kiev, police pushed the opposition candidate when he tried to approach a table where ballots were located and he broke a rib and finger when he fell.
Opposition leaders are threatening to take to the streets if the alleged vote-rigging is not stopped — a potentially serious move in a country where massive demonstrations in 2004 forced the rerun of a fraud-ridden presidential election. Western observers have denounced Sunday’s election as unfair. They said the imprisonment of President Viktor Yanukovych’s arch-foe, Yulia Tymoshenko, and nontransparent vote tallying were a step back from democracy....
Isn't Russia behind the Ukraine?
With counting completed for most of Parliament’s 450 seats, Yanukovych’s party and its allies appeared sure to have enough seats for a majority.
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Related: Parties press for recount in Ukraine
"Ex-leader named murder suspect
KIEV — Ukrainian authorities formally notified jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko that she is a suspect in the murder of a businessman and lawmaker in 1996. Tymoshenko is suspected of ‘‘ordering and organizing’’ the contract-style killing of Yvhen Scherban, his wife, and two other people, the prosecutor general’s office said. Tymoshenko denies the accusations and says it is part of a broader move by President Viktor Yanukovych to keep her in prison. She is serving a seven-year prison term for abuse of office while negotiating a 2009 gas deal with Russia."
Yeah, she's no Catherine the Great:
"Ukrainian Greek culture faces threat in modernity" by Will Englund | Washington Post, November 22, 2012
DONETSK, Ukraine — The Greeks arrived in present-day Ukraine before the Tatars, before the Russians, before the Jews, possibly even before the Ukrainians themselves....
There are about 91,000 Greeks in Ukraine, according to the last census, but they don’t live in the Crimea anymore. That fact lies at the heart of one of those arguments that Ukrainian Greeks love to bat around, and have been doing so ever since they left there in 1778: Can their Greek heritage survive the modern era?
The Crimean Greeks lived for about 300 years under the rule of the Muslim Khanate, and when imperial Russia made a move to conquer the Crimea they asked Catherine the Great, fellow Orthodox Christian, to offer them her protection.
Sure, she said (or words to that effect). You’ll be best off if you leave your homes of the past two millenniums and set up shop in this other land I’ve just acquired, far to the east.
‘‘She awarded lands to the Greeks,’’ exclaimed Yelena Prodan, head of the Donetsk Greek Society, at a board meeting one night recently. ‘‘Orthodox Greeks were rescued from the Muslims.’’
*********************************************
Starting on the shores of the Sea of Azov, the Greeks settled in villages on the steppe. They were exempt from conscription, which was a plus, and they prospered. When the city of Donetsk was founded in 1869 by the Welshman John Hughes, as a coal center, they began migrating into town.
They kept their native language — or, actually, languages. Those whose families came from the coastal towns of the Crimea spoke a Greek that was heavily influenced by the Turkic language of the Khans. Those whose roots were in the remote mountains spoke a language that’s descended directly from ancient Greek — closer to it, probably, than you would hear in Athens today.
In the 1920s, in the first blush of the proletarian revolution, the early Soviet Union strongly encouraged the development of ethnic cultures, a sort of de-Russification after czarist rule. Here, a Greek theater opened, as did Greek schools and Greek newspapers. Greek poets flourished.
Then in 1937, Joseph Stalin decided that this was, in fact, criminal behavior. About 20,000 Greeks were executed, Prodan said, others deported to Kazakhstan or Siberia.
‘‘After 1937, people were afraid of saying they were Greeks,’’ Prodan said. But deep in the villages, within their own homes, families kept the old memories, and the old languages, alive.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, suddenly all the walls were down. Schools opened to teach Greek to a younger generation — but they teach modern Greek, to foster ties to the people of the ancient homeland.
Museums and cultural festivals have sprung up to revivify Greek identity here — yet there’s a real danger that in the slowly dying villages, the indigenous Greek dialects, with centuries of history behind them, could wither away to nothing.
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"Ex-official gets life for Ukraine killing" by Ellen Barry | New York Times, January 30, 2013
MOSCOW — A Ukrainian court sentenced a former security official to life in prison Tuesday for the death of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist whose mysterious death in 2002 provoked an international outcry and helped set off protests against the president at the time, Leonid D. Kuchma.
The former security official, General Oleksei Pukach, who once headed a surveillance department for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, testified that he had not intended to kill Gongadze, but strangled him with a belt accidentally in the course of an interrogation. He is the highest-ranking official to be convicted in Gongadze’s death.
Gongadze went missing in 2000 and his body was found two months later, beheaded, in a forest 75 miles from Kiev, the capital. He had infuriated the president with muckraking publications in Ukrainskaya Pravda, an Internet newspaper he had founded.
The killing came to epitomize the role that crime had come to play in Ukrainian politics and provoked a wave of demonstrations that some describe as the first manifestation of the 2004 Orange Revolution.
Hmmmmmmmmmm!
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More hardball politics:
"Kazakhstan military plane crashes, killing 27, including official" Associated Press, December 26, 2012
MOSCOW — In Ukraine on Tuesday, a police helicopter belonging to the Interior Ministry crashed shortly after takeoff in the central part of the country, killing five people on board, officials said....
Ministry spokesman Serhiy Burlakov said investigators were working to determine what caused the helicopter to hit the ground as it was gaining speed Tuesday afternoon....
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