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Weapons Point at Viktor Yushchenko
// The Ukrainian president could be impeached
Impeachment proceedings could be started in arms scandal
As the battle for power heats up in Ukraine, the subject of Russia is coming to the forefront. The Supreme Rada commission investigating arms supplies to Georgia completed its visit to South Ossetia and Russia yesterday. Chairman of the commission Valery Konovalyuk told Kommersant that the commission has uncovered new information on Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko’s responsibility for arming Georgia before the war in the Caucasus. That information will be made public within a month. The Ukrainian president is fighting back. On Saturday, the Ukrainian national council on television and radio broadcasting made the decision to stop broadcasting Russian television channels on Ukrainian cable networks.
A Hello to Arms
The scandal over Ukrainian arms supplies to Georgia has reached it culminating phase. “We have received new data on the responsibility of the high leadership of Ukraine and President Yushchenko personally for deliveries of arms to Georgia, which was preparing for war,” Valery Konovalyuk, head of the Rada temporary investigative commission on Ukrainian supplies of military equipment to Georgia and Rada member from the Party of the Regions, told Kommersant. “We will present that data to in a hearing in the Rada in November.”
The investigation began on September 2, the same day the ruling coalition of the pro-presidential Our Ukraine – People’s Self-Defense and the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc fell apart in the Supreme Rada. Since then, Konovalyuk has publicly accused Yushchenko of illegal arms supplies to the regime of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili several times. Konovalyuk claims many types of weapons were taken out of the active arsenal and delivered in circumvention of the treasury.
The new source of information on Viktor Yushchenko’s malfeasance was the commission members’ trip to South Ossetia on Monday. “The Ukrainians met with Prosecutor General Taimuraz Khugaev, who presented specific information on how Yushchenko’s Ukraine was shoulder-to-shoulder with Saakshvili,” Irina Gagloeva, head of the South Ossetian committee on the press and information, told Kommersant. “They were given all the video recording we have and material on arms and the participation of Ukrainian mercenaries in the war on the Georgian side.”
Konovalyuk did not mention the specifics of the evidence he received in Tskhinvali in his conversation with Kommersant. “We asked a series of specific questions and received concise answers. Now we have received confirmation that the Ukrainian leadership knew of the war as it was being prepared. We encouraged Saakashvili to act cruelly and rashly through the arms shipments, naturally,” Konovalyuk said. The temporary investigative commission is laying the full blame on Yushchenko, without making any charges against Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. “The cabinet of ministers oversees issues of arms deliveries only formally. It is all managed by the president in reality. We will prove that,” Konovalyuk said.
The charges that the commission will make against the president will most likely play an important role in fight for power going on in Ukraine that may lead to early parliamentary elections. Talk of early elections has quieted because of the financial crisis and the political parties have begun to cancel their orders for outdoor advertising space in Kiev and other cities. Observers remain certain, however, that the battle in which Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and Party of the Regions leader Viktor Yanukovich are ensnared will continue even without a new election date.
One possible course of development in that conflict could be Yushchenko’s impeachment. Both Party of the Regions members and supporters of the prime minster were talking about it not long ago. The well-publicized Rada hearings, in which Yushchenko figured prominently, could lead to an early end to Yushchenko’s term, thus creating additional space for maneuvers for Tymoshenko and Yanukovich. Moscow would be happy to see event develop that way as well.
A Farewell to Television
Yushchenko has been up to some intriguing of his own. One of the moves in the battle with his opponents was the cessation of Russian television broadcasts on the territory of Ukraine on the night of October 31. Yushchenko had long been in favor of removing the Russian television channels that presented him in a bad light, to the advantage of Yanukovich and Tymoshenko, from the Ukrainian airwaves. Four Russian television channels, Channel One Worldwide Network, REN TV, RTR Planeta and TVCI (the international version of TV Center), were taken off Ukrainian cable networks by order of the national council on radio and television broadcasting.
The reasons for the council’s decision were explained by its deputy chairman Igor Kurus. “On March 1, 2006, we changed the principles for the rebroadcast of programs from countries that are not members of the European Union and have not ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television. Since then, we have repeatedly contacted the Russian Embassy, the television channels themselves and their distributors with the requirement that they adapt their broadcasting to our legislation, in particular, that they observe laws on copyright and public morals. But we never received a coherent response,” Kurus said.
Kurus said the sanctions applied not only to Russian channels, but to other foreign channels as well. “We banned the broadcast of American, Georgian, Israeli, Chinese and Korean channels,” he told Kommersant. “We also turned off three British channels because they seemed nearly pornographic to us. Kurus added that Kiev is not interested in removing the Russian channels from Ukraine forever and, after they meet the requirements of the national broadcasting council, it will be willing to restore them to Ukrainian cable. Kurus acknowledged that not all cable operators had met the regulator’s demands and the banned Russian channels can be seen in the Crimea and several regions of Eastern Ukraine as usual. “That decision was made by local authorities, but the prosecutor general is already active. The law will be enforced in all the territory of the country,” he stated.
Spokesmen for Russian television companies contacted by Kommersant all said that they do not understand Ukraine’s charges. “We did not receive any written charges from the council and neither did our distributor. So we are mystified by the sudden action of the Ukrainian regulator,” commented Sergey Koshlyakov, director of international relations for the All-Russia State Radio and Television Broadcasting Corp. “Our product is a specially licensed version cleaned up for international broadcast, so there are not likely to be any convincing charges of copyright violation. If it is a question of content, we are ready to discuss it, but no question shave been formally asked.” Alexander Pavlov, an official representative of TV Center, also told Kommersant that it broadcasts a “juridically cleaned up product” in Ukraine.
Both sides of the dispute acknowledge the role of politics in it. “It is mostly a political topic,” a REN TV executive told Kommersant. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also raised the issue to the political level when he said on Saturday that Moscow would react to Kiev’s actions. “We will stand up for the rights of our companies to broadcast and, at the same time, achieve respect for the rights of the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine,” Lavrov said. He mentioned as well, as if in passing, that, among the countries of the former USSR, Georgia has also turned off Russian television broadcasts “for political reasons.”
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reacted sharply to Lavrov’s statements. “The demand made by Ukrainian authorities, which is absolutely legitimate and commonly accepted in the civilized world, that television broadcasts conform to national legislation has been subjected to political speculation,” a statement issued by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry reads. “Hopes that a Russian-speaking population can be made from the Ukrainian people are baseless.” Kurus told Kommersant that “Politicization on the conflict is coming from the Russian side. But the more Russia shouts, the less chances it has for those channels to show up on our cable networks.”
Alexander Gabuev
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 05, 2008
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