Good Housekeeping
// The price of the question
“Anyone but Proshka,” Evsey, the hero's servant says in Ivan Goncharev's classic A Usual Story, as he left his beloved, the housekeeper Agrafena, in the village. “Anyone but Vladimir Ogryzko,” the Communists, Regionals and Socialists say in the Ukrainian Supreme Rada.
It is not important that they were ready to vote in favor of Ogryzko a week ago and the Party of the Regions expressed its support for him as soon as Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk resigned. Something or someone has obvious brought influence to bear on the anticrisis coalition partners.
What is good for the anticrisis coalition is good for Russia, and vice versa. Everyone in Kiev knows that. Of course they say that they are taking care of Ukraine and defending its national interests. But the main objection the parliamentary majority has to Ogryzko is his pro-Ukrainian position that, according to the coalition, run contrary to good-neighborly relations with Russia.
“Anyone but Ogryzko,” is what the Kremlin might say as well. Maybe it did not say that, but the that is what they heard in Kiev any way. And then the Rada resoundingly rejected him as foreign minister.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko wanted to take Ogryzko with him on his visit to Moscow, where he would sign important interstate documents. That could not pleased Moscow.
There was a popular question in the Soviet Union at one time: “:Who are you for, masters of culture?” That seems to be what they wanted to ask Yushchenko. In Russia, they do not expect him to be pro-Russian, of course. But they clearly wanted a balanced approach to relations with the East and the West.
But that would cost the Ukrainian president too much.
Even if Yushchenko did not postpone his visit to Moscow himself, it is more important for him to be in Kiev right now. That is where his place in the political scene is being decided. And the future of Ukraine.
It is obviously important for the Kremlin too that Yushchenko stay in Ukraine until he proposes a candidate for foreign minister whom the Rada can approve. That means whom Moscow approves.
Every defeat of Yushchenko, every humiliation, is balm for Russian President Vladimir Putin's soul. That is another reason why it is more important for Yushchenko to be in Kiev now than in Moscow. If only because Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is expected to visit Ukraine this month. The Ukrainian and Belarusian president have something to talk about face to face – their relations with Moscow of late. And it is all the same to Minsk who the Ukrainian foreign minister will be.
Alexander Vinogradov, deputy editor-in-chief, Kommersant Ukraine
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 21, 2007
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