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The Crisis Is Over in Ukraine
The political crisis in Ukraine ended Saturday night. It lasted 60 days, but ended with satisfaction all around. Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovich forgot about their old hard feelings and called each other partners. The president decided not to remember that he had dissolved the Rada either. The prime minister agreed to early elections on September 30. Their supporters practically forgot everything they had been fighting over for the last two months. Kommersant special correspondent Mikhail Zygar witnessed this Ukrainian happy ending.
The Solution
At 3:30 a.m., Ukrainian President appeared in a window on the fourth floor. He waved his arms at journalists lying directly beneath and banged on the window. Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich appeared in another window in his shirtsleeves. He cast a gloomy look at the street. It was beginning to get light.
Negotiations between the two Viktors, speaker of the Supreme Rada Alexander Moroz, opposition leader Yulia Timoshenko and another dozen Ukrainian politicians had been in progress for eight hours.
The political crisis in Ukraine lasted 60 days. It began on Easter week. Yushchenko compared the dissolution of the Rada to the casting of the Pharisees from the Temple at the time. By Whit Sunday, Yushchenko had persuaded the “Pharisees” to leave the parliament.
A little after 4:00, Yushchenko, Yanukovich and Moroz came out of the presidential secretariat building.
“We have news worthy of this great holiday of Whit Sunday,” the president said. The political crisis in Ukraine is over. We have found a solution that is a compromise.” He looked surprising well for having has a sleepless night. So did Yanukovich. He was wearing a fashionable checked jacket and a big smile.
In the last two months, Yushchenko and Yanukovich have spent a lot of time together in their endless negotiations and apparently have grown close.
“I want to thank our immediate partners, with whom we found reached this excellent result,” Yushchenko continued, nearly hugging Yanukovich, who continued to smile. A few years ago, Yushchenko was not calling him a partner, but a bandit.
The new-found partners had succeeded in finding a way out of the crisis on that amazing night that made them all look like winners. Yushchenko dreamed of dissolving the Rada. He issued two decrees to that effect in two months, but it did not dissolve. Under the first decree, it was to take place on May 27, that is, yesterday.
Yanukovich was not against new elections. He would win them most likely and even make a better showing. But he did not want the Rada to be dissolved at the president's will. He and Speaker Moroz claimed that the president's decrees were illegal.
Finally they have reached an agreement on it. The president has agreed to pretend that he never issued any decrees. The Rada has agreed to meet two more times, on Tuesday and Wednesday, to pass the laws necessary for the elections and then dissolve itself, not by presidential order but because the embers from pro-presidential Our Ukraine and from the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc are resigning. Under Ukrainian law, the Rada cannot function if more than a third of its members are absent. New elections will be held September 30.
The agreeing Viktors were in a playful mood.
“Let's not engage in… what's that called? Revisionism. There is such a word,” Yanukovich said. “We have to agree. If there were mistakes on both sides, they have to be corrected.”
Yushchenko was ready to make corrections to. When they asked him about the internal forced troops making their way to Kiev, he widened his eyes.
“That's a lot of nonsense, one of the fables they are telling to misinform the public!” he exclaimed and went on to say that the extra forces were coming to the capital only because Sunday the final match between Kiev Dynamo and Donetsk Miners soccer teams.
“And this evening we are going to the game together!” Yushchenko beamed, taking Yanukovich and Moroz by the arms. Finally they embraced. Camera flashes blazed. It was already light out.
Before the War
Just a day before the peace, the president and prime minister were practically ready for war to break out in Kiev.
“Yushchenko is Shrek!” an aggressive crowd of 1000 young people in shorts and sandals (it's hot in Kiev) chanted in front of the besieged Prosecutor General's office.
Berkut special forces in full battle gear guarded the building shared the crowd's anger. Inside the building, they were saying that it was going to be stormed on Friday night. Supposedly a unit of Alpha troops, which are subordinate to the president, were in battle readiness and they intended to take the building from Berkut, which is subordinate to the government.
They were waiting for Alpha, but they never came. Boys with Party of the Regions flags took off their shirts and spread them on the ground to sleep on. The reporters were drifting away and MPs were filing out of the building as well.
In the morning, I went into the building that a war was almost fought over. Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun was still in charge. He had won court battles with former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma as well as Yushchenko to prove that all attempts to fire him were illegal. Thanks to a decision of the Solomensky Court in Kiev, which stopped the president's order to dismiss him, Piskun was again saying that he was the only legal prosecutor general. He called together the regional prosecutors in the main auditorium of the building, sat them in their chairs and showed them to the reporters: they support him, nit the president.
The regional prosecutors sat silent and cowed.
“We prosecutors are also people who consider the law supreme,” he announced. “What am I supposed to do now? I am supposed to initiate a criminal case against people who illegally remove people from their jobs. I am not ready to do it, there is no case yet, but it is getting ripe.” His threats were hints, if not at the president, at least at Secretary of the Security Council Ivan Plyushch.
The regional prosecutors sat looking half dead and Piskun kept on joking.
“What will you do if President Yushchenko declares a state of emergency?”
“I'll put on a leather jacket, take a Mauser, form a tribunal and then we'll take him out to the courtyard and shoot him,” Piskun joked.
The regional prosecutors were ready to pass out.
The next morning, after Yushchenko and Yanukovich had agreed on everything, Piskun was again ready to talk to me. It was easier to get in on Sunday. The Berkut troops had been relieved from duty at the prosecutor's building and moved out of Kiev altogether. Young people with Party of the Regions attributes remained and, due to the soccer game that even, their numbers were increasing. Busses were arriving from Donetsk and many fans wanted to catch a tan by the prosecutor's building before the match started. Everything was calm. No one knew the two Viktors had come to an agreement and set a date for the elections. No one chanted “Yushchenko is Shrek.” Only one older woman with hair in the style of Timoshenko held a broom and shouted, “Yulia, go to America. Here's your ride.”
The ever merry prosecutor general was also relaxed, and joking less than usual.
“Do you feel that they sold you out?” I asked him. “While you were fighting here, the president and prime minister agreed on everything.”
“I'm ready to be sold out if it helps the people. If violating the law is for the good of the people, then do it for God's sake. But I don't think this will be for their good.”
“You will probably be removed from office again. Yushchenko and Yanukovich have agreed on everything, the Rada is meeting in Tuesday. It will probably dismiss you.”
“If the Rada votes that way, I will not resist it.”
“What will you do?”
“As long as I am prosecutor general, I will work as prosecutor general. And then I will run for parliament.”
“With what party?”
“With the Yulia Timoshenko Bloc. Or Our Ukraine,” he laughed. He is now an MP from the Party of the Regions.
“Why not Party of the Regions?”
“Maybe with the Party of the Regions. I'll see which of them will be most honest and go with that one. Now the Regionals are very honest people. But o Timoshenko Bloc is more honest, I'll go with it.”
Out the window, I see that the youth that have spent two days surrounding the building are leaving for the game.
Victory, Kinda
For early elections to take place on September 30, MPs from the Timoshenko Bloc and Our Ukraine are supposed to resign this week. They first threatened to do so on Saturday. In the morning, both factions held emergency meetings and gave Yanukovich an ultimatum: if he and the president did not announce a date for the elections by 4:00, the Orange would resign, that is self-destruct, killing all the rest of the Rada at the same time. Then all of the compromise laws the opponents had been developing over the last two months would remain unenacted.
At the appointed hour, I venture unto Our Ukraine's closed meeting. Having said they would resign, they now sat dutifully waiting for a signal from the presidential secretariat. The president was then only beginning the talks that would end 12 hours later. So the legislators sat and discussed their domestic problems lightheartedly.
“This country needs to be fully reloaded,” said deputy chairman of the party's executive committee Igor Zhdanov. “The court system has completely discredited itself. The Constitutional Court has been practically destroyed. It has to be renamed. Maybe Constitutional Tribunal, as in France.”
“Maybe it would be better not to,” someone suggested.
“Why not? The best things to do would be to call a constitutional assembly and develop a new constitution.”
“But if you call a constitutional assembly, half of the places will belong to Yanukovich. They will write the constitutional, not you,” I pointed out.
With the hum of the president's supporters' conversations about reforms they had no chanced of carrying out, I drifted off to sleep. I dozed for 40 minutes. The MPs continued talking about the same topics. There was no news from the presidential secretariat.
A concert was beginning on the Maidan at the same time. Day of the City was that weekend. Kreshchatik was closed to traffic and several thousand people walked on it, eating ice cream or drinking beer. Toward evening, it started to rain and the public thinned out. The Blue-and-White activists began packing up their tents on the Maidan.
“Where're you going?” I asked.
“What is there to do here? Day of the City is over. We can go home.”
“What?” I asked. “Did you accomplish anything?”
They glanced at each other and then looked away. “Well, yeah. It was a victory, kinda.”
They had certainly forgotten what they had fought for for two months.
Mikhail Zygar
All the Article in Russian as of May 28, 2007
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