U.S. freezes aid, says there is proof Kuchma approved Kolchuga sales to Iraq; Foreign Ministry questions timing of accusations.
The United States announced Sept. 24 it had suspended $55 million of aid to Ukraine as a part of wider policy review plan toward the country after it determined President Leonid Kuchma personally approved the sale of an anti-aircraft radar system to Iraq.
U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Sept. 24 that the United States had authenticated an excerpt of a July 2000 recording provided by Kuchma’s former bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko. On the recording former arms export chief Valery Malev, who died suspiciously in a car crash earlier this year, tells Kuchma that Iraq wants to buy four Kolchuga systems. Kuchma gives a go-ahead for the deal.
“We believe this recording to be authentic,” Boucher told a news briefing in Washington.
Boucher said an investigation is underway to determine whether Iraq actually possesses Kolchuga systems.
“We are not certain that these systems are in Iraq,” Boucher said. “On the other hand, there are some indications that suggest it may be there and we are continuing to assess those.”
Marie Yovanovitch, second in command at the U.S. Embassy, confirmed Sept. 25 that, “We do have some information that there may be some [Kolchugas] in Iraq.”
The Kuchma administration denied that Ukraine has had anything to do with selling Kolchuga radar systems to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions.
Calling U.S. allegations “indiscriminate accusations” not backed by proof, Yury Serheyev, state secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, questioned the timing of the U.S. allegations.
“We would not like to think that there is any connection between the [U.S.] statement and our internal political situation,” said Serheyev, quoted by The Associated Press.
Ukraine’s only manufacturer of Kolchugas – the Topaz factory in Donetsk – has only produced “three or four” such systems making it easy to track, said Ihor Kharchenko, the deputy state secretary of the Foreign Affairs Ministry.
He said that three Kolchugas have been sold to Ethiopia and the fourth is in “pre-contract negotiations with a large country, not subject to UN sanctions.”
Yovanovitch said that the U.S. had verified that Ethiopia had Kolchugas.
The Kolchuga is a passive radar system capable of tracking moving objects on the ground and in the air when they emit radar signals. It emits no signals of its own, is mobile and is easy to hide, involving an antenna attached to an ordinary-looking truck.
Melnychenko fled Ukraine in late 2000 with hundreds of hours of recordings that appeared to implicate Kuchma in a dizzying array of high crimes, including unsanctioned arms sales to Iraq and complicity in the September 2000 murder of Georgy Gongadze.
Kuchma has admitted that his voice is on the tapes, but he has maintained they were doctored.
Although independent foreign analyses have indicated the tapes were authentic, local prosecutors have refused to investigate the tapes. The U.S. analysis of the tapes is believed to be the first testing carried out by a foreign government.
Boucher said the U.S. analysis covered only the segment of recordings relating directly to the Kolchuga sale.
“We really looked at this particular tape because of the issues involved. I don’t have [anything broader on the tapes].”
Allegations have swirled for months against Kuchma about the alleged transfer, but the Kuchma administration has angrily denied the reports. The United States had previously kept out of the row in public, saying it had no credible evidence the Kolchuga system had been sold to Iraq.
After the stunning announcement by the United States, international leaders lined up to demand answers from Kuchma about the Kolchuga sale.
NATO General Secretary George Robertson, in Warsaw for a meeting of NATO defense ministers, demanded an explanation from Kuchma on Sept. 25. A day earlier Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who has supported Kuchma in the past, told journalists that he fully supported the U.S. position vis-a-vis Ukraine. Kwasniewski made the comment following a conversation with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
In the wake of its findings the United States has immediately suspended a significant portion of its aid to Ukraine. Boucher said the suspension would cover all programs dealing with the central government authorities, including work on reforms in fiscal and commercial law, pensions and government regulations. He said such programs had a budget of approximately $54 million in fiscal year 2002, representing about a
| Kolchuga radar system |
third of the total Freedom Support Act assistance to Ukraine.
Chris Crowley, head of the United States Agency for International Development, said late Sept. 25 that he was unsure specifically what USAID programs would be affected.
“USAID is a mixture of work with the government and NGOs and the private sector,” he said. “We are looking at those activities in our portfolio to see how we can disaggregate some activities from the other.”
He added that no program has been suspended yet.
Boucher said the aid suspension is not expected to affect the bulk of U.S. assistance to Ukraine, designed for the private sector, particularly non-governmental organizations and regional government bodies. The move also doesn’t concern initiatives targeting small-business development, such as land titling, and various exchange programs, as well as military-to-military and nonproliferation assistance.
Since the mid-nineties, few countries besides Egypt and Israel have received more U.S. assistance money than Ukraine. In July a congressional committee earmarked $155 million in assistance for Ukraine for the fiscal year 2003. That’s $10 million to $20 million less than the amount of funding provided in 2000 and 2001.
U.S. officials said further measures were being considered in a review that would last a week or two.
An analysis of the [Kolchuga] recording “has led us to re-examine our policy toward Ukraine, in particular toward President Kuchma,” State Department spokeswoman Lynn Cassel said.
“There’s a unanimous view in the U.S. government that this is egregious,” Reuters quoted a senior U.S. official as saying. “The question is how do you do it in a way that still maintains your ability to engage Ukraine and shape the kind of country you want to see Ukraine become five, 10 years down the road.”
The recording excerpt authenticated by the U.S. contains a 90-second conversation between Kuchma and Malev, then the director of state arms export agency Ukrspetsexport.
According to a public transcript released by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, Malev told Kuchma that Iraqis offered his company $100 million up front through a Jordanian intermediary for four Kolchugas.
Malev suggested that the system be packed in the crates of another Ukrainian company, and Kuchma gives his permission for the deal, according to the transcript.
“OK. Go ahead,” Kuchma tells Malev at the end of the transcript.
While Boucher denied that U.S. investigators had looked at other tapes, Reuters reported that its source said the authenticity of the Kolchuga recording now “colors the way that we look at the other recordings.”
Oleksandr Zhyr, the former chairman of the Rada committee investigating Gongadze’s disappearance and other crimes, has vouched for the authenticity of recordings, but he criticized Melnychenko’s handling of the tapes.
Zhyr told the Post that he had obtained copies of 700 hours of the recordings along with the device Melnychenko claims he used to make them. Zhyr wouldn’t elaborate on how he obtained the recordings.
“Unfortunately, Melnychenko’s behavior and his manipulation of the release of the recordings has been disgraceful,” Zhyr said.
He said Melnychenko has been reluctant to release the entire archive and has repeatedly timed new releases to various political events.
Zhyr, who promised to make copies of all the recordings public in the near future via the Internet, began on Sept. 24 publishing some of the unreleased recordings on a Web site called The Fifth Element (www.5element.net). The site posted a 9 minute 38 recording containing the entire conversation between Kuchma and Malev on Sept. 27.
The Kuchma administration was scrambling to diffuse the situation as the Post went to press. The Presidential Administration issued a statement Sept. 25 saying that Kuchma had several days before sent an open letter to the head of the U.N. Security Council requesting creation of a special commission to investigate Ukraine’s possible role in arms supplies to Iraq.
“Ukraine is prepared to make available all information, and is open to inspections by competent authorized international organizations, including U.S. experts,” the statement read.
The allegations seemed sure to bolster the cause of the opposition, increasingly active its efforts to oust Kuchma in recent weeks.
“We are talking about large-scale shadow activities here, but in general I would say the opposition has received another argument from the United States for their actions,” said Oleksandr Dergachyov, chief editor of Politychna Dumka, a twice-weekly magazine.
