Hours after former deputy prime minister arrested, president, prime minister and parliament speaker issue angry statement to effect that they are fed up with blistering scandal that is garnering international media attention
Hours after former Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was arrested on new charges of bribery Feb. 13, Ukraine’s president, prime minister and parliament speaker issued an an angry, defensive statement indicating that the nation’s top politicians have had enough of a blistering scandal that is garnering media attention from around the globe.
President Leonid Kuchma, Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko and Parliament Speaker Ivan Pliushch signed the statement, claiming that the intensifying scandal was caused by “an unprecedented political campaign bearing all signs of psychological war.”
The statement, which was read on state television channel UT‑1, came on the heels of the arrest of Tymoshenko. She is accused of handing former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko an $80 million bribe, in addition to stealing and illegally exporting Russian natural gas, stashing up to $1.8 million.
Tymoshenko is one of the leaders of the newly formed Forum for National Salvation, which united this month in opposition to Kuchma. Cosigners of the statement reserved their harshest words for that group.
“We all see now the involvement of those Ukrainian politicians and those political forces who have nothing but personal interests and ambitions, egotistical aspirations and current expectations,” the statement said. “They are instigating an atmosphere of hysteria and psychosis, hoping to put out of balance the legitimate state institutions and to get to power at any cost.”
Such ramblings are not uncommon for Kuchma, who has been known to mercilessly lash out at political foes. Some said the biggest surprise in the statement was one of the three cosigners, Yushchenko.
Batkivshchyna faction head Oleksandr Turchynov said he was ashamed of Yushchenko. Tymoshenko was the prime minister’s closest ally until she was fired Jan. 19 because of the pending criminal charges. Yushchenko, who had been at odds with the president for much of his yearlong term, seems to have made an about‑face.
Deputy Prosecutor General Mykola Obykhod said Feb. 13 that in 1996 Tymoshenko transferred $4.6 million from her company Somolli Enterprises in Cyprus to the accounts of Vilmer company, supervised by Lazarenko adviser Petro Kyrychenko in Switzerland.
On Jan. 15 the General Prosecutor’s Office charged Tymoshenko with contraband, falsification of documents and tax evasion.
According to political analyst Mykhailo Pohrebinsky, Tymoshenko’s arrest was concocted as a means to deflect attention away from the ongoing scandal involving murdered journalist Georgy Gongadze and audio tapes linking President Leonid Kuchma to the murder.
Pohrebinsky thinks the plot to arrest Tymoshenko was hatched during a meeting of the Council for National Security and Defense, attended by Kuchma, Yushchenko and Pliushch on Feb. 10.
During the meeting, Kuchma fired the chief of the State Security Service (SBU), Leonid Derkach, and appointed Volodymyr Radchenko, a former SBU chief who left in the job in 1998, to head the agency. Kuchma told Radio Liberty that more firings would follow.
Protesters praised Derkach’s dismissal, and lay a burial wreath in a symbolic move during a march involving more than 2,000 protesters in downtown Kyiv on Feb.11.
“We are not satisfied with Derkach’s dismissal alone,” Yury Lutsenko, leader of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement, said Feb. 13. “We want Kravchenko. Only on this condition will we agree to negotiate with authorities. As for [Prosecutor General] Potebenko, parliament should decide what to do with him.”
Potebenko returned to Kyiv on Feb. 14, cutting short a hastily planned vacation in Western Ukraine, because he reportedly had a fever.
It was an eventful week for the Ukraine Without Kuchma protesters, who had pitched tents on Kyiv’s main street to drum up support for the opposition.
On Feb. 13, Starokyivsky District Court of Kyiv banned the tents from Khreshchatyk. When court executives arrived, the protesters refused to take down the tents, claiming only one of the 36 tents was subject to the court’s decision.
The loophole stemmed from the fact that the Kyiv City Administration filed suit against Socialist Party deputy Valentyna Semeniuk and tent camp supervisor Yevhen Filindazh for erecting “small architectural constructions on the territory of historical and cultural preserves.”
Semeniuk removed her personal tent from Khreshchatyk on Feb. 13; however, she plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.
“If I were standing on Khreshchatyk with a big umbrella, would they call it a small architectural construction as well? Ukrainian courts adopt political decisions instead of juridical ones,” Semeniuk said.
Meanwhile, members of Ukraine Without Kuchma demonstrated in Dnipropetrovsk during the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 12 . The movement’s organizers said that on the eve of the visit, 11 participants of the rally were beaten up and detained by plainclothes assailants.
“The violence against the demonstrators in Dnipropetrovsk, the banning of the tent camp in Kyiv and the arrest of Yulia Tymoshenko are all links in one chain. Leonid Kuchma showed the whole world that his idol and model is odious Lukashenko,” said Anatoly Matviyenko, leader of Sobor party and member of the Forum for National Salvation.
The Gongadze scandal erupted in November after a former presidential security guard released an audiotape that included conversations allegedly of Kuchma ordering top aides to “get rid of” Gongadze, who disappeared in September. His beheaded body was found in a wooded area south of Kyiv in November.
See full English-language transcript of Kuchma’s address to the nation at http://www.kpnews.com/main.php?arid=7476
