As a Ukrainian-Ukrainian with no academic credentials other than having run a blog visited by nearly every major Western university and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, here’s my two Ukraine-splaining kopiykas about the big issue of 2019: Who will be the next president.
Firstly, I haven’t missed a single election since hitting the voting age in 1998. That’s when freshwoman Yulia Tymoshenko had already put herself in the public eye, her signature braid look yet to be invented, but her energy company doing billions of dollars in business with Russia.
Secondly, having admired her seemingly reformist transformation in cutthroat battles with Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine’s second and third presidents, respectively, by mid-2008 I had fallen out of love with the two-time prime minister.
That’s when she chose not to cross Russian President Vladimir Putin over Georgia in hopes of winning him over in the upcoming gas talks, a key success factor in the 2010 presidential election.
Even so, painting Tymoshenko as another Hugo Chavez or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes as a bit of a stretch to me.
Why?
If she were that serious about socialism, she’d have to part ways with Ihor Kolomoisky faster than you can say bailout.
To be fair to him, he’s the white knight who helped keep Kharkiv, Dnipro and Odesa out of Russia’s bear hug in 2014 but, believe me, he’s no socialist. He’s an oligarch, in an honorary exile of sorts, looking to get back at Poroshenko — and get back in the game. If the Privatbank story is any guide, Kolomoisky’s defense of Ukraine’s statehood falls into the “business first” category. Likewise, his “readiness” to support Tymoshenko probably comes with strings attached.
Still not enough to dispel myths about Tymoshenko’s socialist streak? OK, remember that spectacular spurned lover-faced “propalo vsio” (all is lost) blooper from 2009, an accidental double entendre of comic proportions? That’s when her “grand coalition” pipe dream, an open secret rumored for months, blew up right in her face. If successful, it would have allowed her and the Party of Regions, Ukraine’s richest clan, to cling to power on a Constitution-crushing rotating basis — two decades into the future (2009-2029). Autocratic? Sure. Socialist? Not so much. Good luck selling wealth redistribution to the Akhmetovs and Yanukovychs! It’s miscalculations like this, combined with a terribly bad gas deal and an equally bad economy, that cost her the presidency back then.
Moving further down the road, a few more tales from days bygone and how they’ve evolved into the proverbial “we have what we have,” as Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first president, put it. The late 1990s and 1998 in particular — Kuchma’s fourth year as president and my first as a voter — saw the arrival of an entire cohort of post-Soviet politicians, or oligarchs-to-be, if you will. Not only did it mark Tymoshenko’s maiden voyages to the Rada (1997, 1998) — ex-Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s Hromada (Community) waiting with open arms — but it was also a breakout year for freshman Poroshenko, who cast his lot with what soon would become the Party of Regions.
Now that they’ve grown up, you’d think these two leaders oppose each other tooth and nail, in each and every ideologically entrenched way?
Think again!
Let me give you an intimate, close-to-home illustration of how opposites attract and how messy and intertwined Ukrainian politics is. In gross violation of a raft of regulations, a titanic of a high-rise condo complex is about to be shoehorned into my neighborhood in Kyiv’s Obolon district, known for the beauty of its river and lakefront landscapes. Add to this an epically aging infrastructure, a nationwide problem. Most of the housing and infrastructure dates back to the Brezhnev-Gorbachev eras — precast concrete panels — whose lifespan and quality of life depend on maintenance, which leaves a lot to be desired. Just to be clear, my apartment had gone without running hot water from late May until Dec. 14. It’s back — on an on-again, off-again basis, blowing hot and cold like Katy Perry’s hit song, in a reflection of the general state of affairs in Ukraine.
Now guess who wants to walk all over us with that high-rise complex while arguing the exact opposite?
Guess who wants to dump thousands of happy new dwellers on our community, where trenches full of broken pipes — sometimes even geysers — dot the streets like it’s a war zone?
Where new malls and eateries outnumber new schools and day care centers?
Oh, don’t worry, we’ll be boiling our own hot water and just one more kindergarten should fix the problem, the developer says. Great! How much additional electricity, cold water, transportation and pollution? How’s that going to affect our quality of life?
Plus, we locals definitely beg to differ on the kindergarten issue, Kyiv being a magnet for labor migration in an otherwise largely jobless country, where the next best option for many is emigration.
Speaking of joblessness and labor migration, the talent behind the impending construction boom in our neighborhood is…a development company vice-chaired by Ksenia Pavlovska, an assemblywoman from Rivne Oblast, my ancestral homeland. Yes, you heard that right, a state legislator doing business — private business, mind you — in a state other than their constituency.
As if that wasn’t ironic enough, she’s also a proud ally of presidential frontrunner Tymoshenko, whose local election posters used to decorate countless balconies in my predominantly orange neighborhood in 2008.
That’s when Oleksandr Turchynov, who currently serves as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, was running for mayor as Tymoshenko’s endorsee, campaigning against exactly that — against out-of-control, in-your-face, sardine-packed construction.
And what a politically sensitive mother lode of construction business awaits the Tymoshenko camp assemblywoman-developer.
Alas, the would-be site happens to be…a pool — originally, a “swimming palace” of a total of seven pools — six for children, one for adults, complete with a shaft for divers.
Once affordable to the general public and teeming with kids, the palace ended up privatized and converted into a luxury fitness center — in the pivotal, oligarch-hatching late ’90s.
Now that it’s obsolete and no longer profitable, as the owners’ representatives claim, they apparently want it gone in favor of something bigger. A lot bigger. Economies of scale and all.
And guess who the owners are? At least one of the two key owners, Aleksandr Melamud, reportedly holds a passport of — you guessed it, Russia. In this candid 2012 interview in Russian he recalls being “categorically against the Orange Revolution” of 2004-2005.
May I remind you that the Orange Revolution was against a rigged presidential election, among other things. Sound shocking? Relax, there’s a silver lining: The other key owner, Garik Korogodsky, gave up his Russian citizenship in 2015.
On top of that, according to Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko — an ally of Poroshenko — in the spirit of goodwill, the owners want to bless their triple-towered 28-story edifice with a brand-new state-of-the-art in-house pool.
What a relief for a not-so-upscale community consisting mainly of aging 9- and 16-story “brezhnevkas.”
Make no mistake, there’s nothing wrong with building big high-quality houses for people who worked hard to afford them. But why squeeze them into neighborhoods that have enough problems of their own — and into land lots originally designated for a different type of construction?
And thereby hangs another plot twist, a little legal problem: The owners own the pool but not the land. The land still belongs to the city and was originally designated for a sports/recreational facility.
Naturally, they want it re-designated for housing. That, of course, would require some skillful bureaucratic and public relations maneuvering. No wonder, from what we’ve heard, they’re looking to “clean up” some of the “swampy” areas adjoining the beach of a nearby lake in the process. How incredibly generous and trendy! Build three towers, drain one swamp. Do the frogs, ducks and hedgehogs consent?
In the small world of Obolon and the small fish that live in it, nestled right next to the lake and the pool-on-the-chopping-block, is the school I went to. As the construction plans get under way, a member of my school’s parent-teacher association has come forward to us about an offer of “renovation help” floated unofficially on the fringes of a City Council meeting in October.
If true, it’s another classic soft power tactic used by developers to put the best face on a problematic project and minimize negative publicity, nipping the rebellion in the bud.
Keep in mind that laws, courts and regulations don’t work in Ukraine the way they do in the West.
Consequently, in a country with a gross domestic product per capita of $2,639.82 in 2017, money talks so much louder. Given the sheer size of the project, we’re talking millions and millions of almighty dollars here.
In other words, much like Ukraine’s against Russia, ours is a battle against all odds.
Because, let’s face it, what happens when soft power doesn’t work and resistance doesn’t stop? Hard power kicks in! Things get kinetic, with armies of baseball bat-wielding titushki deployed and even shots fired.
In this regard, the most insanely ironic aspect of the whole story is that my school had also graduated Oleksiy Durmasenko (1989-2014), a bullet-braving Ukrainian flag-waving war hero who fought and died for Ukraine. And for the post-World War II order, to be sure.
Lastly, take one more guess.
Guess whose votes it’s going to take to fly this on a magic carpet ride through City Council in early 2019? The Poroshenko-Klitschko majority!
Sadly, I did vote for these magicians, or shall I say, “reformers.” My bad, my mistake.
But did I vote for the Minsk “peace deal” — a deal with the devil — and for all the other wheelings and dealings that have reconsolidated the elite status quo over the last four years? Hell no.
So…should something happen to our activists, most of whom are women, I predict a rally in front of the U.S ambassador’s residence. After all, didn’t they have “the pleasure of my company” at those optimistic post-Maidan Fourth of July receptions in 2014-2015?
As Tymoshenko leads in the polls, by plurality, the question to her — and to all the other candidates — is: Are you OK with “business as usual”?
If the answer is yes, then maybe you got the pulse of the nation all wrong.
