The question of how the Ukrainian diaspora living in the West should deal with Ukraine’s pro-Russian and anti-democracy stance has arisen several times since the election of the President Viktor Yanukovych on Feb. 7.
The Ukrainian Congress Committee of America chose to ignore and bypass a meeting with the Ukrainian leader on his recent trip to New York from Sept. 21-24. Instead, they held a protest rally during the meetings of the United Nations General Assembly, where Yanukovych spoke.
About 200 Ukrainian-Americans in New York took to the streets on Sept. 22 to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s policies. Ukrainian diaspora groups also rejected Yanukovych’s invitation to meet with him during the president’s New York trip from Sept. 21-24, when Yanukovych spoke at the United Nations General Assembly. (UNIAN)
As Tamara Olexy, head of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America told the Kyiv Post: “We understood that there is no sense to meet with Viktor Yanukovych. The president has not yet answered the list of grievances that the World Congress of Ukrainians presented to him at the meeting in June of this year despite his promise.”
This leads to a bigger question: Strategically, what other options are available to Ukrainian community leaders when dealing with the current Ukrainian government? It’s not as simple as a dichotomous yes or no decision. The question has not been well explored and discussed.
Traditionally, the Ukrainians abroad have exclusively used only two negotiation tactics in conflict situations with Ukraine: isolation and/or confrontation. Ask any master’s in business administration student who has taken a basic course in conflict resolution and they will tell you that there are three more approaches, which the diaspora is ignoring and is not utilizing in its negotiation tool kit.
I’m constantly amazed at this frequent lack of transfer from professional life to volunteer life. Skills and techniques that managers, executives, consultants and professionals regularly use during the day are ignored in the evening, when we sit down as volunteers in our Ukrainian organizations.
While the snubbing of Yanukovych by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America in New York could be considered by many as a short-term public relations victory, in my mind, it was a tactical and strategic error. A much bigger and more important opportunity window was ignored and missed by Ukrainian diaspora leaders in the West.
Most people don’t realize that the Yanukovych government now desperately needs the support of the leadership institutions in the Ukrainian diaspora, in both Canada and the United States.
Why? And why now?
One signal that was misinterpreted by the diaspora, just before the Yanukovych visit to New York, was the token attempt at a last minute reproachment with the western Ukrainian diaspora, which included the sudden reappearance of an edited and watered down Holodomor web page on the Ukrainian presidential web site. It came as a reply to the five-month-old letter of demands from the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and included an offer to re-open the KGB archives on Holodomor and to set up a public TV broadcast station in Ukraine.
Is Yanukovych suddenly turning democrat? No.
The Yanukovych government is seeking a prestigious and influential two-year seat at the United Nations Security Council. This requires convincing two thirds of the 192 member countries of the United Nations to vote for Ukraine. The key influential players here are the USA and Canada. Without their overt support, any bids for a seat on the UN Security Council are doomed to failure.
“Ukraine is ready to discuss all the promising concepts of reform of the Security Council,” Yanukovych told the UN General Assembly “We are convinced that the key to success is recognizing the interests of all regional groups, which are under-represented in this body, in particular the Eastern European one.”
With this pronouncement, Ukrainians living abroad in America and Canada now suddenly find themselves in an elevated position, holding two strategically important trump cards in Ukraine’s bid for nomination to the Security Council. Sadly, this issue is not even on the Ukrainian diaspora radar.
The Yanukovych government needs to court the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian World Congress to convince both the American and Canadian governments – and other strategic member countries – to support Ukraine’s future UN bid. Ukrainians living abroad hold an important “supporter trump card” to support Ukraine’s bid as well as a “detractor trump card” to derail or torpedo Ukraine’s bid.
According to Kyiv Post article on chronicling Yanukovych’s visit (Sept. 24, Ukrainians in New York greet Yanukovych with snub, protest”: “Olexander Motryk, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, called Askold Lozynskyj several days before Yanukovych’s visit and asked what the president could do to avoid the street protest. Lozynskyj answered: fire Soldatenko [head of the Institute of National Memory], Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk and recognize the Holodomor as genocide.”
With these two trump cards, the diaspora can add many more demands to the negotiation table.
Wolodymyr (Walter) Derzko is a senior fellow at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) and a lecturer in the master’s of arts program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, Ontario College of Art & Design University in Toronto, Canada.
