In a recent editorial we commented that the diaspora has to accept Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in the Feb. 7 presidential election because it was a fair and democratic election and the people of Ukraine have made their choice.
At the same time, we noted that President Yanukovych has the weakest mandate of any Ukrainian president since independence, having won only by a 3.5 per cent margin (the lowest in history) and also bearing the distinction of being the only Ukrainian president who failed to get a majority of voters to elect him. Thus he does not have a mandate for a major change in direction.
While we in the diaspora understand this reality, Viktor Fyodorovych apparently does not.
Instead of recognizing that he is in charge of a deeply divided country and, as president, is obligated to help bring it together and to serve all the people, Yanukovych, during his first three weeks in office, has embarked on a radical policy of russification, subservience to Moscow, and disdain for the Constitution of Ukraine, which can lead to an ultimate breakup. Let us examine his record to date.
• His inauguration was blessed by Moscow Patriarch Kirill, the head of a foreign church. Regulations call for a blessing by the heads of churches in Ukraine. He could, at least, have asked to be blessed by Patriarch Vladimir of he Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. But by asking Kirill to come down from Moscow for the official blessing he is simply proving the fact that the UOC-MP is a puppet of Moscow, as is he himself.
• On his very first day in office he pulled the Holodomor section off the presidential web site. By doing this he is denying this horrible genocide, which was the most traumatic disaster to afflict Ukraine in the 20thcentury and whitewashing Stalinist Russia of this act of genocide. Can you imagine a leader of Israel denying the holocaust?
• On his visit to Moscow March 5, he pledged to revoke the Hero of Ukraine status accorded both Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Had he made this announcement in Donetsk, he could at least claim to be playing up to his own electorate. But, by announcing it in Moscow, he is pandering to a foreign power. Frankly, many observers noted how he deferred to Russia’s leaders during the visit and how they treated him with disrespect. When you act like a flunkie, you can expect to be treated as one.
• He unconstitutionally put together a new coalition which included defectors from The Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko and Our Ukraine in it numbers because he did not have a majority with blocs alone, as required by law. This is because deputies are not elected as individuals, but as members of a bloc. Since the government of Yulia Tymoshenko lost a confidence vote, he had the right to call new elections if a new coalition could not have been formed within 30 days. That’s what should have been done.
• He picked as his prime minister, a native Russian who can barely speak the official language of the state he is supposed to govern.
• He chose as education minister a Ukrainophobe who is bent on russifying the system.
• He ordered the SBU to stop declassifying old KGB documents which reveal the full extent of the crimes committed by the Soviet regime against the people of Ukraine.
During the election campaign Yanukovych bristled at Yulia Tymoshenko’s charges that he was nothing but a Russian stooge. His actions to date show that’s exactly what he is. It’s time for Yanukovych to realize that he was elected as President of Ukraine to serve all the people and to reverse his current course of action.
Marco Levytsky is the editor and publisher of Ukrainian News, a bi-weekly newspaper distributed across Canada.
