Editor’s Note: With research material prepared by the Yalta European Strategy, the Kyiv Post is publishing a summary of highlights from each year the conference was held starting in 2004. The newspaper is a media partner of the 12th annual event, being held in Kyiv on Sept. 10-12.
As the 12th
annual Yalta European Strategy takes place in Kyiv for the second year, Ukraine
is reminded again of its multiple challenges: winning the war, regaining Crimea
and righting its economy through greater investment and stronger democratic
institutions.
Leaders in the world and Ukraine mostly ignored the first Yalta European Strategy in 2004. Two years later, participants outlined a step-by-step strategy for Ukraine’s entry into the European Union by 2020. That goal remains a distant dream, with EU expansion in doubt and Russia continuing to wage war against Ukraine following the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea last year. (YES)
While the
YES conference, started in 2004 by billionaire Victor Pinchuk, may not have
solved any of Ukraine’s problems, it has elevated the nation’s profile in the
world by bringing top business and political leaders together in the same room
for informal and public talks with policymakers.
To its ardent
supporters, the event makes a difference.
“It is the
go-to event each year if you want to know the state of affairs in Ukraine,”
Anders Aslund, an economist and author of “Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How To
Fix It.” He has attended the forum for the last 10 years. “YES is easily the
best conference in Ukraine each year. It attracts a better selection of
high-level speakers and participants than any other conference. It is very well
composed in terms of themes and speakers, and it is superbly organized. It is
fast, lively and intense.”
President Petro Poroshenko, then a Ukrainian lawmaker, talks to Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, during the 10th annual Yalta European Strategy in 2013. Poroshenko criticized Russia for politically motivated embargoes on Ukrainian exports in a bid to stop Ukraine from signing an association agreement with the European Union. “European integration is our future. And the (Russian-led) Customs Union, sorry about that, is our past,” Poroshenko said, to which Glazyev responded: “It is your decision, your responsibility. Our job is only to warn you.” (YES)
At the
other end of the spectrum, however, is political scientist and historian Taras
Kuzio, author of “Ukraine: Democratization, Corruption and The New Russian
Imperialism,”
Kuzio said
he was invited to this year’s forum but the event
organizers didn’t offer to pay his expenses and he is not attending.
“YES was
always merely a talking shop rather than a serious brainstorming of
intellectual minds on Ukraine’s integration into Europe because its overriding
strategic purpose is to flatter oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s ego,” Kuzio said,
accusing Pinchuk of promoting Russian business interests in Ukraine, covering
up his father-in-law and ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s alleged role in the Sept.
16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze and supporting ex-President Viktor Yanukovych and other anti-democratic
forces through the years. Kuchma has always denied involvement in Gongadze’s
murder.
Billionaire Victor Pinchuk, founder of Yalta European Strategy and ex-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2013. Pinchuk has spent more than $11.5 million on the event since 2006. (YES)
YES
spokesman Dennis Kazvan said that Pinchuk would not respond to what he called
Kuzio’s unfounded attacks.
Others were
more in the middle, although Volodymyr Panchenko, head of the International
Center for Policy Studies, is skeptical about the conference’s value. “Even
though ‘kings’ or ‘queens’ often visit the conference – because they are paid for
it – it doesn’t mean we’re important for them,” he said.
Panchenko
said the event cannot mask Ukraine’s absence of a clear strategy. “Our
political and business establishment is too weak to take part in serious
discussions on country’s future course,” Panchenko said.
Ivanna
Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of Ukraine’s parliament who served as executive
director of YES from 2011-2014, said that Pinchuk deserves credit for his
courage in bringing people with radically opposing viewpoints together for
talks on tough issues that the authorities prefer to avoid.
Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, a member of parliament and former executive director of the YES forum.
Two
exchanges vividly stand out during her four-year tenure in leading the event.
One took
place in 2012, when ex-Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin defended the
imprisonment of ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a conviction seen by most
as politically motivated.
“I do
remember how tough it was to get these horrible people like Mr. Kuzmin and put
him on a panel,” she said.
To
Klympush-Tsintsadze, Kuzmin’s performance provided an “emperor has no clothes”
moment, when the corruption of Ukraine’s judicial system became obvious to
participants. “They were horrified. They were feeling the times of the NKVD,”
she said, referring to the acronym of the predecessor agency of the Soviet KGB.
Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski (C) speaks with Javier Solana, a former NATO secretary general, during the opening of the 11th annual Yalta European Strategy on Sept. 11, 2014 in Kyiv. (Yalta European Strategy)
In
retrospect, it also foreshadowed the public eruption that became the 2013-14
EuroMaidan Revolution. It was triggered not only by Yanukovych’s rejection of a
political association and free-trade deal with the European Union, but also by
the regime’s authoritarianism.
Another
memorable exchange took place in 2013, the last year that the event took place
in Yalta. Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president since June 2014, got into a
heated debate with Sergei Glazyev, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
advisers, on Russia’s politically motivated embargoes on Ukrainian exports.
Glazyev was
one of the few Russians in attendance that year. Other invited Russians
cancelled two weeks before the start, Klympush-Tsintsadze said, amid strong
Kremlin pressure to get Yanukovych to ditch the EU pact.
“There was
a political game behind it,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said. “Yanukovych’s team was
playing two ways, so to say, trying to blackmail Russia with their possible
signing of the association agreement without their sincerely wanting to do so.”
Glazyev warned
Ukraine of severe repercussions if its leaders signed the EU agreement and
predicted that Ukraine would regret doing so.
In
retrospect, Klympush-Tsintsadze wishes that Ukraine would have taken Glazyev’s
warnings more seriously.
Renat Kuzmin, ex-deputy prosecutor general and Hryhoriy Nemyrya, deputy Head of Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party attend the second day of the 9th Yalta Annual Meeting on Sept.15, 2012. (YES)
“We didn’t
think, as Ukrainians, something so illogical…and something so irrational as he
was saying could actual be a real policy,” she said. “None of us took it
seriously enough.”
Asked to
recall memorable speakers over the years, Klympush-Tsintsadze cited former U.S.
Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice and former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.
This year’s
event is drawing more than 350 global leaders from 20 countries, including
Ukraine’s Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Legendary singer
Elton John will appear on Sept. 12. Full details can be found at the website
yes-ukraine.org.
Still,
little has gone according to the hopes of many YES participants, who as far
back as 2006 created a detailed roadmap for Ukraine’s entry into the EU by
2020. It was promptly discarded by Ukraine’s political leaders.
Klympush-Tsintsadze
still has hope, however, for bigger and better changes ahead for Ukraine. She
said that events such as YES can help.
“I do think
that it is our – I fear to say last chance, but very close to last chance, to
get the country off the knees in economic terms and also in political terms in
creating a system with rule of law and justice that these citizens really
deserve,” she said.
It all
depends on “whether we have enough people capable of fighting the old system
and willing to fight the old system among the authorities now,”
Klympush-Tsintsadze said.
She hopes
it does. “It’s not a prognosis,” Klympush-Tsintsadze said. “It’s a hope.”
Kyiv Post
chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected] and staff
writer Olena Goncharova can be reached at [email protected]
