Ukraine teeters on brink of revolution

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/10/2014 (3465 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Only a few photographs of dead fighters and flowers in the centre of Kiev recall the dramatic events that unfolded on Independence Square, or the Maidan, a year ago. The barricades and the encampment are long gone.

The city feels subdued and traumatized as it awaits the parliamentary elections on Sunday. The energy and hope of a new beginning that sustained the revolution have been drained by a war that has claimed 3,600 lives. Crimea is gone, large swathes of Donbas, the industrial region in the southeast, have been seized by separatists and the ceasefire is fragile.

There has been little in the way of good news. Ukraine has lost precious time to reform its economy, which is teetering on the verge of collapse.

The first post-revolutionary government included some of the activists from the Maidan protests and proved to be pitifully weak, lacking experience and skills. Pavlo Sheremeta, who resigned after six months as economy minister, said that the old ways were so entrenched that he had little control over his own ministry, a replica of Gosplan, the Soviet state-planning committee.

“I spent three hours every day signing some 200 to 300 papers,” he said. “Most of it was total nonsense produced by the apparatus to justify its existence.”

The deciding factor, the political will to change the country’s post-Soviet order, has been conspicuously absent in Ukraine. Urgent reforms have been stalled by Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, a vestige of the old regime. The point of the elections is to consolidate President Petro Poroshenko’s power and give him control over the legislature.

“We must create a new, decentralized system of governance,” said Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Groisman, a Poroshenko ally, “otherwise no reform will be possible.”

If the Poroshenko Bloc, the president’s party, wins an outright majority, Groisman may lead the next government. If not, Poroshenko probably will form a coalition with current Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, who is running on a nationalist ticket.

As ever in Ukraine, nothing is what it seems. The elections will not overhaul the system in which deputies are the extensions of business interests and can be sold and traded. The new parliament is likely to be dominated by old faces wearing new masks.

The odious Party of Regions is gone, but its spirit has been reconstituted in the Strong Ukraine and Opposition Bloc parties. Oligarchs including Rinat Akhmetov, Sergei Levochkin and Dmitry Firtash, who has faced bribery charges from American officials, still are said to influence the makeup of party lists, including Yatseniuk’s People’s Front. Igor Kolomoisky, the most powerful oligarch and the governor of Dnepropetrovsk, stronghold of the anti-separatist resistance, has no party of his own but will control many votes.

To counter those forces, the first post-Soviet generation is pushing its way into politics. Its people may win only about 20 seats in the new parliament, but they hope that their anti-corruption message will spread. Young Ukrainians who were educated in the West and landed successful jobs in private firms and investment banks are flocking to help build a new state.

They will face enormous obstacles. Much of the Ukrainian economy is plagued by ingenious schemes for diverting state money into private pockets. Some of the most outrageous ones set up by ousted President Viktor Yanukovych have been closed, but many survive. Even the lustration law, which blindly targets officials who served under Yanukovych, so far largely has been used to clear space for new clans.

Sooner or later reform comes into conflict with vested interests. Daniil Pasko of the National Reform Council, an advisory body, said that the entrenched apparatchiks “understand the system we want to change 10 times better than us – they built it.”

The outcome of the battle is of existential importance to Ukraine. Reformers are arming themselves with new institutions, such as the Anti-Corruption Bureau, which will have law-enforcement powers. In the meantime the old prosecutors, who often acted like raiders, have been stripped of their vast powers.

The new political class also will face huge pressure from Russia. Ukrainian reformers’ success is President Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare. He will do anything in his power to stop the idea from spreading to Russia.

Ukraine’s corruption is an ally for the Kremlin. Russia also is ratcheting up pressure by demanding prepayment for future deliveries of gas from Gazprom, as well as the repayment of old debts. Ukraine has not yet experienced the full brunt of the economic crisis, but, as winter approaches, gas shortages will bring the truth home.

With the economy contracting by as much as 10% this year, with inflation at 14%, with reserves melting away and with debt repayments looming, Ukraine cannot survive without foreign aid. This aid depends on the government’s ability to show progress on reforms, including deregulation and removing energy subsidies, however resistant the oligarchs may be.

“Everyone understands that, if we don’t fix the system, the pond will simply cease to exist,” said Dmytro Shymkiv, Poroshenko’s deputy chief of staff in charge of reforms.

They need to show results. The biggest threat is not only that the money will run out, but also that the patience of those who stood on the Maidan and who have been fighting the war will wane. Frustration is showing in the popularity of Oleh Lyashko, a pitchfork-wielding populist seen as a clown but expected to finish second nonetheless.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers still at the front are unable to vote. With the fighting nearly over, they soon will come home to find a government they played no part in electing. If they see no change in the way their country is run, they will take to the streets, not with wooden shields and sticks, as they did a year ago, but with real weapons. The next Maidan will look less like a carnival and more like the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

If nothing else, this should concentrate the minds in the Ukrainian government.