Commentary
Manitoba Legislature Honours
Ukrainian Swindler
On May 27, the Manitoba Legislature honoured Victor Yushchenko, the
current president of Ukraine. Politicians from all parties in the legislature
gushed with praise for the Ukrainian president, calling him a “champion of
freedom and democracy”. In reality, Yushchenko stands
neither for freedom nor democracy, for the Ukraine or elsewhere. Like Leonid Kravchuk,
Leonid Kuchma and all of the other oligarchs who came
to power in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yushchenko
has spent the past two decades enriching himself at the expense of the
Ukrainian people and selling out the country to the highest bidder.
Yushchenko was a career
member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high-ranking bureaucrat
in the Soviet state bank for many years. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the
early 1990s, Yushchenko and several colleagues seized
control of the Ukrainian division of the bank. Through a series of financial
manipulations they proceeded to appropriate the assets of the bank for
themselves, swindling millions of Ukrainian workers out of their life savings
and pensions.
Yushchenko’s sometime
coalition partner and sometime rival, Julia Tymoshenko,
likewise used her positions in the Soviet communist party and state to amass a
personal fortune when the Soviet Union collapsed. She took control of the multi-billion
dollar natural gas industry in Ukraine during the early years of the Leonid Kuchma regime and served as deputy-prime minister under Kuchma.
The contradictions between Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and former
Ukrainian Prime Minister Victor Yanukovych have nothing to do with freedom and democracy for Ukraine or
any other matters of principle. They represent a falling out among thieves,
each eager to grab the lion’s share of the wealth looted from the Ukrainian
people. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko
see their fortunes linked to selling out Ukraine to the U.S. and Western
Europe, while Yanukovych is more closely linked with
the Russian oligarchs who seized control of that nation’s public assets.
Ukraine’s history is that of being a
battleground for its more powerful neighbours
fighting to control its rich agricultural lands and natural resources. For most
of the past several centuries Ukraine has been divided between the big powers,
with Russia controlling the eastern regions, while Poland and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire controlled the western regions. Yushchenko’s
agenda to sell out the nation to the U.S. and European interests and his determination
to bring Ukraine into NATO threaten to split the country once again.