Gas rips off masks
This has never happened before. A meeting of the National Security and Defense Council that had been put off for a long time and finally took place on February 10, dealt another blow to Ukrainian statehood, adding to the chaos in state administration and people’s minds. The only good news is that the country’s most influential roundtable did not consider revising contracts between Naftohaz Ukrainy and Gazprom. NSDC Secretary Raisa Bohatyriova made the announcement and added that the subject of RosUkrEnergo was not raised, either. Then what were the people responsible for national security and defense fuming over after the gas row?
According to Bohatyriova, the discussion concerned ways to mitigate the consequences of the gas contracts for the Ukrainian economy. It was pointed out that it is important for this country to maintain the gas transit price on the market level, for this will provide additional budget revenues worth between three and five billion dollars, keep Naftohaz Ukrainy in the black, and secure Ukraine against default.
A positive program based on wishful thinking is fiction and not a source of any particular hopes, although Bohatyriova appears to expect something of this kind and assures that everything will be done in an “absolutely proper manner.”
What? How? Minimum information for answers to these questions can be found in the prime minister’s accusations of the political leadership and the counteraccusations and explanations voiced by Bohatyriova’s deputy Stepan Havrysh after the NSDC meeting. Among other things, he reminded journalists that the prime minister said in an interview that the NSDC’s aim is to return RosUkrEnergo to the gas market, and that NSDC serves to protect corruption. Was the prime minister aware of the audience she was addressing and the effect of her statement on the younger generation’s worldviews? After all, the NSDC is not just so many people gathered at a table, the prime minister included. It is a state agency that must keep functioning after its current membership is replaced. Will the people still trust it after such statements by the prime minister—and about the prime minister, for that matter? Tymoshenko might as well remember that the USSR’s collapse began with discrimination against the top state agencies.
NSDC is a special body in Ukraine. Its documents and resolutions are often closed to the general public because they contain classified data. In this particular case they were not to be disclosed, either, and the prime minister and the other participants were duly notified. Therefore, by making her statement for the press, Tymoshenko had violated the law, noted Havrysh.
Most importantly, he said, her statement was contrary to the purpose of the meeting, discussion, and the contents of the documents. He explained that the NSDC meeting was indended to make it possible for the government to expand the discussion involving the head of state and parliament, in order to work out an anti-crisis program and overcome the situation with Ukraine’s energy security.
“We believe that the threats to our energy security have reached the highest level after the signing of the gas accords… The prime minister has acted in bad faith and inadequately in regard to the situation that developed during the NSDC meeting, providing untruthful information that does not correspond to reality,” Havrysh summed up.
Bohatyriova made another interesting statement in which she concurs on the assessment of Russia’s loan to Ukraine published by Den’: “The Russian Federation may issue this loan to Ukraine with the aim of receiving dividends and getting hold of certain assets, perhaps the gas transportation system, and give us the money.” Bohatyriova stressed that the government needs this loan to cover the seven-percent budget deficit, according to expert estimates.
In view of this, Tymoshenko has to be punished, but it looks as though the NSDC did not know how. A solution to this problem was offered by Inna Bohoslovska, chairperson of the Verkhovna Rada’s commission of inquiry, who intends to have the Prosecutor General’s Office join in handling the case. “I’m going submit forward a parliamentarian inquiry to the Prosecutor General’s Office tomorrow, demanding a criminal case to be opened against the prime minister and her suspension from office,“ she told journalists.
Naturally, official Moscow pretends to take no interest in Ukraine’s domestic political conflict. Russia’s independent journalists, however, believe differently. They sum up the results of the gas confrontation in a markedly tough style. Thus, maydan.org.ua published an article of Moscow’s noted journalist and writer Yulia Latynina. Perhaps the most interesting part of the article deals with the roots of gas/political confrontation: “Suppose the intermediary heavily overstated the expenditures by buying their own assets and sponsoring Our Ukraine, while the overblown budget was presented to Moscow as ‘expenditures on Yushchenko…’
“Suppose President Yushchenko did allow the intermediary to finance Our Ukraine but never regarded this as a loss of his political independence. He never for a moment believed that he had been bought, or that he could be bought. Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s anger at Yushchenko was mounting in geometric progression because the intermediary was reporting the sums spent on Yushchenko with nothing to show for it, while Yushchenko did not know that he had been bought.”
And then follows an intriguing twist: “Yulia Tymoshenko became prime minister; the intermediary would never be able to strike a deal with her or buy her because no matter what the intermediary could offer her, it would be part and Tymoshenko wanted it all.”
What do Ukrainian citizens want? They want to hear what the government is doing to ease the burden of the crisis; they want stability and new jobs. No news from that front so far. Instead, we see expos ? shows on television, with politicians trading humiliating statements rather than ideas. To quote ex-Speaker Arsenii Yatseniuk, “The gas has ripped off the masks.”
