Incumbent president fires ambassadors. Why?
Shortly before the runoff, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko unexpectedly fired six ambassadors: Inna Ohnivets (Slovakia), Borys Bazylevsky (Ireland), Ihor Lossovsky (Malaysia), Ihor Lohinov (Iran), Ihor Polikha (India, Bangladesh, the Republic of Maldives, Sri Lanka, and the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal), and Ivan Dovhanych (Vietnam and Cambodia).
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine explains this as a regular rotation procedure. However, replacing Ukrainian ambassadors to Vietnam, Iran, and Malaysia seems odd, considering that two of these ambassadors received their postings in the second half of 2009: Lossovsky on June 4, and Dovhanych on June 3. According to the Central Election Commission, Viktor Yushchenko did not receive any votes in those countries in the first round of the presidential elections.
Anatolii Hrytsenko, member of the Ukrainian parliament’s NUNS faction, declared during a coordination session on the night of February 8, 2009, that he wanted to know the reasons for dismissing those ambassadors from their posts. He asked the Verkhovna Rada Speaker, Volodymyr Lytvyn, to forward an official enquiry on the matter to the incumbent head of state.
Ihor Popov, the Ukrainian president’s representative in parliament, was present during the coordination session. He said he couldn’t answer any of the MPs’ questions because it was out of his jurisdiction, but promised to find the reasons behind the ambassadors’ dismissals.
Some Ukrainian politicians are sure that Yushchenko fired these ambassadors precisely because no one cast a ballot for him under their jurisdictions. Mykhailo Brodsky wrote on his Web site that Yushchenko ended up acting like Leonid Kuchma, who fired all those who voted for his political adversary between the first and second rounds of the 1999 presidential campaign.
The current president of Ukraine has on occasion punished his ambassadors for his own foreign political goofs, he fired the Ukrainian Ambassador Oleh Diomin to the Russian Federation and his colleague in Germany, Ihor Dolhov. President Yushchenko dismissed them because those countries were opposed to Ukraine’s NATO Membership Action Plan.
It is necessary to point out that Ukrainian ambassadors are part of the country’s elite personnel; they can’t be handled indiscriminately, especially since the Ukrainian school of diplomacy is being established while the country is faced with a constantly increasing number of foreign political challenges.
