The West will help us

President Viktor Yushchenko has turned for assistance to prominent political technologists John Podesta and Michael McCarry, who worked on the team of former US President Bill Clinton. The American PR experts are expected in Kyiv this week.

According to the magazine US News and World Report, Podesta and McCarry will meet with Yushchenko to give him a “small piece of advice.”

Yushchenko’s press secretary, Iryna Herashchenko, has not denied that the meeting is taking place, but says that the visit is part of the Ukrainian presidential administration’s plan to study the experience of various presidential offices. “While the secretariat is undergoing reorganization, the leadership is closely studying the experience of presidential offices in the world, in particular those of France, Poland, America, and Russia,” the presidential press secretary explained. Meanwhile, the American magazine attributes the visit of the two PR experts to the “political crisis” stemming from corruption charges against the “Orange team.”

During a recent power lunch with American political analysts at the Washington-based Carnegie Foundation, Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov of Ukraine stated that Ukrainian oligarchs will be paying foreign consultants to work out a development strategy for Ukraine. “We requested famous consulting firms to work out a development strategy for Ukraine, and those wealthy individuals who gathered for talks with the president promised to foot the bill,” he said. He emphasized that the new Ukrainian government would like wealthy Ukrainians to become the nation’s bourgeoisie and become involved in the reform process in Ukraine. One gets the impression that the leadership is tired of stepping onto the same political rake and now doubts its own managerial capabilities.

Ukrainian political analysts reacted to the visit of their American colleagues with surprising unanimity. Nearly all of them called the visit from the foreign experts “normal international practice” and showed no signs of an inferiority complex in this connection. “If there is such a need, foreign experts can be invited. After all, the institution of foreign aides was established under President Kravchuk,” The Day learned from Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research.

According to Vasyl Stoyakin, director of the Political Marketing Center, Viktor Yanukovych also asked American experts for help and got it. “I think enlisting the help of foreign consultants can be useful. After all, anybody can give advice, but it is up to our politicians to act on it,” Stoyakin told The Day.

Meanwhile, Viktoria Podhorna, director of the Center for Sociopolitical Design, thinks this move is “somewhat belated;” American experts should have been invited much sooner. She went on to say that American and Russian PR specialists cannot be compared: “The Americans work within the limits of professional ethics, while the Russians are unrestrained in their arbitrariness. Russian experts play at politics instead of working professionally. If you recall Marat Gelman, who publicly discussed the confrontation between the US and Russia in Ukraine, his statement was that of a political player, not a professional, who should always keep his mouth shut and play behind the scenes.”

For the sake of impartiality it should be said that after his failure in Ukraine, the Russian spin doctor Gleb Pavlovskiy is still working successfully in Belarus, collaborating with the Azerbaijani government, and hosting an analytical program on NTV television.

Experts attribute the American consultants’ visit to the fact that trust in the Ukrainian leadership is waning both in Ukraine and the West, where expectations were as great, or perhaps even greater, than in Ukraine. Fesenko believes that the Americans’ assistance may prove especially effective at the international level. “It is obvious that Yushchenko’s team has PR problems,” he said. “At least working out ways to influence international public opinion and staging appropriate informational campaigns to enhance Ukraine’s international image and facilitate European integration will serve a good purpose. In this sense both American and European experts can be of service. Frankly, I would look to European experts, who would help organize more effective work in the European direction.”

Still, not even the most professional PR campaign can compensate for the lack of a strategic policy, which also poses a problem for the new leadership.