WEEKLY ROUNDUP 

The message was clear: follow the Poltava example where "centrist positions have greater popularity." Just one thing was missing. The authors from the Presidential Administration did not specify who had carried out the polls and how. This reminds one of the old folk song "If I Were in Charge in Poltava." In Khmelnytsky, another song is popular about how some were sowing millet and others were threatening to trample it down. A joke, of course...

However, the People's Deputies debating the situation in Ukraine's energy park last week were in no mood for jokes. Their final diagnosis was: sheer disaster. Of course, they had no way of knowing that two weeks ago, on Sunday, a 86-year-old woman died in a fire in Volochysk (Khmelnytsky oblast) precisely because of what is going on in this park. There was an unscheduled electricity cutoff, so she lit a candle and then fell asleep without blowing it out, never to wake up. Only recently people would live a hundred years in Volochysk and other towns and villages, and die of natural causes. "Starting in the 1990s, Ukraine's average life expectancy has dropped by two years, to 67; in our oblast it was 69 years (63 for men and 74 for women)," the local statistical department reports.

The word catastrophe resounded in the local council's conference hall last week as the deputies agreed this was the only word to describe health care in the oblast (and the audience included Centrists, Left, and Right). When in real trouble political affiliations become of minor importance.

Another point on the agenda to strike up a lively discussion was whether or not the oblast council's apparatus should be expanded. After the session council chairman Mykola Prystupa explained to journalists that, having more bureaucrats, he would be able to keep the "process of spending financial resources" under tighter control. He also referred to Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko and his initiative in terms of programs of national economic rebirth.

Could this initiative have prompted Mr. Kuchma's meeting with regional media representatives and his statement about a referendum concerning the "prolongation of certain transitory clauses of the Constitution"? This question worried all the provincial public interested in politics. Some felt sorry for the President's spokesmen who had to refute the ITAR-TARS reports allegedly distorting his statements. Others did not bother about politics and sang their favorite songs...