We warned…

The situation in which this country is today could have been avoided. Since 1996 Den has been taking a firm position and setting the milestones which the country was and is to reach. Time and the subsequent events have not only confirmed our viewpoints – ignoring the latter has often led to tragic consequences. After all, today’s losses – a part of the territory and thousands of human lives – are the price Ukraine is paying for failure to hear the wise and change the country. We focus here on the main subjects that the newspaper Den has been broaching even when they seemed exotic to many. Society may have been too busy to hear what we said, and it perhaps does not like to be told things. It is not a rebuke on our part. Let us take a different approach and remind the reader of what we have written so that lessons can be learned.

Russia’s aggression could have been prevented

As is known, whoever is forewarned can avert a grave danger – on one condition, though: the warned one should not ignore alarming reports. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government used to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to negative forecasts and warnings about the likely dangers.

In the published materials, the newspaper Den has often made forecasts and warned the powers that be about the danger this country faced. For it is the duty of a newspaper not only to supply information, but also to analyze the likely course of events.

In June 2009 a certain Russian historian published an article on the causes of World War Two on the Russian defense ministry’s official website. By contrast with the Soviet and Russian propaganda, he laid the blame on the stubbornness of Poland rather than on the aggressiveness of Nazi Germany. In the view of this historian, if one may call him so, Germany’s demands were quite moderate.

In the article “They Found the Guilty” of June 5, 2009, Den analyzed this kind of opinions. In what does the author thinks they were moderate? Yes, just a trifle: “…to make the Free City Danzig part of the Third Reich, to allow building exterritorial highway and railroad which would connect East Prussia with the main part of Germany. It is difficult to call the first two demands unfounded.” On what grounds? It’s very simple: “The vast majority of the population of Danzig, a city seized from Germany under the Versailles Peace Treaty, was constituted by Germans who sincerely wished to reunite with their historical homeland. Also quite natural was the demand about the highway and the railroad…”

Even at that time, the newspaper pointed out the danger of such historical justifications. “For some reason, we don’t attach much importance to Russian antics. For if Moscow chooses to recognize the independence of Tiraspol, as it did in the case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, this may create the problem of a ‘Ukrainian corridor’ with all that this implies in the historical context. Judging by this kind of publications, Moscow is drawing up similar plans, and one must be prepared to this.”

The annexation of Crimea and Russia’s aggression in the Donbas could have been forestalled all right. In the article “Under the Guise of Democratization,” dated August 8, 2012, the newspaper warned: “We, Ukrainians, must insist on the territorial integrity of Moldova – for our own security.” “Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, who visited Tiraspol to attend celebrations to mark the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Dniester peacekeeping operation, said the conflict between Chisinau and Tiraspol should be resolved by inducting Transnistria into Moldova as a special region… He went on to say that Russia did not rule out settlement of the Transnistrian conflict by way of establishing a federal Moldovan state.”

The newspaper warned that “as the First Capital City believes, federalization of Moldova, if successful, will make it possible for Ukraine to opt for this model, which will make it easier to influence both Chisinau and Kyiv. The chief message is that this will help undermine territorial integrity and force some regions to be closer to Moscow – in other words, to buy separate regions instead of the country as a whole. As they put it, cheap but good.”

As is known, Cassandra’s prophesies were not heeded, which produced tragic results.

By Yurii RAIKHEL (has been contributing to Den since 2007)

Checking by means of the Gongadze case, or On the Kuchma system

One of the most crucial subjects Den has been handling for more than 14 years is a high-profile Gongadze case. This crime became a symbol of the Kuchma system which he begot in the 10 years of his presidency. This concentrates a lot of today’s problems. The absence of a legal end to this tragic story, as well as to those of beating up the public activist Oleksii Podolsky and assaulting the two-convocation MP Oleksandr Yeliashkevych, is bound to produce new crimes.

No changes to the Constitution or the drawing-up of new laws will change anything as long as this country has not paid off its old debts, until society is sure that criminals, no matter who they are and what office they hold, are punished. Only then will we be able to speak of reforms and modernization of the country. Otherwise, there will always be a temptation to turn being in power to personal advantage, which also applies to law-enforcement bodies. Impunity forms a vicious circle of crimes.

As presidents, premiers, prosecutors, and ministers have kept changing, there is still no final legal conclusion about who ordered murdering the journalist. It is now the new government’s responsibility. And a test. Many politicians failed to pass this test. Unwillingness to put at last an end to the Gongadze case and to the Kuchma system as a whole ended ignominiously and sometimes tragically for many power-wielders, even though we warned about the danger. For example, well before the murder of the well-know journalist, Yeliashkevych said to Den about Kuchma: “The Lazarenko case is only one of the chapters in the Kuchma case” (Den, No. 17, February 17, 1999).

One of the Orange Revolution’s demands was to finally solve the Gongadze case and break the system of Kuchma because the Maidan protested against the latter. The success of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency depended on this. This was not done. All that the third president managed to do was push a little the “case of the decade.” The perpetrators of the Gongadze murder, including their chief Oleksii Pukach, ended up behind bars. Then the case foundered. As a result, Yushchenko lost in 2010, even though we had warned.

“As far as Yushchenko is concerned, Pinchuk, who knows this subject very well, says absolutely right that Yushchenko’s actions begin to resemble those of Kuchma,” the abovementioned Yeliashkevych says to Den (No. 124, July 28, 2007). “It is a critical line now, and I think that now, after such a frank comment by Pinchuk, Yushchenko should take care that he does not cross a certain line. I would like the president, whom Ukraine was proud of in the fall of 2004, to remember about his historic mission and understand that it is better to be president for a short time but to remain in the people’s memory as a president who can work in such a way that neither he nor the people will be ashamed. I would also like to caution him against physical contacts with Leonid Kuchma.”

“Yushchenko must have given Kuchma some guarantees of safety,” the then member of parliament Taras Stetskiv says in a comment to Den (No. 164, September 14, 2012). “We hoped that Yushchenko would come [to power] on the crest of the Maidan wave and do something. We even tried to help him, but he didn’t want this,” says Oleksii Podolsky in an interview with Den (No. 142, August 14, 2009). “Instead, he took to the RosUkrEnerho gas needle, as Kuchma once did, and became a Gazprom slave, putting his own interests above those of the state.” Podolsky went on to stress the main idea: “If we forgive the government the murder of Gongadze, we will be killed by the hundred tomorrow.”

Unfortunately, this warning forecast came true five years later. Kuchma’s best pupil Viktor Yanukovych became a dead end branch of this system. The country is still spitting out the blood of his rule. Incidentally, Yanukovych, during whose presidency a case was first opened against Kuchma in March 2011, had a chance to go down in history as a positive character.

“I think the fact that the prosecution has taken up this case may be the beginning of the dismantlement of a corrupt oligarch clan system in Ukraine,” Ukraine’s first president Leonid Kravchuk comments to Den (No. 67, April 15, 2011). “If they are not afraid, if they have enough willpower and determination. Then it will be recorded in history that the coming to power of President Yanukovych made it possible to take the first steps towards this kind of developments.”

One more warning in a later period. “If Viktor Yanukovych is determined to bring the investigation of Kuchma’s high-profile crimes to the logical end, he will gain, no matter how odd this may sound, a moral advantage over his opponents,” says Yeliashkevych in an interview with Den (No. 179, October 4, 2013). “And, whatever his motivation may be, he stands a real chance to become not only a Eurointegrator president, but also a person who rescued the world from the ‘Kuchma virus.’”

But Yanukovych was not determined to follow this advice, so he became a refugee president, not a Eurointegrator president, who disgracefully fled to Russia. “The Kuchma case went through various judicial bodies and was dropped, while the Pukach case was inherited by the current authorities. Yanukovych blew his chance. The Gongadze case is an element of blackmail in big-time politics,” said Podolsky in 2012 (Den, No. 164, September 14, 2012). “It allows the current government to hold the Kuchma family on a hook.”

To conclude, I would like to recall the words of Pukach. After pronouncing the sentence at the Pechersk Court in January 2013, Judge Melnyk asked the defendant if he agreed to it. Pukach said: “I will agree when Kuchma and Lytvyn share this cage with me.” That was a message of sorts to the then government, which still remains topical today. Experience shows that it is better to learn on the mistakes of predecessors – all the more so after the events that have occurred in Ukraine over the past year.

By Ivan KAPSAMUN, The Day

Spearheading the movement to NATO

Running ahead of your time is an honorable, albeit perhaps ungrateful, thing. The voice of truth in dark times is worth its weight in gold. The newspaper Den is one of the few that knew what was to be done and what would happen if we were just sitting by. What is really important is a joint effort of Den and the Institute of World Politics to create a successful European Ukraine.

As many as 10 (or, maybe, more) years ago Den’s journalists regularly and seriously wrote about the need to integrate into NATO. From the very outset, when National Security and Defense Council Secretary Yevhen Marchuk announced the decision on Euro-Atlantic integration (the article “We Have Made a Choice. A Long Way to NATO” of May 24, 2002), Den was perhaps the only in Ukraine to write about the advantages of NATO. And what did it hear in response? It is better not to quarrel with anybody, for nobody is threatening us.

As many as 10 years ago Den wrote about how to carry out reforms patterned after those in Central Europe – it wrote about tedious and meticulous work aimed at changing the post-Soviet rules of the game in almost all the spheres of life in Ukraine (the article “Step by Step. A New Period in Ukraine and the EU. Is Kyiv Prepared to Do Routine Work” of December 2, 2005). And what did it see in response? A sheer populism of politicians and, accordingly, mistrust of voters towards these politicians.

As many as 10 years ago Den journalists advised European and American journalists, politicians, and diplomats to immediately support Ukraine without waiting for a suitable opportunity, for this opportunity was not necessarily to come (the article “Before the Istanbul Summit” of March 24, 2004). But they still lacked foresight. Why did NATO fail to give Ukraine the Membership Action Plan at the Istanbul summit?

Today, everybody must give themselves an honest answer.

Many Ukrainians, who excel in taking a critical attitude to all governments, must take at last a critical attitude to themselves: why did they oppose integration into NATO, why did they back those who played in a sheer populism?

Many politicians should muster enough strength to ask themselves why Ukraine has missed all the possible and impossible chances. Why are politicians so pro-Euro-Atlantic today but were so afraid of this 10 years ago? Why are some politicians, who should have abandoned the political arena long ago, still turning up at TV channels? Yet this question is not so much to politicians as to journalists.

Many journalists must answer to themselves: why were they busy seeking a high rating instead of reporting on what was really important? Why are they not saying in pursuit of ratings about what really influences the might of the state?

Changes are possible in Ukraine. Ukraine will be successful. But everybody must be prepared to make difficult decisions and hear those who speak quietly. Only in this case there will be competent ministers, a mature society, and foreign support that will not die out under a stern look of the Kremlin’s host.

The energy of the street must turn into the energy of responsible office work. We must switch from the phase of spectacular effects to that of difficult, boring, and slow reforms. This will not help you hype yourself or gain a high rating, but it will help you make a new Ukraine. Are you still bewildered? Can’t you see what is primary and what is secondary? Do you think we are all the same? Luckily, there is a newspaper that will keep you from losing your way in the chaos of false ideas.

By Serhii SOLODKY, First Deputy Director, Institute of World Politics (worked for Den in 1999-2006)