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Crisis in Ukraine: The View from Beyond Kiev

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If, however, the violence and lawlessness escalate, then I don't really see why either side in this debate, given their fairly stringent positions and values that they associate with those positions, why they would want to live together. In other words, for a civil war to occur, one side has to want to coerce the other side or conquer the other side. I think at that point, if the violence escalates, the East will not want to be with the West and the Western parts will simply say, "Well, those Easterners are just Muscovite slaves, or something, and let them go wherever they want to."

Or there could be conflict over which regions in the middle go where, because there are regions that are fairly closely split. But there aren't that many of them actually. We're only talking about maybe Kiev itself, which has a symbolic significance, and one or two other regions out of more than 20.

DAVID SPEEDIE: Again with regard to the political leadership vacuum, I read somewhere this afternoon that President Yanukovych does not have time to look at the pictures of the demonstrations.

But let's look beyond the immediate time frame and the political opposition, the likely candidates to emerge on the scene in any leadership capacity. There is Mr. Yatsenyuk, who is the parliamentary leader of the Fatherland party [Batkivshchyna], and of course who is an ally of Ms. Tymoshenko, who is incarcerated. There is the former boxing champion, Mr. Klitschko with the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform [UDAR]. And then there is Mr. Tyahnybok of Svoboda, the rightist organization.

Guide us through a little bit of these opposition leaders and what their role is in the current situation.

NICOLAI PETRO: Those three parties form what they call the "united opposition." Having said that, it is important to stress, and each of them individually stresses, that after these events, the purpose of which is to remove the president and establish a new parliamentary majority--after that, they will again be at each other's throats because there is nothing that unites them.

And even within the Batkivshchyna party, there is a deep rivalry between Mr. Yatsenyuk and Ms. Tymoshenko. There was a big scandal here not long ago with a letter that she wrote, which seemed to imply that Mr. Yatsenyuk is not exactly necessarily the prime candidate for any presidential position in the future and she can think of other people, namely like herself, who would be much better suited. So with respect to Yatsenyuk and Batkivshchyna, they have their agenda.

The UDAR party is the latest and the least known addition to Ukrainian politics. Its political agenda is equally amorphous. It simply seems to be a gathering of people who don't like any of the other existing parties.

And then there is Mr. Tyahnybok's party, or as it's called the "national movement," which is called "freedom" (Svoboda). There is quite a bit of debate about how to characterize Mr. Tyahnybok's party. Without going into whether the appropriate nomenclature is right wing or just nationalist or fascist, let me say that there is a resolution of the European Parliament of November 13, 2012, which specifically asks for all of the other political parties in Ukraine to disassociate themselves from Svoboda because of its "racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic politics."

So that's the coalition as it stands.

There are no--I was thinking about this just today--there really are no ideological parties in the Ukrainian political spectrum, with two exceptions. One is the Communist Party, who have their well-established ideology.

The other now, a recent addition to the latest parliament, is Svoboda. They are, for want of a better term, a nationalist party whose agenda is a new social order. As he mentioned recently on an interview I saw, they are ideological opponents of liberalism, and their agenda is to have a resurgence of the Ukrainian nation around authentic Ukrainian values.

The rest of the parties, including Batkivshchyna, including the Party of Regions, the current largest party in parliament, the president's party, and UDAR, are simply a convenient grouping of political elites from various regions of the country who do not have any clear ideological allegiance.

So one of the problems that we have in trying to understand, as some do, who should we support in Ukraine is that we have nationalists, we have communists, and then we have a big mass of individuals and groups that have no particular allegiance to any ideology. They are not liberals and there is no liberal party here. That makes it very difficult to know which side is really the preferable one for the kind of long-term democratic, liberal evolution that many people hope for in the Ukraine.

DAVID SPEEDIE: That speaks again to the overly simplistic reporting, I think, that one sees, even in the relatively responsible Western press, the idea that the people we see in the main square in Kiev are the sort of liberal freedom fighters, it's a black/white situation.

You wrote recently in The National Interest a very interesting piece, where you said, and I quote: "By the end of December, the issue of EU accession was already all but irrelevant. The rallying cry of the opposition is now national revolution spearheaded by racial nationalists who had always opposed European integration because it would dilute their idea of nationhood and force Ukraine into what they call 'the global concentration camp.'" Then you go on to say: "The key actors in Ukrainian politics are not invested in the political system."

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Nicolai N. Petro is professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island. He has served as special assistant for policy in the U.S. State Department and as civic affairs advisor to the mayor of the Russian city of Novgorod the Great. His books include: The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard,1995), Russian Foreign Policy (Longman, 1997), and (more...)
 

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