I was really interested in your comments about Mr. Akhmetov, the oligarch with 300,000 employees. This seems to me to speak to--again it goes back to perhaps Russia's dilemma in the era of the oligarchs and so on in the 1990s--but it seems to speak to something, if not anarchic, at least highly chaotic in the governance of Ukraine at this point, that seems to be forgotten in much of the commentary.
There is this narrative of a Ukraine that will seek unity with the West and democratic polity and so on and so forth. But we're an awfully long way from that.
The question beyond Akhmetov and his potential role is that of leadership now and in the foreseeable future in Ukraine. So many of the names we see coming up seem improbable--Mr. Klitschko and others. What do you see as the short-to-even-midterm prospects for the type of leadership in Ukraine that really would bring about or exert some quantifiable improvement in the internal situation?
NICOLAI PETRO: Well, there are presidential elections scheduled for May 25. Sometime after that, many people have spoken about the need for parliamentary elections to really reset the parliament, because although the members of parliament that are there now have been elected, many have abandoned their parties, they have formed new political coalitions. It is not at all clear--particularly this is the case with the Party of Regions--who they represent anymore, because the party and the groups and political and economic constituencies that they were elected to represent have basically faded from the scene. So there probably ought to be parliamentary elections sooner rather than later.
And then there is the issue of the constitution again, because each new government has imposed a different version of the Ukrainian constitution of 1996. Right now there are so many questions about both its legitimacy and how it is to be applied, and the constitutional court is under significant pressure and political difficulties. So it is hardly in a position to interpret the current constitution. There does need to be some sort of work on the constitution and a new consensus on the constitution.
Among the political candidates for the one thing that is currently on the books, namely the presidential elections, we have one clear leader, and that's Petro Poroshenko. He has absorbed Klitschko's constituents. Building on that and his own personal popularity and financial wealth, he appears to be the clear leader. The second candidate, but bya considerable distance, is YuliaTymoshenko.
If one were to imagine that these two emerged in the final round, because no one surpassed the 50-percent barrier on the first round, and these were the two choices, it's hard to see who anyone that might have supported the agenda of the Party of Regions' candidates in the first round would vote for, because both of these candidates represent the opposite political agenda. Assuming the Party of Regions still retains its traditional popularity in the east and the south, we are left again with a divided nation at the end of the elections with whichever of the two leading candidates right now, Poroshenko or Tymoshenko, representing only a very small regional constituency of the country--although, of course, they will claim to speak for the entire country.
DAVID SPEEDIE: Tymoshenko is a fairly familiar name obviously, Nicolai, prime minister after the Orange Revolution, then of course imprisoned and recently released from prison and so on. Poroshenko is perhaps less well known over here. Give us a thumbnail sketch of his background.
NICOLAI PETRO: He, like Yatsenyuk, the current prime minister, has held a number of positions in government--not top positions, but in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in security issues, and of course he has business connections in Russia as well as I think a factory in Slovakia as well as Ukraine. So he has covered many technical bases that give him, I think, a good grasp on the locations of power and influence in Ukraine.
The question that needs to be asked is: Is he the kind of politician who can reach out to an additional constituency? Again, I think of the populations in the east and the south as a constituency with a different agenda from the population in the west and even the center.
One thing that has not yet taken place--there is still time to do so, even in the political campaign--but we have not yet seen any of the leading candidates from the opposition travel and be able to rally support in regions in the east and the south where they are not at this point well-liked and well-understood. And conversely, leaders of the Party of Regions are loathe to venture into the west, which they know is hostile territory.
I'm just afraid that at the end of this presidential campaign we will not wind up with a country that is any more united than we have now.
DAVID SPEEDIE: It sounds like the old adage "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
Finally, Nicolai, there is a veritable feeding frenzy, of course, in all aspects of this over in the West. In the Financial Times today, a headline "Transnistria Feels Squeezed by Clash Between East and West." I thought about you, because it says in one fairly provocative paragraph: "NATO's top commander has warned that Russian divisions could sweep into Transnistria next, a move that some fear would give Moscow a foothold from which to seize Odessa on Ukraine's Black Sea coast."
Are you lying awake at night waiting for the Russian invasion?
NICOLAI PETRO: No, and I don't think anybody here seriously expects anything like that. As we can see, opinions are divided, even in the east, and especially in the south. It's not as clear-cut a case as seemed to be in Crimea.
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