Russian Military Seizes Crimea
Parliament Authorizes Use of Force in Ukraine
Pro-Russian protesters drag a wounded man away from the fray in Kharkiv.
Action Flouts U.S. Warning to Respect Ukraine’s Borders
By ALISON SMALE and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
As Russian armed forces effectively seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean
peninsula on Saturday, the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir
V. Putin the authority he sought to use military force in response to
the deepening instability in Ukraine.
News Analysis
Russia to Pay? Not So Simple
By PETER BAKER
The U.S. has said that there will be costs for using force, but history
has shown that Russia is willing to absorb any fallout.
Memo From Kiev
Ukraine’s Leaders to Face Battle for Credibility
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Successful revolutions, as the interim government in Kiev has been learning, are harder to maintain than it first seems.
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Graphic: Ukraine in Maps
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Video: Obama Warns Russia on Ukraine
Credibility
- New York Times - 11 minutos atrásThe challenges for Ukraine's new leaders are many and varied. With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia now openly intent on a military ...
After Initial Triumph, Ukraine’s Leaders Face Battle for Credibility
KIEV, Ukraine — The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former Soviet space. But successful revolutions, as the interim government here has been learning, are a lot harder to maintain than it can seem in the bright dawn of first victories.The challenges for Ukraine’s new leaders are many and varied. With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia now openly intent on a military showdown over control of Crimea, the government faces a powerful test of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Demonstrations are growing in the Russian-speaking east of the country, underscoring the tenuous nature of the government’s control there. Washington and Brussels, Kiev’s only hopes at this point for the aid necessary to avert economic collapse, are scrambling to deliver and have shown no desire for an armed confrontation with Russia.As it met for the first time on Saturday in an air of crisis, the new government also faced questions of credibility, legitimacy and inclusiveness arising from the way in which it came to power.“You have a revolution, with unelected guys seizing power,” said Andrew Wilson, a Ukraine expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations.“The people on the Maidan might be right, they might be martyrs, and they have good arguments, but no one elected them,” he said. “You need to get real politics and competition and more legitimacy. Of course, the counterargument is just concentrate on economy. But the credibility question is tearing the country apart and the transfer of power cut a lot of corners constitutionally.”Reaching out to the Russian-speaking east, the industrial heartland of the country, is crucial, all agree, even by a new government that has very few representatives of what was regularly the country’s largest and most popular party, the Party of Regions, led by the ousted president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. Instead, the government is currently dominated by those associated with a former prime minister, Yulia V. Tymoshenko, who is widely blamed for the failure of the 2004 Orange Revolution to change Ukraine’s corrupt political system, and by Ukrainian nationalists.An early triumphalist mistake, Mr. Wilson said, was the quick overturning of a 2012 law on languages that allowed regions to make Russian a second official language, needlessly offending, even goading Russian-dominated regions like the Donbass and Crimea.Whether Egypt or Libya, post-Soviet Georgia or Ukraine itself a decade ago, recent history is littered with failed or broken dreams of new democratic beginnings. The forces of the old order retreat, regroup and capitalize on the instability or inefficiency of the new.As Russian forces appear to be establishing their control of Crimea in the name of a seemingly manufactured local cry for aid, Ukraine today is a good example of how deep, domestic, centrifugal forces can be easily manipulated from the outside to keep a new, inexperienced government shaken and destabilized.Kiev itself is not a dominant capital like Paris, said Bruce P. Jackson, president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, which has been working in Ukraine for 15 years.“Kiev has always been more of a compromise than a capital, and if it loses the ability to compromise, it loses its credibility as a capital,” he said.What worries him, Mr. Jackson said, is that the new government is too beholden to the people’s movement on the Maidan. He is also concerned that it is not reaching out sufficiently to the east and needs the credibility of both presidential and parliamentary elections to answer Mr. Yanukovych’s charge, echoed in Moscow, that those politicians of western Ukraine, who have regularly lost elections, have seized power instead.In essence, he suggested, the revolutionaries “have knocked out the foundations of modern Ukraine,” and they need to be restored in a way that recognizes the diversity of the country.Sudden, unmediated political change in countries like Ukraine rarely goes smoothly, he said, pointing to the Rose Revolution in Georgia, whose main proponents are now out of office and many in exile after an administration that inevitably produced some achievements but considerable disappointments, aided by Russian efforts to keep Georgia unstable.Those efforts culminated in the 2008 Russian-Georgian war, when Russia provoked Georgia into skirmishes that prompted an invasion and the annexation of two Georgian regions with sizable numbers of ethnic Russians, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. That annexation has not been recognized internationally, but what is happening in Crimea seems drawn directly from the same playbook, but faster and with less pretense of responding to an endangered ethnic Russian population, which has been attacked by no one.But Crimea is only the most vivid challenge to the credibility of the new Ukrainian government. Russia possesses numerous tools to destabilize the new powers in Ukraine, from financial instruments and customs duties to energy supplies and trade sanctions. A push for decentralization in Crimea can easily be followed by similar demands from eastern Ukraine, far more dependent on Russian trade. On Saturday, for example, thousands of demonstrators shouted pro-Russian slogans in Donetsk.Mr. Putin was always said to be obsessed by the Orange Revolution, seeking to ensure that no such popular uprising could happen in Moscow, where the first sign of popular demonstrations were met with real force. But, analysts suggest, Mr. Putin also saw how the Orange Revolution unraveled.By picking sides, by pressing on economic and energy levers, by funding and favoring certain personalities, Russia helped the Orange Revolution fail, because it did not change the system of politics by oligarchy. Moscow played a longer, successful game, helped by Ukraine’s own divisions and petty politics.The main fear in Kiev now is how to resist similar efforts by Moscow to destabilize, weaken and discredit the current government. Economically, it is very vulnerable, with big bills to pay for Russian natural gas and to service existing loans, and its currency is dropping. Nearly 30 percent of all its trade is with Russia, and it is almost entirely dependent on energy from Russia, which can easily renege on promised discounts for gas.Only last Sunday did the acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, and the interim prime minister, Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, get a first look at Ukraine’s accounts. “They were shocked after having seen the books,” a senior Western diplomat said.On Thursday, Mr. Yatsenyuk told Parliament that loans worth $37 billion had disappeared from Ukraine’s treasury during Mr. Yanukovych’s three-year leadership, and warned that unpopular measures were needed to salvage the economy. He added that as much as $70 billion had been sent out of the country during Mr. Yanukovych’s presidency.“I want to report to you — the state treasury has been robbed and is empty,” Mr. Yatsenyuk told Parliament. Last year, according to the economist Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Ukraine’s current-account deficit was an estimated 8.3 percent of gross domestic product. Its foreign-currency reserves cover just over two months of imports. The budget deficit is nearly 8 percent of G.D.P., he said, and the economy has been in recession since mid-2012.The West is scrambling to find cash to tide Ukraine over, with a team from the International Monetary Fund scheduled to arrive next week. Ukraine’s new authorities have said the debt-burdened country may need at least $15 billion in new loans this year. But Christine Lagarde, the fund’s managing director, warned on Friday against panic, saying that Ukraine’s needs had not yet been assessed.Mr. Putin’s move to seek authorization for military intervention will make the atmosphere in which the new government is operating that much more charged. And Russia is unlikely to give up the bargaining chip of Crimea quickly, and without obtaining a substantial benefit.copy http://www.nytimes.com/
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