His hand strengthened by the elections, Yanukovych resumed negotiations to complete the agreement with the European Union. In April 2013, the president expressed confidence that the remaining issues—concerning justice and electoral reform—would be resolved rapidly. He pardoned Yuriy Lutsenko but not Tymoshenko in response to calls for the release of political prisoners. Everything seemed to be on track for the conclusion of the trade and political agreement between Ukraine and the EU.
But apparently Yanukovych had not quite read Moscow correctly in his desire to walk a middle course. In July, Russia suddenly halted imports of chocolate from Ukraine’s main confectioner, saying the products didn’t meet safety standards. Then, in August, toying with Kiev, Russia started to subject all Ukrainian imports to more thorough customs inspections. The restrictions were lifted temporarily about a week later. An aide to Putin didn’t mince words, though, saying that the problems could become permanent if Ukraine signed the agreement with the EU.
It isn’t really clear if Yanukovych just misread Moscow or hoped to present the Kremlin with a fait accompli when the accord was signed. Some Ukrainians believe that the president was double-dealing all along—knowing that Russia would bring pressure on Kiev to halt the process of integration. Whatever his motivation, it is true that Yanukovych faced the threat of crippling sanctions from his largest trading partner.
On November 21, 2013, Ukraine announced that it would no longer seek an accord with the European Union. Instead, it would turn to the east and pursue partnerships with Russia and a trade bloc of former Soviet states called the Eurasian Economic Union. The Kremlin said it welcomed “the desire of our close partner Ukraine to optimize and develop trade and economic cooperation.”
Shock, dismay, and outrage spread through the streets of Kiev almost immediately. Within twenty-four hours, tens of thousands of protesters rushed into the Maidan, the central square of Kiev, as well as into cities across the country. The United States and Europe expressed concern. Ukrainians accused the president of bowing to the Russians in a treasonous act.
For the next three months, Ukraine was again in chaos, ungovernable and at the edge of civil war. The police used tear gas and truncheons to break up the demonstrations. That just brought more people into the streets. Security forces could not hold the protesters back and they eventually occupied several buildings. Opposition politicians quickly jumped on the bandwagon of the enraged population. Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight champ turned liberal legislator, emerged as the voice of dissent: “If this government does not want to fulfill the will of the people, then there will be no such government, there will be no such president. There will be a new government and a new president.”
At first, Yanukovych sought to remain above the fray, leaving the prime minister, Mykola Azarov, to be the voice of the government. The president said only that people should observe the law. The prime minister accused the protesters of trying to launch a coup. The president carried through on a state visit to China on December 4. The visuals were awful. While people rioted in the streets of Kiev, Yanukovych toured a museum of ancient artifacts and a factory.
The president’s casual approach to the unfolding chaos only enraged the protesters further. On December 8, hundreds of thousands of people descended on the square, smashing a statue of Lenin. The crowd roamed the city, blockading buildings and forming a tent city. The police stood aside, refusing to repeat the violent crackdown of the week before. Soon, antigovernment demonstrators had unwelcome company—large crowds supporting Yanukovych.
The president could no longer ignore the peril that he and the country faced. In a sense, he had to make a choice—and not surprisingly he turned eastward, securing a $15 billion loan from the Russians on December 16. Putin tried to give the embattled Ukrainian leader space. He announced that the two leaders had not discussed membership for Ukraine in the customs union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
But for the opposition, the loan was further evidence that Yanukovych was now doing Moscow’s bidding. The demonstrations continued and got larger. In response, the Party of Regions sponsored legislation restricting protests and promising harsh penalties for those who participated in them. On January 16, 2014, the parliament passed a bill prohibiting people from installing tents or sound systems in public and exposing the organizers of unauthorized meetings to criminal penalties. Opposition leaders cried foul, with Klitschko saying, “What happened in the parliament is a violation of all rules and laws, it carries no legal weight.”
The threats had little effect. Tensions worsened, and in February several protesters died in clashes with police. International mediators stepped in, hoping to force a stand-down by both sides. For a brief time it seemed as if they had succeeded. Demonstrators ceded some buildings to OSCE monitors in exchange for amnesty for those who had “violated public order” between December 27 and February 2. The president withdrew riot police from the front lines of the confrontation.
The uneasy calm broke suddenly and violently on February 18. In a two-day period, nearly ninety people were killed and hundreds were wounded as police and protesters battled for the streets around parliament and Independence Square. The apparent spark for the unrest was a rumor that the Rada (as the parliament is called) would not restore the Orange Revolution–inspired constitution of 2004.
International leaders watched with alarm as Kiev began to resemble a war zone. Russia, France, Germany, and Poland sponsored talks between Yanukovych and the opposition leaders. They reached an agreement, with the president promising to return to the constitution of 2004. Ukrainian legislators passed an amnesty for all antigovernment protesters, and called for assistance to the relatives of those and for the release of Yulia Tymoshenko.
A moment comes in every revolution when people are no longer fearful of their government. When I visited Bucharest with President Bush in 2005, the Romanians described such a time. In 1989, with revolutions toppling communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, Nicolae Ceauşescu went into the public square to tell the people all he had done for them. Suddenly, one old lady yelled, “Liar!” And then ten people, one hundred, one thousand, and soon the entire square was yelling, “Liar!” Ceauşescu, seeing the rising tide against him, fled. But he was caught by the military, handed over to the opposition, and he and his wife, Yelena, were executed.
Perhaps Yanukovych had in mind the “Ceauşescu moment” when he decided to flee Kiev. His own party condemned his “cowardly flight.” Despite claiming that he would not resign and he would remain in office—he obviously had not. Ukraine appointed an interim president and prime minister and prepared for new elections. Yanukovych would eventually show up in Moscow, where Putin was willing to protect his man from his own people.
The world breathed a sigh of relief. President Obama and Chancellor Merkel both talked to the Russian president by phone. There were promises to work for a peaceful and stable Ukraine—together.
Vladimir Putin, it turns out, had a different definition of a stable Ukraine—one without a part of its territory. In late February 2014, Russian forces seized Crimea. Pro-Moscow separatists held a referendum that supposedly affirmed the citizens’ desire to be incorporated within Russia. The Russian parliament claimed that it could not, of course, deny the Crimeans that privilege, and it voted to annex the territory on March 23, 2014.
A month later, pro-Russian separatists moved against mainland Ukraine, taking over in parts of eastern Donetsk and the Luhansk region along the Russian border. Moscow denied the involvement of its own forces. But European and American satellite imagery suggested otherwise. Nevertheless, Putin gave a clear rationale for why he might want to invade, even while denying he had done so. He explained that ethnic Russians living in eastern Ukraine had to be protected from Kiev. They had suffered discrimination and their rights had been abridged since independence. That argument had been used before: Adolf Hitler claimed to be protecting ethnic Germans in 1938 when he annexed Austria and the Sudetenland
, territory located within the borders of Czechoslovakia.
But there was little that the international community could do. Since the climactic events in the early days of 2014, two agreements, negotiated in Minsk in September 2014 and February 2015, have been violated again and again. Cease-fires have been negotiated, broken, and renegotiated. The Russians have stopped short of supporting independence for eastern Ukraine, but Kiev doesn’t really govern it either. Ukraine is a partitioned state: Crimea gone; eastern Ukraine occupied and unstable; and the west trying to build a functioning democratic government under trying circumstances.
The man whom the Ukrainians elected in 2014, businessman Petro Poroshenko, has that unenviable task. He has sought closer cooperation with the European Union, establishing a free trade zone committed to removing tariffs and other barriers over time. The Ukrainians have received significant aid from the United States, the EU, and other countries. Some reforms have been carried out, including changes to the tax code backed by the IMF and passing budgets with a deficit that falls within internationally acceptable standards.
Poroshenko has tried to bring decent and talented people into his government. Ukraine is blessed to have a large and educated diaspora. People of Ukrainian descent have come back from Canada, the United States, and other parts of Europe to try to help since the events of the Maidan. Natalie Jaresko, an American citizen who once worked for me at the State Department, is emblematic of this trend. Widely regarded as competent and honest, she was able to accomplish a great deal as finance minister.
But it is still, as former foreign minister Tarasyuk said several years ago, hard to get anything done in Kiev. In February 2016, the economics minister, Aivarus Abromavičius, a Ukrainian of Lithuanian descent, resigned, saying that powerful figures were derailing reforms through pressure and intimidation.
The difficulty is most evident in the on-again/off-again efforts to root out corruption. Still, to be fair, Poroshenko has achieved more in his term of three years than his predecessors did in their combined years.
Before he took office, anticorruption efforts in Ukraine effectively amounted to sound and fury. The Yushchenko administration had spent years trying to pass a package of anticorruption laws through parliament, and it finally succeeded in 2009. But a year later, Yanukovych was elected and had them overturned.
Yanukovych would go on to oversee the deepening of corruption, including the takeover of strategic industries by his cronies. His family benefited too as his son Oleksander quickly became the second-richest man in Donetsk. Ukraine plummeted to 144th place on the international Transparency Index, a scale that measures and compares corrupt practices across the globe.
After Yanukovych was ousted, Poroshenko moved quickly to pass legislation and to create new institutions devoted to fighting corruption. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which reviews complaints from citizens, is paired with the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, which is a watchdog over the activities of government officials. There is a new Law on the Judiciary and the Status of Judges to try to force greater judicial independence. And there have been a few prosecutions of high-ranking officials—principally from the Yanukovych period. Efforts have been made to boost government accountability and transparency through the introduction of innovative electronic platforms for public procurement and financial disclosure by public officials. Steps have also been taken to limit bribes and fraud in the customs system.
These are very helpful and welcome steps. But there is also a troubling tendency in Ukraine to use corruption as an epithet against those with whom you disagree. Charges of complicity or outright participation in shady dealings fly around almost every major politician.
This has not improved the atmosphere for governing. And the country has pressing problems. While it has experienced periods of significant growth since independence, the economy has contracted in recent years—7 percent in 2014 and 10 percent in 2015. The chaos in the eastern part of the country has caused stagnation in some of the most important industrial regions, like Donetsk. Pension reform needs to be completed to relieve the pressures of entitlements to an aging population. The eastern third of Ukraine remains poor, polluted, and undereducated, providing fertile ground for Putin’s appeals to the Russian-speaking population there. There is so much to do.
Facing these challenges, Ukraine continues to experience repeated political crises within the leadership that hinder progress. The latest occurred in the winter of 2016 when the president tried to sack his prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk: a familiar pattern since independence.
The unpopular Yatsenyuk fought back, though, threatening to take the whole government down with him if he was removed. He won a vote of no confidence but not the support of the president. This locked the two in a battle that once again set governing aside while they engaged in political theater, which Yatsenyuk eventually lost.
“You Don’t Need Another Revolution”
“How can you cooperate with corrupt people?” I was in Kiev in 2016 and engaged in a roundtable discussion with some young parliamentarians. My host, Victor Pinchuk, warned me that these twenty-somethings were not much interested in the art of compromise. “They are young and determined—patriotic but not sure how to move the political process forward,” he said. The parliamentarians represented mostly liberal political parties, including the president’s, identifying themselves as members of the Poroshenko faction.
The young man’s question came in response to my admonition to work together and forge legislation across party lines. “That’s what governing is,” I said. But it was clear that most of them were in no mood to hear about compromise. They considered themselves to be challengers to the system, to the status quo—to the very parliament that they represented. The legislature was not a place to govern; it was a place to demand outright victory. It was easy to see why very little was getting done.
Yet these young parliamentarians were a compelling group. They wanted the best for their country and they wanted to help build democracy in Ukraine. They were passionate and sincere. Now if they could just overcome their stubbornness, I thought.
Later that day, I spoke to a group of some two hundred students from local universities. I expressed my outrage at what Vladimir Putin had done in partitioning the country. I said that I understood how hard it was to govern under Ukraine’s “international circumstances.”
But I went on to say that the country could not let its grievances with Russia retard the effort to build a stable democracy. “Suppose West Germany had taken that course and waited until it was unified to build a strong and vibrant state. The Federal Republic of Germany would not have been able to take advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and integrate East Germany, completely on Western terms,” I said. I wanted to be careful not to offend my audience, but I felt strongly about what I said next. “You have had three revolutions in twenty-five years: independence, the Orange Revolution, and the Maidan,” I began. “It is time to stop having revolutions and to start governing.” The students burst into applause and onto their feet. The Ukrainians are tired of the drama, I thought. Can’t their leaders see?
That night my host gave a lovely dinner in his spectacular downtown apartment. The living room was adorned with extraordinary works of European art and a grand piano that I was dying to play, but chose not to. Several key political figures were there, including Yulia and the soon-to-be-ousted prime minister, Yatsenyuk. They all talked in apocalyptic terms about the battles going on inside the parliament. The conversation was surreal—no names were attached to the accusations and no actual examples of corruption were given. They talked instead in circles—about self-dealing and conflicts of interest. Still, one got the impression that everyone thought the person sitting next to them was likely corrupt. They were self-absorbed and focused on the political intrigue that seemed to consume them.
As the plane took off that night, I looked out over the vast territory of Ukraine. The country wasn’t dealt a ve
ry good hand. It is dogged by questions about its identity as a nation; shadowed by a neighbor that poses an omnipresent threat; and subjected to leaders who constantly seem to confuse the personal with the political.
Institutions are supposed to help contain and overcome human imperfections. I reflected on Madison, who said that the American Constitution was not perfect—it was the hard work of imperfect men. Ukraine has thus far survived multiple crises and lived to fight another day. That means its leaders still have a chance to deliver stable democracy to Ukraine—no matter their imperfections.
Chapter 5
KENYA: “SAVE OUR BELOVED COUNTRY”
The old man shuffled into the Oval Office holding on to a beautifully handcrafted ivory walking cane to keep him upright. It was June 27, 2001, and Kenya was to hold elections the following year. Daniel arap Moi had led the country for more than two decades. Now he wanted to be president again.
Colin Powell had met with Moi a month earlier and urged him to honor the constitutional provision barring him from seeking reelection. Moi had made no such commitment. Now it was President Bush’s turn to deliver the message. Just before the Kenyans arrived, Jendayi Frazer, the NSC Africa specialist, briefed the president. “Mr. President, you have to let him know in no uncertain terms that we will not support him if he tries to hold on to power,” she said.
Jendayi knew Kenya. A highly regarded Africanist, she had been my PhD student at Stanford. My mind flashed back to 1991 during my first stint at the White House. Jendayi was on the phone asking to speak with me urgently. She was doing field research in Nairobi. “Things are a little tense here and there is a lot of violence,” she said. “Could you ask someone in the government if I should leave?” I walked down the hall and put the question to the special assistant for African affairs, David D. Miller. He didn’t hesitate. “Tell her to get the hell out of there.” I did, arranging for Stanford to get money to her so that she could come home.
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