Political Chaos in Ukraine

We continue to mourn for those in the United States who have lost and suffered so much from Hurricane Katrina. We pray that the compassion of believers all over the nation will bring as much healing as Katrina brought destruction.

Today, in Ukraine, President Yushchenko dismissed the cabinet of ministers and the Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Another very powerful official, Poroshenko, resigned his post as did several other major figures. All of these persons played significant roles in last year’s Orange Revolution. What is happening here?

Over the week, the head of the president’s secretariat resigned. On Monday he gave a press conference where accused multiple high level government officials of corruption. His accusations were mostly addressed to the stunned Poroshenko who was standing right behind him at the time! This resignation and strong accusations forced the president to respond in some way. For two days, he attempted to mediate a resolution and then today announced that the ministers were dismissed from their positions.

For several months, a small war had been waging between Poroshenko (who is known as the chocolate king because of his ownership of several confectionary factories) and Tymoshenko, the firebrand radical known as the gas queen for her involvement in reforming the gas industry in Ukraine in the early 1990s. The two had repeatedly come into public conflict and apparently, with the weekend resignation and accusations, the internal breakdown could no longer be masked.

No one knows what will happen next. Tymoshenko leads a political party that has the fourth largest number of seats in parliament. Poroshenko belongs to Yushchenko’s party “Our Ukraine” which has the largest number of seats but not a majority. Originally, they were planning to approach the March parliamentary elections as a united bloc but now that is being called into question. Tymoshenko has yet to publicly address the situation.

What further complicates the whole situation is that later in the year, constitutional reforms are supposed to begin which gives more power to the prime minister and parliament and drastically weakens the presidency. This reform was agreed to in order to end the stalemate in parliament during the Orange Revolution. The president plans to challenge the reform in court. If the challenge fails, parliament will then appoint the prime minister and no single party has enough votes to secure that position.

So we are in a mess here politically. I don’t think the Orange Revolution is unraveling. Much was accomplished. What we are seeing, though, is the reality that the revolution was led by a coalition of some good people and some not so good people, all with different political, ideological, and personal agendas. The only thing that united them was getting rid of the old regime.

The BBC has some good, clear reporting on the controversy.