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Ukraine Politics - Background

All East European nations experienced a traumatic twentieth century, but Ukraine's trials were particularly tragic - millions were killed in the Great War, Stalin's genocidal famine, and Hitler's invasion. The trauma's of this period echo down generation upon generation to the present. Corruption is a significant problem. The Ukrainian Government openly acknowledges that corruption remains a major issue in society. Their efforts to fight corruption effectively are hampered by the general public's widespread tolerance and apathetic response.

Ukraine is two nations in one country. Eastern Ukraine looks to Russia, and Western Ukraine looks to Europe. The population of Ukraine is over 45 million. Ethnic Ukrainians make up approximately 78% of the total; ethnic Russians number about 17%, ethnic Belarusians number about 0.6%. The industrial regions in the east and southeast are the most heavily populated, and the population is about 69% urban. Ukrainian and Russian are the principal languages. Although Russian is very widely spoken, in the 2001 census (the latest official figures) 85.2% of the ethnic Ukrainian population identified Ukrainian as their native language. While members of the three Orthodox churches comprise a majority of believers in the western part of the country overall, the Greek Catholic communities constitute a majority in three of the eight western oblasts: Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ternopil.

The entrepreneurial dynamism and pro-European sentiment is palpable in western Ukraine, with construction visible in the cities and countryside, coffee houses full of students, and European Union flags proudly displayed and dreams of NATO accession unabashedly uttered. But overt Russian-affiliated intervention into internal Ukrainian politics includes both advocacy of a Ukrainian political force and via participation of a handful of Kremlin sponsored or tolerated fringe groups and NGOs.

Conventional wisdom divides Ukraine into the Orange provinces in the West, the center of support for politicians leaning towards Europe, and the Blue provinces in the South and East, the center of support for pro-Russian politicians. At times it seems that Ukraine's emerging two-party system could be dangerous for Ukrainian unity, leading to a possible East/West split of the country. Some speculate that Ukraine could be divided into three parts, with the east/south annexed by Russia, a Russian-controlled central region, and a European-oriented rump Ukraine in the west. But nothing in Ukraine is so simple. While Prime Minister, Orange leader Yuliya Tymoshenko made deals favorable to Moscow, and the Blue Party of Regions includes pro-European factions.

Ukraine has a parliamentary-presidential system of government with separate executive, judicial, and legislative branches. The president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and may veto legislation. Ukraine's presidency was initially the pre-eminent post in the Ukrainian government, and economic and legal reform was primarily dependent on the president's support. Amendments to the Constitution that took effect January 1, 2006, shifted significant powers from the president to the prime minister and Supreme Rada. Ukraine's Constitutional Court ruled on 30 September 2010 that the 2004 constitutional reform, which transferred a significant amount of power from the president to parliament, was adopted in breach of the constitution. The court's decision meant that the amendments that came into force in summer 2006 are no longer valid, and that the norms of the 1996 Constitution have been restored.

The 450-member parliament (Supreme Rada) initiates legislation, ratifies international agreements, and approves the budget. Its members were elected to four-year terms in 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006. Initially the prime minister was appointed and dismissed by the president, although his/her appointment was subject to parliamentary approval. The prime minister nominated and the president appointed the members of the Cabinets of Ministers. The prime minister can also be removed by a majority vote in the Verkhovna Rada. Should the prime minister be removed, the entire Cabinet of Ministers resigns.

The constitution was amended to transfer power, especially with respect to appointment of ministers, from the president to the prime minister. Beginning in 2006, a majority of deputies in the 450-member unicameral parliament (Supreme Rada) forms a coalition, which then names the prime minister, who in turn nominates other ministers. The president nominates the defense and foreign ministers, and the Prosecutor General and Chief of the State Security Service (SBU), each of whom must be confirmed by the parliament.

Although final independence for Ukraine was achieved in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, democracy remained elusive as the legacy of state control and endemic corruption stalled efforts at economic reform, privatization, and civil liberties. A peaceful mass protest "Orange Revolution" in the closing months of 2004 forced the authorities to overturn a rigged presidential election and to allow a new internationally monitored vote that swept into power a reformist slate under Viktor YUSHCHENKO.

The Orange Revolution allowed Ukraine to move away from patronage politics to charismatic politics, but a necessary shift to programmatic politics remained in the future. Through the end of the Kuchma era, patronage politics had dominated Ukraine's political scene; people voted for candidates they believed would provide direct benefits, and politicians sought office and connections primarily for division of the spoils. The Orange Revolution ushered in an era of charismatic politics, a large but only partial step away from the patronage model, to which Regions was still firmly wedded. Ukraine's weakness, in Taran's view, was an absence of programmatic politics and clear party platforms.

Most Ukrainian parties remained associated with their dominant personalities rather than policies or ideologies: Yushchenko (Our Ukraine), Tymoshenko (Batkivshchyna, Tymoshenko Bloc), Yanukovych (Party of Regions), Lytvyn (People's Party), Moroz (Socialists), Vitrenko (Progressive Socialists). The Communists were perhaps the only exception currently, but they had no future. Yushchenko, Yanukovych, Tymoshenko, Moroz, and Lytvyn were all cut from the same cloth and used to the same "old" rules of politics. Ukraine sorely lacked a new generation of politics and politicians. The current Rada was nearly bereft of professionals, packed instead with what one Rada member called "businessmen, bureaucrats, cultural figures, and crazies."

Optimism about political stability decreased after the September 2005 crises. In that month, PresidentYushchenko dismissed the Yulia Tymoshenko government leading to a split in the Orange Revolution camp. Divisions in broad revolutionary coalitions, such as the one formed during the Orange Revolution, are common, but where Ukraine’s case is different is that the split came very early in the first year of the Orange presidency. Also in September, President Yushchenko’s entourage was accused of corruption leading to the dismissal of many business allies, such as Petro Poroshenko (secretary of the National Security and Defense Council).

The September 2005 split between erstwhile allies Yushchenko and ex-Orange PM Yuliya Tymoshenko got deeper and wider in the 2006 election campaign, despite talk (dreams?) of a post-election re-formation of the "Maidan team" (shorthand for the political forces that joined on Kiev's Independence Square to resist the Kuchma-Yanukovych efforts of 2004 to "win" the presidential election by hook or by crook). When not spitting on each other, many Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko bloc (BYuT) representatives spared little energy in attacking their "Blue" opponent, Yanukovych's Party of Regions.

Internal squabbles in the YUSHCHENKO camp allowed his rival Viktor YANUKOVYCH to stage a comeback in parliamentary elections and become prime minister in August of 2006. An early legislative election, brought on by a political crisis in the spring of 2007, saw Yulia TYMOSHENKO, as head of an “Orange” coalition, installed as a new prime minister in December 2007. YUSHCHENKO, TYMOSHENKO, and YANUKOVYCH had dominated Ukrainian politics in the last few years.

For most of February 2008, there was a deadlock within the Rada due to objections by opposition leader Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions to Ukraine’s request for a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP). The Rada experienced a deadlock again during summer 2008 due to the defection of two BYuT members of parliament (MPs), resulting in the party’s loss of the majority. In July 2008, Yuliya Tymoshenko’s government survived a vote of no confidence. In September 2008, the coalition between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko’s parties collapsed. A new coalition was formed between the former Orange allies, along with the Lytvyn Bloc, at the beginning of December 2008; however, this new coalition did not resolve disagreements between the President and Prime Minister.

Russia weakened the country by splitting, by feeding different groups of influence, by using openly energy as a weapon of international policy, using religious issues and others, cultural and etc. Ukraine faced so many things happening and those things were organized and well thought of in advance, unlike the situation in Ukraine. Therefore Russia clearly used Ukrainian weaknesses to the maximum to strengthen their own.

But while Russia might have some influence in political maneuvering leading up to elections, the most important question was how Ukraine managed to deal with the economic crisis. And that, observers say, will not be decided by elections but by how soon Ukraine's political leaders can put aside their differences and push through significant economic reforms. By 2009 political infighting was the greatest threat to stability. They say that conflicts between Mr. Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have already paralyzed policymaking - and this is likely to benefit their political rivals. Especially Victor Yanukovich, the leader of the opposition Party of Regions. He had announced he would run for president and topped national opinion polls.

One reason for this is that Ukrainians had lost faith in the country's current leaders. The government and president cannot unite their forces and concentrate on purely economic things. They are talking politics all day and they tell you it's a continuous political scandal which is shown on TV channels, on the radio and the people of Ukraine understand that we cannot live in such way anymore.

Ukraine held local elections on October 31, 2010. International and local election observers concluded that overall the elections did not meet standards for openness and fairness. Observers noted shortcomings such as insufficient training for electoral commissions, which contributed to procedural violations and organizational problems. In particular, the registration of fraudulent Batkivshchyna Party candidate lists led to the disqualification of all Batkivshchyna Party candidates in the Kyiv and Lviv oblast council elections, preventing the main opposition party from running for election in regions where it had considerable support. Election observers also reported incidences of law enforcement authorities pressuring monitors and candidates, and election officials selectively barring or removing candidates from ballots.

The new parliament, elected in the country’s 28 October 2012 parliamentary elections, was widely expected to be divisive after opposition forces made considerable gains. Ukraine’s three opposition parties drew slightly more votes than President Yanukovych’s two-party governing alliance. The president kept narrow control of parliament. But he faced new parties and younger faces as the vote recharged Ukraine’s pro-Western opposition. While the Party of Regions remained the largest faction in the 450-seat body with 210 seats, imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Fatherland opposition faction and world champion boxer Vitaly Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms (UDAR) held 99 and 42 seats, respectively. The nationalist All-Ukrainian Union “Freedom” also enjoyed a surge in the polls, holding 37 seats.

Ukraine faced political uncertainty after the sudden resignation of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and his Cabinet 04 December 2012. The president asked the prime minister to stay on as interim leader as the country prepares for talks with international lenders on multi-billion-dollar financial assistance to help overcome its economic crisis. The office of Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovych, said Azarov, who was 64, resigned because he wanted to take his parliamentary seat rather than stay on as prime minister. He made the decision after spending two-and-a-half years trying to revive the debt-ridden economy. Despite these efforts, the economy shrank in part because demand declined for Ukraine's main export products, such as steel. The national currency, the hryvna, had also weakened. On 13 December 2012 the new Ukrainian parliament finally managed to choose a speaker and reelect Mykola Azarov of the Party of Regions as prime minister after two days of brawling among deputies in the chamber crippled its inaugural session. The Verkhovna Rada has a long history of physical altercations between lawmakers.

A controversial 2016 documentary produced by US director Oliver Stone and broadcast on Russian television presented the Ukrainian revolutions of 2004 and 2014 as organized uprisings instigated from outside and planned with US participation. Posted on YouTube and screened by nationwide Russian TV channel REN TV on 21 November 2016, the film, titled Ukraine on Fire, features Ukraine's ousted former president Viktor Yanukovych, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Vitaly Zakharchenko, who served as Ukrainian interior minister under Yanukovych, discussing the events leading up to and following the "Maidan" revolution of 2014.

The film reports that the CIA closely collaborated with Ukrainian nationalistic organizations against the USSR as far back as 1946, using them as counterintelligence sources. In 2004 Ukraine became a battlefield between Russia and the West. The pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych won the presidential election, though the process was tainted by widespread allegations of intimidation and massive vote-rigging, as well as the poisoning of the pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.

In the end, Yushchenko, whose wife had been an employee of the US State Department during the Reagan administration) gained the presidency thanks to a peaceful protest that the film claims was inspired from outside the country, resulting in a re-vote.

Shortly before Yanukovych was due to sign the agreement at an EU Eastern Partnership summit (in Lithuania in late November 2013) public organizations financed by NED, journalists receiving US grants and the TV channels created on the eve of the Maidan uprising played an important role in the protests.

In the Minsk Agreement, the framework to settle the conflict in Donbass was laid out in February 2015, with German and French mediation. Political, legal and military statements of intent broken into 13 points. As "Minsk" doesn't contain a timetable, it doesn't say what should happen first, or second.

Kyiv and Moscow entrenched themselves behind their own priorities. The Ukrainians want to deal with questions of security first, and then get into the politics. The Russians see it exactly the other way around: they want Kyiv to firstly fulfill its political obligations - and any military talk can come after that. In Kyiv, any political concessions are seen as betrayal and surrender. The Russian leadership, on the other hand, with its shrill rhetoric, has positioned itself on the side of the separatists.

In September 2020, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine declared unconstitutional a number of powers of the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAPC), as well as an article on criminal liability for inaccurate declaration of income of officials. This decision aroused the dissatisfaction of V. Zelensky, who submitted to the Verkhovna Rada a draft law on the termination of the powers of the current composition of the court. In response to the actions of the head of state, Judge of the Constitutional Court I. Slidenko announced attempts to usurp power by the president and warned of the tragic consequences of such a scenario. However, the president was forced to withdraw his project when he realized that his demand to dissolve the court would not be met. According to some experts, V. Zelensky's concession was due to pressure from the oligarchs on him.

It should also be noted that the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe expressed the opinion that the decision of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine on the powers of the NAPC "lacks clearly defined arguments, that it does not have a solid international legal basis, and that it was probably accompanied by a serious procedural shortcoming - the unresolved issue about the conflict of interests of some judges”.

Significant human rights issues in 2021 included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by the government or its agents; torture and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of detainees by law enforcement personnel; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; serious abuses in the Russia-led conflict in the Donbas, including physical abuses or punishment of civilians and members of armed groups held in detention facilities; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including violence or threats of violence against journalists, unjustified arrests or prosecutions of journalists, and censorship.

Although the constitution and law prohibit torture and other cruel and unusual punishment, there were reports that law enforcement authorities engaged in such abuse. While courts cannot legally use confessions and statements made under duress to police by persons in custody as evidence in court proceedings, there were reports that police and other law enforcement officials abused and, at times, tortured persons in custody to obtain confessions. Abuse of detainees by police remained a widespread problem.

Prison and detention center conditions remained poor, did not meet international standards, and at times posed a serious threat to the life and health of prisoners. Physical abuse, lack of proper medical care and nutrition, poor sanitation, and lack of adequate light were persistent problems.

The NGO Association of Ukrainian Monitors on Human Rights in Law Enforcement continued to report a widespread practice of unrecorded detention, in particular the unrecorded presence in police stations of persons "invited" for "voluntary talks" with police and noted several allegations of physical mistreatment that took place during a period of unrecorded detention. Authorities occasionally held suspects incommunicado, in some cases for several weeks.

While the constitution provides for an independent judiciary, courts were inefficient and remained highly vulnerable to political pressure and corruption. Confidence in the judiciary remained low. Despite efforts to reform the judiciary and the Office of the Prosecutor General, systemic corruption among judges and prosecutors persisted. Civil society groups continued to complain of weak separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of government.