ANALYSIS: RUSSIAN SATELLITE SHIFTS ORBIT
by Ian Mather Diplomatic Correspondent

Scotland on Sunday
December 5, 2004, Sunday

UKRAINE’S Supreme Court has a reputation for fierce independence
unusual in a former Soviet republic and last week it demonstrated it
with a vengeance.

In a humiliating rebuff to outgoing President Leonid Kuchma and his
pro-Moscow protege, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, it threw out
the presidential election result in which Yanukovych had been declared
the narrow winner.

The court’s decision, which cannot be appealed against, is a stunning
victory for the Western-oriented opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko
and his backers, and is massively significant since it clears the way
for a Yushchenko victory which could take Ukraine out of the Russian
sphere of influence and closer to membership of the European Union
and Nato.

The decision gives Yushchenko exactly what he wanted: a straightforward
re-run of the last round, between the two highest-scoring candidates
from the first round.

Kuchma, who is at the end of a 10-year stint as president, had
dismissed the idea of a re-run as a “farce”, instead seeking a
completely new election. This would have opened up the field to
fresh candidates, allowing Kuchma to ditch Yanukovych in favour of
a different pro-Moscow candidate thought to be less unpopular.

There are other signs that the tide has turned against Ukraine’s
pro-Moscow establishment. The country’s parliament has begun flexing
its muscles, adopting a more aggressive role against Kuchma for
the first time. In an emergency session it voted to invalidate the
election.

Later, when Kuchma sought to circumvent the opposition by pushing
through a political reform that would have transferred significant
powers from the president to parliament, boosting the prime minister’s
role, the parliament rejected it.

The Supreme Court’s decision is also a serious setback for Russian
President Vladimir Putin, who had mounted a personal campaign to
try to assure the election of Yanukovych. He paid two high-profile
visits to Ukraine during the election campaign and later caused anger
in Europe and the US by congratulating Yanukovych on winning before
the official outcome was announced.

The prospect of a Yushchenko presidency has raised old Russian fears
of ‘encirclement’ if Ukraine, a large and strategically important
nation, were to move out of Moscow’s orbit, and line up with the West,
particularly the United States.

But it is a triumph for Washington, which announced it would refuse
to accept the last election result and hinted at sanctions against
Ukraine if the result were not reversed.

It is also an unexpected success for the EU, which argues that it has
an external security role in what it calls the “common neighbourhood” –
which includes Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, and the Caucasus republics
of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Moscow fiercely rejects such a role for the EU, arguing that Ukraine
and other former Soviet republics belong to what it calls its
“near abroad”.

“The Russians still perceive it as their sphere of influence and would
prefer not to have anyone from the EU,” said Wojciech Saryusz-Wolski,
an analyst at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress