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Ukraine Moves to Strengthen Ties With Europe, and Bolster Truce
Under Pressure, Ukraine Leader to Seek Aid on U.S. Visit
(about 9 hours later)
KIEV, Ukraine — The Ukrainian Parliament passed a series of laws on Tuesday meant to cement the country’s Western orientation while strengthening its truce with pro-Russian separatists in the southeast. The steps were more freighted with symbolism than likely to bring any immediate change.
KIEV, Ukraine — Seeking elusive military and economic aid from the United States, President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine headed to North America on Tuesday, while also facing increasingly skeptical questions both here and abroad about the slow pace of change.
One of the Parliament’s votes was to ratify an association agreement with the European Union. The rejection of the pact by the previous president just before he was scheduled to sign it led to mass demonstrations and his overthrow in a people’s revolution last February.
A White House meeting with President Obama and an address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday will likely generate fresh moral support, if little else, for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.
The lawmakers also approved two laws meant to fulfill the promises Ukraine made in negotiating a shaky cease-fire with the rebels after five months of armed conflict. One of the laws grants temporary autonomy to two regions, Donetsk and Luhansk, where the rebels tried to break away from Ukraine. The other grants amnesty to separatists who did not commit war crimes.
“It is a clear sign of solidarity and support from the United States,” Pavlo Klimkin, the foreign minister, said in a brief interview before leaving.
President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine sought to portray the votes on Tuesday as a moment of triumph for Ukraine, but they were actually concessions to Russia’s significant influence over the future of the country.
Photo opportunities alone are enough to help Mr. Poroshenko domestically, although given its raft of problems, Ukraine would like more. Winter looms with gas supplies from Russia cut off; it is unclear that limited self-rule for Russian-backed separatists regions is enough to satisfy the Kremlin; and the country is spending itself toward bankruptcy.
The agreement with the Europe will not be fully implemented for more than a year in order to help allay Russian concerns that its market would be flooded with low-cost European goods moving through Ukraine.
Ukraine’s leaders tried to put a celebratory face on new laws pushed through Parliament on Tuesday, even if they were mostly symbolic at this stage. One ratified closer economic and political ties with Europe, while the second tried to cement a recent truce with the separatists by supporting temporary self-rule for the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
As for autonomy, large areas of the two regions are rebel-held and not in the government’s control; if the new laws are rejected by the separatists or their Russian patrons, they will prove meaningless.
“We are fixing the 350-year-old mistake: Ukraine is Europe,” Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the prime minister, told Parliament, known as the Rada. “It’s a shame that this agreement is sealed with blood. But that was the choice. That was the price of independence.”
That prospect, though, did not deter soaring rhetoric about the legislation from government officials.
Despite the warm public embrace Mr. Poroshenko can expect in Washington, behind closed doors there will be questions about whether the February revolution is slouching toward the same failure as the 2004 Orange revolution, with public demands for change smothered by the personal ambitions of its staggeringly wealthy, isolated political class.
“We are fixing the 350-year old mistake — Ukraine is Europe,” Arseniy Yatsenuk, the prime minister, told the Parliament, known as the Rada. “It’s a shame that this agreement is sealed with blood. But that was the choice, that was the price of independence.”
“There are too many signs of politics as usual, Ukrainian style,” Thomas O. Melia, the deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Law, said at a weekend conference here.
Officials from the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, meeting in Brussels last week, agreed to delay key provisions of the pact, which Moscow has long opposed, until the end of 2015.
The February overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the previous president, and the May presidential election were expected to usher in a transition period to address significant issues of corruption and economic reform, he noted.
Ukraine will maintain its tariffs on imports from Western Europe until then, though Ukrainian goods will gain favored access to European markets right away. Russia had threatened to impose high tariffs on Ukrainian goods, in addition to the embargoes it has already imposed on certain products. It has also threatened to inflict even heavier damage on Ukraine’s battered economy by lowering tariffs on European goods.
“So that is where we are after six months? We almost have our first major law through the Rada, but not yet,” Mr. Melia said.
Heavy pressure from the Kremlin was the reason the former Ukrainian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, rejected the deal last fall. After he was toppled, the new government quickly reversed the decision, and Russia responded by seizing Crimea and stirring up violent unrest in southeastern Ukraine, areas where much of the population is ethnically Russian.
“In order to keep the coalition intact to defend Ukraine from military aggression, you have to make progress on the domestic reforms,” he added. “It is not two different battles; it is the same battle. If the domestic institutions and habits don’t get fixed now, then the consensus and support for defending Ukraine against Russian aggression will disappear.”
Mr. Poroshenko’s government has held the agreement up as the means for transforming Ukraine’s widely corrupt and inefficient Soviet-style government and economy. The agreement requires Ukraine to align its laws, standards and economic practices with those of Europe, a process that the government has argued would force the country to stop putting off difficult reforms.
Mr. Poroshenko sought to portray the laws passed Tuesday as triumphs for Ukraine. But in reality Russia holds the keys to both.
The government’s announcement late Friday that it would delay implementing the pact surprised and worried both pro-Western Ukrainian activists and foreign donors.
Because of Kremlin opposition, the measure on forging closer economic ties with Europe will be delayed for at least 15 months. The autonomy measures will be meaningless without Russian approval, since Ukraine does not actually control the territory addressed by the law. Separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk reacted by stressing that they would still seek independence.
“It takes away from the pressure to make the necessary reforms,” said Erik Berglof, the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Still, he noted, Ukraine depends heavily on its access to the Russian market and had to avoid being locked out.
Political critics accused the government of abandoning the southeast in the face of Russian aggression, with the death toll above 3,000 people. Russia denies direct involvement, but President Vladimir V. Putin seems bent on keeping Ukraine destabilized to prevent it from moving out of Moscow’s orbit.
Mr. Poroshenko and his ministers have said repeatedly that changes demanded by the agreement would begin at once. But both activists and foreign donors expressed concern that nothing significant had changed in Ukraine since the February revolution.
In an embarrassing blow to the Ukrainian president, Parliament failed to pass what Mr. Poroshenko had advertised as the cornerstone of his anti-corruption campaign: laws meant to establish an anticorruption bureau.
Some of them mocked another bill, which the Parliamentiament considered on Thursday, to establish an anticorruption committee that some see as another bureaucratic delaying tactic rather than a concrete step toward reform.
A recent Gallup report found that one in three Ukrainians had been asked to pay a bribe last year, and that eight out of 10 paid. Even after 23 years of independence, Ukraine still has a highly centralized, Soviet-style government. Farmers must ask government permission to change their crops, for example, while universities won the right to order their own supplies — like pencils — only in July. Rebuilding the judiciary and the police is considered essential.
Critics in Ukraine assailed the law granting special status for three years to the separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, known collectively as Donbass, where fighting since April has killed at least 3,000 people.
“The bribes start with payments to the local doctor and end with bribes to the president,” said Tamara Trafenchuk, a retiree who was touring the opulent estate built by the former president, Mr. Yanukovych, on Kiev’s outskirts. “We want more decisive steps on corruption and economic reforms.”
“The adopted law feels vile,” Andriy Shevchenko, a young Parliament member allied with Yulia Tymoshenko, an opponent of the president. “With the president’s initiative and the helping hands of Parliament, Donbas is being discarded.”
In their own defense, government officials have said they are trying to carry out a herculean task: delivering radical reforms while fighting a war, even as the economy collapses. A gas dispute with Russia and lack of coal from the separatist areas means winter fuel supplies are uncertain.
Many separatist leaders also rejected the measure, even though two of them signed the cease-fire accord with the government on Sept. 5 in Minsk, Belarus.
The International Monetary Fund, which has agreed to lend Ukraine about $18 billion over two years, estimates that the economy will shrink by more than 6.5 percent this year.
The law grants the separatist regions special powers, including the right to establish their own police forces, elect their own regional councils and use Russian as their official language, for three years. The government says that by then, the constitution will have been amended to devolve such powers to regions across the country. The law also gives the regions the right “to strengthen and deepen the neighborly relations with Russian territories.”
The top Democratic and Republican senators on the Foreign Relations Committee introduced a proposal to increase aid to Ukraine and impose more sanctions on Russia. The bill will be voted on by the committee within hours of Mr. Poroshenko’s speech to Congress, according to its sponsors, Senators Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, and Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee.
Gennady Tsipkalov, the latest prime minister of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic, said in a posting on a Russian social media site, Vkontacte, that the special status provided by the law might have been enough if it had been offered when the rebellion first erupted in April. But he said it was no longer sufficient because of the number of people who had since died in the fighting. “People made their choice — a separate Luhansk People’s Republic,” he wrote.
But Mr. Obama is not expected to go beyond the $70 million in training and nonlethal aid like night vision goggles that has already been pledged.
Andrei Purgin, the first deputy prime minister of the similar self-declared republic in Donetsk, told the Interfax news agency the question of autonomy was moot. “One can definitely say that we will not be part of Ukraine,” he was quoted as saying.
Given the deepening crisis, Ukrainian political leaders issue frequent calls for national unity. But each key leader is running a separate slate for Parliament.
The most important question, though, was whether the new law would satisfy Russia. The Ukrainian government is banking that the Kremlin will endorse the plan because it signed the Sept. 5 agreement, but Moscow has been pushing for an even more decentralized federal system that would allow regions to pursue independent foreign relations and veto some decisions by the central government.
Some analysts have suggested that the war might actually abet the reform process, because military veterans will insist on reforms so that their fellow soldiers will not have died in vain.
Europe voted on Tuesday in Strasbourg, France, to ratify the agreement with Ukraine at the same time the Ukrainian Parliament was doing so. “The message this sends could not be clearer: the European Parliament supports Ukraine in its European vocation,” said Martin Schulz, the president of the body, in a statement. “The European Parliament will now continue helping true democracy take root in Ukraine, with the next step being the sending of observers to the upcoming elections to make sure that they are free and fair.”
“If you want to die for this country, you will work honestly in Parliament,” said Capt. Pavlo Kyshkar, a candidate on the slate of an independent party.
But Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, expressed skepticism about the delays in implementing some of its provisions. Referring to the union’s executive body, the European Commission, she said, “It could be that the Commission wants to create room for a political solution and the cease-fire, but it also seems like they gave in to Russian pressure.” In a statement, she called for a “guarantee that the treaty will not be changed between now and 2016 as a result of pressure from the Kremlin.”
There continued to be reports of fighting in the southeast on Tuesday despite the fragile cease-fire. Col. Andriy Lysenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s national security council, said three Ukrainian soldiers had died in the last day. The City Council in Donetsk, a rebel stronghold and the capital of the region of the same name, said three people were killed and five were wounded in shelling overnight as clashes continued around the airport, news agencies reported.
