Ukrainian President Quotes

Everyone knew Russia’s ambitions extended to the Crimea, but a few years earlier some steam was let out of the kettle when the pro-nationalist Ukrainian president was replaced by a pro-Russian successor. The fate of the Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol seemed secure, and Russia went about its business.

Kyiv on May 31, the Russian president signed a treaty of friendship with his Ukrainian counterpart, pledging “mutual respect” for “territorial integrity” and the “inviolability of borders.”186

Olga found that there were many accounts for the Chinese President, perhaps not all of them legitimate, but that certainly wasn’t her problem. She opened one at random and read Xi’s first tweet out loud: “ ‘What is it about dictatorship that you don’t understand?’ ” “Good question!” said Yogi. “Now try Putin.” “‘My thoughts and prayers are with the Ukrainian people. At least what’s left of them’.

Unit 1’s service life came to an end on November 30th 1996 after Ukraine’s government agreed to decommission it in exchange for US$300 million of foreign funds to modernise Ukraine’s power sector, including improvements to Chernobyl’s remaining reactor. Despite this, the plant struggled through its final few weeks, during which it was forced to shut down first because of weather damage to electricity infrastructure and then from a steam leak. In a televised event on December 15th, 2000, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma ordered the permanent shut down of the plant live from Unit 3’s control room, saying, “To fulfil a state decision and Ukraine’s international obligations, I hereby order the premature stoppage of the operation of reactor number 3 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.”267 With that, Chernobyl’s last reactor ceased producing power for the final time.

I visited with American diplomats at the U.S. embassy just before they became entangled in the impeachment of President Donald Trump. On the day I visited, they were overwhelmed by Russia’s latest disinformation campaign: Russian trolls had been inundating Facebook pages frequented by young Ukrainian mothers with anti-vaccination propaganda. This, as the country reeled from the worst measles outbreak in modern history. Ukraine now had one of the lowest vaccination rates in the world and the Kremlin was capitalizing on the chaos. Ukraine’s outbreak was already spreading back to the States, where Russian trolls were now pushing anti-vaxxer memes on Americans. American officials seemed at a loss for how to contain it. (And they were no better prepared when, one year later, Russians seized on the pandemic to push conspiracy theories that Covid-19 was an American-made bioweapon, or a sinister plot by Bill Gates to profit off vaccines.) There seemed no bottom to the lengths Russia was willing to go to divide and conquer.

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

Although at the time I didn’t realize this, the Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev had begun promoting ‘glasnost’ or political openness throughout the Soviet Union, and everywhere Ukrainians were debating the justice of Soviet domination over our country. Finally, the citizens of Ukraine were beginning to realize that Moscow was destroying their environment and endangering their lives.

The crisis inUkraine deepened when pro-Russian supporters, allegedly led and organised by Russian forces, seized police and security buildings in about ten towns and cities across the east of the country. Oleksandr Turchinov, the acting president, ordered an “anti-terrorist operation” to retake the buildings. Thousands of Russian troops are mustered along the Ukrainian border, adding to fears that a crackdown on pro-Russians could trigger a land invasion.

The Ukrainian authorities said Thursday that former President Viktor F. Yanukovych and Russian security agents were involved in plans for elite police units

In personal and political terms, Trump was incapable of empathy. Dirt on his political opponents was “big stuff”; the American national interest, as well as the lives of Ukrainians at war, was not. There was no need for a more complicated explanation for the root of the scandal that would soon engulf the president.

Firtash was the Ukrainian middleman for Gazprom, the Russian state-run natural gas giant. Putin used the company as an instrument of statecraft and an engine of corruption. Firtash bought gas from Gazprom at a steep discount. He marked it up threefold when he sold it to Ukraine, pocketing $3 billion and paying pro-Russian politicians, chiefly Yanukovych, to do the Kremlin’s bidding. Through the oligarch’s largesse, the president paid Manafort his millions.

Revolution in nearby Georgia, his team came up with the color and the slogan for what they called the 2004 Orange Revolution. Everything was in orange—their banners, scarves, hats, and handouts. Yushchenko's campaign functioned like a Swiss watch, and he consistently led Yanukovych in the polls. He seemed the likely winner. Desperate, Yanukovych asked Putin for advice. The Russian president's PR people offered a few suggestions. First, favor close relations with Russia, not with the West. Second, make Russian the second official language of the country. And third, run as a proud Ukrainian nationalist, not as an American puppet. One poster quickly showed up on billboards: the faces of Yushchenko

he had betrayed the ideals of the Orange Revolution. Poroshenko kept his cool, dropping pellets of poison into the dialogue whenever it suited his purposes but otherwise standing on the sidelines, biding his time while trying to appear statesmanlike. As Yushchenko opened the second year of his presidency, he found himself in serious trouble. He had his chance to fight corruption and launch a major program of economic and political reform; after the Orange Revolution, he had even had his chance to rise above politics and become a Ukrainian Mandela. But, in almost every respect, he fell short. Moreover, hovering like

The weekly news round-up show is on. The well-dressed presenter walks across the well-made set and into shot, briskly summing up the week’s events, all seemingly quite normal. Then suddenly he’ll twirl around to camera 2, and before you know it he’s talking about how the West is sunk in the slough of homosexuality, and only Holy Russia can save the world from Gay-Europa, and how among us all are the fifth columnists, the secret Western spies who dress themselves up as anti-corruption activists but are actually all CIA (for who else would dare to criticise the President?), while the West is sponsoring anti-Russian ‘fascists’ in Ukraine and all of them are out to get Russia and take away its oil, and the American-sponsored fascists are crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns because the West is organising a genocide against Us Russians and there are women crying on camera saying how they were threatened by roving gangs of Russia-haters, and of course only the President can make this right, and that’s why Russia did the right thing to annex Crimea, and is right to arm and send mercenaries to Ukraine, and that this is just the beginning of the great new conflict between Russia and the Rest. And when you go to check (through friends, through Reuters, through anyone who isn’t Ostankino) whether there really are fascists taking over Ukraine or whether there are children being crucified you find it’s all untrue, and the women who said they saw it all are actually hired extras dressed up as ‘eye-witnesses’.

The Podesta Group (founded by the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman) lobbied for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, which is directly tied to the Kremlin, according to intelligence officials. Tony Podesta also received about $900,000 from a group that lobbied on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted Putin-allied Ukrainian president. The Podesta Group also successfully lobbied their pal Hillary Clinton, while she was secretary of state, to let a Russian company, whose chairman made a big donation to the Clinton Foundation, buy about a fifth of the U.S. uranium supply. A Russian bank affiliated with the company paid Bill Clinton a half million dollars just before the deal went through.

Kotlarsky is described in the 2019 article as a “Ukrainian who was in the car-service business in New York City.

Bush took Gorbachev’s side in his address to the Ukrainian parliament, dubbed by the American media his “Chicken Kiev speech” because of the American president’s reluctance to endorse the independence aspirations of the national democratic deputies. Bush favored setting the Baltic republics free but keeping Ukraine and the rest together. He did not want to lose a reliable partner on the world stage—Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that he represented. Moreover, Bush and his advisers were concerned about the possibility of an uncontrolled disintegration of the union, which could lead to wars between republics with nuclear arms on their territory. Apart from Russia, these included Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In his speech to the Ukrainian parliament, President Bush appealed to his audience to renounce “suicidal nationalism” and avoid confusing freedom with independence. The communist majority applauded him with enthusiasm. The democratic minority was disappointed: the alliance of Washington with Moscow and the communist deputies in the Ukrainian parliament presented a major obstacle to Ukrainian independence. It was hard to imagine that before the month was out, parliament would vote almost unanimously for the independence of Ukraine and that by the end of November, the White House, initially concerned about the possibility of chaos and nuclear war in the post-Soviet state, would endorse that vote.

Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence. The referendum provision was important for more than one reason. On August 24, it helped those members of the communist majority who had doubts about independence to vote in favor of it—theirs, after all, was not the final decision and could be reversed in the future. The referendum also gave Ukraine a chance to leave the union without open conflict with the center. In the previous referendum organized by Gorbachev in March 1991, about 70 percent of Ukrainians had voted to stay in a reformed union. Now another referendum would enable it to make a clean break.

Gorbachev believed that support for independence in Ukraine would never reach 70 percent. Yeltsin was not so sure. In late August 1991, soon after the Ukrainian parliament had voted for independence, he instructed his press secretary to make a statement that if Ukraine and other republics declared independence, Russia would have the right to open the question of its borders with those republics. Yeltsin’s press secretary indicated the Crimea and eastern parts of Ukraine, including the Donbas coal region, as possible areas of contention. The threat was partition if Ukraine insisted on independence. Yeltsin then sent a high-powered delegation led by his vice president, General Aleksandr Rutskoi, to force Ukraine to reverse its stance. But the Ukrainians stood their ground, and Rutskoi returned to Moscow empty-handed. Blackmail had failed, and Yeltsin had neither the political will nor the resources to deliver on his threat.

On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate. The results were mind-boggling for even the most optimistic proponents of independence. The turnout reached 84 percent, with more than 90 percent of voters supporting independence. Western Ukraine led the way, with 99 percent in favor in the Ternopil oblast of Galicia. But the center, south, and even the east were not far behind. In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.) In the center and east of the country, many voted for independence while supporting Leonid Kravchuk’s bid for the presidency. He won 61 percent of the popular vote, obtaining a majority in all regions of Ukraine except Galicia. There, victory went to the longtime Gulag prisoner and head of the Lviv regional administration Viacheslav Chornovil. Ukraine voted for independence and entrusted its future to a presidential candidate who, many believed, could strike a balance between Ukraine’s various regions and nationalities, as well as between the republic’s communist past and its independent future.

Like many post-Soviet countries, during its first years of independence Ukraine underwent a major political crisis caused by economic decline and social dislocation and focused on relations between the presidency and parliament, both institutions having been created in the political turmoil of the last years of the Soviet Union. Russia resolved the conflict in September 1993 when President Yeltsin ordered tanks to fire on the Russian parliament building and the Russian authorities arrested Russia’s vice president and the head of parliament, both accused of instigating a coup against the president. Yeltsin’s advisers rewrote the constitution to limit the power of parliament, turning it into something more of a rubber stamp than an active agent in the Russian political scene. Ukraine resolved the emerging conflict between the president and parliament with a compromise. President Kravchuk agreed to call early presidential elections, which he lost, and in the summer of 1994 he peacefully transferred power to his successor, Leonid Kuchma, the former prime minister and erstwhile rocket designer heading Europe’s largest missile factory. Throughout the tumultuous 1990s, Ukraine not only managed its first transfer of power between two rivals for the presidency but also maintained competitive politics and created legal foundations for a viable democracy. In 1996, President Kuchma rewrote the Soviet-era constitution, but he did so together with parliament, which secured a major role for itself in the Ukrainian political process. One of the main reasons for Ukraine’s success as a democracy was its regional diversity—a legacy of both distant and more recent history that translated into political, economic, and cultural differences articulated in parliament and settled by negotiation in the political arena. The industrialized east became a stronghold of the revived Communist Party.

The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2003, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia. THE

The Ukrainian scene remained as pluralistic at the turn of the twenty-first century as it had been after the declaration of independence. If anything, it became even more diverse. Eventually, all political forces had to accept the reality that Russian political solutions generally did not work in Ukraine. President Kuchma explained why in a book published in 2003, close to the end of his second term in office. The title was telling indeed: Ukraine Is Not Russia. THE MAJOR CHALLENGE to the democratic nature of the Ukrainian political process was the catastrophic economic decline that followed the declaration of independence and was often blamed on it, making not only the Leonid Brezhnev era but also the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms look like a paradise lost. In six years, between 1991 and 1997, Ukrainian industrial production fell by 48 percent, while the gross domestic product (GDP) lost a staggering 60 percent. The biggest loss (23 percent of the previous year’s GDP) occurred in 1994, the year of presidential elections and the signing of the first cooperation agreement with the European Union. These were figures comparable to but more significant than American economic losses during the Great Depression, when industrial production fell by 45 percent and GDP by 30 percent.

The new “men of steel” included the leader of the Donetsk group, Rinat Akhmetov, who in the early 1990s took over leadership of a company called Lux, known to the Ukrainian authorities for its criminal origins and connections. In the Dnipropetrovsk region, two local businessmen divided major metallurgical assets: Viktor Pinchuk, who married into President Kuchma’s family, and Igor Kolomoisky, who established one of the first major private banks in Ukraine. Others also shared the loot of post-Soviet Ukrainian privatization. Still, the corrupt and often criminal nature of the privatization process aside, the “oligarchization” of the Ukrainian economy coincided with the end of economic decline. Ukraine began the new millennium with a rapid economic recovery, and, for better or worse, the oligarchs were important figures in that new success story.

Regardless of whether or not President Trump is impeached, the government is corrupt.

The Ukrainian men should have been smart and told President Zelensky they would defend Ukraine, but not the traditionally Russian part of Ukraine that Russia was invading.

On his desk was a printout of an article, set to run in the next morning’s New York Times. It explained how a Ukrainian government anticorruption team had discovered a secret handwritten ledger listing Manafort as the designated recipient of $12.7 million in previously undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Russian political party aligned with former president Viktor F. Yanukovych, Manafort’s client.

With the inauguration as president of Viktor Yuschenko in 2005 after the Orange Revolution of the year before, the position of the Holodomor in Ukrainian life and politics changed significantly. Yuschenko took a far more explicitly nationalistic stance on history than his predecessors had done, and the Holodomor memorial is one of the products of his otherwise disastrous time as president.

With the return of Yanukovych, first as prime minister in 2007 and then as president in 2010, the Holodomor began to fall back again in terms of public remembrance. Because of this political shift and because this was a taboo topic in Soviet times, the Holodomor has not entered into the DNA or soul of Ukrainian politics, or worldview, as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide have in Israel and Armenia.

Purgin was one of the founders of Donetsk Republic, the miniature group of political activists who from 2005 had been working to re-create the state of 1918. The group was born in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004 in whose wake Viktor Yuschenko, a man with Ukrainian nationalist credentials, became president.

Just before this the Verkhovna Rada made a cardinal error. It voted to pass a law to downgrade the official status of the Russian language. This was immediately vetoed by Oleksandr Turchynov, the acting president, but the damage was done. It frightened many Russian speakers and gave Putin and the “anti-Maidan” and pro-Russian constituency just what they needed in terms of “proof” of their claims that neo-Nazi Ukrainian nationalists had taken over.

Most damaging in the recordingd in which [Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European intgration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).

Most damaging in the recordings in which [President Leonid] Kuchma gave his interior minister an order to kidnap an opposition journalist, Heorhii Gongadze. He had disappeared in September of that year, and his headless body was found in a forest near Kyiv in November... With American and European leader demanding an impartial investigation into the President's role in the kidnapping and murder of Gongadze, Kuchma abandoned his ambitions of European integration and turned for support to Russia and its new president, Vladimir Putin (p.58-59).