Kyiv woos oligarchs, bolstering east against Putin
Even as a new alarm sounds about it massing troops on the Ukrainian border, Russia may have missed its chance to exploit unrest in the Russian-speaking east to seize Ukraine’s industrial heartland in the way it took Crimea.
A week after violence involving pro-Moscow separatists left three people dead in border cities, the outlines of a consensus have emerged between the new leaders in Kyiv and the eastern business oligarchs allied to ousted president Viktor Yanukovich.
Cooperation between Kyiv and the magnates in Yanukovich’s native Donetsk and the wider Donbass coalfield would make it harder for Moscow to present any military intervention as humanitarian help and less likely it would be widely welcomed.
It follows a vow by Ukraine’s new prime minister to decentralise power to the regions, safeguard Russian language rights and protect industries, a compromise Western diplomats have been pressing for to stop Ukraine breaking up.
Shortly after Yanukovich fell, parliament briefly moved to make Ukrainian the sole official language. That, and the inclusion of nationalists in the new government, alarmed Russian-speakers and helped fuel the separatist move in majority ethnic-Russian Crimea.
Describing “an understanding between the elites and regional government in the east and the central government”, a political source in the Donbass said it included constitutional change to strengthen rights to use Russian as well as decentralisation.
“This will contribute to unity in the country,” he said.
Volodymyr Kipen, a political analyst in Donetsk, said Moscow – despite its denials – could yet invade, or more likely promote unrest. But he also said the oligarchs, seeking stability for businesses built on the back of 1990s acquisitions of ex-Soviet state assets, were rallying behind Yanukovich’s successors.
Noting the failure of pro-Kremlin activists to hold out after a takeover of the regional assembly building early this month that saw Russia’s flag flown from the building for nearly a week, he concluded:
“The Crimean model has now failed in the Donbass.”
Weekend rallies demanding union with Russia drew only a few thousand and passed off without incident, despite noisy chants of “Crimea-Donbass-Russia” during a standoff with riot police as people waved Russian flags below the Donetsk governor’s office.
That protest failed to disrupt a visit by the German foreign minister, who met Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov and came away praising his pledges to prevent the country breaking up and to cooperate in liberal reforms of a corrupt, failing economy.
“We have heard here today the very pressing desire that the new Ukraine should be a united Ukraine and that there should be no breakup,” Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after meeting Akhmetov and steel magnate Serhiy Taruta, Donetsk’s new governor. He also met Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk and praised the “signal” he sent to easterners in a speech made, significantly, in Russian.
Taruta, critical of missteps in Kyiv that played a part in the loss of Crimea, told Reuters he expected tough negotiations on sharing power but believed the government which appointed him was moving in the right direction. He felt his own efforts to ensure police were loyal and to stop Russian “provocateurs” coming across the border were curbing unrest.
Fear of hardline Ukrainian nationalists in the government is widespread among Russian-speakers in the east, who share the view dispensed by Kremlin-controlled media that there has been a “fascist coup” in the capital.
There is also deep anger in Donetsk region, home to 10 percent of Ukraine’s 46 million people and producer of 20 percent of its industrial output, that 23 years of post-Soviet independence have left them poor and exploited by a rich elite many see as little more than a mafia.
Yet despite that profound discontent, only a minority seem actively to want to break with Ukraine and join Russia.
A month ago Steinmeier was in Kyiv negotiating an end to bloodshed between Yanukovich’s police and protesters.
His arrival in the fallen president’s power base followed weeks of Western pressure for compromise to prevent Ukraine cracking open along an east-west faultline that could hand its main industries over to Russian President Vladimir Putin.