Sunday 27 May 2012
Chicago Summit: NATO Remains AWOL From Europe’s East
CHICAGO, USA -- With the salient exception of Georgia, NATO basically ignored its own immediate eastern neighborhood at NATO’ Chicago summit (May 20-21).
Europe’s East – a “gray zone” of six countries bordering on NATO and the EU – faces a deepening security vacuum and Russian re-expansion.
This region is the arena of protracted conflicts (Russia-Moldova, Russia-Georgia on two fronts, Armenia-Azerbaijan), territorial occupations, ethnic cleansing, massive Russian military bases (prolonged in Ukraine and Armenia since 2010 for decades to come), and failing tests of NATO’s open-door and partnership policies.
NATO seems to treat Europe’s East with benign neglect, which deepens from one summit cycle to the next; NATO’s policy from Lisbon to Chicago has confirmed the pattern.
NATO/US disengagement and Russian sphere-of-influence rebuilding are concurrent processes, mutually reinforcing in this region.
Benign neglect tends to grow deeper and even becomes institutionalized with the passage of time.
In this region, it takes the form of conceding primary authority on peacekeeping and conflict-mediation to Russia, which acts within institutional formats that constrain the West and exclude NATO outright.
Except for a fleeting moment in 2002, NATO has recused itself from a peacekeeping role in its eastern neighborhood.
At the Chicago summit, NATO again urged all parties to the protracted conflicts to respect those same institutional formats (meaning: 5+2 in Moldova, the Geneva format in the case of Georgia, the “Minsk Group” in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict) despite their ineffectiveness.
This summit’s communiqué called on “all parties to engage constructively and with reinforced political will in peaceful conflict resolution.”
Repeating a phrase from earlier communiqués, it declared that “the persistence of protracted conflicts in [the] South Caucasus and Moldova continues to be a matter of great concern for the Alliance.”
But the concern seems to remain at the declaratory level (Chicago Summit Declaration, May 20).
Overcommitted to failed expeditionary operations in distant theaters, NATO has no security solution to offer in its eastern neighborhood; and – as the Chicago summit confirmed – NATO lacks the collective inclination to provide one.
While some NATO partners become security providers in the region, the Alliance itself has missed the chance to become an effective security actor in Europe’s East.
Again, with the singular exception of Georgia, others are scaling down their erstwhile ambitions for closer cooperation with NATO.
The Ukrainian government has regressed from membership aspirant during Viktor Yanukovych’s first premiership (2002-2004) to staunchly “non-bloc” under Yanukovych’s presidency.
At the Chicago summit, Yanukovych limited his role to seeking business opportunities for Ukraine in the context of NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.
He offered to lease Ukraine’s Soviet-era, heavy-duty transport aircraft for NATO’s reverse transit, and to repair Soviet-made military equipment in Ukraine for the Afghan army’s use.
For its part, Azerbaijan joined the non-aligned movement in 2011 – a move that precludes NATO membership aspirations, though still allowing other forms of Azerbaijan-NATO cooperation.
In the Karabakh conflict, Russian-backed Armenia occupies territories of Western-oriented Azerbaijan.
Amid Western indifference to this situation, Azerbaijan seeks political support among the non-aligned countries.
Baku continues to seek an upgraded individual partnership agreement with NATO, but the Alliance procrastinates.
Azerbaijan is a troop contributor and a crucial way station for NATO forces operating in Afghanistan.
President Ilham Aliyev attended the Chicago summit in that context.
Armenian President Serzh Sarkisyan, on the other hand, followed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s example and declined to attend the summit.
Azerbaijan obtained a degree of satisfaction when the Chicago summit’s communiqué endorsed Azerbaijan’s “territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty” along with those of Georgia and Moldova (Chicago Summit Declaration, May 20).
This basically restates the formulation from NATO’s 2010 Lisbon summit communiqué; but the restatement was in doubt until the last moment, as diplomats involved in the anachronistic “Minsk process” sought to change the Lisbon formula to Azerbaijan’s detriment.
Turkey defended Azerbaijan’s interests in the drafting process.
Presidents Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania and Traian Basescu of Romania expressed concern over arms sales by certain Western European countries to Russia.
In their speeches at the Chicago summit, Grybauskaite and Basescu noted that such arms sales can generate security risks to NATO allies and partners.
Basescu urged NATO to introduce controls over arms sales by NATO member countries to non-members (meaning essentially Russia).
Such procedures should involve advance notice to the Alliance and a certification that the arms sales would not pose additional risks to allies and partners in the region.
France is going ahead with the sale of Mistral-class amphibious assault warships to Russia.
On the eve of the Chicago summit, Italy delivered samples of Centauro tanks and Iveco armored vehicles to Russia for testing and possible procurement.
History’s most successful alliance seems painfully irrelevant to the security of its own eastern neighborhood, from Ukraine to the South Caucasus.
Yet, this neighborhood sits astride the Alliance’s vital energy supply routes to Europe and logistical corridors to Asia.
“Relevance” is a particularly sensitive word in the NATO lexicon.
From the 1990s onward, NATO leaders serially insisted that NATO remained “relevant” and had to prove it.
That proof, however, has yet to materialize in Europe’s East.
Art Becomes An Agent Of Disruption In Ukraine
KIEV, Ukraine -- Never on the map of the contemporary art world, Ukraine is experiencing an unusually high level of activity in this realm with a new solo exhibition by British sculptor Anish Kapoor, the first international Bienalle of Contemporary Arts in Kiev and the emergence of the Future Generation Art Prize.
This trend was started by the Pinchuk Art Center and is developing into something much larger than just an exhibition by contemporary art masters for a small creative community.
The Ukrainian public, as well as Ukrainian artists – still fresh and curious – are delving deeper and deeper into the world of the conceptual and abstract.
More galleries and art auctions are opening in various cities within the country; contemporary art has become a very popular subject for Ukrainian media and artists are experimenting with social and public art more then ever.
Arts and creativity are known to influence minds and society, explained Richard Armstrong, the Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
This concept, for instance, was behind the creation of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1930th, he said.
In the entire post-Soviet territory, access to anything modern and contemporary was forbidden for many decades.
Contemporary art, for many not the easiest aspect of culture to understand – and also one of the most expensive — only recently made its way into Ukraine and was met with great enthusiasm.
The Pinchuk Art Center, the pioneer center in that region, continues to bring the most interesting artists to Kiev.
Kapoor, the Mumbai-born British sculptor, has brought a selection of about thirty works to Kiev.
According to Armstrong, the Pinchuk Art Center’s strategy is not typical for post-Soviet territory.
“In the place like that the idea would be to make a very broad subject,” he said.
But the Center explores an artist in depth through a comprehensive exhibition.
In addition to showing Demian Hurst, Olafur Eliason, Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, the Center always has room for Ukrainian artists like Boris Mikhailov and Pavel Makov.
When Pinchuk Art Center was first founded by a Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk and his foundation, there was plenty of skepticism:
“Even I had some doubts”, Pinchuk admitted in an interview during Kapoor’s opening. “Who knows, people would think he’s a little bit crazy, contemporary art…”
But the experiment has proved to be a success.
The center allows thousands of visitors, most of whom have grown up without seeing the original works of Pollock and Warhol, an opportunity to see something new, and little by little extends the boundaries of their perception of beauty and art.
The cultural experiment has grown to such an extent that even Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture decided to catch up with the rest of the world and organized the First Kiev International Biennale called “Arsenale”.
The event is hosted in Art Arsenal, another center in Ukraine focusing on modern art, with the mission of conceptualizing the country’s culture and present its historical and artistic heritage in a global context.
The Biennale started on May 24th and will continue through July 31st.
Works by more than 100 artists will be presented in Kiev, including Ai Wei Wei, Louise Bourgeouis and Jake and Dinos Chapman.
Has anyone ever seen anything by Ai Wei Wei in Kiev before?
Another subject that brings attention to Ukraine among artists is the international Future Generation Art prize for artists under the age of 35.
The $100,000 prize was established by Pinchuk’s foundation in 2010 to support young artists.
It is given to one international winner, and to one Ukrainian winner. Brazilian artist Cinthia Marcelle won the first edition of the prize.
Artem Volokitin, the local winner, accepted an apprenticeship at the studio of British sculptor Antony Gormley as part of his award.
It’s interesting and exciting that internationally acclaimed artists are showing their work in Ukraine.
“What was important for me, is to show my art there and share it with people of my own generation and younger,” said Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist known for his large-scale installations, who had a solo exhibition in the country.
“Art is the voice that is contributing into Ukrainian society.”
Let’s not forget that the Soviets were afraid of Western culture.
Who knows, maybe disco had a hand in all of that social change and perestroika?
If Ukrainian politics and economics can’t speed up the process of creating a more progressive and innovative mindset, maybe Art will.
Ukraine, Seeking To Access A $15.6 Billion IMF Bailout
NEW YORK, USA -- Ukraine, seeking to access a $15.6 billion International Monetary Fund bailout frozen because of government unwillingness to raise household natural-gas prices, is considering higher tariffs from 2013, a minister said.
The former Soviet republic, which faces parliamentary elections in October, may be willing to raise costs in stages starting next year, Foreign Minister Kostyantyn Gryshchenko said yesterday in an interview.
The Washington-based lender has demanded the increases to narrow the budget deficit by trimming losses at state-run energy company NAK Naftogaz.
“We aren’t ready for any steep rise,” Gryshchenko said in the interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York.
Ukraine wants the IMF lending to resume “as soon as possible,” he said.
“We’ve met all the conditions except the increase in natural-gas prices.”
The IMF halted Ukraine’s latest bailout, which it approved in 2010, last March after the government refused to raise gas tariffs.
Efforts to placate the lender by reducing the price paid to Russia for the fuel by a third have so far failed.
IMF officials are in Kiev May 21-28 for talks with the government.
The hryvnia fell 0.6 percent to 8.0638 per dollar as of 11:06 a.m. in New York, the biggest drop since Jan. 21, 2011.
Ukraine stocks declined to their lowest in almost three years after German confidence fell more than economists forecast.
Ukraine’s government will continue to seek a discount on Russian energy imports, which it deems too expensive, according to Gryshchenko.
“We’re overpaying billions of dollars for Russian gas supplies and that creates pressure on our financial system,” Gryshchenko said.
“These days, it’s cheaper to buy Russian gas that was shipped to Germany than what we pay for direct supplies from Russia. This is ridiculous -- the deal isn’t sustainable.”
It’s in Russia’s interests to change the gas accord as demand weakens when prices rise, Gryshchenko said.
Vladimir Putin’s return this month for a third term as Russia’s president increases the chances of negotiating a discount, he added, without elaborating.
Ukraine receives fees from Russia for gas that transits its territory en route to Europe and generates exports revenue by selling commodities such as grain, steel, chemicals and machinery.
Economic growth will slow to 3 percent this year in 2012, less than the government’s 3.7 percent forecast and last year’s 5.2 percent expansion, because of weakening export demand, the IMF said April 17 in its World Economic Outlook report.
Ukraine's Tymoshenko To Bring Case To European Rights Court
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Ukraine's ex-premier Yulia Tymoshenko is weak yet combative and will turn to the European Court of Human Rights to rule on her case, Belgium's former prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said Friday.
"Physically she is very weak. She has back pain and was lying down throughout the visit," Verhofstadt told AFP after a meeting with the fiery Orange Revolution leader that lasted over an hour.
"But she is in high spirits and remains very combative," said Verhofstadt, who leads the liberals and democrats in the European Parliament.
Tymoshenko, 51, is serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of power and now faces fresh charges that could extend her sentence to 2023.
"For her, the only objective authority capable of treating her case is the European Court of Human Rights and she wishes to bring her case there as quickly as possible," Verhofstadt said.
A Ukrainian court on Monday once more adjourned a tax evasion trial of Tymoshenko due to her absence in hospital with debilitating back pains and set the next hearing for late June.
With the delay, Tymoshenko believes Ukraine's leaders have found a way to "eliminate a political adversary for legislative elections on October 29", Verhofstadt said.
Her latest trial began on April 19 but has been adjourned twice already because the opposition leader complained that her severe back pains forced her to lie down.
She has been hospitalised at a public clinic since May 9.
Last week the Ukrainian appeals court also decided to postpone until June 26 its consideration of Tymoshenko's appeal against her sentence for abuse of power.
Her jailing prompted howls of international criticism.
The European Union and many member countries have threatened their officials will boycott matches in the Euro 2012 that Ukraine co-hosts with Poland from June 8 to July 1.
Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine is one of the four Ukrainian cities to host the tournament, but the last match will be held in the city on June 17, before Tymoshenko's next hearing.
Tuesday 22 May 2012
Ukraine’s Boycott Blues
KIEV, Ukraine -- Sporting boycotts are back in fashion. Azerbaijan hosts the Eurovision Song Contest on 26 May, with Armenia predictably absent. Russia is beset by Circassian activists claiming that the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics are desecrating their ancestral homeland
But Ukraine is on the receiving end of the bitterest current campaign, in the run-up to the European Championship football finals beginning on 8 June.
In 2007, when the tournament was awarded to Poland and Ukraine as co-hosts, the ‘Orange Revolution’ was only three years old.
There was still hope that Ukraine would change for the better.
Poland had joined the EU in 2004, Ukraine had not; but the tournament was supposed to symbolise common heritage and cooperation across the EU border, and an bright future for an ever-expanding Europe.
Though one reason why Ukraine and Poland got the nod was Italy’s match-fixing Calciopoli scandal the previous season.
But now the finals symbolise everything that is wrong with Ukraine.
The ‘Orange’ era is long over and Yulia Tymoshenko, one of its leaders, is in prison after a show trial: she is in constant need of medical treatment for spinal problems and was briefly on hunger strike.
Visiting journalists are queuing up to write the same story of ‘Poland good, Ukraine bad’.
Corruption is rampant, including in the preparations for the tournament itself.
Here in the UK we are often cynical about our Olympics’ ‘legacy’ and ‘sustainability’.
London 2012 is over-running its original budget of £9.3bn ($14.7 billion).
But the Ukrainians (current GDP per capita about $7,200 a year have spent even more – and they are only co-hosts. One investigation claimed a total cost of $14.5bn already back in 2011 – but nobody really knows how much.
Kickbacks on most projects are allegedly as high as 40 per cent.
Ukraine has concentrated on mega-projects.
Four shining new stadia have gone up in the host cities of Kiev, Lviv, Kharkov and Donetsk.
Kiev’s new Olympic stadium cost an estimated $600m, half as much again as the Allianz Arena in Munich that will host the Champions’ League final this Saturday.
Infrastructure upgrades have concentrated on airports, which is sensible enough for Ukraine’s long-term business future, but ordinary Ukrainians don’t see the benefit.
The Ukrainian government hoped the finals would boost both the country’s image and FDI, but are getting the opposite after the Tymoshenko trial highlighted Ukraine’s lack of a rule of law.
Ukraine has always been an oligarchic state; now it often seems like a Mafia state.
Corporate raiding is widespread.
Ukraine’s hotel rates have been jacked up, way above any tournament ‘premium’; many have allegedly been penetrated by mafia interests to profit from a month’s price-gouging.
But many fans will still live in tent cities, including the potential flashpoint of several thousand English fans camping outside the remote city of Donetsk.
So should anybody boycott the tournament?
No one has mentioned bringing teams home.
Moving games, or even just the final, to Poland seems impractical at this stage.
Fewer foreign politicians in the posh seats is hardly a disaster.
There is certainly no need to grant president Viktor Yanukovich and his ministers a handshake or photo-op. (His four-minute standing conversation with Barack Obama at the Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul this March was blown up in the Ukrainian media as the diplomatic triumph of the century).
The ‘Euros’ do matter, because they ought to show ordinary Ukrainians that a bit more Europe will improve their daily lives.
The right to demonstrate has been whittled away over the last few years; Ukraine’s police, particularly the traffic police, are notoriously corrupt.
If the Ukrainian authorities are suddenly a bit more hands off in June, the EU should press to ensure that improvements are maintained through to the key parliamentary elections in October and beyond.
But Ukraine’s problems go deep.
The EU has more power than it thinks, and boycott is not the only weapon.
A travel bans on officials linked to Tymoshenko’s jailing could rein in a few of Ukraine’s corrupt kleptocrats.
The EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement are already agreed but not yet signed.
They are rightly on hold until Ukraine’s political prosecutions come to an end.
And how will Ukraine’s team do?
They are held back by the aging star Andriy Shevchenko.
Now 35, he understandably wants to bow out in a blaze of glory in front of his home fans; but the team as a whole has to slow down when he is up front.
Ukraine's Topless Fighters Plot To Storm The Euros
KIEV, Ukraine -- Anna darts gleefully around the two sparsely-furnished rooms situated through an archway off a steep street that climbs up from Kiev's Independence Square. She is a general showing off her new headquarters.
"This is going to be our training room for our Euro strikes," she says.
"That's for the girls to get fit on for when they scrap with the police or have to run away from them," she says, pointing to a set of wall-bars and an overhead muscle-tone pulley-bar by the front door.
The topless activists of the Femen women's rights group, whose eye-catching antics have made them the cover girls of international feminist protest, are shouting loud and clear that their attendance at next month's Euro-2012 soccer tournament - welcome or not - can be counted on.
Bare-breast public appearances - flash-mob-style - by the neo-feminist group are guaranteed throughout a month-long Euro soccer feast expected to draw a million or so foreign visitors.
Indeed, Anna Hutsol, a small 27-year-old with close-cut, flame-dyed hair and the group's main ideologue, is warning of a blitz of stunts to dramatise Femen's view that Euro-2012 will only fuel prostitution and the former Soviet republic's sex industry which it says demeans women.
Ukraine's police, gearing themselves to control hundreds of thousands of rowdy visiting fans, might find themselves just as busy with the small army of activists that Femen plans to field.
"We are going to do everything we can to interrupt and disrupt, to break up these (Euro) events," Anna said.
She says she has 40 or so Femen activists on stand-by for action in Kiev with two or three in each of the other Euro cities -- Lviv, Kharkiv and Donetsk.
"We've got people coming from abroad too - a Brazilian woman and someone from France," she said.
So what do they plan for the tournament, which opens in Ukraine on June 9 and runs for the whole month?
Will they "streak" onto a pitch? Will they raid a VIP box? Will they pull off an en masse Femen spectacular at the July 1 final in Kiev ?
"I can't give you concrete details. But we'll be staging all sorts of strikes - at stadiums and alongside, at press conferences and at cup ceremonies, everywhere," she said.
"Of course, we'll be going to Poland, too," she said.
Neighbouring Poland is co-host of the tournament.
For Femen, Euro-2012 is both a target to be disrupted and a platform for protest.
Far from being a showcase for a modern European state as the authorities envisage, the Euros will only hurt Ukraine's future by boosting prostitution and making it a sex tourism destination in Europe, Femen says.
It is an event the group has spent at least two years sharpening its knives for.
Some critics question the sincerity of their beliefs and dismiss the young women, all in their 20s, as attention-seekers.
Don't their topless antics only provide images for a prurient, sex-obsessed media and re-inforce the stereotype of Ukrainian women that Femen is fighting against?
Do their tactics help or hurt their cause?
Eccentric and contradictory though it might seem to some, stripping down to the waist publicly is the only effective weapon the group has found to get attention, Femen says.It is an event the group has spent at least two years sharpening its knives for.
Some critics question the sincerity of their beliefs and dismiss the young women, all in their 20s, as attention-seekers.
Don't their topless antics only provide images for a prurient, sex-obsessed media and re-inforce the stereotype of Ukrainian women that Femen is fighting against?
Do their tactics help or hurt their cause?
Eccentric and contradictory though it might seem to some, stripping down to the waist publicly is the only effective weapon the group has found to get attention, Femen says.
"Euro-2012 will not help Ukraine develop. The only thing that will develop is the sex industry here. Euro-2012 will help make Ukraine one big Euro brothel," says Sasha Shevchenko, a tall, blonde 24-year-old and a regular participant in topless actions.
Other Femen core activists are Oksana Shachko, 25, a waif-like icon painter who handles design for the group, and Inna Shevchenko, 21, a blonde, former journalist who has the same surname as Sasha but is no relation.
Since the group set itself up in 2008 - then using a downtown cafe as its operational base - it has gone on to establish itself as a global reputation.
There is something to Femen's complaints about sex tourism.
Any online 'Ukraine' search on the Internet soon throws up a dating ad for Ukrainian girls "looking for" foreign men.
Though prostitution is illegal in Ukraine, pimps regularly work central Kiev streets, such as the Khreshchatyk boulevard, handing out visiting cards for erotic massage parlours or walking up to foreign men to direct them to apartments for sex.
Equally, young women often complain they are approached on the streets and propositioned for sex by foreigners.
Prostitution parlours have sprung up in many apartment blocks in advance of the Euros, Femen says.
Femen's argument is that Ukraine's authorities and UEFA, Europe's governing soccer body, have turned a blind eye to the directors of the sex trade who have set up shop well in advance.
"UEFA has social programmes like, for instance, 'football without racism'. Why can't it set up the programme 'football without prostitution or sex tourism'?," asked Anna.
She is echoed by fellow activist Sasha Shevchenko.
"At the start we had high hopes that UEFA would speak out against prostitution. But after several protests we realised that UEFA and the Euro organisers have an interest in Ukraine becoming one big bordello," she said.
With a new operational base close to Kiev city centre, Femen has already fired its first shots.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in the Kiev this month, 23-year-old Yulia Kovpachyk loped up the ramp of an open-air exhibition where the Euro soccer trophy was on public display, ostensibly to be photographed alongside it like hundreds of other sightseers.
She then pulled down her T-shirt to reveal the words "F--k Euro 2012" - Femen's current slogan - etched in black paint across her torso.
She was seized by security guards, but not before she had grabbed hold of the 60 centimetres (two feet) high cup with both hands.
"Yulia got the usual fine of 119 hryvnias (nearly $15) for the administrative offence of hooliganism," said Anna. "But, of course, we don't pay these fines."
The group has started going further afield too.
For a protest last year outside the Paris apartment of the former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, three activists provocatively dressed up as hotel chamber maids - an allusion to his arrest in New York on accusations of attempted rape.
He was later cleared and released.
In Switzerland on a bitter cold day in January, Femen activists took off their tops and scaled a security fence at the Davos economic summit.
And in March they went topless at a Moscow polling station against Putin's certain re-election.
Oksana's breasts were emblazoned with: "I steal for Putin!"
Their actions typically end with them being bundled away - often physically carried off kicking and screaming - by local police.
But a bare-breast action in the former Soviet republic of Belarus against the country's hardline leadership turned into something far more serious.
Inna, Oksana and a third activist were seized, apparently by members of Belarus's KGB state security agency.
Inna says they were driven off to woodlands away from the capital where they were interrogated and made to undress and dress again several times.
Anna herself does not take part in topless protests, but reels off recent successes with the pride of a general listing his campaign victories.
"We grabbed the UEFA cup of course. We had our 'sex bomb' action on the metro. There was the protest in the bell tower of St Sophia's cathedral. We staged an action in Turkey in March, then there was Putin and we carried out our action at the Indian embassy," she said.
There are unanswered questions about the group - notably about the funding which allows Anna, Sasha, Oksana and Inna to devote themselves full-time to Femen activities, and pays for travel abroad, legal counsel in numerous court actions and a stack of other overheads.
Anna ducks the question, speaking broadly of "charitable help" from inside the country and abroad and income raised from Femen's online shop which sells branded T-shirts, sweat shirts, handbags and hats.
"The biggest part of our supporters are people abroad. They understand what a woman's movement is all about. Ukrainian society is less ready to help and sympathise. But now we can afford to go to McDonald's whereas before it was a yoghurt and a stick of bread," she said.
And the question remains over just what long-term effect their brash protests will have in improving women's rights. Have they made a difference?
"I can see progress and I can't help but be happy about it," said Anna.
"We have new supporters springing up in different countries and they are organising themselves. This shows that our ideas are not being confined to our country and this city."
"The Euro organisers now know who they have to be afraid of. They have to be afraid of us and they will have to get ready for us appearing at every Euro event," says Inna.
As she leans forward to make her point, the black scrawl of a partly-visible Femen slogan shows at the neckline of her denim jacket.
Came To fight: Ukraine’s LGBT Leader Beaten Upon Canceling Gay Parade
KIEV, Ukraine -- Conflict for conflict’s sake is what some anti-gay campaigners in Ukraine were apparently seeking as yet another LGBT parade failed to march through Kiev.
As Ukraine's Gay Forum head called the action off, hooligans cornered the man to sort him out.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community of Ukraine were diverted from their gay pride route on Sunday, as half a thousand of nationalists and anti-gay activists arrived at the parade’s meeting point in downtown Kiev.
Some ultra-right and religious campaigners were merely holding placards reading “No to gays!” but police reports said nationalists were firm in their resolve to attack the march.
Observing the unexpected threat, as the meeting point had supposedly been kept secret, the gay pride leaders took the rueful decision to cancel the action.
But it appears some anti-gay demonstrators did not want to give up on their hopes to beat up an LGBT-er so easily.
As Svyatoslav Sheremet, the leader of Ukraine’s Gay Forum, finished telling journalists the parade was canceled over security concerns, a bunch of young men in balaclavas cornered him and another activist in the street.
“It was seven or ten of them. I could not defend myself as the attackers had pepper spray and I had to protect my eyes. I fell to the ground and was kicked. When I got up, they ran away,” Sheremet told the Ukrainian news website gazeta.ua.
The LGBT activist got away with minor injuries.
He says he would not be able to recognize the attackers.
“They looked like typical street gang members,” sighs Sheremet.
Still, he does not think aggression against the LGBT movement in Ukraine is anything exceptional.
“Our society is very divided. Many hate many. This happens in any country with poor social welfare. So those attacking LGBT will be attacking other minorities,” he says.
Amnesty International has accused the Kiev police of connivance, though the police had 10 buses with law enforcers along the route.
“It has been clear from the start that the Kiev Police Department did not want this march to go ahead. Their reluctance to commit to the event and to put adequate security measures in place to protect demonstrators left organizers fearing for their safety,” said Max Tucker, the NGO’s head.
Ukrainian Female Students Protest Minister's 'Ugly' Insult
KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's education minister is in hot water after saying that women at the highest levels of study in the country's university system are less attractive than other Ukrainian women
Dmytro Tabachnyk said last week that the country's better graduate and post-graduate students "are girls who have a less bright, less attractive, and less model-like appearance."
A group of about 10 women who are graduate students or doctoral-level students at Ukrainian universities gathered in front of the Education Ministry in Kiev on May 21 to complain about Tabachnyk's statement.
The women -- students of fields such as law, medicine, and education -- dressed in long gowns for the protest and carried placards saying "I read that I am ugly!"
Each also held a university diploma to prove that they had obtained a four-year university degree in Ukraine.
The women demanded that Tabachnyk either apologize for his remarks or resign from his cabinet post.
Tabachnyk refused to meet with the women.
Since his first week as Ukraine's education minister in March 2010, Tabachnyk has faced calls to resign from protesters that have included students at the Ukrainian Catholic University as well as members of the opposition Forward, Ukraine! party.
For years, those groups have accused Tabachnyk of "openly and publicly humiliating" Ukraine's intelligentsia, denigrating Ukraine's culture and language, and trying to vindicate the regime of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych shocked a luncheon at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January when he told investors that they should visit Ukraine in the spring "when it gets warm and women in Ukrainian cities begin taking off their clothes."
Yanukovych told the gathering "You will see such beauty! It is very beautiful!"
Dmytro Tabachnyk said last week that the country's better graduate and post-graduate students "are girls who have a less bright, less attractive, and less model-like appearance."
A group of about 10 women who are graduate students or doctoral-level students at Ukrainian universities gathered in front of the Education Ministry in Kiev on May 21 to complain about Tabachnyk's statement.
The women -- students of fields such as law, medicine, and education -- dressed in long gowns for the protest and carried placards saying "I read that I am ugly!"
Each also held a university diploma to prove that they had obtained a four-year university degree in Ukraine.
The women demanded that Tabachnyk either apologize for his remarks or resign from his cabinet post.
Tabachnyk refused to meet with the women.
But three men with lower-level posts in the ministry emerged from the building with bouquets of flowers during the demonstration, telling the protesters that they were, indeed, beautiful.
Comments Attributed To 'Tiredness'
The women refused to accept the flowers, saying they wanted Tabachnyk himself to apologize personally.
Earlier, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov took steps to distance himself from Tabachnyk's comments by posting an apology on his Facebook page.
Comments Attributed To 'Tiredness'
The women refused to accept the flowers, saying they wanted Tabachnyk himself to apologize personally.
Earlier, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov took steps to distance himself from Tabachnyk's comments by posting an apology on his Facebook page.
He said the education minister probably was "tired at work" when he made the remark.
Tabachnyk himself has the title of professor and the equivalent of a doctorate degree in history.
Tabachnyk himself has the title of professor and the equivalent of a doctorate degree in history.
He is currently a member of Ukraine's Academy of Legal Sciences.
Since his first week as Ukraine's education minister in March 2010, Tabachnyk has faced calls to resign from protesters that have included students at the Ukrainian Catholic University as well as members of the opposition Forward, Ukraine! party.
For years, those groups have accused Tabachnyk of "openly and publicly humiliating" Ukraine's intelligentsia, denigrating Ukraine's culture and language, and trying to vindicate the regime of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych shocked a luncheon at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January when he told investors that they should visit Ukraine in the spring "when it gets warm and women in Ukrainian cities begin taking off their clothes."
Yanukovych told the gathering "You will see such beauty! It is very beautiful!"
Sunday 20 May 2012
Kickin’ down the cobblestones
In the days of Boris Godunov, the area around present-day Ploshchad Ilyicha (named for Lenin’s patronymic, as he was often called “Ilyich” by his closest comrades) became home to the coachmen who ferried Muscovites to farms east of the city. Today, a preserved row of brightly painted 19th-century houses on pedestrian-only Shkolnaya Ulitsa makes a picturesque reminder of this horse-drawn era. Nearby, industrial sites are being repurposed into buzzing cultural spots: an expansive car museum occupies an old garage, an offbeat club and bookshop have roosted in a former factory and a metallurgical factory is slated to become a media center. Begin at Rimskaya metro station, taking a left at the first intersection in the underground passage to reach street level.
Head south away from the exit and turn onto the first street on the right. Charming, car-free Shkolnaya Ulitsa looks much as it did in the 19th century, when it served as the main transportation artery for stagecoaches en route to Vladimir and Ryazan. Coachmen then occupied this strip of Easter egg-colored houses, each of which includes a gate for horses. Though it was renamed “School Street” in 1923, there was never a school nearby; as with nearby Library Street, the educational moniker was purely a gesture. The city reportedly has hopes to turn the street into a tourist destination along the lines of Stary Arbat. But for the time being, most pedestrian traffic comes from a Belarussian open-air market held here on the weekends.
9/2 Ul. Rogozhsky Val, 671-4625, open daily 10 am-9 pm, closed Mon.
Head south on Rogozhsky Val. When it intersects with Novorogozhskaya Ulitsa, stop at the dark pink building on the left. Though less flashy than the privately owned Autoville museum across town, this massive retro car collection is bigger and more fun. Housed in an airy Soviet garage, it features an exhaustive assortment of Sovietmade cars as well as foreign makes, like the black Packards favored by Stalin and his henchman Beria in the ’30s. There are also bizarre curiosities such as the Zundapp Janus, a futuristic East German micro car made briefly in the late ’50s. The quirky Janus (named after the twofaced Roman god) has a front door leading straight into the front seat, as well as a door opening into the rear-facing backseat; Khrushchev acquired the vehicle when he was worried that the Soviet Union was falling behind in the trend toward compact cars. The museum also has a sizeable gift shop selling model cars and other swag.
38 Rabochaya Ulitsa
Turn left on Rogozhsky Val and continue until the diagonal Rabochaya Ulitsa. Head left and stop at the concrete building on the right, a former factory. On the upper floor, a hip club-slash-bookstore in the mold of Project OGI offers books by Russian independent publishers by day and a wide range of indie concerts by night. The bookstore also has a cafe good for tea and pastry, as well as unusual gifts, such as posters featuring animated characters Cheburashka and Crocodile Genya.
11 Ul. Zolotorozhsky Val
Return to the metro on Rabochaya Ulitsa, then cross the street to Ploshchad Ilyicha. The looming complex of buildings to the east belongs to the “Serp i Molot” (Hammer and Sickle) factory, which is currently slated for redevelopment as the new “Media City” complex. Founded in 1883 by a French entrepreneur, this metallurgical factory is one of the oldest in Moscow. Initially it specialized in making iron, nails and bolts. After 1917 the factory acquired its revolutionary name, and in the ’30s it became one of the Soviet Union’s leading steel producers. Today, it’s a hodgepodge of crumbling brickwork and colorful renovated buildings. If you’re feeling energetic, walk around to the far side of the complex for a look at the decaying House of Culture, which remains abandoned after recent plans to create a club there fell through.
1 Bulvar Entuziastov
Walk back towards the metro on the side of the grassy park closest to the road. In the 18th century, the city’s eastern boundary lay in this area. Today, all that remains of the gates that stood here is this 1783 stone marker, which signals two versts to the city center (a verst is an old Russian measurement equal to 1.6 kilometers).
1 Bulvar Entuziastov
Ploshchad Ilyicha would be incomplete without a Lenin statue, which is found to the right of the metro entrance. This unusually haughty Vladimir Ilyich, hands clasped behind his back and chin thrust to the sky, was installed here to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, in 1967. Enter the underground passage to return to Rimskaya and Ploshchad Ilyicha metro stations.
Kalashnikov manufacturer eyes branded clothing line
The legendary brand of automatic rifle, the Kalashnikov, might become a fashion symbol, as the arms manufacturer mulls extending its range of products to non-military goods.
Factory Izhmash, which has been producing the famed weapon since 1948, has been in talks with the Kalashnikov family over the ownership of the brand,
“The practice of using a weapon’s brand name for accessories and clothing is being used by world’s leading manufacturer Beretta … We are evaluating the prospects of this scenario for the Kalashnikov brand,” the company’s director general, Maxim Kuzyuk, was quoted in an official press-release.
he Izhevsk-based factory has been having financial problems, an audit carried out by state-run corporation Rostekhnologii, the company’s main stake-holder, found in 2010.
The modernisation of the 200-year old factory was launched shortly after, but the latest version of the Kalashnikov rifle, demonstrated earlier this year, drew criticism.
The extended control over the brand is to allow the factory to put an end to levy-free use of the name by souvenir manufacturers all over the world.
“If ownership rights for the brand belonged to Izhmash, we could develop it [the brand] more efficiently and secure guaranteed income for the family of Mikhail Alexeyevich Kalashnikov,” Kuzyuk said, according to the press-release.
“The extended usage of the brand would be focused on high-tech produce, which comply with Kalashnikov’s values – reliability and failure-free operation,” Kuzyuk said.
“Izhmash is against the fact the cheap souvenirs are being manufactured under this brand,” he added.
Italian company Beretta could be a role-model for the new use of the brand. The world’s oldest weapons manufacturer also offers lifestyle goods, apparel and accessories for outdoor activities and hunting.
Currently, Izhmash has the rights to use the name Kalashnikov only together with a graphical image of the automatic rifle and for naming their military produce, according to the press-service.
The family of the 92-year old small arms designer was not available for comments.
Ukrainian Experts Share Criticism Of Ukraine Reflected In European Report
KIEV, Ukraine -- A number of Ukrainian experts completely agree with the criticism expressed in the report of the European Commission on the implementation of the European Neighborhood Policy in Ukraine for 2011.
"The opinion of the leading experts, who have dealt directly with the Ukrainian-EU relations, practically coincide with the assessment of the European Union," coordinator of the Youkraine.eu platform Oleh Rybachuk said at a press conference hosted by Interfax-Ukraine on Thursday.
According to him, such reports are important evidence about how the European Union estimates the process of reform in Ukraine - they reflect the level and stage of the Ukraine's integration and also take the temperature of Ukrainian-EU relations, to some extent.
At the same time, the coordinator noted that the assessment of the reforms dealing with democracy is a main criterion for the EU on how sincerely the country, which aspires to gain EU membership, actually desires it.
According to him, authorities said that Association Agreement, Free Trade Area were more necessary for the EU, because the Ukrainian market is very attractive to the EU.
"Everything reflected in the report shows contradictory values," he said adding that such issues as fair and free elections, respect of human rights, freedom of peaceful meetings, mass media freedom, justice independence, fighting corruption are important for the EU.
In turn, Chairman of Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union Arkadiy Buschenko declared: "We have more radical views on the situation with human rights, more critical. I understand that diplomatic language does not allow [me] to express everything openly. But people with intellect must see the possible unfavorable consequences for the country behind those very moderate conclusions."
According to him, in recent years the situation with the human rights has worsened in Ukraine.
He stressed that the country still has a problem with judicial system and also added: "These prosecutions [notorious criminal cases against members of the Cabinet of Ministers of Yulia Tymoshenko] allowed us to look at this very attentively. Maybe it will become a definite step forward, as now politicians are treating such problems as criminal judicial implementation, and the conditions and regime of custody very seriously."
Talking about corruption, an expert from the Ukrainian Institute for Public Policy, Ivan Presniakov said the only successes were on paper.
In truth, everything that happened in 2011 was done for show, and on paper, in terms of the fight against corruption. Everything that was done was just the [production of] documents, which were drafted a long time up, but there was no real action, no real change."
In the report of the European Commission on the implementation of the European Neighborhood Policy in Ukraine, which was presented on May 15, EU highlighted the slow pace of the implementation of economic reforms, the worsening situation with democracy in Ukraine in 2011, and the absence of significant results in fighting corruption.
Ukrainian PM Admits No Discounts From 2010 Gas Deal With Moscow
KIEV, Ukraine -- Meeting with members of the European Parliament in Brussels this week, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov acknowledged what the critics of President Viktor Yanukovych have been saying all along: The much-ballyhooed April 2010 Kharkiv natural-gas deal with Russia has brought the country no tangible benefits.
When Yanukovych and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the deal in Kharkiv, it was touted as a huge foreign-policy win for Kiev and a turning point in Russian-Ukrainian relations.
Yanukovych agreed to allow the Black Sea Fleet to remain based in Ukraine until at least 2042, saying publicly that, in exchange, Moscow had reduced Ukraine's gas rate by 30 percent.
"In reality," Azarov said on May 16, "there was no reduction in price. There was rent for the [Sevastopol] base of [Russia's] Black Sea Fleet. But it gave us breathing room."
Parliament deputy Taras Steckiv of the opposition Our Ukraine/People's Self-Defense bloc said Azarov's admission proves the opposition was right all along.
"Azarov said what the opposition has said since April 2010: There was no discount, but what amounts to a one-sided concession that was not justified by anything and which threatens Ukraine's national interests," Steckiv said.
"Russia got a base for its fleet while selling us gas for the highest-possible price, and it does not plan to make any concessions to Ukraine on gas prices."
Azarov's statement is all the more embarrassing because the 2010 gas deal was presented as a corrective to a 2009 agreement negotiated by then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko is now serving a seven-year prison sentence on charges that she had abused her authority with that agreement.
The Tymoshenko prosecution has piqued tensions between Ukraine and the European Union, which feels it was a politically motivated vendetta.
Blogging for Russia's RIA Novosti agency, Fyodor Lukyanov, a foreign policy analyst and editor of "Russia In Global Affairs," wrote that the 2010 deal has borne no fruit because Ukraine's divided political elite "cannot set a clear course toward rapprochement with Moscow."
Lukyanov said Russia will only "budge" on gas prices if Kiev agrees to "share" its gas-pipeline system or join the Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus customs union.
Lukyanov notes that the customs union, which has gained little traction so far, is a precursor to the Eurasian Union project, which both Medvedev, now Russia's prime minister, and President Vladimir Putin are pushing enthusiastically.
Lukyanov says one of the priorities of Putin's new presidency will be "to win over Ukraine," suggesting that the Kremlin has adopted the tactics of a "siege."
Myhailo Honchar, director of energy programs at the Nomos think tank in Kiev, said Azarov's comments show the difficult position Ukraine is in now, with relations strained both east and west.
"There are definitely no simple solutions to getting out of the present situation," Honchar says.
"I think that the admission we heard in Brussels is intended to send a signal both to Russia and also to Europe. In order to conduct negotiations with Russia, you must formulate a position of strength, which Ukraine just does not have.
"Under such circumstances, you must rely on the support of the European Union. But the political situation that we see today regarding the European Union does not lend itself to this."
Ukraine Under Increasing Fire Over Jailed Ex-PM
MOSCOW, Russia -- The government of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has given the European Union permission to send specialists to assess the condition of jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who says she was beaten by prison guards last month while being transferred to a hospital for treatment of a back condition.
Meanwhile, criticism in connection with Tymoshenko's incarceration is mounting in the West, with some European leaders threatening to boycott the Euro 2012 football championship in Kiev next month.
Tymoshenko was convicted last year on charges of abusing power while in office -- charges she and her supporters, along with the EU and the United States, say were politically motivated.
Tymoshenko, who was sentenced to seven years in prison, went on a hunger strike last month after accusing prison staff of beating her while she was being transferred to a hospital. Ukrainian officials deny the charges.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov alluded to the controversy about Ms. Tymoshenko's treatment in a speech he gave to the European Parliament while visiting Brussels Wednesday.
He accused political opponents of "unscrupulously misinforming and deluding" European officials.
The EU has warned Kiev it will not sign agreements on political association and a free-trade zone if Ms. Tymoshenko remains in prison.
Earlier this month, Ukraine's government was forced to postpone a Central and Eastern European summit in Yalta after European leaders threatened to boycott it.
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has said he will not attend the Euro 2012 football ((soccer)) championship in Kiev next month and other European leaders could follow suit.
But some observers question whether such actions will have an impact on President Yanukovych's government.
Taras Kuzio of Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, says there is no way the government will free Ms. Tymoshenko or other jailed opponents, such as former Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko -- at least before Ukraine's parliamentary elections in October.
"The priority for them is to obtain a parliamentary majority, because they see that as a stepping stone to Yanukovych winning a second term in 2015. So there will be no softening of the official position on these individuals who are incarcerated for political reasons, because the priority for Viktor Yanukovych is not European integration. The priority for Viktor Yanukovych is a political and economic monopoly of power."
Olexiy Haran, a political science professor at Kiev-Mohyla Academy in the Ukrainian capital, says the boycott of the summit in Yalta and the threatened boycott of the Euro 2012 football championship are important symbolically, but that further steps are needed.
"What I believe now is important are targeted sanctions, not against the country, and not even against Yanukovych at this point, but against some people in law enforcement bodies in Ukraine -- at least one or two -- in order to show what would be the result if the present course would continue," Haran said.
Haran says Yanukovych does not want to be seen in the West as an illegitimate leader and, therefore, what he hears from officials at the NATO summit taking place in Chicago on Sunday and Monday will be "really important."
Speaking to VOA's Ukrainian service after visiting Yulia Tymoshenko in the hospital earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft said Washington continues to view her prosecution and the prosecution of other opposition leaders as politically motivated.
He also stressed the importance of conducting free and fair elections for parliament this coming October.
He noted that U.S. President Barack Obama raised these issues with Mr. Yanukovych when they met at a nuclear summit in Seoul earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Yevgenia Tymoshenko, the jailed former prime minister's daughter, told a U.S. congressional panel in Washington, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or U.S. Helsinki Commission, Thursday, via live video link from Kiev, that she is "very afraid" for her mother’s life in the hospital.
She called on U.S. legislators to "keep the pressure on" Ukraine's government.
The Ukrainian “Human Barbie Doll” - Valeria Lukyanova - Is This The Future Of Cosmetic Enhancement?
Immaculate doll-face, globulous breasts, teeny waist, slender limbs, vacant ice-blue eyes, long platinum hair - Valeria Lukyanova of Odessa, Ukraine, has re-designed her physical form to resemble Barbie, the plastic Mattel toy.
Is the result “beautiful”? Critics screech that she’s “creepy” and “lifeless” with an “uncanny valley” absence of sexuality, but… let’s not kid ourselves here.
The 5’ 7” 21-year-old Plastic Fantastic internet sensation is lauded as extraordinarily desirable - an ideal female aesthetic - by thousands of commenters and 215,000+ “Like” clickers on her Facebook page that’s only 24 days old.
Plus she’s been awarded mainstream attention by Forbes, HuffingtonPost, Daily Mail, Fox News, ABC News, New York Daily News, and International Business Times.
Eventually, millions of wide-eyed adorers will gaze greedily at the 11,000 photos of her already online.
“Barbie” - the doll - has been castigated since her development in 1959 as a female caricature with impossible-to-attain proportions.
Valeria hasn’t precisely copied her mentor’s dimensions - she’d need a 39-18-33 ratio at 6’ in height - but her curves - created via dozens of nips, tucks and lifts at the supposed cost of $800,000 - resemble the plastic icon close enough to re-animate the original prepubescent lust of many grown males, who secretly undressed, long ago, the dolls of their sisters.
Does the emergence of this life-size Barbie clone represent the future of cosmetic enhancement?
Will other girls/women follow in the faux-Barbie’s slim pointy footsteps?
Will thousands of ribs be removed to achieve the minuscule belly? (Valerie’s goal, she claims, is to be photosynthetic, a sun-eater, avoiding digestion entirely.)
Will millions of chins and cheeks be chiseled to achieve her dainty visage?
Will breasts world-wide be pumped up to impersonate her pontoon mammaries?
The answer to these questions is Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes they already have.
Truth is, Miss Lukyanova’s plagiarism of a hottie icon trails South Korea’s idol-mimicry by at least half a decade.
In Seoul - widely regarded as the world capital of plastic surgery - cosmetic enhancement is avidly accepted by the masses, entrenched in the culture.
An estimated 20% of all SK women between the ages of 19-49 have had “some work done.”
Additionally, it’s popular in SK to get your features restructured so you can resemble a hallyu star.
The phrase, “imitation is the highest form of flattery” is taken seriously in East Asia; fans who identify with a beautiful TV soap opera or K-pop star can fulfill their desire to look like Lee Young-Ae, Kim Hee-Sun, Song Hye-Gyo, or Han Ga-In, by scheduling appointments in the Gangnam district of Seoul, where over 400 plastic surgery clinics and skin-treatment centers are located.
The West has not traveled down this copy-cat road as quickly, perhaps due to it’s higher regard for individuality.
Taylor Swift has made squinty eyes and lace dresses popular, and Justin Beiber’s haircut is “cool” with middle schoolers, but few Caucasians have carved themselves up to resemble the famous.
A notable exception is the OctoMom - Nadya Suleman - who hijacked the full lips and vulpine face of Angelina Jolie.
Suleman is derided, justifiably, as an unlikable loon, and her brazen rip-off of Brad’s beau’s face has perhaps stalled copy-cat cosmetology in the West.
But now, the arrival of “Barbie” from Ukraine…
Her emergence from the ex-Soviet steppe-locale appears, simultaneously, both complicated and unsurprising.Ukraine is known for both it’s radical feminism and it’s stunningly lovely XX gender - Traveler’s Digest recently selected the women of Kiev (the capitol) as the planet’s most beautiful.
Ukraine activist group FEMEN is possibly the most visible, revolutionary feminist squad in the world today, organized by three women who committed themselves to “Marxism, instead of Marriage.”
FEMEN primarily opposes the legalization of prostitution and sex-tourism in its homeland, but it’s also staged demonstrations against Vladimir Putin (for being a “Gas Gangster”), Pope Benedict XVI (“Pope, Get Out of my Pussy!”), Paris Hilton (for supporting the “corrupt” modeling industry), Dominique Strauss (for being “the symbol of lawless, arrogant rapists”), the embassies of Iran (for stoning women to death) and Egypt (to support the revolution), and it journeyed to Turkey (to protest domestic violence).
What is FEMEN’s primary “activist technique”? Toplessness.
FEMEN’s protests are invariably led by young, attractive, bare-breasted women, a maneuver that guarantees the group street attention and press coverage.
I haven’t located any FEMEN opinions of Valeria Lukyanova, but I don’t think they regard her self-acquired shapeliness as a anti-feminist statement.
If Valerie was a prostitute they’d decry her activities, but she’s not - her appearance lures attention to her career as a model, an esoteric singer (she claims to have written 70 songs) and a New Age spiritual-philosopher.
Capturing media gaze via sex appeal is, of course, a strategy that FEMEN itself does quite brazenly.
Returning now to examine Valeria Lukyanova’s fixed plasticine form, let us speculate…
In the fast-approaching future:
Will entire malls be filled with lookalike Barbies shopping for Barbie clothes? Accompanied by lookalike Ken-males?
Will these perfect people line up to sip smoothie drinks alongside other desirables, representing Latin, African, Asian, Arab, etc., startlets-and-stars-of-the-month?
Will transforming our face and physique be easy and cheap in the next generation, in surgeries as simple as dental cleaning?
Will we abandon flesh-love altogether, preferring instead, sex liaisons with cyborg Barbies, Kens, and Kim Hee-Suns?
Will sex in the future be entirely virtual / pornographic?
Will we become nanobot-beings, metamorphosing into whatever enticing shape we want?
Will we be empathetically deeper, in love - and turned on - by kindness and wisdom; will we be absolutely disinterested in physical form, orgasming instead via emotional and intellectual channels?
Or… finally… will we have all these options, and more, in a highly-variable society that offers dozens of choices in lifestyle menus that continue to expand, exponentially?
I don’t know. Predictions?
I don’t see Valeria Lukyanova as instantly forgotten.
I see her as a historical marker, a pioneer in a trend - where we actualize our desire to become our favorite toys.
The result? “Spidermans” fly through our cities. “Incredible Hulks” crash our parties. Everyday is Halloween.
Regions Lukewarm On Ex-PM Overseas Trip
KIEV, Ukraine -- President Viktor Yanukovych’s Regions Party is lukewarm to approving legislation that would allow jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko to receive medical treatment abroad, a senior party official said Thursday.
Without the support of the Regions Party, the bill, recently submitted to Parliament by an independent lawmaker, will fail and the government will most likely continue to face political pressure from the European Union.
Oleksandr Yefremov, the leader of the Regions Party in Parliament, said his allies will not back the bill because it has been tailored to fit only “one person.”
He said the party would back the bill only in case of a serious medical emergency. “Today, we do not have such a problem,’ Yefremov told reporters.
The comment dashed hopes of opposition lawmakers that the authorities – responding to the pressure from the EU - may have decided to let Tymoshenko leave Ukraine for medical treatment in Germany.
The hopes were fueled earlier this week after a key committee in Parliament – unusually quickly - had given its green light to the bill, which was immediately put into agenda by Parliamentary Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn
The EU has condemned the sentencing of Tymoshenko to seven years in prison last October as politically motivated.
Tymoshenko, who was found guilty of abusing her powers as prime minister in forcing through a 2009 gas deal with Russia, has denied any wrongdoing and said Yanukovych was pursuing a personal vendetta against her.
The European Union has urged Tymoshenko's release and warned Ukraine its 27 members would otherwise refuse to ratify landmark agreements on political association and free trade with Kiev.
EU leaders also warned about the possible boycott of next month’s Euro 2012 soccer matches in Ukraine.
EU commissioners have said they will not attend games in Ukraine, and several EU leaders are considering similar action in protest of Kiev’s treatment of Tymoshenko.
The bill was prepared by Taras Chornovil, an independent lawmaker, and is supported by opposition groups.
Valeria Lutkovska, a Yanukovych ally who was recently appointed as Ukraine’s human rights envoy, said sending Tymoshenko for treatment overseas would violate the constitution.
“The problem with the constitution emerges,” Lutkovska said.
Later in the day, Lutkovska explained that relocation of a Ukrainian prisoner for treatment overseas would also require an agreement between Ukraine and the government of a country that has agreed to treat the prisoner.
Senior officials from Germany and Ukraine have been over the past month discussing the possibility of relocating Tymoshenko for treatment to a German hospital Charite, people familiar with the issue have said.
Meanwhile, Yefremov, underscoring his skepticism over the bill, said that an entire detention facility in Sevastopol has recently asked to be relocated to Germany for medical treatment.
“You know, I think in Sevastopol, the entire detention facility has asked to be treated in Charite of Germany,” Yefremov said.
“So, if any country gives us an opportunity and treats 300,000 people that are currently kept in detention facilities, I think we would be ready to consider such a bill.”
Opinion: Who Will Win Ukraine's 'Political Football Match Without Rules'?
KIEV, Ukraine -- If democracy had existed in ancient Egypt, then not a single pyramid would not have been built. All because free people in democratic countries will only agree to build pyramids for good wages, and good wages are incompatible with a luxurious lifestyle of the Pharaohnic family. But if the country has no Pharaoh then it will not cross anybody's mind to build pyramids.
If "Ukrainian democracy" had existed in ancient Egypt then the pyramids would not have been built, not only because of a lack of money for salaries but also because of the ordinary theft of half of the funds allocated for their construction.
I'm not actually a big proponent of building pyramids. But "Ukrainian democracy", I like it.
What is more, it feeds me. Not in the sense that it provides some kind of social security and promises a good retirement. No!
With enviable regularity "Ukrainian democracy" feeds me with plots for novels, as well as offering so many potential fictional heroes that no one writer could fit it all in even if he writes two thick novels in a year.
Therefore because of a lack of enough lifetime to write hundreds of novels, I have to write some of the real-life stories just like this, in short articles.
Ukrainian democracy feeds me with plots for novels and so many potential fictional heroes that no one writer could fit it all in.
The presidency of Viktor Yanukovych started in 2010 with a slogan: "We are building a new country".
Billboards with the slogan decorated all the country's cities, villages and roads.
So, everyone understands that major construction work is starting, which means that smaller signs of the kind that adorn building sites will soon appear, reading: "Sorry for the inconvenience."
Anyway the construction boom first started in the capital, Kiev.
On the hills overlooking the Dnieper River work began on a presidential helipad and overpass leading to the government quarter in the city.
At the same time work began on a helipad near the mountain at the summit of which is buried national Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, a hundred kilometers from Kiev.
They said that from now on for the effective use of time of the head of state the president will only go and see the grave of the great poet by helicopter.
The helipads having not been completed the country set about building stadiums for Euro 2012 to be held in just a month, new airport terminals in the cities where matches will take place and, of course, set about the repair of the roads on which hundreds of thousands of fans from Western Europe will doubtless travel on when they come to Ukraine.
Stadiums seem to have been built and officials from UEFA were very pleased, roads are still under construction but the helipads they just can't manage to sort out.
It would be a pity if fans arrive in Kiev or elsewhere in their helicopters and they have nowhere to land.
Of course international VIPs might arrive by helicopter to Kiev, Donetsk and Lviv to support their national teams.
Yet there is currently a big question mark over the arrival of presidents and prime ministers.
They first call for Viktor Yanukovych, or to be exact, the state of Ukraine, to release Yulia Tymoshenko. First for treatment and then completely.
But in a normal country the president cannot simply release a person from prison!
Wasn't it the judge who put her there and not the president? There was an investigation, there was a trial.
The court sentenced her to seven years in prison, but the investigation continues and will soon add one or two other sentences to her first making her a permanent resident of Kachanovskaya female penal colony.
Therefore it would make more sense for the heads of state and presidents to send their request directly to the judge Rodion Kireev who announced the verdict, and not to president Yanukovych who does not deal directly with such matters as there are more important things in the state than Tymoshenko.
For example the literary process. But more about that a bit later.
The paradox of the current political situation is the fact that Yulia Tymoshenko is getting in the way of Viktor Yanukovych from "building a new country".
He hoped that while in detention she would not bother him, but as it turned out, while in prison she disturbs him and the building of a new country even more.
Hundreds of government officials from former Soviet states and other foreign countries require and request a meeting with her, distracting the "builders of a new country" -- a large and active clan of businessmen representing the eastern regions of Ukraine.
And for some reason no one wants to meet Viktor Yanukovych!
He organized a summit for heads of state of central and eastern Europe in Yalta and presidents simply refused to come to it in a sign of protest.
However it is not all bad. A few days ago the president of Moldova finally arrived to visit President Yanukovych.
The Ukrainian president pleased with the respect shown to him by the president of the neighboring country relaxed and talked, which seldom happens to him.
He said to the Moldovan president, but loud enough so the whole world heard, that for both Ukraine and Europe it would be useful to take a break from their relationship and to forget about each other for a while.
Clearly Europe is tired of Ukraine but president Yanukovych has made it clear that Ukraine is sick of Europe, too.
Moreover, neither Russia nor the United States are behaving in a humane way and also call for the release of the above mentioned Yulia Tymoshenko as if she was a common victim of judicial abuse.
Vladimir Putin has somehow also forgotten that a criminal case was opened against her in Russia ten years ago and several Russian defense ministry officials were sent to prison involved in the fraud of United Energy Systems of Ukraine, which at that time was overseen by Yulia Tymoshenko.
Looking for Ukrainian politicians and officials who have never broken the law is a tedious and thankless task.
Among political analysts there is an idea that if you want to put people in jail then you should imprison not just political rivals but all those guilty of something.
However, the Minister of Internal Affairs recently announced that among all the people arrested for corruption the majority are members of the ruling party - the Party of Regions - and not the opposition.
He immediately added that this is completely logical, as the Party of Regions is the largest in Ukraine and almost all government officials are members of it.
Don't think that I am defending someone or standing up for Yulia Timoshenko or Angela Merkel who was also criticized by the Party of Regions for her public statements.
I just think that if the Party of Regions would spend five year putting in prison all the corrupt members of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and then, cleansed from corruption, Yulia Tymoshenko would come to power and spend five years imprisoning those corrupt members of the Party of Regions, the situation would clearly improve and the parties themselves would be reduced to a human scale.
This would be a big positive.
Yes, the country is looking forward to Euro 2012, but this political "football" without rules has been going on in Ukraine for two years already and during this time the two major political parties have simply trampled the "football field", which is Ukraine itself.
At the moment it's a one-sided game and it's clear that the ruling party is winning.
Meanwhile the president has somehow hidden from public view behind the very high and well-protected fence of his country residence.
Near to it a new building with an office for the president was constructed.
Strange, but when completed this new building immediately became the property of some Cypriot off-shore company that the government now pays monthly rent to.
It means he will only visit his official office in Kiev when absolutely necessary.
For example when presidents of western countries come to their senses and stop their boycott of him.
Until that moment he may remain alone in his "Cypriot" forest - land of the former state residence "Mezhygorye" that as it turned out now, too, belongs to the Cypriot off-shore company.
He is secluding himself, I think, to sit down at a large, multi-volume novel.
Indeed in a tax return this year he wrote that he had received an advance of $2 million for not-yet-written literary work.
The authors of real best-sellers in Ukraine get no more than $4,000 to $5,000 per book. So count how many best-sellers he will have to write.
At least one of these books should be devoted to a woman.
That is, to Yulia Tymoshenko. But first there is the question of genre. The novel will probably start as a drama and end up as a black comedy.
By the way, ten years ago one of Yulia Tymoshenko's political aides contacted me and asked me to write a novel about her with the title "Kill Yulia".
For money of course. The plot, a conspiracy against Yulia Tymoshenko. I refused.
But soon three novels were released in Ukraine with a similar plot and one of the books was called "Kill Yulia".
She wanted to become a literary heroine and she has become one.
She wanted and still wants to be the president of Ukraine.
In her life, Yulia Tymoshenko has always achieved what she wanted. By any means.
And if Viktor Yanukovych loses his grip on power and doesn't pass it to his heir she will pick it up and then the "black comedy" will continue and become both "horror" and "action".
Tymoshenko Daughter To US Congress: Don't Abandon Us
KIEV, Ukraine -- The daughter of Ukraine's detained former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko told US lawmakers Thursday she still feared for her mother's life, and implored them to "keep the pressure" on Kiev to help free political dissidents.
Speaking via live video link from Kiev to a House of Representatives hearing in Washington, Yevgenia Tymoshenko also warned that Ukraine's powerful current rulers will do "anything possible" to manipulate results of the country's upcoming October election.
"I am very afraid for my mother's life now in the hospital," where she is surrounded by medical personnel who are under intense pressure from the regime, Yevgenia told the so-called Helsinki Commission on security and cooperation in Europe.
The opposition leader has been struggling with medical problems and complained over rough handling by her guards.
"We are just asking you please to keep the pressure on," Yevgenia said.
"Please don't leave us alone, because in Ukraine there's not enough power in people, not strong enough to fight against this injustice."
Tymoshenko has been imprisoned since August, when she was given a seven-year sentence for abuse of power.
President Viktor Yanukovych said Tymoshenko and 13 former senior officials from her government had been accused of various crimes.
Yevgenia said a Ukrainian court recently delayed hearing her mother's prison sentence appeal, so her lawyer was now presenting the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
He told Yevgenia that he was hoping to soon bring a congressional delegation to Kiev, and that he was expecting the United Nations to "robustly" weigh in on Tymoshenko's detention.
The former premier recently had a chance to speak with US officials, her daughter said.
"My mother outlined the critical situation that she is in, legally, politically, medically and in a humanitarian way," Yevgenia said.
She added that her mother had strong worries about the upcoming election.
"The regime has accumulated so much financial power via different schemes (and) they will use this financial resource to do anything possible to falsify the elections," she said.
Also testifying at the hearing was David Kramer, president of democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who led a delegation to Ukraine last month and met with Yanukovych and other officials.
Speaking via live video link from Kiev to a House of Representatives hearing in Washington, Yevgenia Tymoshenko also warned that Ukraine's powerful current rulers will do "anything possible" to manipulate results of the country's upcoming October election.
"I am very afraid for my mother's life now in the hospital," where she is surrounded by medical personnel who are under intense pressure from the regime, Yevgenia told the so-called Helsinki Commission on security and cooperation in Europe.
The opposition leader has been struggling with medical problems and complained over rough handling by her guards.
She briefly went on a hunger strike to protest her detention.
"We are just asking you please to keep the pressure on," Yevgenia said.
"Please don't leave us alone, because in Ukraine there's not enough power in people, not strong enough to fight against this injustice."
Tymoshenko has been imprisoned since August, when she was given a seven-year sentence for abuse of power.
The case has drawn international outrage with observers saying her prosecution was politically motivated.
President Viktor Yanukovych said Tymoshenko and 13 former senior officials from her government had been accused of various crimes.
Yevgenia said a Ukrainian court recently delayed hearing her mother's prison sentence appeal, so her lawyer was now presenting the case to the European Court of Human Rights.
"Those who have been imprisoned absolutely must be released," said Republican Chris Smith, the commission's chairman and a fierce human rights defender.
He told Yevgenia that he was hoping to soon bring a congressional delegation to Kiev, and that he was expecting the United Nations to "robustly" weigh in on Tymoshenko's detention.
The former premier recently had a chance to speak with US officials, her daughter said.
"My mother outlined the critical situation that she is in, legally, politically, medically and in a humanitarian way," Yevgenia said.
She added that her mother had strong worries about the upcoming election.
"The regime has accumulated so much financial power via different schemes (and) they will use this financial resource to do anything possible to falsify the elections," she said.
Also testifying at the hearing was David Kramer, president of democracy advocacy group Freedom House, who led a delegation to Ukraine last month and met with Yanukovych and other officials.
Kramer said the October polls will be "a critical test" of Ukraine's ability to conduct elections which meet the criteria of international monitors.
Sunday 13 May 2012
Extending broadband’s reach in Russia
Rosnano, the state technology fund, has invested in Silicon Valley firm NeoPhotonics in a move to develop broadband Internet capacity in Russia.
Tim Jenks, NeoPhotonics’ founder and CEO, said he had been watching the pace of development of the Russian and Eastern European broadband markets for several years.
“Not only are these markets deploying high-speed, agile and fiberoptic networks, but also we are seeing more of our customers target service providers and invest locally in Russia and more broadly in Eastern Europe,” he said, Rosnano’s web site reported.
Analysts agreed that the potential for rapid growth exists, not only domestically, but also in the use of the country’s territory as a transit region for signals between Europe and Asia. They cautioned, however, that climate and distance could pose problems for construction of an international signal network, as could Rosnano’s poor record of maintaining projects that were not immediately profitable.
Rosnano paid $39.8 million in cash, 17 percent of its capital, to acquire newly issued common stock in NeoPhotonics, which designs and manufactures photonic integrated circuits, or PICs.
PICs increase the functionality, agility and, most of all, speed of bandwidth-intensive networks, from 10 gigabits per second to 100. NeoPhotonics’ own PICs can also adjust bandwidth more easily for volatile traffic.
Jenks founded NeoPhotonics in 1996, later inventing the PICs, which work without converting signals from light.
“Essentially, light goes into the chip, is manipulated by the chip, and all the networks that provide voice, network data and video are really optical,” he said in an interview to the web TV channel SNNLive. “Keeping the light in the light domain is what our chips do.”
Rosnano and NeoPhotonics announced the deal on April 30, when both companies published their investment communiques. Sergei Polikarpov, Rosnano’s managing director and now a member of NeoPhotonics’ board, said that his company will support expansion of NeoPhotonics’ market presence in Russia.
In particular, Polikarpov said, Rosnano will build a research and development, production, and processing facility in Russia by July 31, 2014.
“With our support in Russia, we can further enhance the company’s development cycles and shorten the time for broader adoption for Neo- Photonics’ products in Russia and in the global market,” Polikarpov said.
Mikhail Bodyagin, Internet industry analyst at iKS-Consulting, told The Moscow News that Rosnano is trying to catch up with the fast-growing broadband market. According to their latest research, the share of broadband-connected households went up by 6 percent last year, reaching 40 percent penetration among all Internet-equipped residences in Russia, and 22 million Russians have broadband in their homes, of whom 16 percent live in Moscow.
Apart from the big cities, however – where broadband providers are competing to increase speeds – there is a big gap in the market, said analyst Ismail Belov of international think tank IDC. Because of Russia’s unique geographical position, it is well-placed to serve as a transit point for broadband signals between Europe and Asia, as well as between the different regions of the country.
“A short time ago, 3G was the main hope for broadband to bring such services as high-definition television and telemedicine to far, remote places, but it has since been proven that 3G has serious technical limitations,” Belov said. The 3G signal works poorly over long distances, a significant drawback in a country the size of Russia, so the technology can be used only at the so-called “last mile” proximity to the user.
“This literally means that a high-density network of transmitters needs to be installed all over the country’s huge territory, while only voice and SMS exchanges can operate more or less well if the density isn’t achieved,” Belov said.
While the market niche and technical elements give positive indications of the investment’s potential, analysts cautioned that financial aspects of broadband expansion should be scrutinized more thoroughly. Belov noted that the volume of the broadband market, including the potential for signal transit across Europe and Asia, could be twice as big as the whole Russian communications market’s current volume. He added, however, that the initial investment would be huge due to climate and distance, as companies would have to build transnational optical lines that would work with PICs, able to transmit hundreds of gigabits of information at one time without loss.
“Scale-wise, I would compare such a project with the Baikal- Amur Railway,” he said, the train line extending from the Irkutsk region north of Mongolia to the Pacific coast, whose problematic construction stretched for nearly 60 years from the 1930s.
Rosnano’s reputation for supporting projects that have not proven immediately profitable has also come into question. Dow Jones Newswires has reported that Neo- Photonics, which went public in 2011, has seen improving revenues in the past few quarters, but has been slow to turn a profit.
In March, Rosnano’s directors closed 13 investment projects that the fund had been jointly supporting, which had been previously approved by the supervisory board of Rosnanotech, Rosnano’s predecessor until it became a joint-stock company in March 2011.
Rosnano said that the main reasons for termination of the projects were “refusal of the applicant to carry out the project, usually because of a worsening financial position,” and “irreconcilable disagreement with Rosnano over financial obligations.” For more than half of the projects, the planners reported that they intended to continue with alternative sources of support.
The fund emphasized, however, that the cancelled projects represented a minority of its support, 3.1 percent of its approved budgets. As of March of this year, Rosnano had approved 145 projects with budgets totaling 568.6 billion rubles ($19.3 billion), and had contributed a share of 239.8 billion rubles ($8.12 billion).
United Russia proposes tougher rally laws
In the name of a normal life for local residents, United Russia’s latest legislative initiative could see protest organizers have to fork over 1.5 million rubles if there is public disorder at their rallies.
The United Russia faction in the State Duma suggested raising the fine for organizers of illegal demonstrations by 750 times.
The bill, which proposes increasing fines for organizers of rallies where disorderly behavior takes place to 1.5 million rubles, was presented to the parliament by deputy chairman of housing politics and management committee, United Russia member Alexander Sidyakin.
“Riots on the streets of Russian cities are unacceptable, no one can interfere with residents’ normal lives,” said head of faction Andrei Vorobyov.
He argued that the move does not limit democracy.
“Our colleague’s initiative does not deny citizens the right to express their civil position and take part in public campaigns, but introduces adequate responsibility for illegal, provocative actions,”
He argued that the fines were nowhere near similar punishments in the United States and European countries, where organizers pay 100,000 and more in dollars and euro in case they cause disorders at mass events.
Sidyakin also wants to stop using administrative arrests for violations, and replace it with 240 hours of community service as a punishment instead.
“We must move away from administrative arrest – we are turning opposition members into martyrs, who are jailed for 15 days, and then they say that “the regime throws them behind bars,” Vorobyov said.
The law would also have those who force people into taking part in rallies and marches fined 1 million rubles, and there would be a higher punishment for not allowing people take part in mass rallies.
The law has been discussed in the State Duma since April, and the Communist Party has expressed dissatisfaction with it, arguing that it violated constitutional rights.
The discussions restarted after the March of Millions on May 6 ended in public disorder and fights with police on Bolotnaya Ploshchad.
Moscow City Hall supported the initiative.
LDPR and A Just Russia deputies criticized the bill.
The former said they considered existing punishment enough and noted that the All-Russia People’s Front also allowed violations at their rallies, not just the opposition.
A Just Russia also did not like the bill, State Duma deputy speaker from the party Nikolai Levichev told Interfax.
“Amid the events developing on the streets, this proposal looks provocative,” he said. However, one A Just Russia member voted for the bill – a member of the State Duma defense committee, Igor Zotov.
Opposition figure Boris Nemtsov called the bill anti-constitutional. “He [Alexander Sidyakin] must understand that he wants to bankrupt all the people who disagree with the authorities. He has one aim – to bankrupt, make them lose their flat, their possessions. It is the right way, the North Korean way, the way of Lukashenko. Everything is clear,” he informed.
The Public Chamber also criticized the proposals, calling them “absurd.” “It will not lead to anything but the radicalizing of the protest movement and outrage,” said chairman of the PC committee on social politics, labor relations and quality of life Elena Topoleva.
Political analyst Mikhail Vinogradov called the step repressive, and said it was aimed at taking all responsibility off law enforcement officers who work at rallies.
“This law could limit the constitutional right of citizens for freedom of assembly,” he said.
IPO postponement raises fears of more to come
..................
The delay of a long-awaited initial public offering by real estate giant O1 Properties has sparked fears of a repeat of the rash of IPO postponements that plagued Russian companies last year.
The company, which develops elite office complexes in Moscow, announced in a statement late Thursday that it was postponing its planned issue in London due to “adverse market conditions.” The firm said it might consider returning to the market at some point in the future.
The listing was slated to raise around $425 million on the London Stock Exchange, and would have been the largest IPO of a Russian company since last October, according to Bloomberg. It is now the first London offering to be pulled this year.
The postponement echoes a string of similar IPO pull-outs from Russian companies this time last year, also due to rocky markets. The spring of 2011 saw the announcement of postponed offerings from several metals and mining companies, followed by Russian Helicopters and Domodedovo Airport.
Many had planned to list this year instead, but analysts told The Moscow News that the current market conditions meant it was unlikely they would push forward with plans in the near future.
“The same problems remain in place now as last year,” said Yulia Gardeyeva, an analyst at the Troika Dialog investment bank. “It is unlikely that market conditions will improve in the summer because there is still a lot of pressure in the euro zone.”
A fresh wave of uncertainty over the peripheral euro zone economies has sent the Russian market tumbling 14 percent since March of this year, causing investors to shy from riskier assets, such as the Russian real estate sector.
Tigran Ovanesyan, a real estate analyst at Uralsib investment bank, said the IPO postponement tendency was in part a result of a seasonal change in investor appetite for stocks, which leaves only a small window for companies to complete their offerings.
“For a second consecutive year we are seeing an interest in stocks in the first half of the year and then the markets become more risk-averse, so there is a correction in the second half,” Ovanesyan told The Moscow News. “This is in part due to the fact that investors are not willing to buy high-risk stocks just before going on summer leave.”
Another problem, analysts said, is that Russian companies have a tendency to value their stocks too high and then pull out of offerings when investors indicate that they are not prepared to cough up.
Bucking the trend is the Etalon property group, which floated $500 million of shares at a discount to fund expansion last year, a strategy which Ovanesyan said served the company well, since it allowed it to reinvest the capital into the booming Russian property market.
The IPO postponement trend does not bode well for the long list of flotations planned for this year, whose ranks include such giants as Russia’s biggest lender, Sberbank, and its largest cell phone operator, MegaFon. The companies plan to raise $6 billion and $4.7 billion, respectively.
But Gardeyeva said the bigger companies will likely be on safer territory due to their size, while smaller firms, such as O1 Properties, are likely to suffer.
“In periods of volatility, people usually look for liquidity, and in order for the stock to be liquid, it needs to be a relatively large company with a relatively large free float,” Gardeyeva said. “Most likely it will be the smaller deals that are going to be sidelined again.”
Ukrainian President Can't Win Struggle With Tymoshenko
BERLIN, Germany -- Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych wanted to take revenge on his arch-rival Yulia Tymoshenko. But locking up the former prime minister was the worst mistake of his presidency, say analysts.
Tymoshenko has the upper hand in the battle for public opinion, while Yanukovych is ruining his presidency.
The humiliation that Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych experienced on March 27 couldn't have been worse.
The Ukrainian president had traveled to the South Korean capital Seoul to attend an international summit on nuclear safety.
On the day before the summit, he had handed over the last highly enriched uranium still in Ukraine's possession to nuclear power Russia, in keeping with its commitment to relinquish its stock of the material before the summit.
And now he wanted to receive the praise he thought he deserved from US President Barack Obama, the most important guest at the Seoul meeting.
The Foreign Ministry in Kiev had done everything in its power to arrange a private meeting with the America president.
But the US president had no intention of enhancing the status of his Ukrainian counterpart with such a gesture.
Instead, Obama spent only four minutes talking to Yanukovych while standing up in the conference center.
It was clearly meant as a punishment for a political pariah.
But one photographer did snap a picture when the two men shook hands, and the next day the mass-circulation Kiev newspaper Segodnya ("Today") published a photo of the two politicians that almost filled the front page.
Above it was the headline: "Yanukovych Breaks Through Isolation -- Return to the Big Political Stage. Our President Spoke with Obama Longer than Expected in Seoul."
The story even characterized Yanukovych as one of the "main protagonists of this Seoul summit."
It may have been a trivial event in terms of global politics, but it says a lot about Yanukovych, about his inferiority complex and his dream of joining the big league and working alongside major world leaders -- and about how he lies to his people at home in Ukraine.
Today, more than five weeks later, not even the government mouthpiece Segodnya would dare to perpetrate such a farce.
By now, even the most remote shepherds in the Carpathian Mountains know that their president is isolated in the West.
This can be chalked down as a success for Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko, who was imprisoned four months ago at Kharkiv Prison Number 54 after a trial that many Western observers saw as orchestrated by Yanukovych.
There are many indications that Yanukovych's insatiable lust for revenge against the former prime minister, his worst political adversary, could spell his downfall.
"The Tymoshenko case is the most egregious mistake the president has committed throughout his term in office. I don't know what came over him when he set this process into motion," says Yuri Romanenko, head of the Ukrainian think tank Center for Political Analysis.
"Now that this affair has become international, he can no longer control it. It will bury him. The European Football Championship will be transformed from the longed-for triumph into a tragedy."
How could Yanukovych have ruined his presidency in a mere two years?
In the February 2010 election, he captured the votes of 12 million of the 36 million Ukrainians eligible to vote, in results that placed him clearly ahead of Tymoshenko and were not even questioned by the West.
The Americans, the Germans and the French were the first to congratulate the new president.
Yanukovych announced his intention to "completely modernize" the country and wage an uncompromising battle against corruption, and he promised that Ukraine would become a paradise for investors.
But he failed to make good on any of his promises.
Commenting on the current state of Ukraine, jailed former Prime Minister Tymoshenko likened her country to the H.G. Wells novel "The Island of Doctor Moreau" and George Orwell's "1984," calling it a republic of horror and "a nation of losers, without historical memory, without national pride, without positive economic prospects and a European future."
Europe's largest country, she says, is now controlled by "one family -- a family with a large appetite or, rather, bulimia, a miserable IQ, and pretensions of eternal power."
The statement is an allusion to the president's origins and to how he and his friends have hijacked the country that was entrusted to them.
Even if one takes Tymoshenko's remarks with a grain of salt, given her resentment of Yanukovych, her conclusions are correct.
They explain why, after two years, barely more than 10 percent of Ukrainians still support their president.
Ironically, it was already clear in 2010 that the man who had captured the presidency lacked almost everything that was needed to govern a country that was aimlessly adrift, namely political intelligence, tact and the ability to compromise.
But what else could be expected from someone who had grown up without parents, surrounded by the black slag heaps of the Donbas steel-producing and coal-mining region of eastern Ukraine, and had already tangled with the law twice as an adolescent?
Yanukovych was born as the son of a locomotive engineer in Yenakiieve, in an area then known as Stalinsk.
His mother died when he was two and his father was sent to a prison camp for 10 years for having collaborated with the Germans during the war.
Yanukovych began working in the local steel mill at 19.
Later he became an engineer and, naturally, a member of the Communist Party, which installed him as the head of a repair business.
He has never been able to furnish proof to back up claims that he earned a degree from the Ukrainian Academy of Foreign Trade.
Yanukovych was strongly influenced by the region surrounding the mining city of Donetsk.
He was convicted of robbery at 17 and of assault at 20.
He says today that he was rehabilitated, but it has since emerged that he later had the court records destroyed.
His rise to power began after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when bandits and oligarchs used Kalashnikovs and explosives to divide up the Donbas coalmines and steel mills amongst themselves.
Akhat Bragin, a businessman who controlled virtually everything in Donetsk, from the central market to the Shakhtar football club, became a godfather figure in the region.
But his power was short-lived.
In October 1995, a powerful bomb blew up Bragin while he was watching an FC Shakhtar Donetsk game.
His body could only be identified with the help of his severed arm, to which his Rolex watch was still attached.
Yanukovych, a down-to-earth giant of a man who likes to sing karaoke and can shoot a wild boar from a distance of 100 meters (330 feet), used to box with Bragin.
He also boxed with Bragin's successor Rinat Akhmetov, who is now the head of the largest industrial group in Ukraine and the president's most important political donor.
To the oligarchs, Yanukovych seemed to be the perfect man to help them safeguard their business deals.
He became the head of the Donetsk regional administration in 1997.
Five years later, then-President Leonid Kuchma brought him to Kiev and made him his prime minister.
Kuchma also wanted to install Yanukovych as his successor in 2004, but then overt election fraud triggered the Orange Revolution, bringing Tymoshenko and her ally, Viktor Yushchenko, into power.
Five years later, it was all over for Ukraine's democratic spring.
The leaders of the Orange Revolution were hopelessly at odds, and Ukrainians felt that the only solution to their troubles was to vote Yanukovych into office as president.
But it turned out that they had replaced one evil with another.
The new president was more interested in promoting the well-being of the oligarchs, who had accumulated their wealth during the sale of public property in the 1990s.
Whether the source of their profits was coal, steel, natural gas or titanium, Yanukovych made sure that they continued to flow.
He reduced profit taxes on large companies while eliminating a low flat-rate tax on small businesses, driving them into the streets for protests lasting several weeks.
At some point Yanukovych must have perceived the independence of the newly wealthy oligarchs as a threat, and he began to build his own empire, dubbed the family, a group of like-minded people in which hierarchical relationships are governed by blood ties and private dependencies.
His son Oleksandr, a 38-year-old dentist and businessman, was suddenly in the game.
Ukrainians were aware that the president's younger son Viktor was a member of parliament for his father's party, but hardly anyone knew anything about Yanukovych's eldest son.
They were all the more astonished when his name appeared on the list of the 100 richest Ukrainians last year.
Then it emerged that Oleksandr Yanukovych is the president of a firm called Management Assets Company, which builds office towers and hotels in Donetsk, and that he is a player in the gasoline market and owns 100 percent of shares in the All-Ukraine Development Bank, the Tonis television channel and four luxury yachts.
It has now become known that Oleksandr Yanukovych is influencing the country's most important personnel decisions.
In recent months, the top posts at the national bank, the tax authority, the Interior Ministry and the Finance Ministry were newly filled with friends of Oleksandr Yanukovych or family confidants.
The intelligence service was entrusted to the previous head of the state security service, a former KGB agent.
Now all key positions are under the Yanukovych family's control.
The most influential oligarchs, with the exception of Akhmetov, Yanukovych's friend from his Donetsk days, saw their status downgraded.
Now they are expected to pay hush money, which is referred to as donations for "social initiatives."
In this manner, Yanukovych has brought the equivalent of about €800 million ($1.04 billion) into the government coffers in the midst of an ongoing financial crisis.
And should anyone choose not to comply, the heads of the intelligence service and the tax authority have plenty of incriminating information against each of the oligarchs in their safes.
The installation of the new economics minister at the end of March was an example of how politics works under the Yanukovych regime.
The post was awarded to Petro Poroshenko, known as the "chocolate king" of Ukraine, who served as head of the security council and foreign minister under the Orange movement.
Poroshenko, 46, who began his career selling cocoa beans, now owns the largest confectionary manufacturer in Ukraine, several auto plants and the Channel 5 television station.
Poroshenko's defection to the opposite camp surprised the supporters of the Orange movement, but not those familiar with the Kiev power clique.
By doing so, he was "apparently trying to save his property," says a member of parliament for Tymoshenko's Fatherland party.
Poroshenko presented Yanukovych with a list of 12 items that he described as conditions for his entry into the government.
The bold demands included the "elimination of the shadow economy" and the "defense of entrepreneurship against violent pressure."
The canny Yanukovych rubber-stamped all of the items.
But then, on the day Poroshenko was to take office, he sent the tax police to the chocolate king's factories.
It was a clear warning to Poroshenko that, as minister, he was to abide by the rules set down by the president's family.
The fact that Yanukovych is deceiving his voters just as he duped the oligarchs who brought him into power is something that rarely works for long in post-Soviet countries.
People in circles close to the president "are already thinking about the time after Yanukovych," says political analyst Romanenko.
That, he says, explains "the mind-boggling amount of security Yanukovych has: He fears an assassination."
A review of the two years of Yanukovych's presidency quickly reveals why this man cannot make peace with Tymoshenko.
Any form of pardon would only put her back into the game of winning political power in Ukraine.
Her supporters are in the process of forming a united front with other opposition parties for the parliamentary election this fall.
If they regained a parliamentary majority, they would immediately introduce impeachment proceedings against the president.
Yanukovych fears this scenario more than upsetting Western Europeans over the European Football Championship, especially now that he realizes that he could wind up in prison if he loses power.
The president is "somewhat resistant to advice" on the issue of Tymoshenko, says a German diplomat who served as ambassador to Ukraine and later worked as an adviser to Tymoshenko when she was prime minister.
"He knows that there isn't much left for him to gain in Europe."
He does have a dilemma, though: The prisoner in the Kharkiv women's prison is stronger than he is.
Tymoshenko may have been a poor manager as head of the government, but she is fantastic as a PR strategist working on her own behalf.
She, together with her daughter Yevhenia and attorney Serhiy Vlasenko, are the ones who are controlling public opinion, not Yanukovych.
"Save my mother before it's too late," Yevhenia Tymoshenko says at her press conferences.
Unfortunately, no one knows what is really happening behind the prison walls, and whether Tymoshenko was actually punched during her forced transfer to a hospital.
The claims were voiced solely by her attorney, a member of parliament for Tymoshenko's party.
Last Friday, when Professor Karl Max Einhäupl, the head of Berlin's Charité university hospital, made his way to see his patient once again, the former prime minister was in the 15th day of a hunger strike.
Those who know Tymoshenko also know that she is capable of taking things to extremes.
But appeals such as one by the Ukrainian World Congress, an international umbrella organization for Ukrainian communities around the world, to stop the campaign give her an opportunity to end the hunger strike.
On Friday, she agreed to be treated in Kharkiv in the presence of a German doctor.
This means that Tymoshenko is also not going to be treated in Germany.
Perhaps her path will lead to Russia instead.
President Vladimir Putin has announced that he would be "pleased to accept Tymoshenko for treatment."
Yanukovych couldn't deny him such a wish, because he urgently needs a discount on Russian gas deliveries, and hopes to get it during Putin's state visit at the end of May.
Eventually, however, after being treated for a herniated disk, Tymoshenko would be returned to Ukraine.
"And what happens then?" asks the editor-in-chief of an independent Kiev newspaper.
"Then everything starts all over again, just with a different emphasis. Hardly anyone wants to see a comeback by the former prime minister."
Tymoshenko, he says, "is like Yanukovych: She obstructs our country."
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