Russian gas sees Timoshenko’s kulich in prosecutor’s hands

he under scrutiny gas deal which has seen Yulia Timoshenko square up to the Prosecutor General in Kiev took a turn for the festive on Friday.

The Ukrainian opposition leader is unable to travel while the prosecutor probes a deal she signed with Russia in 2009 that, investigators allege, saw her pay over the odds for Russian energy.

“The investigator thanked me for the Easter kulich. I think he was satisfied,” she informed. Whether this will satisfy the answers to his questions remains to be seen.

“Seeing as I can’t leave Kiev we will celebrate the resurrection of Christ here,” she added.

Kaspersky’s son kidnapped in Moscow

Ivan Kaspersky, 20, the son of antivirus Mogul Yevgeny Kaspersky, has been kidnapped in Moscow.

Neither Kaspersky Lab, nor law-enforcement are confirming the information. Sources said the young man has been missing for two days.

“At first security services were looking for him, then the police joined the search,” sources said. Lifenews claims the kidnappers are asking for 3 million euros ransom.

Yevgeny Kaspersky has flew from London to Moscow after the news came through.

Ukraine asks Moscow for Timoshenko documents

A Ukrainian parliamentary commission is going to ask Russia to provide documents pertaining to opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko.

“We are currently formulating two questions,” commission head Inna Bogoslovskaya told Interfax.

“We are applying to the ministry of foreign affairs of Ukraine to assist in obtaining documents relating to whether or not she wrote off debts for (Ukrainian gas company) UESU, which they owed to the Russian ministry of defence,” she said.

Timoshenko is accused of signing a gas deal with Russia that was unfavourable to Ukraine.

Investigation into politician’s death opened

The Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case into the death of A Just Russia member Maxim Glovoznin, who died at the steps of Moscow’s Vishnevsky hospital after doctors refused to help him, as his friends attest.

Head of Russia’s Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin demanded a thorough investigation into the politician’s death.

The case has been opened under “not helping the sick and leaving them in danger,” and those found guilty could face up to three years in prison.

Bastrykin said investigators would have to determine the full circumstances of the death and evaluate the action or inaction of medical personnel. Investigators have also been asked to check all the institute’s documents to see if they comply with federal laws.

The tragic death happened on April, 14, when Goloviznin felt ill in the car and collapsed.

It happened next to Vizhnevsky hospital, and Goloviznin’s friends say they tried to get him into the building, but security would not let them through. The man died outside of hospital.

The security guard called a doctor, but was told that the hospital did not accept emergency cases, and so no one could help. The doctors told Goloviznin’s friends to call an ambulance.

They even tried blocking the road, but it did not help. When the ambulance arrived, the Glovoznin was already dead.

The institute claims that as soon as the car with Goloviznin pulled up, they sent a duty doctor to look at the man. The medic declared him dead, head of the institute Valery Kubyshkin was quoted .

He also wrote that Goloviznin had died a long time before he reached the hospital.

Medical sources said the post-mortem determined that Goloviznin died two hours before he was taken to the hospital.

investigative department, however, said that the results of the post-mortem were not ready yet.

The Public Chamber was outraged at the incident.

“We are outraged at the actions of the security of the institute that refused to let a car with a dying man through to the territory of the organisation,” head of the commission on social issues and social policy Elena Nikolayeva said.

The Public Chamber will conduct its own investigation, she said.

We have to determine if the blame lies with the institute’s employees, or if it is the regulations of the health ministry that ban federal medical centres from accepting sick people from the street,” Nikolayeva said, adding that an analysis of the rules had to be conducted.

The number of complaints to the public chamber from people who were illegally refused treatment is growing, Nikolayeva said.

One of such cases was in Novosibirsk last year, when a refusal to treat a child for formal reasons resulted in the baby’s death.

Leonid Roshal Director of Moscow’s children surgery and trauma unit, President of national medical ward told Interfax about a comparable, but staged, spectacle outside his clinic.

On Thursday some people walked into the reception and said a woman needed emergency treatment in a car.

“An anti-shock room was arranged, the neuro-surgeon walked down, got ready. However, when everything was ready the doctors came to the car and found out that the woman did not require help,” he said.

Roshal said the woman was a professional actress, and said that if it was an attempt to provoke, then it is worrying.

Roshal recently criticised health ministry officials, saying that “It is, of course, a disaster that there is not a single normal experienced organiser of healthcare in the healthcare ministry.”

An Evangelical Preacher’s Message Catches Fire In Ukraine

KIEV, Ukraine -- Every Sunday, thousands of worshipers crowd into an arena here for a rollicking evangelical Christian service. A choir and rock band belt out gospel tunes in Russian.
People sing along and clap and shimmy in the aisles. They dash up to the stage for a chance to grab the microphone and declare how their new faith has changed their lives.

It is as if a Sunbelt megachurch had been transplanted to Kiev, birthplace of Slavic Orthodoxy, land of onion-domed cathedrals and incense-shrouded icons.

But the preacher at the podium has little if any connection to the United States. Could there be a more unlikely success story in the former Soviet Union than the Rev. Sunday Adelaja, an immigrant from Nigeria who has developed an ardent — and enormous — following across Ukraine?

From his start with a prayer group in a ramshackle apartment soon after the Soviet collapse two decades ago, Mr. Adelaja has built a vast religious organization under the banner of his church, Embassy of God.

He has become one of Ukraine’s best known public figures, advocating a Christianity that pairs evangelical tenets with an up-from-the-bootstraps philosophy found in religiously oriented self-help books. (Several of which Mr. Adelaja has published.)

He has throngs of admirers, but is also reviled by some in the Ukrainian establishment who resent a black man from Africa luring white Slavs away from their religious traditions.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church calls him a cult leader, and law enforcement officials have repeatedly investigated him, once accusing him of involvement in a pyramid scheme. Around Kiev, it is not hard to find racial caricatures of him.

The Russian government, too, has taken offense, barring him from entering the country, though he has a growing number of adherents in Russia.

Mr. Adelaja said he believed that he was declared persona non grata because he was a staunch supporter of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the pro-Western uprising in 2004 that the Kremlin opposed.

Mr. Adelaja, who has a boisterous laugh and a relentlessly sunny personality, tries to brush aside the insults. He said his church’s popularity showed that Ukrainians were on a spiritual quest after having weathered the state-mandated atheism of the Soviet era.

He said that more than 100,000 people attended services regularly at the main arena in Kiev or his affiliates across Ukraine, which has a population of 46 million.

“I came to this country disadvantaged as a black person,” he said in an interview, adding that he was blistered with slurs and epithets. “But still, with all my disadvantages, with my accented Russian language, I went out and said, ‘Hey, this will help you.’ And people have responded to it.”

Mr. Adelaja, 43, arrived in the Soviet Union in 1986 as a college student, then stayed after the Soviet collapse in 1991, later moving to Kiev. His wife, Bose, is also Nigerian and often conducts services at the church.

They speak fluent Russian, which is the native language for many here and is understood by most speakers of Ukrainian, the country’s other main language.

Embassy of God has sprouted affiliates throughout the world, and Mr. Adelaja has been praised by some American evangelicals for bringing their brand of Christianity to the former Soviet Union.

In Ukraine, Embassy of God undertakes a wide array of charitable activities, feeding thousands of people a month at soup kitchens and running treatment centers for alcohol and drug addiction.

But it has also thrived because Mr. Adelaja has tapped into a desire of people in formerly Communist countries to learn entrepreneurial skills and make money.

Mr. Adelaja did not study in the United States, but says he has learned from the teachings of American pastors. His views sometimes reflect the so-called prosperity gospel — a belief among some strains of evangelical Christianity that God wants the faithful to attain material wealth.

On a recent Saturday night here, Mr. Adelaja conducted a seminar with a few dozen people in a church annex. Reading from an iPad, he recited passages from the Bible and discussed how Christian principles could assist in business.

Mr. Adelaja and a parishioner, Ishtvan Birov, 35, bantered about how to innovate in life, personally and professionally. The conversation veered from Jesus to Steve Jobs, the Apple chief executive, back to Jesus again.

“Apple takes a model and keeps improving on it,” Mr. Birov said.

Mr. Adelaja responded, “That is the principle of God — to always keep making it better.”

He added, “God is strategy, God is strategic thinking.”

After the seminar, Mr. Adelaja explained that in the post-Soviet era, Ukrainians at first had only one major choice, the Orthodox church. But he maintained that many were turned off by Orthodox services because they were conducted by solemn, bearded priests chanting complicated liturgical texts.

“We are always thinking, how can we make the Bible still relevant?” he said. “The same values, the same product. But not doing it in the Orthodox old style. I don’t want to go to a church where I am just standing there and don’t know what is going on. We must make it interesting. We must change the packaging. Not communicate it in a way that pushes them away, but draws them close.”

Mr. Adelaja has never sought Ukrainian citizenship because he said he did not want to raise suspicions that he was interested in obtaining political power.

Because he is not a citizen, the authorities could deport him at any time. But he said that they feared doing so because of a potential backlash from his many parishioners.

Prosecutors also seem reluctant to move forward on a 2009 criminal case against him, which alleges that he took part in a fraud scheme whose victims included his church members.

Mr. Adelaja said the charges amounted to a political vendetta, and the case did not appear to have diminished his standing here.

In the interview, Mr. Adelaja said he did not live a life of luxury. He said his parishioners were encouraged to donate 10 percent of their salaries to the church, though there is no requirement that they do so to attend services, and many do not.

Mr. Adelaja said that money goes toward the church’s activities, including plans for a new $50 million headquarters here. He earns a living largely from sales of his books, he said.

His opponents said whether or not he was exploiting parishioners financially, he was promoting false Christian ideals.

“His methodology, his Biblical views are twisted,” said Dmitri A. Rozet, who runs a Web site called Adelaja Watch. “He wants to use God for human benefit. That does not correspond to anything that Christians have believed for almost 2,000 years.”

Still, at services on a recent Sunday, many parishioners seemed enthralled.

“Before, I was depressed, and my life was a nightmare,” said Anna Vdovenko, 63. “Now, I am living. And it is all thanks to Pastor Sunday.”

Chernobyl: The Fallout

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- This corner of Ukraine was ‘a wonderful place to live’ until April 26th, 1986, when a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl exploded. Twenty-five years later, the devastating effects are still felt.
I heard a huge bang and saw black smoke and then white steam rising from the plant,” says Sergei Parykvash, looking over his shoulder at the dead hulk of Chernobyl’s nuclear power station. “The day of the blast, April 26th, was my day off. But I came to work here the next day, just as planned.”

Parykvash was in the vanguard of Soviet efforts to control the meltdown of reactor number four when, 25 years ago this week, an experiment with its cooling system went dramatically wrong and caused the worst nuclear accident in history.

The massive explosion tore the reactor apart, spewing radioactivity across a swathe of the Soviet Union and high into the atmosphere, from whence it was carried across northern Europe and came down in rain, contaminating land as far away as Ireland.

Today, the reactor sits inside an eerie 30km (19 miles) “dead zone” of mostly abandoned towns and villages, and millions of people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus continue to live with the poisonous legacy of a catastrophe that demonstrated the dangers of nuclear power.

Those dangers were starkly highlighted again last month, when an earthquake and tsunami triggered an emergency at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, raising fresh doubts about the future of atomic energy and throwing attention back onto this poisoned corner of Ukraine, where officials are struggling to raise money to ensure the long-term safety of the site.

“No one here understood the scale of what had occurred, and officials didn’t tell us anything,” recalls Parykvash, as he looks at the crude concrete and steel sarcophagus – which is now riddled with cracks – that was thrown up around reactor number four after the explosion.

“When we finally realised, and when we heard that the accident was a danger to the whole world . . . well,” says Parykvash, “then it became clear that something really terrible had happened.”

AT 1:23AM on April 26th, 1986, technicians at the VI Lenin nuclear power station began a test on the cooling systems of reactor number four, which had been operational for only three years.

As they gradually shut down the reactor and launched the experiment, they committed a series of errors that compounded fundamental design flaws in the plant, and a massive power surge sent temperatures in the core spiralling to critical levels.

Within seconds, two explosions ripped through the reactor with enough force to hurl a 2,000-tonne safety plate off the top of the building. All cooling systems were destroyed and the fuel rods were shattered. Fire took hold of the graphite inside the collapsing core of the reactor.

It was this fire that sent a radioactive plume across Europe, and glowed menacingly beneath helicopters that dropped thousands of tonnes of quenching sand, lead, clay and boron onto the burning core.

On the ground, fire fighters and other workers helped tackle the blaze and clear away highly toxic debris from the reactor. The flimsy suits, goggles and masks worn by the men – who were dubbed “bio-robots” – offered little protection against radiation.

“Robots could not go in because the inside was completely destroyed and pathways were blocked. It had to be people. The chances of coming back were slim. We had already said goodbye to the world,” says Anatoly Tkachuk, an engineer who entered the crippled reactor block and has written a book about it.

“There were wave-like movements in the air – the air was even moving by itself. It was awful. We immediately felt pain in the throat – the first sign of a high radiation dose – and headaches, pressure in the head, very painful joints, especially the knees.

“People knew it was dangerous but didn’t really know what they were doing. At the beginning, people were moving radioactive material around with their hands.”

While the first teams of liquidators fought desperately to stabilise the plant, Soviet officials under Mikhail Gorbachev – who was later praised for his policy of glasnost or “openness” – said nothing about the accident.

The world began to fear a nuclear emergency only when scientists in Sweden detected raised levels of radioactivity on April 28th, when Soviet media first revealed there were problems at Chernobyl.

The traditional communist May 1st parades and celebrations in Kiev were allowed to go ahead as normal, however, even though the wind was blowing towards the city from the direction of the stricken power plant less than 150km (93 miles) away.

May Day had been eagerly anticipated by the 50,000 residents of Pripyat, a town just three kilometres (1.9 miles) from Chernobyl. That was the day a fairground was due to open in the Soviet Union’s ninth “atomic town”.

Here, the average age was just 26, wages and amenities were good and the unspoiled forests and streams all around offered excellent fishing, hunting and delicious wild berries and mushrooms.

The yellow big wheel is still there, alongside a listing red carousel and multicoloured dodgems that sit rusting on the moss-covered floor of a ruined funhouse.

The fairground sits at the heart of the world’s largest ghost town, where the blank windows of apartments blocks, schools and offices stare out at empty squares and boulevards.

Propaganda posters and placards, once as bright as the official vision of the Soviet future, lie rotting in the tall grass.

Furniture, books and toys wait in gently crumbling rooms for owners who left home 25 years ago and never returned.

“They ordered our families to evacuate on the afternoon of April 27th. They told them to take just their documents and a few essentials because they would only be gone for a few days.

No one told us it was the end,” remembers Parykvash, as he talks with another former Pripyat resident, Valera Zabiyaka, in front of the echoing Hotel Pollisya and Pripyat’s once-proud Palace of Culture.

“My wife worked there,” says Zabiyaka, pointing to a two-storey building whose red “restaurant” sign is still intact above the trees that are growing up in the surrounding streets.

“This was a wonderful place to live – a young town full of energy and life. This is where our first children were born, where we had our first apartment. It was impossible to think we were leaving here forever.

“And then I remember later, when the only people here were workers in special suits with radiation detectors, and the terrible silence.”

Natalya Oleinichenko, who still works at the Chernobyl plant, remembers Pripyat as “a town with such potential”.

“They were building a fifth reactor block at the power station, and there were plans to bring another 25,000 people to the town. We had a good rail connection to Kiev, and in summer a fast boat took you straight to the city,” she says sadly. “Have you seen the pier on the river?” she asks with a fading smile. “The future was bright then. It really was.”

Parykvash is one of several thousand people who keep Chernobyl secure and monitor the state of the sarcophagus and the tonnes of nuclear fuel and highly radioactive wreckage inside.

Only a few of them are on-site at any one time, and the once-bustling industrial complex is now almost deserted. Reactor four sits encased in its crude concrete tomb, three other reactors are silent and cranes stand idle around the unfinished reactor five.

A broad canal takes water through the complex and out into the surrounding forests, where some ecologists claim nature is thriving in the absence of people. Others say radiation has badly affected wildlife numbers and diversity.

“We have reinforced the shelter and extended its life by repairing cracks to reduce the chance of collapse and of rainwater getting in and toxic dust getting out,” said Yulia Marusich of Chernobyl’s information centre, where detectors show radioactivity near the reactor to be 300 times higher than in Kiev.

“The nuclear fuel-containing masses inside the reactor still represent a risk. There are no conditions for a spontaneous chain reaction at the moment, but we cannot just leave the reactor.”

Ukraine has employed a French consortium to create a new shelter for Chernobyl by 2015. It is now being built close to the reactor, and will be slid into place over the top of the existing sarcophagus when it is ready.

Marusich says the “technological complex” will be the largest moveable construction in the world, and as well as protecting the reactor for a century, will contain the cranes and other machinery workers need to dismantle the highly hazardous wreckage inside the sarcophagus.

A conference of international donors in Kiev this week pledged €550 million ($801 million) to the project, well short of the €740 million ($1.08 billion) Ukraine had hoped for. Several countries, including Ireland, said their own economic woes prevented them from committing funds.

Officials are confident that the money will be found however, especially given the renewed focus that the Fukushima emergency has placed on questions of nuclear safety.

At the final checkpoint on the edge of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, visitors step into antiquated radiation detectors and wait for the all-clear, while a man in camouflage runs a Geiger counter over their vehicle.

Then they drive on into the tranquil Ukrainian countryside, past farms where people and animals still live and through villages that are not abandoned.

Chernobyl has also left a deep scar here, and is believed to have affected some eight million people across a broad swathe of Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.

The accident is officially blamed for the death of 31 plant workers and liquidators, and for more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer in subsequent years.

Many locals and medical experts attribute a rise in other physical and mental problems to the disaster, but the United Nations and other major international agencies refuse to acknowledge a direct link.

Medical groups working with people in the Chernobyl fallout zone also cite the long-term psychological damage caused by the persistent fear of radiation-related illness and the stigma of living in an area that is infamous the world over.

A recent poll showed that about 60 per cent of Ukrainians think nuclear power is dangerous, a feeling held most strongly by those who were in their 20s and 30s in 1986.

The disaster did little to deter the most badly affected countries from exploiting nuclear energy, however.

Ukraine shut down the last block at Chernobyl only in 2000, and still relies on atomic energy for almost half of its electricity. Russia still operates dozens of reactors and is building several more in a bid to almost double capacity by 2020.

Belarus is planning to construct its first nuclear power plant, despite safety objections from neighbouring Lithuania. The Baltic state closed its last reactor, which was similar in design to Chernobyl, at the request of the EU in 2009.

Many activists say the reliance of a host of countries on atomic power, and the influence and financial clout of the nuclear lobby has led governments and institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to play down the health impact of Chernobyl.

Greenpeace has accused the IAEA, which is part of the United Nations, of “whitewashing” the effects of the accident “in a deliberate attempt to minimise the risks of nuclear power in order to free the way for new reactor construction”.

“I feel terrible for the Japanese for what happened ,” sighs Vasily Berezhnoi, an ultrasound technician who examines people for thyroid problems as part of a Red Cross mobile screening programme in Ukraine.

“It’s a tragic coincidence that it took place on the eve of our anniversary.”

Taking a break from his work, he stands in the sun and looks out towards the forest where villagers regularly gather mushrooms and berries, ignoring warnings that they are still contaminated by nuclear fallout.

Behind him, a queue of schoolchildren – all of whom were born well after 1986 – wait nervously for their scans.

“It’s clear that we can never have full control of the atom,” says Berezhnoi. “There could be another nuclear catastrophe anywhere, anytime.”

Health effects - The controversy over numbers

Thirty-one people died in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl accident as a result of the explosion and a clean-up operation that exposed them to extremely high levels of radiation.

Controversy surrounds the question of how many people have subsequently died or suffered serious illness due what is still classed as the world’s worst nuclear accident.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) says that “many” of more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer found in people who were children or adolescents at the time of the disaster were probably caused by the disaster.

Children were particularly vulnerable to thyroid problems because their growing glands quickly absorbed radioactive iodine after the accident, and they were major consumers of contaminated dairy products.

Soviet authorities failed to distribute safe potassium iodide to saturate their thyroids and hamper uptake of the radioactive substance.

The UNSCEAR report angered many people by insisting that “apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure”.

Many of the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” who took part in the clean-up operation at Chernobyl complain of major health problems due to radiation exposure, and some researchers have reported a sharp rise in birth defects after the accident.

Greenpeace has predicted that some 270,000 cancer cases may ultimately be attributable to the disaster, more than 90,000 of which could prove fatal, while the New York Academy of Sciences has claimed that almost one million people worldwide may have died to due radiation from Chernobyl.

“State structures have for the last 25 years done everything to cover up the information for the sake of the nuclear energy lobby, which is the most powerful lobby in the world and dictates the conditions today,” alleges Belarussian nuclear expert Yury Bandazhevsky.

International Leaders Visit The Chornobyl Site In Ukraine

CHORNOBYL, Ukraine -- Yesterday, the Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych together with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Director of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Yukiya Amano visited Chornobyl nuclear power plant and examined the exact model of its 4th reactor in its current state.
Ban Ki-moon thanked Viktor Yanukovych for making such a far-sighted decision to host a nuclear energy Summit in Ukraine. "One of my priorities in office is creating a world free of nuclear weapons," emphasized Ban Ki-moon.

The IAEA Director General noted that, despite the bitter examples of Chornobyl and Fukushima 1, the world would not abandon nuclear power. "So now, the most important task of the international community is to provide safety of such plants," he said.

25 years ago the nuclear reactor No 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Station exploded releasing dangerous radioactive elements into the air and spreading across millions of square miles, polluting many European nations.

Today, Pripyat and Chornobyl are two towns closest to the reactor, and, previously, home to more than 60,000 residents, have been included in the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant exclusion zone - 30 km/19 mi area around the site of the reactor, administered by the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Ukraine.

Since 2002 Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has become tourist destination for a limited number of tourists.

Public interest to visit Chornobyl has grown so much recently, that Ukrainian government had to streamline the procedures for signing up for the tours.

Visitors come in groups for a one to three-day tours that include visiting the observation point, located about 200m from the reactor sarcophagus, vehicle scrap yard, city of Pripyat and the surrounding villages.

The radiation level in the exclusion zone, for the most part, is a little higher than in the rest of the area, but it is still lower than the level of sun radiation one would get from the transatlantic flight.

The typical dose at the site in winter does not usually exceed 0.5 - 0.9 mR/h.

Ukrainian Doctor Killed In Libya, Wife Loses Legs In Bombing

KIEV, Ukraine — A Ukrainian neurosurgeon has been killed in the besieged Libyan city of Misrata during battles between rebels and government forces.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said the doctor was killed by a shell while leaving his home on Wednesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, during a visit to the Ukrainian capital Kiev, said the doctor's wife was severely wounded by the shell.

He says "my deepest condolences for that couple. This is not just a couple, this is what Ukrainian people are showing to humanity, to the world."

The foreign ministry on Thursday expressed concerns that some Ukrainians living in Libya have disregarded the ministry's warning to leave the country immediately.

The ministry says 19 Ukrainians were evacuated Sunday from Misrata.

Naftogaz Case A Diversion, Says Tymoshenko

KIEV, Ukraine -- A criminal case charging a former Ukrainian head of state and the director of state utility Naftogaz with abuse is a political diversion, the accused said.
Opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Oleg Dubina, the former head of Naftogaz, were questioned by Ukrainian authorities in a case involving a 2009 natural gas deal with Russian energy company Gazprom.

Gazprom cut gas supplies to Ukraine briefly before Tymoshenko helped clinch a deal to resume supplies.

The deal put tight restrictions on Kiev and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych later landed a new deal in exchange for an extended lease for the Russian Black Sea fleet in Crimea.

Kiev claims Tymoshenko's deal was brokered without the consent of the Cabinet.

She said the Yanukovych government is trying to bankrupt Naftogaz and take it over. The case, she claims, is an attempt to draw attention from government inadequacies.

"I think with these criminal cases they want to divert attention from major scandals that are going on now -- the unjustified increase in gas prices for households in Ukraine, skyrocketing prices for food and consumer goods and the drop in real purchasing power of pensions and wages," she said.

Tymoshenko faces separate allegations that she misused federal money meant for environmental projects to pay for pension funds during her tenure as prime minister.

Ukraine To Deliver 26 Armored Vehicles To Iraq

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine on Wednesday announced that it began the delivery of 26 armored vehicles for the Iraqi armed forces.


The state-owned Malyshev Plant SE, based in Kharkiv, east of Ukraine, will deliver the 26 armored personnel carriers (BTR-4) as part of the 2009 agreement signed between the two countries.

The BTR-4 armored vehicles were designed by Kharkiv Morozov Machine Building Design Bureau. The personal carriers were built at the Malyshev Plant, according to its Director General Volodymyr Mazin.

The Malyshev Plant will now begin work on the second batch of armored personnel carriers. However, there has not been set a date for the delivery of the next 62 vehicles.

In 2009, Iraq and Ukraine signed an agreement for the purchase of 420 BTR-4 armored vehicles. The last set of armored carriers will be delivered in March 2012.

The contract was worth $2.4 billion and also includes 32 aircraft and repairs.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced that its military adopted a indigenous anti-tank missile system capable of destroying low-altitude, slow-moving aerial targets, the first of ten ordered.

The Stugna-P system was developed by Luch Design Bureau, which is based in Kiev, and implemented features of foreign models of the same class.

The laser-guided system has a range of 4 kilometers and is capable of destroying armored vehicles, small fortifications and even helicopters flying at low altitude.

Ukraine Not To Join Customs Union - Foreign Minister

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine will not join the Customs Union (of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan), Ukrainian Foreign Minister Konstantin Grishchenko said on Friday in reply to questions by parliamentarians.
Speaking in parliament, he reminded the audience that President Viktor Yanukovich had offered to cooperate with that organization on the “three plus one” formula.

“This means the following – first of all Ukraine intends to cooperate with the Customs Union without formal membership in it,” he said.

“We are not in the process of negotiations with the Customs Union,” he added. According to Grishchenko, Russia does not make Ukraine’s entry into the Customs Union as condition for continuing cooperation.

Russia has just “expressed its wish to see our country in that union,” the foreign minister said.

“In accordance with the foundations of Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policy, European integration remains the main foreign policy priority for our country,” he added.

According to Grishchenko, Ukraine intends this year to sign an agreement on associated membership with the European Union, which also includes an agreement on a free trade zone.

“It is very important for Ukraine that the formation of the Customs Union should not worsen terms of trade with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan,” he said.

According to the minister, “there is a threat that measures of protection applied in trade with one country would involve the whole territory of the Customs Union,” Grishchenko added.

He also reminded parliamentarians that in trade with Belarus the free trade regime is applied to all items, while in trade with Russia, sugar is excluded from the list of commodities falling under the regime of free trade.

As for trade with Kazakhstan, nine Ukrainian products, including sugar, tobacco, alcohol and some other goods, are excluded.

U.S. Helps Ukraine Get Rid Of Scud Missiles

WASHINGTON, DC -- The United States said Wednesday it helped Ukraine destroy a stockpile of 185 surface-to-surface Scud missile systems.
"Over 185 Scud missile airframes and 50 transporter-erector-launchers were destroyed or demilitarized," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Some "1,441 tons of Scud missile liquid oxidizer fuel that posed an environmental and safety threat to Ukraine's population also is being eliminated."

The work was financed by the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Fund, established in 1994 to take advantage of opportunities to help countries disarm.

China Aircraft Carrier Could Be Ready By Summe

NEWPORT BEACH, CA -- China's first aircraft carrier could begin trials as early as this summer--a move that would drastically alter the appearance of the balance of power in the region, the chief of US forces in the Pacific said Tuesday.
The craft was purchased from the Ukraine over 10 years ago, and is generally accepted as symbolic of China's desire to be a military power capable of topping America's decades-long hold on the West Pacific.

"Based on the feedback from our partners and allies in the Pacific, I think the change in perception by the region will be significant," Admiral Robert Willard told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Willard also made note of the "remarkable growth" of China's military.

The US Pacific command under Willard has five aircraft carrier strike groups, which it has used to demonstrate American power across an important global trade region.

However, China's military build-up, which includes the swift development of ballistic missiles and cyber warfare capabilities, has ruffled feathers in the region.

Willard said that China has increased and improved its fleet of both conventional and nuclear-powered submarines, which had prompted a proliferation of submarines in the Asia-Pacific. Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and Australia were also mentioned as countries that have either acquired or announced their intention to acquire or increase their submarine fleets, reported the Associated Press.

China, Ukraine Aim To Up Trade To USD $10 Billion By 2012

SANYA, China -- China hopes to increase trade volume with Ukraine to $10 billion U.S. dollars by 2012, Chinese President Hu Jintao said Thursday in Sanya.
Hu made the remarks when meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Mikola Azarov in the southern Chinese resort city in Hainan Province.

Bilateral cooperation between China and Ukraine in economy, trade, technology and space technology have deepened remarkably in recent years, Hu said.

He said that China hopes the two countries could well implement major cooperative projects and improve cooperation in science, technology and agriculture.

Hu said China attaches great importance to the relations with Ukraine and bilateral ties have developed steadily since the two nations established diplomatic relations in 1992.

He said the two countries should further expand people-to-people exchanges and strengthen cooperation and coordination in international and regional issues such as reforms on the United Nations, climate change and nuclear non-proliferation.

Azarov said Ukraine would like to maintain high-level exchanges with China and deepen cooperation in such areas as economy, trade, space technology, agriculture and culture.

He said the Ukrainian government welcomes Chinese enterprises to invest in the country.

Azarov will attend the annual meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan on Friday.

Ukraine-Russia Gas Contract Could Be Canceled By Court - Prosecutors

KIEV, Ukraine -- The 2009 gas contract between Ukraine and Russia was signed with gross violations of Ukrainian laws and could be canceled by court, Ukrainian First Deputy Prosecutor General Renat Kuzmin said.
"All actions on the Ukrainian side were illegal. It means the contract and all actions on its implementations could be questioned and canceled by judicial procedure," Kuzmin told Ukrainian TV channel Inter.

Prosecutors said Friday the head of Ukraine's state-owned gas company, Naftogaz, has been charged with abuse of office over the 2009 contract with Russian energy giant Gazprom.

Oleh Dubyna became the latest in a crackdown on Ukraine's top-ranking officials linked to the previous government.

The existing contract was signed in 2009 by then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Earlier this week, Ukraine's state prosecutor's office launched a criminal case against Tymoshenko, now an opposition leader, over abuse of power linked to the signing of the contract.

The government of President Viktor Yanukovich, her rival, has long urged Russia to review the pricing formula but talks have not been successful so far.

In 2010, Naftogaz and Gazprom signed an additional agreement with a discount of $100 per 1,000 cubic meters.

Tymoshenko said she is being targeted by pro-Russian Yanukovych to divert public attention from the possible ditching of Ukraine's associate EU entry bid.

Earlier, Yanukovych said Ukraine would pursue ties with the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in a 3+1 format after Gazprom said a union entry would cut the country's gas bill by $8 billion every year.

British MP Urges Investigation Into Constituent's Ukraine Death

LONDON, England -- Ministers are being urged to secure an investigation into the death of a Devon man killed in a car accident in Ukraine in which his internet bride is a suspect.
An appeal has been made to the UK Government for an inquiry into the suspicious death of Barry Pring, who was run over near the capital, Kiev, more than two years ago, after it was claimed attempts for a proper probe had been blocked by the Ukrainian authorities.

Parliament heard that immediately after Mr Pring was killed, his Ukrainian wife, whom he had married only a year earlier after meeting her through an online dating agency, came to Britain attempting to get hold of his assets.

MPs were told Mr Pring was a "reasonably wealthy" man.

The case was raised by his constituency MP Neil Parish, the member for Tiverton and Honiton, and so is covered by parliamentary privilege. He pressed for a proper investigation.

Deputy Commons Leader David Heath said he would raise the case with the Foreign Office minister responsible for consular services.

Mr Parish told a parliamentary debate: "A constituent of mine, Mr Barry Pring, joined a dating agency in 2007, met a Ukrainian woman online and later married her. To cut a long story short, tragically, a year later Mr Pring was run over in a very suspicious car accident 28 kilometres outside Kiev.

"An investigation is being carried out into whether – I think I can say this under parliamentary privilege – his wife was responsible for his death.

"Immediately after his death, she came to Britain and started trying to get hold of all his assets, and he was a reasonably wealthy man. I have written to ministers to try to find out what exactly we can do."

Highlighting the difficulties encountered, Mr Parish said: "Of course, I understand the issue of the sovereign powers of Ukraine, but this case is not being investigated properly by the Ukrainian authorities. Every time we try to get a proper investigation that is blocked.

"There is no doubt that there are problems within the police authorities in Ukraine.

"We have dealt with our own police and with Interpol, and I appeal to ministers to do much more to make sure that a proper investigation into the death of my constituent is carried out, so that his family can know what happened to him."

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We have provided consular assistance to the family since the death.

"The British Embassy in Kiev has written to the Ukrainian authorities several times seeking updates on the case. We have passed on whatever information we have received to the family."

Exhibit Chronicles Lives Of Workers At Chernobyl

NEW YORK, USA -- Families walk their children to school. Teenage girls smile backstage before a concert. Couples work out at a gym not far from villages where subsistence farmers draw well water and raise crops.
Welcome to the present-day Chernobyl region.

A quarter-century before a tsunami triggered a nuclear crisis in Japan, the world's attention was riveted by the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant as it spewed radioactive material across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

A generation later, thousands of people live in the region — and even still work at the disabled plant.

Freelance photojournalist Michael Forster Rothbart wanted to understand why anyone would choose to stay in the radioactive area, so he went to Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship in 2007 and for two years lived 10 miles south of the Chernobyl "exclusion zone."

He got to know the people whose lives changed on April 26, 1986, when the No. 4 reactor blew up 60 miles from Kiev, Ukraine's capital.

His "Inside Chornobyl" exhibit, a photographic collage that focuses on five families who work in the Chernobyl zone, opens Sunday at the Ukrainian Museum in New York. A parallel exhibition of his work, "After Chornobyl," opens at the Ukrainian Institute of American on Tuesday.

Both run until May 8.

"People told me 'I'd rather die here than live anywhere else,'" he said of the 3,800 people who work at the plant, many of whom live in Slavutych, 30 miles to the east.

"In this country we're so mobile that it's hard for us to conceive that people have such deep ties to the land and community that they would stay in the face of such adversity," he said. Some stay for lack of alternative or a sense of duty, others because they have decent jobs or simply because it's home, Forster Rothbart said.

Chernobyl workers make about $500 a month, about twice the country's average monthly wage.

Many of Forster Rothbart's images belie the enormity of the 25-year-old catastrophe. The explosion released about 400 times more radiation than the U.S. atomic bomb dropped over Hiroshima. Thousands of children developed thyroid cancer, and other possible health problems are still being documented.

But how many people died is still debated. Several international agencies say 50, and others predict radiation-related deaths will eventually climb into the thousands.

The plant stopped making electricity in 2000, but nuclear fuel remains on site. The Chernobyl plant lies within the exclusion zone, where workers live for two weeks at a time because of high contamination.

The zone also is home to some 400 elderly people who returned to their ancestral homes despite government's warnings to stay out. Another 3,800 people work at the plant.

For "Inside Chornobyl," which uses the Ukrainian spelling, Forster Rothbart focused mainly on those who commute daily by train from Slavutych. It's a city of 25,000 people built after the accident for displaced workers from Pripyat, which was abandoned after the explosion and is now an eerie ghost town a mile from the plant.

Some are involved in a project to build an enormous cover for the reactor building intended to block fallout from escaping when the reactor is disassembled sometime in the future.

Forster Rothbart said his goal was to go beyond the "sensationalist approach" that showed the suffering but obscured the complexity of how displaced communities adapt and survive.

"I sought to create more nuanced portraits of these communities. Their suffering, of course, but also their joy, beauty, endurance and hope," he said.

People expect the Chernobyl zone "to look like a bombed out crater," he said, but a walk along the Pripyat River is like any scenic area of Ukraine.

The difference is that the radiation — invisible to the eye — "is all around you," he said.

His photo montage is combined with text mounted on large vinyl banners. Among the most chilling images is that of two dolls lying on a shattered kindergarten windowsill in Pripyat. A caption quotes the school's former director: "I only went back once. I couldn't stop crying."

Another is that of the plant's burned out fourth-block control room, where a combination of design flaws and human error triggered the accident. Another photo shows three workers checking their hands and feet for radioactive contamination before heading home.

The exhibition juxtaposes images of people's working and private lives. It shows Oksana Rozmarisa operating machines that measure radiation levels in the plant and her husband, Leonid, as a shift supervisor there.

The photos also portray the couple's passion for bodybuilding. In one image, Leonid holds up his wife in one arm and his son in the other.

In other photos, engineer Tanya Bokova poses at the plant's decommissioning office and at home with her husband. Their smiling faces make clear the Chernobyl disaster does not overshadow their lives.

"I feel happy because I have a family, a beloved husband, parents together. I have a good job, which I go to with delight," she is quoted as saying in a photo caption.

As for Forster Rothbart, he said, "The story seemed important enough that I was willing to undertake some risk."

"In this country, every day people die in car crashes. We're used to it and so we don't even think about it. The same is true in Chernobyl.

Radiation is just part of living there," he said. "Everyone in Slavutych knows someone who has cancer or who died of cancer. It's sort of a veil of normality over this very troubling background."

He said it was impossible not to draw parallels between the Chernobyl accident and Japan's crippled nuclear plant.

"They'll be forming a similar exclusion zone 25 years from now; they'll still be dealing with the consequences just like the people in Chernobyl are today," he said.

The exhibit is presented jointly by the museum and the Children of Chornobyl Relief and Development Fund.

Forster Rothbart, 39, lives in Oneonta, N.Y. He has done freelance work for The Associated Press and other media outlets. Among his other projects is "Fracking Pennsylvania," which explores the effects of natural gas drilling on rural communities.

Capturing The Eerie Beauty Of Chernobyl

TOKYO, Japan -- Pripyat, Ukraine, has been a ghost town for the last 25 years. On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant's No. 4 reactor experienced a sudden power surge resulting in several explosions and fires that sent a massive amount of nuclear debris into the air.
Thirty-six hours after the accident, the approximately 500,000 residents of Pripyat, many of whom worked for the power plant, were ordered to evacuate their homes and eventually told they could never return.

The accident killed two people instantly and a further 28 died of acute radiation in the three months that followed. One person died of cardiac arrest in connection with the incident.

In a 2005 report titled "Chernobyl's Legacy," eight United Nations organizations (including the International Atomic Energy Agency) and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine estimated some 4,000 people could eventually die due to cancers caused by radiation exposure.

Although Pripyat lies within a 30-km radius surrounding the Chernobyl plant that is still off limits due to remaining traces of radiation, Tokyo-based photographer Jun Nakasuji received special permission from the Ukrainian government to go there and report from the area in October and November 2007 and May 2009.

He then published a book titled "Haikyo Cherunobuiri" (Ruins of Chernobyl") in May 2008 and he will release the followup, "Cherunobuiri Haru" ("Chernobyl in Spring"), on April 22.

Both books feature photographs of abandoned homes and other buildings in the off-limits area, as well as reports in Japanese and English.

"When readers see the pictures, they will be able to realize (how much the residents have lost due to the disaster)." Nakasuji said in a recent interview with The Japan Times. "

In Japan, I think about 80 percent of the Japanese populace has not been interested in the problems of nuclear power. However, I thought these pictures could show them what actually happened at Chernobyl."

On March 11, just 46 days before the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl incident, the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was hit by a massive earthquake and tsunami that caused problems at four of its six reactors.

As a result, radiation released from the plant is threatening the lives of nearby residents and the environment of the surrounding area.

On Tuesday, the government's nuclear watchdog raised its assessment of the severity of the crisis from 5 to 7 — the highest level under the international standard — putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster.

However, Japan's nuclear watchdog said the severity of the Fukushima crisis is nowhere near the scale of Chernobyl's.

At the time of Chernobyl catastrophe, Soviet military helicopters dropped sand, boron and other materials on the reactor to extinguish the fire and shield against the radiation.

In the case of the Fukushima plant, Nakasuji points out that Japan's Self Defense Forces took similar measures and used helicopters to drop water on the plant in an attempt to cool down overheating fuel rods.

"Human beings succeeded in gaining nuclear power by using highly developed technologies. But when that power gets out of control, people can only take simple and primitive measures to fix it. In terms of coping with a nuclear crisis, we have made no progress (over the last 25 years)," he said.

Within months after the Chernobyl disaster, a large concrete encasement referred to as the "sarcophagus" was hastily constructed to seal off the No. 4 reactor.

However, that construction has been deteriorating over the past two decades according to the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, which was established by the European Union, the United States and the Ukraine, and is managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Inside the sarcophagus, more than 200 tons of uranium and close to a ton of radio-nuclides (which is a specific type of atom) exist, 80 percent of which are plutonium.

Funded by Chernobyl Shelter Fund, the Ukraine is currently constructing a new metal encasement in the shape of an arch at an off-site location, according to media reports.

When the 108-meter-tall shelter is completed, it will be slid on rails over the existing cement sarcophagus. The Ukranian government has said the construction will cost €999 million ($1.44 billion), according to Russian news agency Interfax. Nakasuji pointed out the enormous amount of energy and manpower required for the construction, and that it also risks the lives of construction workers.

"Given these conditions, apparently nuclear power is not at all friendly to the human beings or the environment," Nakasuji said. "And (people associated with the plant) will have to continue to maintain the shelter forever."

Nakasuji referred to the fact that not just the power plant but also the surrounding region has a number of contaminated areas of high-level radiation called "hot spots."

"In some areas (of the off-limit zone) I visited, the needle of my Geiger counter reached its maximum and eventually read 'error', " he said.

There is a contaminated area known as the "Red Forest," located 2 km west of the power plant, Nakasuji explained.

The name came from eyewitness accounts that said the green pines of the forest turned red when they were exposed to radiation, which reached a level much higher than a fatal dose.

The level is so high that even after the accident, workers constructed a road through the forest by piling up mounds of earth.

That way, the road was much higher than the actual ground of the forest and allowed drivers to avoid radiation exposure, according to Nakasuji.

The forest was covered by lethal ash (radioactive fallout) billowing from the fire after the explosion of the reactor, Nakasuji said.

He added that some dead trees still stood in the forest due to exposure to the radiation. In contrast to that scene, however, he said other areas surrounding Chernobyl were almost teeming with nature by the spring of 2009.

Leafy green trees were growing high up the abandoned condominiums, flowers were blooming in the fields, and even families of wild boar were walking around.

"I took pictures of these spring scenes, which were tranquil but somewhat desolate, for the new book," the photographer said. "However, the resurgence of nature might be false."

Nakasuji points out that radioactive materials that were expelled from the No. 4 reactor included cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years.

Thus it is likely that radiation has accumulated in the trees, flowers and could even be present in the area's wildlife. Thus, he is somewhat skeptical about the area's natural rebirth.

Nakasuji said that he hopes his pictures of Chernobyl will help people to figure out what judgements to make amid the current onslaught of information and speculation surrounding the Fukushima nuclear crisis.

He added that if people were given the correct context they might not have panicked and stockpiled food, water and other goods.

While a huge amount of money has been spent on developing and constructing nuclear power plants in Japan, Nakasuji said it would cost less to install solar power panels on houses across the country.

He also supports the development of wind, water and other renewable energy as an alternative to nuclear power.

"I hope this book brings the opportunity for people to rethink the fact that our everyday lives are dependent on electricity, which is provided by in part by nuclear power."

London Apartment Sells For $222 Million

LONDON, England -- An anonymous buyer who many believe is from Ukraine spent £136 million ($222 million) for a three-story penthouse overlooking London's Hyde Park, reports several British media on paperwork filed completing the sale this week.
Many claim the price tag makes this the most ever spent on a single apartment sale, reports the Telegraph newspaper.

The apartment is in the development called "One Hyde Park," and is attached to the pricey Mandarin Oriental hotel in the swanky Knightsbridge London neighborhood bordering London's equivalent of New York's Central Park.

The buyer, who used lawyers in Ukraine to complete the transaction anonymously, is spending an additional £60 million ($98 million) to fix the place up, having bought it with bare walls and no furnishings, reports the Financial Times.

The entire transaction was allegedly done in cash, the Financial Times reports.

The developers of the high-end apartment complex, brothers Nick and Christian Candy, claim to have made a total of £1 billion ($1.6 billion) in apartment sales at the location to date, reports the Guardian.

The brothers Candy reportedly started their real estate development business with a £6,000 ($9,800) loan from their grandmother.

Umarov escapes

Hopes that the security forces had killed North Caucasus warlord Doku Umarov in last week’s air strike on an insurgent base were seemingly dashed as reports emerged that he could well be alive and back online soon.

Yunus-Beka Yevkurov, head of the Republic of Ingushetia, said there was no way yet of confirming the death or escape of the wanted man, “The remains (found on the site of the attack) have not yet been fully examined and we cannot yet guarantee that he is alive or dead,” he told Kommersant. But a goggle-eyed public will not have to wait long, “If this bandit is alive the fact will soon be confirmed on the internet,” a special services source said.

Battling banks and toppling towers

Two of Russia’s biggest banks are trading verbal blows as VTB and Bank of Moscow squabble over a takeover deal.

The apparent flight of BOM boss Andrei Borodin to London, ostensibly for health reasons, prompted a stinging attack on his organisation from VTB’s Andrei Kostin.

Kostin slammed the lack of transparency in the bank’s books as investigators pursued their inquiries over a $440 million loan made to Inteko chief Elena Baturina, wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov. And former VTB official Mikhail Kuzovlev was the first to benefit from the spat, returning to his post as BOM vice president barely two weeks after he was sacked.

Bank of Moscow is being sold off by the city’s government, with VTB acquiring almost half the shares in the institution. But small shareholders, including Borodin, have been accused of preventing Russia’s second largest bank from completing a takeover.

Russia hands over Katyn files

The Russian prosecutor’s office has handed over 11 volumes of declassified documents to Poland, containing information about 20,000 Polish prisoners of war massacred in western Russia in 1940.

They contain the conviction and burial certificates and lay to rest Soviet claims that the German were responsible, RIA Novosti reported.

In the 1990s, Russia handed over to Poland copies of archive documents from the top-secret File No.1, which placed the blame solely on the Soviet Union. In September 1990, Russian prosecutors also launched a criminal case into the massacre, known as “Case No.159”. The investigation was closed in 2004.

In November 2010, lawmakers from the lower house of Russia’s parliament approved a declaration recognizing the Katyn massacre as a crime committed by Josef Stalin’s regime. Poland has hailed the move.

War, Stalin and memory

Questions of history prompt heated debate and stir powerful emotions in Russia, as in all post-Communist countries. Many attempts have been made to settle the problems of the past, but none was seen through to the end. It invariably turned out that the time was not right because of political instability, an economic crisis, or social problems.

On February 1, the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights, a consultative body comprising representatives of human rights organizations and NGOs, submitted a draft program on memorializing the victims of the totalitarian regime and on national reconciliation to President Dmitry Medvedev.

As expected, it sparked an intense public reaction. The document, whose authors believe that the past century was a time of tragedies and crimes committed by Russians against Russians, has provoked a wave of Soviet nostalgia. It is clear that some people find it impossible to view Russian history objectively as an inalienable part of European and global history. However, the debate this document has stirred could prove useful in that it concerns the key question of the heritage a nation should draw on when formulating its future trajectory.

The ideological confusion of the past two decades has produced a strange aberration in society. Although Russian history boasts a myriad of glorious episodes, many people associate its might and successes solely with Josef Stalin. This could be due to certain forces’ conscious, deliberate efforts to nurture a sense of contemporary Russia’s inadequacy and a yearning for the “great power” we have lost. But there are also objective reasons for this.

For example, part of society still cannot reconcile itself to the humiliating economic and geopolitical position into which Russia was plunged after the end of the Soviet Union. This only drives them into a trap. By upholding their country’s honour and dignity they also defend a leader whose crimes before his own people and other nations are both undeniable and unforgivable.

Ascribing victory in World War II to Stalin, rather than to the multiethnic, multinational Soviet peoples, leads to a complete dead end. It inseparably links victory to the actions of one of the most merciless regimes in Russian history.

Deliberations about Russia’s tragic dialectic could be interesting from the philosophical viewpoint, but politically they are a no-win option. Russia’s unwillingness to confront the whole truth about its 20th century history (which is much more complicated than simply “for” or “against”) hints at an inferiority complex.

This is unacceptable for a country that did not lose that war and which has solid reasons to consider itself one of the few fully sovereign world powers capable of dealing with internal problems without foreign assistance.

Russia could propose establishing an International Memory Institute, as the presidential council has suggested, to pool the efforts of all post-Soviet and post-Communist countries in assessing the past and also act as a counterweight to similar, but clearly anti-Russian, institutes established in other countries.

If Moscow takes the lead on this, the project could become the consolidating factor in the post-Soviet space.

Above all, Russia needs to rely on its historical tradition as a whole, and stop focusing on a very short period of its past as it searches for a new political identity

US billionaire to sell stake in Moscow hotels

Billionaire Ronald Lauder is being asked to sell his stake in 12 Moscow hotels that include Moskva Hotel next to Red Square, Vedomosti reported, citing sources in City Hall. This request is being ascribed to a possible change in plans over the future of the land on which Rossia Hotel used to sit.

The Moscow government holds an 80 per cent share in the Hotel Company, a holding that controls the 12 hotels in question and was originally going to develop the Rossia Hotel land. Lauder’s Russian Real Estate Fund purchased a 20 per cent stake for 5 billion rubles in late 2009.

The “divorce” between Lauder and Hotel Company is expected to be amicable, with a source close to the Hotel Company telling Vedomosti that Russian Real Estate will sell its share to the Moscow government.

Lauder will sell his stake due to the Hotel Company’s plans to build a parliamentary center on the land slated for the company’s most prized asset, Rossia Hotel, which was originally supposed to be rebuilt, Vedomosti reported. The Hotel Company was created in late 2009, with the Moscow government due to transfer shares to 18 hotels, including Moskva and Rossia.Rossia, National and Budapest were dropped from the list, Vedomosti reported.

A source at the Hotel Company said he could not comment on shareholders’ decisions.

But the Rossia Hotel was the most attractive asset in the holding, he told The Moscow News, and uncertainty over its future may lead to shareholders reconsidering their plans.

“We don’t have information on what will be decided about the land slated for Rossia,” he said. “The concept has changed, so yes, a lot of things are under consideration.”

Because the Moscow government will have to pay Lauder back the 5 billion rubles he invested, it may have to sell 49 per cent of shares in Dekmos, a company that controls the Moskva Hotel, to billionaire Suleiman Kerimov, a source close to the company told Vedomosti. Kerimov has not commented on the potential deal.

Yanukovych dismisses some deputy ministers, including two deputy defense ministers

Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych has dismissed Mykhailo Maliarchuk and Borys Andresiuk as deputy defense ministers of Ukraine.

In addition, Kostiantyn Vaschenko, Vitaly Muschynin, Anatoliy Dziubak, and Ihor Lushnikov were dismissed as deputy ministers of labor and social policy, Artem Volodin as deputy environment minister.

Serhiy Bozhko was dismissed as deputy head of the State Nuclear Regulation Committee of Ukraine.

Mykola Shubin was dismissed as deputy chairman of the national agency for the preparation and holding of the Euro 2012 finals in Ukraine responsible for budgetary programs and financial support.

Relevant decrees were signed on Wednesday and published at the presidential Web site.

Yanukovych: Kyiv could sign package agreement on cooperation with Customs Union in '3+1' format

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has called for closer relations between Ukraine and the Belarusian-Kazakh-Russian Customs Union.

"I believe the further development of relations with the Customs Union will rest on a new legal basis regarding free trade agreements and possibly a package agreement on cooperation by a 3+1 formula," Yanukovych said in an annual address to the nation he presented at the Verkhovna Rada on Thursday.

The president said this will help pursue a course toward closer ties between the European and Eurasian economic areas.

Yanukovych: Ukraine should return to mixed electoral system of parliamentary elections

The introduction of differentiated election thresholds and a mixed electoral system at parliamentary elections must be the priority tasks on the way to the modernization of the electoral system in Ukraine, reads the annual address of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a copy of which has been sent to Interfax-Ukraine.

"The modernization of the electoral system and regulation of electoral legislation will help overcome the negative tendencies in the electoral sphere. Among the priority tasks in this direction it is necessary to name the introduction of a differentiated election threshold at the elections to the Verkhovna Rada for parties and blocs, or a prohibition on the formation of party blocs, the introduction of a mixed electoral system at the elections to the Verkhovna Rada, and the further development by local government agencies of the majority system at elections," reads the address.

At the same time, the document reads that if the proportional system remains then election threshold must be differentiated: 4% for parties, 5% for blocs with a gradual increase by 1% for each new party that joins a bloc, apart the first two.

In addition, according to the document, the mixed electoral system is reasonable for regional councils, while city mayors should be elected by an absolute, not relative majority of citizens.

"A two-round electoral system or a an 'additional vote' system can be introduced for this," reads the document.

Foreign minister: Ukraine intensifies work in CIS

Ukraine is hoping to join the CIS Humanitarian Cooperation Council in the nearest future, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Hryschenko said.

"We are now working on joining the Humanitarian Cooperation Council and the Interstate Humanitarian Cooperation Foundation […] We are hoping to make the needed headway within the shortest time possible," Hryschenko said opening the meeting of the CIS Foreign Ministers Council in Kyiv on Friday.

Ukraine is currently in the process of joining various CIS bodies and is intensifying its activities in the CIS, he said.

The intensification of Ukraine's activities in the CIS is confirmed by the fact that Ukraine will host the 6th CIS creative and scientific intelligentsia forum in fall 2011.

Kuchma summoned to Prosecutor's Office for questioning on Monday

Second Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005) has provisionally been summoned to the main investigation department of the Prosecutor General's Office at 1100 on Monday, April 11, for another round of questioning, a source close to Kuchma has told Interfax-Ukraine.

A criminal case against Kuchma was opened on March 21, 2011.

He is accused of abuse of power and official authority, which subsequently led to the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze (Part 3, Article 166 of the 1960 Criminal Code).

Charges were brought against Kuchma and his travel was restricted.

Kuchma last came to the main investigation department of the Prosecutor's Office on Monday, April 4.

The Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) invited Kuchma to attend festivities on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight in Moscow on April 12.

The Prosecutor General's Office said that Kuchma had not asked for permission to go abroad.

In 1986-1992, Kuchma was the general director of Pivdenmash, one of the biggest space rocket manufacturers.

Husband of Ukrainian woman masterminded Hamas rocket program

Israel raised the stakes in its battle with Hamas Monday by indicting a Palestinian engineer for masterminding the group's rocket program and training fighters.

Dirar Abu Sisi vanished from a sleeper train in Ukraine in February and mysteriously resurfaced days later in an Israeli prison, recalling the dramatic covert operations Israeli was once famous for.

His abduction comes during an escalation in tensions between Israel and Hamas that many fear may rekindle full-scale fighting.

The case of Abu Sisi has been veiled in secrecy since his family came forward last month saying he was snatched by Israeli operatives in Ukraine.

Israeli authorities placed a gag order on the case, until the release of Monday's indictment, though it still refuses to say how the 42-year-old Gazan was caught.

The indictment accused Abu Sisi of masterminding the Islamic militant group's rocket program and charged him with hundreds of counts of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and production of weapons.

Abu Sisi denied all the charges and his Israeli lawyer, Smadar Ben-Natan, said the indictment was "inflated, exaggerated and unconnected to reality."
We are going to ask to dismiss this indictment because of the abusive process that has been done to this person and the illegality of his detention.






The indictment described alleged meetings and conversations he held with Hamas operatives as far back as 2002.

"Abu Sisi's ongoing and significant activities in Hamas' service over the past decade, with an emphasis on strengthening and improving the capabilities of Qassam rockets, allowed Hamas to create a growing threat to the Israeli home front, resulting in the death and wounding of many Israeli civilians," it said.

Hamas has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the years, steadily increasing the range of the weapons from just a few to almost two dozen miles.

After the hearing, Ben-Natan accused Israel of torturing her client and forcing him to sign Hebrew documents he did not understand.

"We are going to ask to dismiss this indictment because of the abusive process that has been done to this person and the illegality of his detention," she said.

Israel launched a broad offensive in Gaza just over two years ago to halt persistent rocket fire, inflicting heavy losses on Hamas.

While an informal cease-fire has been generally observed since then, violence has resumed in recent weeks with a cycle of rocket fire and Israeli reprisals.

The Israeli military says Hamas has fully recovered from the 2009 offensive and upgraded its capabilities with longer-range rockets as well as anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.

Monday's indictment indicated that Israel believes Abu Sisi played a role in this recovery.

Abu Sisi's family says he has no connections to Hamas and that he was in Ukraine, his wife's homeland, applying for residency.



The indictment said he had received training on rocket technology at a military engineering academy in the former Soviet republic.

Abu Sisi joined Hamas in 2002 and then after Israel's three-week offensive against Hamas, was given the job of establishing a military academy to train Hamas' officer corps, the indictment said.

Using his skills as an engineer, the document claimed, he also developed propulsion and stabilization systems for rockets, developing a homegrown rocket that could fly up to 15 miles (22 kilometers) in 2007.

During a brief courtroom appearance, Abu Sisi, a senior engineer at Gaza's sole power plant, professed his innocence and accused Israel of trumping up charges against him in a futile attempt to gather information about Gilad Schalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants nearly five years ago.

"I don't have any connection with Schalit and the investigation proved that," he said.




"When they found out I don't have any connection to Schalit, they fabricated these charges."


Ukrainian law enforcement agencies have said they were not involved in the arrest and that foreign security agents are prohibited from operating on the Ukrainian territory.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has said it would demand an explanation from Israel.

His family denied he belonged to Hamas or was a militant.

"He has been slandered," Abu Sisi's Ukrainian wife, Veronika, told The Associated Press in Ukraine. "My husband has never been involved in those horrors."

In Gaza, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri denied the engineer is a member.

"He is a Palestinian citizen kidnapped in a criminal gang-style operation while he was visiting his family in Ukraine, and all the Israeli accusations are only to justify his abduction," he said.

Robbie Sabel, a former legal adviser to Israel's Foreign Ministry, said that under international law, it is irrelevant how Abu Sisi was brought to Israel.

"Once somebody is in the country, he is within jurisdiction," he said.

European solutions to Ukraine-Russia gas disputes

Early in 2011, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych publicly attacked Russian gas pipeline policy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

His speech was the most recent sign of growing tensions between the two countries over the gas politics that many believed would subside after Ukraine’s election of a seemingly pro-Russian president. These tensions between Ukraine and Russia are not new, but their resurgence bodes ill for European energy security.

The latest argument between Europe’s largest gas-supplying country and its key transit state is symptomatic of the wider disagreement between Kyiv and Moscow over gas transit and pricing. This should be a warning flag to Europe that, despite efforts by the International Monetary Fund and numerous countries, the underlying causes of the dispute that left Europe without gas for heating and electricity for nearly two weeks in 2009 remain unresolved and require European intervention.

Following Yanukovych’s 2010 election, Russia agreed to a new gas pricing arrangement that lowered Ukraine’s import prices and was perceived as a return to Russia’s policy of subsidized gas prices for friendly states. In reality, political hype aside, the deal did little more than bring Ukraine’s prices in line with the rates paid by other European consumers as a result of falling market prices.

At the same time, it revived the old practice of mixing political interests with gas pricing by packaging the deal with a Ukrainian extension of Russian basing rights for the Black Sea Fleet. Having pocketed the basing agreement, Russia can continue to play with the terms of the gas pricing deal if it chooses to seek further concessions in the future. Ukraine’s leaders are already voicing buyer’s remorse.

The real culprit in the dispute is the unstable underlying incentive structure in the relationship between the two countries. Gas pricing disagreements between Russia and Ukraine lead to a game of brinksmanship in which each threatens to cut off gas flows to Europe if the other will not back down. For Ukraine, a breakdown in negotiations means losing access to the gas that powers its industry and heats it homes. For Russia, a serious dispute could result in Ukraine cutting access to European customers, making Russia appear an undependable supplier to markets that could look elsewhere for solutions to their energy needs.

Timely action is in Europe’s best interest. It continues to be vulnerable to ongoing gas disputes as Russia supplies more than 40 percent of the European Union’s gas and 80 percent of this arrives via Ukrainian pipelines. This situation will only worsen in the future as dwindling domestic supplies and burgeoning demand are projected to result in a 37 percent increase in gas imports for Europe by 2030. This dependence, however, is not one-sided. Russia’s government relies on European gas exports for 20 percent of its operating budget and needs Ukrainian pipelines to transport the gas to market. Meanwhile, Ukraine remains heavily dependent on Russian gas for a large portion of its domestic energy use. A stable gas pricing and transit arrangement is important for all parties involved.



Looming in the background is Ukraine’s infrastructure problem. Its gas transit system is so old and decrepit that it offers both Ukraine and Russia an overwhelming incentive to make deals and then cheat on them. Both sides abuse the lack of transparency in the system to make claims and accusations during disputes while blaming each other for subsequent gas cutoffs.

This is compounded by the fact that both Russia and Ukraine’s energy industries are state-controlled and their business negotiations are largely conducted by national leaders. As a result, gas contracts are not constrained by market discipline, but rather are subject to political considerations in the context of relations between the two countries.

These dynamics have resulted in a situation that destabilizes Europe’s gas supply and provides Russia with cover to use gas as a political lever against Ukraine and potentially Europe. IMF loans to Ukraine and recent agreements with Russia have created a temporary degree of stability, but long-term solutions are imperative in the near future to provide for both Ukraine’s fiscal future and Europe’s energy security.

Arguably the simplest way to alleviate the supply problem between Russia and Europe is to dilute Ukraine’s centrality by building alternative pipelines – an option which Gazprom is currently pursuing in the North and South Stream lines. But even if both pipelines are built and operate at maximum capacity, they will not keep pace with projected growth in European demand.

Additionally, neither is yet operational and it is not clear that Russia can secure sufficient gas to fill the new pipelines as its Shtokman field remains undeveloped and Turkmenistan is now also selling to China. Economically it makes more sense to upgrade Ukraine’s transit system which will remain an integral piece even if these projects are completed. Politically, however, Russia may be looking for alternate routes to European customers which would allow it to shut off gas selectively to some in the future. This would enable it to further leverage its energy supplier role in individual relationships with European states.

At the recent Davos meeting, Yanukovych argued that the best solution is for Russia to invest into Ukraine’s deteriorating gas infrastructure – a move that would modernize the transit system and increase its capacity by 20 to 60 billion cubic meters of gas.

Yanukovych contends that a $5 billion Russian investment in Ukrainian infrastructure will yield similar or better results than the $25 billion being spent on the South Stream pipeline, which Russia is pursuing instead. However, while Ukraine does not have the money to modernize itself, Russia has historically demonstrated interest only in agreements where it obtains the dominant interest with minority partners who defer to Gazprom.

Late last year, following an agreement between the EU and Ukraine on cooperation in Ukrainian infrastructure modernization, Gazprom announced that it would seek a joint partnership with Naftogaz, bluntly stating that Russian funding of the modernization would accompany a merger between the two companies. This move affirmed beliefs that future Ukrainian negotiations with Gazprom will only come as part of a larger discussion on at least partial Russian ownership of Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Yanukovych and Ukraine are running out of cards to play against the Russians, having already exchanged an extension of Russian basing rights in the Black Sea for a 30 percent “reduction” in gas prices. As Ukraine’s negotiating position weakens, opportunities grow for Gazprom to achieve its ultimate goal – acquisition and control of Ukrainian infrastructure and consolidated control over the gas flow to Europe. Ukrainians cherish pipeline ownership as part of their national sovereignty and a key source of leverage, but they cannot survive on IMF loans forever or even afford to maintain their infrastructure. Without active European involvement and investment Russia will continue to chip away at Ukraine until it acquires a controlling share of its energy infrastructure.

As pro-Russian as Yanukovych originally seemed, he is on a desperate quest for balance, possibly found through European investment in Ukraine. Indeed, the proposal for greater EU investment that emerged from the March 2009 International Investment Conference on the Modernization of Ukraine’s Gas Transit System was a good first step in this direction. Opening Ukraine to foreign investment and partnership with the EU represents a practical step towards resolving the volatility of gas disputes and the problems plaguing Ukrainian energy infrastructure.


If the European Union is willing and able to invest money in a modernization and reform program, its capital would come with strings attached – including demands for market transparency, privatization of Naftogaz, and the raising of domestic prices to market levels. An EU presence would bring modernization to the transit infrastructure, transparency into natural gas transport, and limit the ability of either Ukraine or Russia to use technical issues as a negotiating tactic. It would also temper the possibility that future disputes will turn into energy crises. Given Europe’s dependence on both Ukraine and Russia for natural gas, breaking the bilateral nature of the negotiations carries a host of benefits for Europe and provides a degree of stability and mediator in the event of gas disputes.

Such an arrangement would give Ukraine an invested ally and financial capital, but not at the expense of losing a key pillar of its sovereignty. Russia would also gain from a long-term, stable and dependable energy partner. Moreover, a serious EU investment does not preclude Russian investment, only denies control. While this step would go a long way, the foundation for an energy security framework that ensures stability of supply to Europe will not be found in a single solution. Alternative pipelines, if they materialize, will relieve some of the dependence on Ukraine’s infrastructure and a foreign-capitalized modernization program would significantly improve its reliability while locking the country into long-needed domestic energy reforms.

The dire state of the Ukrainian economy should provide the EU with the necessary impetus to act. Time is a factor as Ukraine’s negotiating position continues to weaken. Ukraine cannot be viewed as a business opportunity alone, but rather as a long-term partner imperative to ensure European energy security. Without greater EU investment, Gazprom will likely force Ukrainian cession of ownership rights over its pipeline network in future negotiations over gas prices and modernization. While partnership with the EU will not fully fix the Ukrainian energy sector, it is certain to reduce the volatility of future pricing disputes and is the only solution that does not leave Europe’s security solely in Russian hands.

Richard B. Andres is a professor of national security strategy at the National War College and senior fellow and chair of the energy & environmental security policy program with the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

U.S. Department of State: Ukraine sees less acts of anti-Semitism

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor of the U.S. Department of State has noted that the number of acts of anti-Semitism in 2010 in Ukraine has decreased.The U.S. Department of State said this in the "2010 Human Rights Reports: Ukraine" published on its Web site on April 8.

The report says there were a number of acts of anti-Semitism, some involving vandalism of Jewish property. According to the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine's (VAAD) there were nine incidents of vandalism during the year compared with 19 incidents in 2009, and 13 in 2008.

There were no reports of violent incidents of anti-Semitism.

The report lists last year's desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Ternopil, Pavlohrad, Sumy and desecrations of Holocaust monuments in Kirovohrad and in Sevastopol, and paint thrown on the walls of a synagogue in Sumy.

At the same time, there were no reports that the authorities had identified suspects or made arrests in cases of vandalism against Jewish property in 2009, including swastikas on the walls of Jewish Charity Center in Melitopol, Nazi symbols on the front door of the Kyiv office of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, and paint splashed on the monument marking the birthplace of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson in Mykolaiv.

In 2010 members of marginal populist and nationalist parties and organizations continued to make occasional extremist, intolerant, and anti-Semitic statements. In January unidentified individuals in Sudak, Crimea were reported to have passed out leaflets calling for genocide against Jews in the country. As of the end of the year, there had been no further developments in the incident.

The report also names the reaction of law-enforcement officers on the anti-Semitic statements by Serhiy Ratushnyak, the former mayor of Uzhhorod, and member of Kherson City Council Serhiy Kyrychenko.

According to the report, Anti-Semitic articles continued to appear in small publications, although their number and circulation continued to decline. According to VAAD, 46 anti-Semitic articles were published in major print media outlets in 2009, compared with 54 in 2008 and 542 in 2007. VAAD said the sharp decrease in anti-Semitic publications was due primarily to concerted political and social pressure by NGOs, the government and the Jewish community on the Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP). In previous years, MAUP, a private higher-education institution, accounted for nearly 90 percent of all anti-Semitic material, but has now ceased the publications.

The document also noted the continued efforts to combat anti-Semitism by senior government officials and politicians from various political parties by speaking out against extremism and social intolerance, and by criticizing anti-Semitic acts.

According to the government the SBU acted to prevent at least six hate crimes in 2009 and 2010, including illegal activities by skinhead groups in Cherkassy and Dnepropetrovsk and an attack on the cultural center Hesed Haim in Sumy.

An estimated 103,600 Jews live in the country, comprising approximately 0.2% of the population,, the report quotes the data of government census and international Jewish groups. Local Jewish leaders estimated the number of persons with an ethnic Jewish heritage to be as high as 370,000

Chernobyl: A Nuclear Accident With No End?

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- As nuclear workers in Japan struggle to contain radiation from the Fukushima reactor, world attention is turning back to Chernobyl, Ukraine. There, people prepare to mark the 25th anniversary of the explosion that blew the roof off Reactor Number 4.
Soviet planners designed Chernobyl in the 1960s to become the largest nuclear power station in Europe.

Instead, Chernobyl is remembered today as the site of the largest nuclear disaster in the world.

Late on the night of April 25, 1985, Yuri Andreyev left his shift as an engineer at Nuclear Reactor No. 4. Ninety minutes later, a safety experiment went awry. The fuel rods melted down, an explosion blew the roof off, and a raspberry-colored light spewed into the night sky.

When Andreyev returned to work, he saw a scene of devastation. After stepping over the discarded boots, jacket and helmets of fire fighters, he stood in the ruined computer control room and looking up saw blue sky.

Twenty-five years later, Andreyev runs Chernobyl Forum, a political lobby for Ukraine’s 100,000 surviving "liquidators" or clean-up men and women. After weeks of heroic work, the liquidators had succeeded in sealing the plant in an improvised steel and cement "sarcophagus."

But that was not before Chernobyl leaked 10 times the radiation of the Hiroshima atom bomb into the environment.

Authorities mapped out the area of the highest contamination - and closed it to human habitation. About 350,000 were forcibly evacuated from a largely rural area slightly larger than the American state of Rhode Island. Still living in this area are sprinkled about 300 largely elderly holdouts, now called ‘forest people.’

After a quarter century, biologists call this zone "Europe’s largest wildlife refuge." With the presence of humans gone, the new colonists are thriving populations of gray wolves, brown bear, elk and wild boar.

In January, Ukraine opened the area to short, controlled visits by tourist buses.

Twenty five ago, a convoy of 1,000 buses evacuated the entire population of Pripyat. A bedroom community for nuclear power workers, it had once been a Soviet model city - home to 50,000 people.

On a recent afternoon, a lone tour bus made the reverse commute, moving slowly down a deserted Lenin Avenue. A recording of the original evacuation order played to a bus filled with Russian and Ukrainian tourists.

Dense forest covered what once were neatly tended playgrounds. Sturdy trees grew up between rusting swing sets. Bushes and trees made driving down side streets impossible. Through the branches, visitors could make out fading communist slogans - hailing the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Union and calling for ‘Atoms for Peace.’

Alexander Sirota lived in Pripyat, until he was 10. Now as a 35-year-old tour guide equipped with a walkie-talkie and digital Geiger counter, he shows tourists - some wearing face masks - his old apartment.

Surrounded by peeling paint, sagging strips of wall paper and light fixtures dissolving in rust, he said he is happy to visit his old home, a place where he spent "the happiest days of my childhood."

Boots crunching over broken glass, Sirota later takes tourists to the gutted cafeteria where he and his mother used to go for breakfast. Then, we go to his elementary school. There, 25 summers and 25 winters have taken their toll, causing a front wall to collapse, exposing old Soviet classroom murals.

For these tourists turned archeologists, the walk takes us below a rusting hammer and sickle sign atop the old administration building and then on to a frozen Ferris wheel - the centerpiece of an amusement park built for May Day festivities that never came.

Maxim, a young man from Donetsk, drops his face mask long enough to say Chernobyl tourism is ‘cool.' But he admits that none of his friends would join him. They said he was crazy to come here: "Insane. They are afraid. Afraid of radiation."

The tour bus rolls on to Chernobyl nuclear power station, stopping 200 yards from Reactor Number 4. Due to high levels of ambient radiation, we have only 20 minutes to pose for souvenir pictures in front of the old sarcophagus of decaying cement and rusting steel.

Laurin Dodd, an American engineer, has come to the site to talk to VOA. He is directing an American-led project to build a new, modern sarcophagus.

"The structure itself is almost a house of cards," says Dodd. "It was built with some robotics and under extreme conditions. And there are large gaping holes. If you go inside, you will see holes the size of picture windows with small mammals going in and out, birds flying in and out."

As scaffolding props up the old ventilation stack, Dodd races to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle.

"There is almost 200 tons of radioactive material still inside the old sarcophagus," said Dodd, who has worked here off and on since 1995. "And the existing sarcophagus was built in six months in 1986 under, I should say, fairly heroic conditions and it had a design life of 10 years - that’s almost 25 years ago."

Built on rails and rising high enough to cover the Statue of Liberty, the new containment structure is to be the largest moveable structure in the world. On April 19, Ukraine officials will hold a donor conference in Kyiv to raise $1 billion to build a structure designed to contain Chernobyl’s nuclear mess for another century.

As authorities in Japan may soon discover, big nuclear accidents have a defined beginning. It is unclear when they ever end.

Leaked Cables Show U.S. Was Wrong On Ukraine's Yanukovych

KIEV, Ukraine -- The U.S. Embassy cables from Ukraine leaked recently by the website WikiLeaks prompt two observations.
The first is that the embassy believed Party of Regions leader Viktor Yanukovych had changed from what he was during the 2004 election, when he sought to come to power through election fraud.

The second is that U.S. officials believed Yulia Tymoshenko was not a better option than Yanukovych in the 2010 presidential election. One cable quotes former President Leonid Kuchma as saying the 2010 election was one of "choosing between bad and very bad" -- with Tymoshenko allegedly being the latter.

Both of these positions were fundamentally wrong -- especially as seen from the hindsight of Yanukovych's first year in power.

The WikiLeaks cables critical of Tymoshenko were a reflection of her own mistakes and of lobbying by U.S. political consultants working for Yanukovych and the Party of Regions since 2005. One of the main criticisms was that Tymoshenko is a "populist," a claim that ignores widespread populism among all Ukrainian politicians.

Indeed, Yanukovych was the most populist in the 2010 elections and the prize for the most populist billboard goes to former President Viktor Yushchenko, who promised to place a 20 percent tax on yachts, limousines, and villas.

The U.S. Embassy bought into the accusation that Tymoshenko was beholden to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Tymoshenko was allegedly the biggest threat to Ukraine's sovereignty and willing to be Russia's pawn, according to a cable quoting oligarch Dmytro Firtash.

Evidence to back this conclusion was her supposed concessions on Georgia during Russia's 2008 invasion and Moscow-friendly positions on the Holodomor and the Black Sea Fleet.

In reality, Yanukovych has caved in to Russia on all three issues. During the Georgian crisis, the Party of Regions and the Communist Party (KPU) supported Russia's dismemberment of Georgia. Likewise, the Party of Regions and the KPU did not support the 2006 law on the Holodomor, and Yanukovych has adopted Russia's position that it was a Soviet (not Ukrainian) famine.

As president, he has extended the Black Sea Fleet base in Sevastopol until 2042-47. A January 2010 U.S. cable reports Yanukovych telling the U.S. ambassador that he was ready to extend the base in exchange for economic preferences from Russia.

Yanukovych, The Pro-Russian Candidate

All this led to the mistaken impression that Russia supported both Tymoshenko and Yanukovych in the 2010 election, as they were both "pro-Russian" and Moscow would be satisfied with either winning the election.

Yushchenko made this argument during the campaign, calling for his supporters not to vote for either candidate in the second round of balloting. That decision probably cost Tymoshenko the election, since she ended up losing by just 3 percentage points.

Other cables claimed it made no difference whether Yanukovych or Tymoshenko were elected as both are authoritarian and would allegedly seek to build a "Putinist vertical power." Such analysis contradicted the reality that Tymoshenko did not have the political machine, ability to blackmail deputies, or control of television stations necessary for such a project.

In addition, since 2008 Tymoshenko has consistently argued for the need to move toward a full parliamentary system. The authoritarianism of the Party of Regions is well documented among Ukrainian sociologists and has been plain to see during the transformation of parliament into a rubber-stamp institution and the return to a presidential constitution.

U.S. cables also buy into the argument of a "pragmatic" wing in the Party of Regions that supposedly desires to unify Ukraine and is pro-European, even possibly willing to compromise on NATO. Such views were intensely lobbied by U.S. political consultants working for the Party of Regions.

But the pragmatic wing of the Party of Regions was not evident in 2005-08 when the party voted with the KPU against legislation to join the WTO. Ukraine's 2008 WTO membership paves the way for the signing of a Deep Free Trade Agreement with the EU, a process the pragmatic wing of the Party of Regions allegedly supports.

These cables also ignored the anti-NATO stances of Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, arguing that this was election rhetoric to mobilize eastern Ukrainian voters that would be ignored after the voting. Again this was wrong, as President Yanukovych is the first of four post-Soviet Ukrainian presidents to not support NATO membership.

The party has also adopted contradictory positions on Ukraine's participation in NATO's Program for Peace exercises, opposing them when in opposition (leading to the cancellation of the Sea Breeze exercises in 2006 and 2009) and supporting them when in power.

U.S. cables from Ukraine also claimed that Yanukovych, if he won the 2010 election, would not be a Russian pawn and would defend Ukraine's interests, even if only in the economic sphere. Although Yanukovych defends his economic interests from Russia, he has adopted domestic, national-identity, and foreign policies that are in Russia's national interests.

Russia successfully lobbied for the four candidates who became the chairman of the Security Service (SBU) and ministers of education, foreign affairs, and defense. Russian citizens illegally control the president's bodyguards and the media-analytical section of the presidential administration.

The Real Yanukovych

U.S. cables from 2005-06 were more critical of the Party of Regions, but in 2008-10 two factors changed. First, public-relations efforts by U.S. consultants persuaded many in the West, including the U.S. Embassy, that Yanukovych had changed.

This ignored his unwillingness to concede the election fraud of 2004 and his continued contention that he won that election. A December 2005 cable quotes Yanukovych as complaining that a "putsch" and "Kuchma's machinations" had denied him the presidency. One cable analyzed the Party of Regions' "heavily pro-Russian campaign rhetoric" in 2006, attributing this to its co-option of Communist voters.

A second factor that changed the tone in the U.S. cables by 2008 was Western fatigue with the feuding Orange political leaders, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. The pair had squandered the five years of opportunity given to them by the Orange Revolution.

All four elections held on Yanukovych's watch -- two as governor in Donetsk in 1999 and 2002 and two as prime minister and president in 2004 and 2010 -- have been criticized as unfree.

U.S. cables from 2005-06 showed that senior members of the Kuchma government who were involved in abuse of office and election fraud were embedded in the Party of Regions, which is described as a "cover for Donetsk criminal circles and oligarchs."

These cables continued to be skeptical about the new face of the Party of Regions and express concern it would abuse state administrative resources, tamper with election laws, and seek to close media outlets they do not control. This is precisely what Yanukovych has done in his first year in office.