Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych must come up with a clear, strategic plan as soon as possible in order to face the country's political and economic challenges, says Amanda Paul of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. Amanda Paul is policy analyst and programme executive at the European Policy Centre in Brussels. The following was sent exclusively to Euractiv. "Ukraine enters 2012 facing many challenges but some opportunities too. Co-hosting the 2012 Euro Football championship with Poland offers Ukraine’s leadership a golden opportunity to showcase the country. However, at the same time, Ukraine faces serious problems both domestically and in its foreign policy, which require a coherent, dynamic and strategic approach. On the foreign policy front...

On January 30, 2012, the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) sent letters to President Viktor Yanukovych, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn, and Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, expressing grave concern over the content of adraft law on amendments to certain legislative acts of Ukraine, tabled in the Verkhovna Rada by the Cabinet of Ministers, which provides for the reform of the oil and gas industry. In particular, the UWC highlighted the proposed amendments to article 7 of the Law of Ukraine on trunk and distribution lines, which currently bans the reorganization (merger, joining, division, separation or transformation) and privatization of state-owned trunk pipeline enterprises. In the new draft of this article, the references to banning the reorganization and privatization of state-owned trunk pipeline enterprises are repealed and replaced with terminology that broadens the government’s mandate. The new language provides...

Ukraine’s president showed no mercy Friday for imprisoned former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, despite increasing fears that her case will hurt his country’s struggling economy and its relations with the European Union. The gas contract with Russia that was the premise for Tymoshenko’s conviction “is Ukraine’s biggest problem today,” President Viktor Yanukovych said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He added that he foresaw more judicial troubles for the ex-premier. Tymoshenko, a bitter rival of the current president, is serving a 7-year sentence on charges of abuse of office in a case the West has condemned as politically motivated. Her family accuses prison authorities of denying her proper medical care. Tymoshenko was found guilty last year of overstepping her authority while negotiating the natural gas import contract with Russia in 2009. Authorities say the contract was not in Ukraine’s economic interest. She charges...

This week, I was initially going to table our predictions for 2012 from the Strategic Foresight Institute, but that can wait. More significant events have appeared recently, that need wider media coverage. Many people were concerned that Ukraine would fall off of the EU spotlight with the election of a new President of the Parliamentary Assembly Council of Europe (PACE) on January 23. That’s not the case. Jean-Claude Mignon said at a press conference right after his election that he is concerned about the case of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and believes that Ukraine should follow European standards of democracy and...

Оn January 23 the prime minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin published in Nezavisimaya Gazeta another policy article called ‘Russia: the national question. Self-determination of the Russian nation: a multi-ethnical civilization sealed with the Russian cultural core.’ It seems that Putin covets Lenin and Stalin’s laurels, known in the post-Soviet space as “experts” in solving national questions. It is known that Lenin wrote the article called ‘Working Class and the National Question’ and Stalin wrote the article ‘The National Question and Social Democracy.’ Everyone remembers well the results of this national policy whose consequences are still felt by all the countries put into the “prison of nations.” Just like his predecessors Putin thinks that the national question “is fundamental for the country.” He admits that the national question in Russia is a burning issue, first of all, because of the “expenditures caused by the mass migration.” In his characteristic style

Occasionally one may find an engaging theme in Svoboda newspaper, published by the Ukrainian National Association in New Jersey, besides its all-important obituary page. This time (Jan. 13) it was an article about scholarly research on the subject of the Ukrainian language. My attention was drawn by its sweeping title: “Halychyna will always be Ukraine’s Piedmont,” which may invite all kinds of commentary, wisecracks included. Actually, it is difficult to disagree with that claim. Having lived most of the first five years of life in the Tomsk area of Siberia, the awareness of the geographic distance lingers on and imparts some objectivity concerning Ukraine’s regional mindsets. A cogent argument can be...

“There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!” thundered Max Shachtman—once known as Leon Trotsky’s “foreign minister”—in New York City in 1950. By popular account, the line had been cooked up that night by a young Shachtmanite named Irving Howe; it ended the debate between the anti-Stalinist socialist Schachtman and his opponent, Earl Browder, former head of the Communist Party USA, who had been expelled from the party in 1946 at the behest of Moscow Central after suggesting that Soviet Communism and American capitalism might coexist after all. Browder’s grandson Bill...

My appointment as director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies ends as of June 30, 2012, and currently the University of Alberta is conducting an international search for a successor. I have served as director for almost two decades (eighteen years as director and one as acting director). As my term is coming to an end, I would like to look back and note some of the transformations, accomplishments, and difficulties of the past two decades. When I arrived in March 1992, everyone at CIUS was working at fever pitch. As Ukraine gained its independence, CIUS became a clearing house of information for the Canadian government and for Western academic, political, and business elites. New opportunities presented themselves for undertaking academic projects in Ukraine. At the same time...

The Russian economy generates no drivers for a political crisis – this elementary proposition underpins Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s steady march to the presidential elections that are just six weeks away. He returns to the good economic news in every speech and article arguing that Russia with its 4 percent GDP growth in 2011 was behind only China and India, while economists point out that Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine also performed better (Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Vedomosti, January 18). Putin also...

Paying Taxes 2012, the annual study from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the World Bank, and the International Finance Corporation, was released a few weeks ago. The study “measures the ease of paying taxes across 183 economies worldwide, covering both the cost of taxes and the administrative burden of tax compliance.” It contains grim news for Ukraine. The study ranks countries along four measures: ease of paying taxes, the number of tax payments, the time to comply, and the total tax rate (which measures the “amount of taxes and mandatory contributions borne by the business in the second year of operation, expressed as a...