ANALYSIS: Putin, Kuchma and Brzezinski (08/19/01)

ANALYSIS

Putin, Kuchma and Brzezinski

by Taras Kuzio

Allegations of a Western conspiracy to unseat President Leonid Kuchma have been fueled and encouraged by media sources close to Russia's President Vladimir Putin who have been alleging that a small group of U.S. policymakers, dubbed the "Brzezinski conspiracy," are behind the attempt to unseat Kuchma. The main source for this KGB-style disinformation is the internet site Strana.ru controlled by Mr. Putin's image-maker, Gleb Pavlovski.

Mr. Kuchma's troubles with "Kuchmagate" are seen as an opportunity to position Ukraine alongside Belarus and Moldova in a four-strong bloc that would confront 'Europe' and NATO together. The most pro-Russian oligarchic parliamentary group, Labor Ukraine, based in Mr. Kuchma's home city of Dnipropetrovsk, has a parliamentary lobby group "To Europe Together With Russia" led by the former head of the presidential administration, Dmytro Tabachnyk.

Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko's dismissal has paved the way for the strengthening of Russian-Ukrainian cooperation. The appointment of Viktor Chernomyrdin as Russia's ambassador to Ukraine and President Putin's personal envoy aims to build on President Kuchma's isolation in the West by drawing Ukraine further into the Russia-Belarus union which will soon be joined by Moldova.

Mr. Yuschenko was seen as an obstacle to this eastward re-orientation of Ukraine and was accused of being in league with the "Brzezinski group" to divide Ukraine and Russia, and turn Ukraine into a pro-Western, anti-Russian state.

Since the events of Kuchmagate unfolded in Ukraine in November of last year, the state-run and oligarch-controlled Ukrainian television has adopted this conspiracy theory and has accused the United States of being behind the affair - a "provocation" whose goal is to unseat President Kuchma.

Rather than focus on the large number of issues raised on the illicitly made tapes and the president's alleged crimes, ranging from murder, corruption and election fraud to abuse of office, the Ukrainian media have claimed that this was a pre-planned provocation directed against Ukraine and its president. Mr. Kuchma repeated the same line when interviewed on CBS's "60 Minutes" in April.

Apparently in an attempt to deflect criticism from Mr. Kuchma, a Russian disinformation campaign has claimed that future members of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement doctored the tapes to implicate the president in the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze. Then, the story goes, they killed him themselves to implicate Mr. Kuchma. As these "nationalist" forces are financed by the United States, Russian disinformation alleges that "it will turn out that the journalist was murdered for U.S. money."

The reformist and pro-Western Yuschenko government, which a communist-oligarch parliamentary alliance voted to oust on April 26, was allegedly in cohoots with Western intelligence, according to Russian sources. This was "proved" by the United States granting asylum to Mykola Melnychenko, the former presidential guard who made the Kuchmagate tapes, a week before the vote to oust Yuschenko. The other piece of "evidence" was that Katherine Yuschenko, his Ukrainian American wife, had allegedly worked for the U.S. National Security Council and the State Department and must by implication be a CIA agent.

A documentary that outlined these outrageous claims was broadcast by state-controlled Russian Public Television (RPT) and then re-broadcast by Inter in Ukraine on the eve of the parliamentary vote to oust Prime Minister Yuschenko. Inter broadcasts mainly in Russian, including the re-broadcasting of RPT, and is controlled by the United Social Democrats, a group of oligarchs.

According to various sources of the current disinformation campaign, pro-Yuschenko reformist and "nationalist-fascist" political parties are allegedly financed by Western intelligence agencies - a claim reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda that attacked émigré bourgeois nationalists."

Radio Liberty's Ukrainian-language service, led by U.S. citizen Roman Kupchinsky, also has been the brunt of Soviet-style propaganda because it was the main vehicle to broadcast to Ukraine the Kuchmagate tapes.

Another plank in this alleged conspiracy is Freedom House, which obtains grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and is led by Ukrainian American Adrian Karatnycky. Freedom House is allegedly biased in favor of supporting the anti-Kuchma opposition and anti-Russian national democrats and nationalists.

The Russian and Ukrainian media have claimed that Ukraine Without Kuchma, For Truth, the Forum for National Salvation and the Ukrainian Legal Foundation (headed by anti-Kuchma oppositionist Serhii Holovatyi) are financed by the U.S. intelligence community and foundations. Anti-Kuchma protests are ridiculed as protest actions, 'conducted with the money of U.S. taxpayers who thus pay for the street fights and protest rallies of Ukrainian fascists staged in front of dozens of TV cameras."

These claims of an allegedly anti-Kuchma Western conspiracy to unseat President Kuchma have strong backers among the Ukrainian elites. Anatolii Orel, head of the foreign affairs department of the presidential administration, is convinced that Kuchmagate is a conspiracy by Western intelligence. Mr. Orel, a pro-Russian grey cardinal in the Mr. Kuchma team and a long-serving former Soviet diplomat, is the architect of Ukraine's increasingly pro-Russian orientation. With Russian support Mr. Orel orchestrated the October 2000 removal of pro-Western Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Borys Tarasyuk.

Presidential adviser and image-maker Mykhailo Pogrebinsky, head of the Russophile Center for Political and Conflict Studies - the ideological brain behind the Russophile SLON (Social-Liberal Alliance) bloc in the March 1998 elections - also has been eager to promote these allegations of a Western conspiracy. SLON's campaign slogan in defense of the Russian language and culture in Ukraine failed to win more than 2 percent of the vote. Vladimir Malynkovych, who presumably at one stage did not feel uncomfortable in working for Radio Liberty's Ukrainian service, has transformed himself in recent months from a sharp critic of Mr. Kuchma to his best defender. Taking part with Mr. Pogrebinsky in a roundtable titled "What Kind of Ukraine Russia Needs" in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 25), he heaped scorn on Mr. Yuschenko and the anti-Kuchma opposition while defending President Kuchma from the claims made on the basis of the Kuchmagate tapes.

The Russophile Ukrainian media has alleged that the West is perturbed by the pro-Russian orientation of Ukraine and especially by the potential for Ukraine to provide Russia with military facilities to help counter the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). President Kuchma met Russian President Putin in the world's former largest nuclear missile factory Pivdenmash (Kuchma was director of the factory during the Soviet era) in Dnipropetrovsk in February.

Russia may well have been behind the Melnychenko tapes in league with Mr. Kuchma's domestic Russophile opponents in a Soviet-style operation against a foreign leader. Putin has since skillfully used this information and the fallout of Kuchmagate to make Mr. Kuchma believe that the "provocation" was all a Western conspiracy to unseat him and that his only real friend is Russia.

Taras Kuzio is a research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at York University, Toronto.

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