Kuchma names Medvedchuk chief of administration (06/23/02)

Kuchma names Medvedchuk chief of administration

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - President Leonid Kuchma named Viktor Medvedchuk, formerly a lawmaker and head of the Social Democratic Party (United), to head his administration on June 12.

In his first comments on the matter, President Kuchma said that he wanted closer cooperation with the Verkhovna Rada.

"One of the reasons I appointed Mr. Medvedchuk is to find a way to work more closely with the Parliament," said Mr. Kuchma while in Vinnytsia on June 17.

Mr. Medvedchuk replaced Volodymyr Lytvyn, head of the For a United Ukraine political bloc during the recent elections to Parliament, who resigned after he won a seat on March 31. Mr. Lytvyn was elected chairman of the Verkhovna Rada on May 28.

Speaking at his first regular briefing as the new Rada chairman, Mr. Lytvyn failed to give his successor as the president's chief of staff a ringing endorsement.

"If it was the appointment of the head of government or the chairman of the Parliament, I might have a comment, but the appointment of the head of the presidential administration is a decision that is entirely the right of the president," stated Mr. Lytvyn, who added that Mr. Kuchma deeply weighs all such appointments.

Mr. Lytvyn noted that the profile and the responsibilities of the office had increased since he took office, which he gave as a reason that Mr. Medvedchuk's appointment has been looked at with such a critical eye by the media.

The appointment surprised some political experts because it puts much authority in the hands of a person who is outside Mr. Kuchma's inner circle. The chief of staff organizes the president's agenda and has much input on whom he meets with and has the power to appoint a good portion of the presidential administration. As a close aide, he also has considerable sway over how the president looks at political issues.

However, Mr. Medvedchuk is far from a political outsider. He was first vice-chairman of the Verkhovna Rada in the last convocation and served as acting chairman while ex-Chairman Ivan Pliusch was ill. He is also head of the SDPU, a political force that counts as its members some of Ukraine's richest and most influential individuals, including ex-president Leonid Kravchuk and the new first vice-chairman of the Parliament, Oleksander Zinchenko.

Some experts said that Mr. Medvedchuk's appointment was repayment for a political debt for the unwavering support by the Social Democratic Party (United) for Mr. Lytvyn's candidacy as parliamentary chairman, which he won with no votes to spare. The SDPU formed a loose political partnership with the pro-presidential United Ukraine bloc in the Verkhovna Rada during elections of the parliamentary leadership, to ensure that a pro-presidential representative was elected chairman.

The coalition is expected to hold for the time being as normal legislative work begins, even though various members of the two factions are highly competitive rivals in the business world.

Mr. Medvedchuk is widely regarded as an adept political manager as well as a keen political strategist and a knowledgeable attorney, which was his first profession. Political analyst Mykhailo Pohrebynskyi, director of the Center for Political and Conflict Studies, said that the appointment of Mr. Medvedchuk was a move to ensure better relations with the Verkhovna Rada while giving the president a good manager.

"The president needed a political manager who will coordinate the huge volume of ambitions, wishes and ideas [that pass his way]," explained Mr. Pohrebynskyi. He added that the pro-Russia stance the SDPU adopted towards the end of the parliamentary election campaign was merely an attempt to draw votes from a certain segment of the Ukrainian population. Mr. Pohrebynskyi said that Mr. Medvedchuk is politically pro-Europe, a stand that is clearly enunciated in the SDPU's political platform.

Mr. Medvedchuk's former protégé and fellow member of the SDPU, Mykhailo Brodskyi, who now leads the Yabluko Party, gave a slightly different reason for the appointment of Mr. Medvedchuk.

"President Leonid Kuchma is getting ready for the end of his mandate, and needs a good attorney right away," explained Mr. Brodskyi, reported the magazine Polityka i Kultura.

The magazine criticized Mr. Medvedchuk for stating only days before his appointment, "I am not a candidate for the post of head of the administration," - even as negotiations between him and the president proceeded.

Viktor Yushchenko, another leading Ukrainian politician, also failed to endorse the appointment of Mr. Medvedchuk.

"You know my relations with Medvedchuk, and I have nothing to add to that," Mr. Yushchenko curtly stated during a break in the parliamentary session on June 14.

Mr. Medvedchuk is believed to have been the person who orchestrated the vote of no confidence in the Cabinet of Ministers last summer, which led to the resignation of Mr. Yushchenko as prime minister. The conventional wisdom is that Mr. Medvedchuk wanted to remove a potential rival for the presidential chair from a high-profile post. Mr. Yushchenko, however, has remained the most popular politician by far in Ukraine since then, retaining a nearly 30 percent popular rating, while Mr. Medvedchuk steadily receives about 10 percent support.

While political experts are at odds over whether his new post will give Mr. Medvedchuk sufficient authority and the public profile to raise his rating and boost himself onto the presidential chair, no one doubts his qualifications to head the presidential administration.

Mr. Kuchma's new chief of staff is an accomplished lawyer who heads the Ukrainian Society of Lawyers and a politician who was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in 1997. He has been a member of various presidential commissions, including the President's Economic Council, the National Council on Corruption and the National Council on Local Self-Government.

Mr. Medvedchuk is a successful and highly controversial businessman, as well. He and his business partner, Heorhii Surkis, have a controlling interest in the Dynamo Kyiv Soccer Club and are the founders of the Slavutych Corp., which has a variety of interests and does extensive trade in gas and oil. In addition, Mr. Medvedchuk is founder and owner of the international law firm BIM.

The new presidential chief of staff was born in 1952 in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. At the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was the representative from Ukraine of the Lawyers Society of the USSR. He was the state-appointed lawyer for Vasyl Stus during his 1980 trial, which led to the Ukrainian poet's second incarceration.

| Home Page |