February 18, 2021

Rada resolution calls Euro-Maidan a nation-building moment

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Presidential Office of Ukraine

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (left) speaks to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces on February 15 in the U.A.E.

 

Zelenskyy signs memoranda with UAE for $3 billion investment

KYIV – The Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s legislative body, on February 17 passed a resolution saying that the pro-democracy Euro-Maidan uprising that culminated this month seven years ago was a significant nation-building moment in the country’s history.

Referred to as the “Revolution of Dignity” in the document, a solid majority of 295 lawmakers voted to give recognition to the nearly three-months of anti-government protests against then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s increasingly authoritarian rule.
“The Revolution of Dignity is one of the key moments of Ukrainian state-building and an expression of the national idea of freedom,” the resolution reads.

Exactly 104 people were killed and 2,500 injured as a consequence of the violent clampdown by authorities against protesters, most of which occurred on February 18-20, 2014, according to prosecutors. Mr. Yanukovych subsequently fled office and in 2019 was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 13 years for high treason while in self-exile in Russia.

In the aftermath, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and eventually seized it in early March 2014. Simultaneously, Moscow started to orchestrate anti-Kyiv protests that spread throughout the north- and southeast – including in Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolayiv, Kherson, Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Government and auxiliary buildings in some of the cities were temporarily occupied by pro-Moscow protesters that included Russian nationals in the ensuing weeks of the revolution.

This period of Russia’s overall attempted seizure of north-southeastern Ukraine was called by Ukrainian political analysts the failed “Russian Spring.”

By April 2014, most of the Russia-orchestrated protests had either subsided or were quashed. Yet they ultimately culminated in the onset of the Donbas War, when a Moscow-devised armed covert invasion of the easternmost Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts ensued in mid-April 2014.

More than 14,000 people have been killed and over 1 million internally displaced so far in the still simmering war, the United Nations says, despite two internationally brokered ceasefires that have never taken hold.

Defense Ministry of Ukraine

A Ukrainian sniper looks through the scope of his rifle in eastern Ukraine on February 10.

 

Zelenskyy signs $3 billion in memoranda with UAE

Earlier in the week, President Volody­myr Zelenskyy went on an official visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where his delegation penned “a number of memoranda and contracts totaling $3 billion.”

Most of the deals were signed with Mubadala Investment Fund, the oil-rich nation’s sovereign wealth fund, reported Ukraine Business News.

“Ukraine has very promising potential for foreign investment, and the signing of memorandums with leading entities of Ukraine represents a commitment to explore potential investments and areas of cooperation on a case-by-case basis,” Faris Al Mazrui, head of the fund’s investment program for post-Soviet countries, told WAM, the Emirates’ news agency. “We are impressed by the quality and caliber of Ukrainian businesses,” Mr. Al Mazrui said.

The memoranda, which are not legally binding, are in agriculture, clean energy, and port logistics and blockchain technology.

Whereas Mr. Zelenskyy’s statement also included “contracts,” The Ukrainian Weekly could not verify on the UAE side among reciprocal government and bilateral company statements or news releases that contracts are part of the agreement.

The day before the presidential trip to Abu Dhabi, three Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a landmine explosion in the Bakhmut district of government-controlled Donetsk Oblast on February 14. The president instructed Defense Minister Andriy Taran and Ruslan Khomchack, the Armed Forces commander, to immediately investigate their deaths on the ground and report by February 22.

Two days later, the State Bureau of Investigation announced that it launched a probe into their deaths.

The president’s office noted that the investigation is looking at three versions of the landmine explosion: careless handling of ammunition and explosive devices; a terrorist attack by militants remotely detonating a mine; and negligence of military personnel when organizing the movement of the military during combat missions.

IMF freezes Ukraine funding

Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund said it will not continue loaning money to Ukraine following its unusually long remote review mission that lasted six weeks and ended on February 12.

Kyiv has been awaiting the next $700 million installment of its $5.2 billion, 18-month loan program from the Washington-based lender. It has already received about $2 billion.

“The country must show more progress on reforms to reach an agreement for a new tranche,” Goesta Ljungman, IMF Resident Representative in Ukraine, said on February 13.

He added that more needs to be done to legislatively restore anti-graft bodies, clean up the judicial system and phase out price control on natural gas.

Additional funding of 600 million euros from the European Union and $750 million from the World Bank is contingent upon Kyiv following through on its IMF loan obligations.

Swedish economist and veteran IMF watcher Anders Aslund, writing a blog for the Washington-based Atlantic Council, said that the IMF mission took so long because it had “hoped the Ukrainian government would realize it was on the wrong track, but it did not.”

He furthermore laid blame on Mr. Zelenskyy for not pushing through the needed reforms to unlock additional funding.

“Alas, many are now coming to regard him [Mr. Zelenskyy] as more like a servant of oligarch interests,” Mr. Aslund wrote, referring to the president’s Servant of the People party.

COVID-19 spike in Ivano-Frankivsk

While Ukraine still hasn’t implemented a COVID-19 vaccination program, Viktor Lyashko, the chief sanitary doctor, urgently visited Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast amid surging coronavirus cases in the city.

On February 16, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the bed occupancy rate in many of the region’s hospitals is at more than 90 percent.

“The Ivano-Frankivsk region has one of the highest levels of morbidity per 100 thousand population and the second highest level in the number of occupied beds – an average of 73 percent,” the prime minister said.

He noted that there are more “actively” infected patients – 9,339 – “than in the city of Kyiv.”

A chief doctor of a children’s hospital in the region told The Ukrainian Weekly that the situation in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast is “serious.”

The doctor, who wished not to be named for fear of repercussions and for not having authorization to speak to the media, said that “extra beds are being deployed in other hospitals [that are not for COVID-19 patients].

The doctor said they “have many children [and their numbers] are growing rapidly.”
Asked whether the rise in infections was due to the influx of winter tourists like snowboarders and skiers, the doctor said, “no.” The physician said, “it’s because how they celebrated Christmas [in January] …this is called caroling and now many villages are sick.”

Ukraine is supposed to receive more than 100,000 vaccines this month to start vaccinating its front-line medical workers and military personnel, but no date has been set for the start of the initiative.

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