Volume 8 Number 3

Summer 1999

Constitutional Watch
     A country-by-country update on constitutional politics in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR

Ukraine - Recent events demonstrate once again that, in Ukraine, politics is a crucial business, and such business is, therefore, dangerous. On May 18, the Central Electoral Commission registered nine presidential candidates, including incumbent president Leonid Kuchma; People's Rukh (PR) leader Gennady Udovenko; the head of the Communist Party (CP), Pyotr Simonenko; Socialist Party leader Alexander Moroz; the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Natalia Vitrenko, and four others from various political groupings.

At the PR party congress, on February 19, 30 of the party's 48 parliamentary deputies voted in favor of a no-confidence motion against Vyacheslav Chornovil, leader of PR since its formation. Chornovil was accused of lacking flexibility and of ignoring the desires of other party members in decision making. On February 27, PR elected Yuri Kostenko, a former environment minister, to head the party. But Chornovil challenged the decision, arguing that the vote on his dismissal did not meet the quorum requirements spelled out in party bylaws. He was supported by the party's presidential candidate, Gennady Udovenko. The dispute effectively led to a split in the party.

On March 2, the 16 pro-Chornovil deputies registered a separate parliamentary caucus headed by Chornovil, called Popular Rukh 1. The infighting took a dramatic turn when Chornovil was killed in a car accident, on March 25. Parliament soon established a commission to investigate his death, although Ministry of Interior officials and police authorities declared the event an accident. While no evidence has come to light that Chornovil's death was the result of foul play, given the number of political assassinations and attempted assassinations in Ukraine, many local observers concluded that Chornovil had been murdered. After Chornovil's death, Udovenko was appointed the acting head of Popular Rukh 1 and was elected chairman of the party's still-divided parliamentary caucus. The Ministry of Justice recognized the Udovenko-led group as the legitimate successor to the original party, provoking strong protests from Kostenko and his supporters. The split could ruin PR's chances in the presidential election, since both Udovenko and Kostenko have registered as candidates.

Because relations between the president and parliament are perennially abysmal, NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia had little practical impact on Ukraine's domestic politics. CP, which holds approximately one-fourth of the seats in parliament, called the war illegal, demanded that Kuchma withdraw Ukraine from all agreements with NATO, and proposed nuclear rearmament. For his part, Kuchma ignored CP demands. On April 23, parliament succeeded in passing a resolution requiring the government to limit the country's cooperation with NATO. Various MPs condemned NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia as Òunjustified and inhumane, calling on Kuchma to submit Ukraine's cooperation programs with NATO to parliament for approval. Ukraine has made several agreements with the alliance, including participation in the Partnership for Peace, joint military training, and a plan to build in Ukraine an international military-training center for peacekeepers. According to Art. 85 of the Constitution, parliament grants consent to the binding character of international treaties of Ukraine within the term established by law. But the Constitution does not detail any procedure for ratifying military agreements, except those involving foreign troops stationed in Ukraine or the movement of Ukrainian troops abroad. Parliament also demanded that Ukraine immediately halt the dismantling of its strategic bombers and nuclear-missile silos. Earlier, on March 28, CP and its allies proposed a resolution authorizing Ukraine's nuclear rearmament, but it failed in parliament. The president and the government have simply ignored parliament's demands on these issues and have taken no steps toward reducing Ukraine's cooperation with NATO. For its part, the president's administration also condemned the Russian-Belarusian Union. According to Foreign Minister Boris Tarasyuk, the union threatens European stability and security.

Local observers believe that Ukraine's last-minute withdrawal, on June 21, from NATO military exercises on the Black Sea indicated nothing more than the president's desire to distance himself symbolically from the West in order to gain popularity with Ukrainian Russophones before the October presidential election. Kuchma has no intention of reducing the country's involvement with NATO and, in recent months, has taken steps to solidify Ukraine's relationship with the alliance. For example, on May 12, the president signed the Law on Peacekeeping Operations. This law allows Ukrainian armed forces to participate in peacekeeping missions authorized by the UN Security Council, the OSCE, or other regional international institutions responsible for maintaining international peace and security. Ukrainian participation in peacekeeping operations abroad must be sanctioned by the president with subsequent approval by parliament. Ukrainian soldiers can be sent on such operations only on a voluntary basis.

In May and June, the IMF released to Ukraine several installments of aid credits, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. After the blistering report on Ukraine issued by the IMF and the World Bank last March, few expected the country would receive IMF credits anytime soon. The latest spate of lending has suggested to some that IMF credits are a payoff to Ukraine for not objecting too loudly to NATO's actions in the Balkans. (Debt relief was a major topic of the G8 summit in Cologne, Germany, on June 18-20, which followed on the heels of Operation Allied Force.) Kuchma was only a passive critic of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia. He did allow the Yugoslav national airline to store a few civilian aircraft in Ukraine so the entire fleet would not be destroyed. And Ukraine was accused by the US State Department of smuggling oil to Belgrade. But Kuchma did little to insult NATO or to befriend Milosevic.

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Kuchma has recently made a few small gains in reforming the Ukrainian economy. On March 9, the Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional a parliamentary directive adopted in 1998 that temporarily banned increases in the prices of utilities and public transportation until the government paid all its wage and pension arrears. The Court ruled that the legislation was not within parliament's competence and therefore violates Arts. 85 and 92 of the Constitution, detailing those competencies. The Court argued that, according to the laws in force, prices can be regulated only by executive bodies.

The day following the ruling, the government announced a hike in electricity and gas rates, by 20 percent and 25 percent, respectively. The IMF required the government to abolish utility subsidies as a condition for releasing a $2.2 billion loan, frozen last fall but resumed on March 26. On March 17, parliament voted 232 to 18 to reinstate the price-hike ban, this time as an amendment to the existing Law on Prices and Pricing. The amendment obliges the cabinet to seek parliamentary approval to raise prices on water, heating, and electricity supplies. It also prohibits the cabinet, once again, from seeking price hikes before all the state's wage and pension arrears have been paid. Because the rate increase was passed as an amendment to a law, rather than as a separate directive, parliament apparently felt that it was skirting the unconstitutional nature of its previous legislation. Nonetheless, President Kuchma vetoed the amendment soon after its adoption.

On April 4, the president vetoed a social security bill that would have raised the minimum pension from $4.20 to $14 per month, arguing that the budget did not contain the funds necessary for such an increase and that the hike would only worsen the problem of pension arrears, currently standing at $585 million. Following parliament's failure to override the president's veto, on April 22, the Communist MPs took to the streets in protest. The Communist faction threatened to abstain from voting on any bill until the veto on the pension increase was overridden. In the past, CP has used similar threats in its legislative battles with the president. For its part, parliament did succeed in overriding a presidential veto on another bill that provided a fourfold increase in special payments to World War II veterans.

President Kuchma also took steps to implement administrative reform. The number of ministries was cut by three (from 21 to 18), the State Committee for Oil and Gas was eliminated, and dozens of other committees were downgraded. The decision to abolish the Information Ministry was met with criticism in parliament, where deputies argued that the move was an attack on freedom of the press and an attempt by the presidential administration to monopolize the media. But Kuchma pushed forward with the administrative reform, because it was another IMF condition for handing over the $2.2 billion loan.

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