Texts for annotation

Text 1

Russia and Ukraine

Dear Viktor, you're dead, love Dmitry

Aug 20th 2009 | KIEV AND MOSCOW From The Economist print edition

Russia’s president writes his Ukrainian counterpart an insulting letter

AFP

RUSSIA marked the first anniversary of its war with Georgia with a verbal salvo against Ukraine. Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, wrote Viktor Yushchenko, his Ukrainian counterpart, an open letter with a familiar litany of complaints: Ukraine was supplying arms to Georgia, complicating the life of Russia’s Black Sea fleet (which is based in Sebastopol, a Ukrainian port), signing treacherous pipeline deals with the European Union, kicking out Russian diplomats and falsifying joint Soviet history.

Less familiarly, Mr Medvedev posted a special video blog to publicise his letter. Dressed in ominous black, and overlooking the Black Sea with two military boats on the horizon, Mr Medvedev said the Kremlin would not be sending its new ambassador to Kiev.

It took Viktor Yushchenko several days to reply. His response was measured: Ukraine had done nothing illegal towards Georgia; had the right to choose its friends; was entitled to its own view of history and its language; and had repeatedly asked the Kremlin to remove some of its diplomats involved in non-diplomatic work.

But Mr Medvedev was not interested in what Mr Yushchenko had to say. He wanted to register Russia’s hand in Ukraine’s presidential election due on January 17th. That election is of almost as much importance to Russia as it is to Ukraine itself. In the previous presidential election, Russia backed Viktor Yanukovich, the Russian-friendly prime minister at the time. He lost badly and so did Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president and now prime minister, who had rushed to congratulate him.

The Kremlin fears making the same mistake twice. But this time, in insulting Mr Yushchenko, it is kicking someone who it thinks is certain to lose anyway. It is also laying down rules which it implies the next president must respect if he or she is to be accepted in Moscow. The ability to influence Ukraine’s policy is seen by Russia as a test of its resurgence.

To show the range of options for reintegrating Ukraine into its “sphere of privileged interest”, Russia recently dispatched Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, on a tour of Ukraine. “When I walked through huge crowds of people, chanting ‘Kirill is our patriarch’, I understood that our great spiritual unity …has become a basic value which cannot be shaken by politics,” he told a doubtless grateful Mr Medvedev on his return.

As the war in Georgia showed, the Kremlin has other means of persuasion at its disposal. On August 10th, a day before the video blog, Mr Medvedev announced new, simplified rules for using Russian military force outside the country to protect Russian citizens and defend units stationed abroad.

A full-blown military conflict with Ukraine seems unlikely but is no longer unthinkable. (Two years ago a war between Russia and Georgia seemed equally unlikely.) Andrei Illarionov, once an adviser to Mr Putin and now a fierce critic, says the key factor is not whether Russia has the military capacity for a confrontation with Ukraine, but that aggression towards the neighbours has become a way of life for the Kremlin. In the past decade, Russia has managed to alienate almost all the former Soviet republics, even undemocratic Belarus. Trade wars and energy cut-offs have become standard policy responses.

Of all the neighbouring republics, Ukraine remains the largest and most important. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish-born American national security adviser, once wrote: “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine, suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” It is far from clear, even now, that Russia has fully accepted Ukraine’s sovereignty. At a NATO summit in Bucharest last year Mr Putin reportedly told President George Bush, “You understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state!”

Unlike Georgia or the Baltic states, which had longer traditions of running their own affairs, Ukraine has had little experience of statehood. “In the last 80 years of the 20th century we declared our independence six times. Five times we lost it,” Mr Yushchenko pointed out in a recent interview.

Ukraine’s politicians and voters seem to be leaving the country vulnerable again. According to a recent poll, more Ukranians think their own government is the biggest security threat to their country than believe Russia is. Corruption and squabbling inside the ruling Orange coalition have paralysed governance. The majority of presidential decrees do not get implemented. Since June Ukraine has not had a defence minister. Its economy contracted by 18% in the second quarter of the year.

“People have lost any respect for their own state,” says Yulia Mostovaya, an influential journalist in Kiev. National ideals have been discredited by cynicism and the corruption of ruling politicians tainted by shady gas deals with Russia. Meanwhile the version of order projected by Russia’s television channels looks increasingly popular (more than 90% of Ukranians say they feel positive about Russia, whereas 42% of Russians see Ukraine as an enemy).

Few leading Ukrainian politicians publicly rebutted Mr Medvedev’s insult to Mr Yushchenko. Most used it as yet another opportunity to kick him. “We have reached a critical point, a point of bifurcation,” says Anatoly Gritsenko, Ms Mostovaya’s husband, a former defence minister and one of the presidential candidates. “Either Ukraine is going down, towards disintegration, or it will start recovering. But the current unstable situation cannot last.”

Russia’s own situation may not be entirely stable and its current rulers may be tempted to provoke a conflict with Ukraine to consolidate their position. One thing looks increasingly certain: the relationship between Russia and Ukraine will be a worry for European security.

Text 2

Lockerbie fallout

Counting the cost

Aug 27th 2009 | EDINBURGH AND LONDON From The Economist print edition

The decision to release the Lockerbie bomber will have lasting consequences

HOW a politician as obscure as Kenny MacAskill came to provoke the ire of Britain’s most important ally, leave the prime minister in a confounding fix and trigger international speculation about shady diplomatic and commercial deals may be the most remarkable story of the first decade of devolved Scottish power. On August 20th Scotland’s justice secretary freed Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the worst terrorist atrocity in British history, the 1988 Lockerbie bombing in which 270 people (189 of them Americans) were killed. Mr Megrahi is dying of cancer and Scottish law permits release on compassionate grounds. To Mr MacAskill’s surprise, it seems, all hell broke loose.

Britain’s ever-less-special relationship with America has taken an undeniable knock: President Barack Obama as well as the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, denounced the release. Even if official American outrage may smack of domestic political posturing, that of the victims’ relatives does not.

At home, Gordon Brown has seen his Labour Party’s standing in the polls slip further, despite his colleagues’ insistence that the decision was made exclusively by Scotland’s nationalist administration. Days of prime ministerial silence on the matter (though England’s victory against Australia in cricket was worthy of comment) fed an impression that Mr Brown is a man who disappears at moments of crisis.

When he eventually spoke up, on August 25th, he declared himself “repulsed” by the celebrations of Mr Megrahi’s return in Tripoli (complete with grateful waving of Scottish flags) but refused to say whether he thought the terrorist’s release was justified. The quasi-judicial decision, said Mr Brown, was entirely Mr MacAskill’s to make. A cautious venture into criticism the next day by Jack Straw, Britain’s justice secretary, did little to remedy the impression that Mr Brown and his team are desperate to stay out of it.

And with reason, perhaps, for suspicions are swirling that Mr Megrahi’s release was part of a dark bargain with Muammar Qaddafi, Libya’s leader. It was ongoing payment for Libya’s conversion from terror-sponsoring rogue state to ally in the war against terrorism, say some. A prisoner-transfer agreement between the two countries ratified earlier this year, which might have provided Mr Megrahi an alternative route home, suggests that London had been willing for some time to oblige the Libyans in the matter.

The release was actually part of a trade deal, claim others, noting that Lord Mandelson, the powerful business secretary, had twice this year met Mr Qaddafi’s son, who told Mr Megrahi on his journey home that “in all the trade, oil and gas deals which I have supervised, you were there on the table.” Lord Mandelson calls the implication that a terrorist was released for commercial reasons “offensive”, but it emerged this week that three British ministers have visited Libya in the past 15 months (as has Prince Andrew, Britain’s special representative for trade and investment). Calls for an inquiry into the release, in particular into whether business considerations played a role, are multiplying.