March Madness

By Volodymyr Kish

Whilst our American friends are indulging in their passion for college basketball in the championship tournament known as the March Madness, over in Ukraine there has been no shortage of a different kind of madness. Even Mother Nature got into the act last week by dumping over a half metre of snow over Kyiv in just one day, paralyzing the city and causing a state of emergency to be declared that is expected to last at least a week. The situation in the capital city was so bad that the army was called out to help deal with the chaos. Streets and highways were impassable with thousands of stranded vehicles cluttering up all major routes. The blizzard caused numerous power failures throughout Central Ukraine. A 70 km long traffic jam was reported on the main highway heading west out of the city.

In a display of true neo-Soviet thinking, the authorities decreed that Monday was to be deemed a “weekend” non-working day, and the following Saturday would become a “working” week day. As Ukrainians tried to cope with the devastation, one pundit demonstrated the essence of current Ukrainian humour by stating that there was only one good thing that could be said about the storm –namely, that it was heading north to wreak the same havoc in the coming days on Moscow.

Meanwhile, a more personal form of madness was evident at the country’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where brawls erupted between the deputies of the Regions Party and their opposition on consecutive days. The ruckus started when a Regions Party member was booed by opposition members for making a speech in Russian. He responded by calling his detractors fascists, and fisticuffs began to fly. Regrettably, parliamentary brawls in Ukraine have become a regular feature, demonstrating how dysfunctional the Ukrainian political system has become.

The ruling Regionnaires also continued their senseless vendetta against former Premier Yulia Tymoshenko despite the almost universal condemnation of this political persecution by the rest of the civilized world. In their latest demonstration of political madness, they succeeded in revoking the parliamentary member status of Serhiy Vlasenko, who also happens to be Yulia Tymoshenko’s defence lawyer. As a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Vlasenko enjoys immunity from legal prosecution. Now that this immunity has been revoked, the Yanukovych machine will now undoubtedly use their control over the country’s prosecutorial and judicial system to put Vlasenko out of commission. This is just weeks after the European Union made it clear that unless the Ukrainian government started behaving like a country that understands what the rule of law is, they can expect no further financial help, or progress of any kind on economic association with the EU. To underline the urgency of the request, they gave Yanukovych a deadline of this May to demonstrate real progress or suffer the consequences. For a country that is edging ever closer to bankruptcy and is in dire need of re-financing, Yanukovych’s behaviour is bizarre, to say the least.

In another dubious move, the Ukrainian government recently signed a deal with Royal Dutch Shell to develop potential natural gas reserves using the controversial new “fracking” technology. Although, Ukraine is in dire straits in trying to insure adequate supplies of affordably natural gas without succumbing to the extortionist terms of its Russian suppliers, turning to fracking is probably not a wise move. Fracking is a relatively new and highly controversial technology that carries significant environmental risks, including contamination of groundwater, surface pollution, micro-earthquakes, surface destabilization, and other effects.

Sanity and rational thinking has indeed been in short supply in Ukraine for the past few years, and one could arguably say decades. Sadly, there seems to be little hope of any remedy in the foreseeable future, at least while Yanukovych and his minions remain in power.