With the kind permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, InfoUkes Inc. has been given rights to electronically re-print these articles on our web site. Visit the RFE/RL Ukrainian Service page for more information. Also visit the RFE/RL home page for news stories on other Eastern European and FSU countries.

Return to Main RFE News Page
InfoUkes Home Page

UKRAINIAN DEPUTY PREMIER TO BE ARRESTED? Last week, investigators twice interrogated Deputy Premier Yuliya Tymoshenko, who is in charge of Ukraine's fuel and energy sector in Viktor Yushchenko's cabinet. The Prosecutor-General's Office has charged Tymoshenko with gas smuggling, document forgery, and major tax evasion during her previous job as head of the Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine. Tymoshenko told the 13 January "Zerkalo nedeli" that the charges against her are "absolute nonsense." However, she added that she is expecting her arrest any moment. Meanwhile, Yushchenko has warned against politicizing Tymoshenko's case, adding that she is "a Ukrainian cabinet member [whose case] should be approached with utmost transparency and under appropriate public control." Many in Ukraine believe that Tymoshenko's case was opened to divert the public spotlight from the scandal implicating President Leonid Kuchma in the disappearance of an independent journalist. JM

UKRAINIAN PROSECUTOR-GENERAL DISMISSES 'MOROZ'S TAPES' AS EVIDENCE. Mykhaylo Potebenko on 12 January said the tapes recorded by Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, in the presidential office and made public by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz cannot be accepted as evidence in the disappearance case of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze, Interfax reported. Potebenko added that even if international experts confirm the authenticity of the tapes, the Prosecutor-General's Office will not accept them as evidence since they were obtained in an illegal way. According to Potebenko, Ukraine's legislation allows material to be accepted as evidence only if it was "...obtained in a legal way and by appropriate bodies that are authorized to gather information." JM

UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT TO VOTE ON REFERENDUM BILL THIS WEEK? First deputy parliamentary speaker Viktor Medvedchuk thinks that a bill on the implementation of the 16 April constitutional referendum should be considered by the parliament on 18 January, Interfax reported on 12 January. Last July, the parliament passed a resolution to incorporate the referendum results into the country's constitution during the current parliamentary session, which ends on 19 January. "There is no need to waste time and hinder this process," Medvedchuk noted. Meanwhile, Deputy Premier Mykola Zhulynskyy has said he foresees the parliament's "voluntary dissolution" because lawmakers are incapable of "fulfilling the people's will," meaning the implementation of the referendum, the "Eastern Economist Daily" reported. JM

The date 13 January marks the 10th anniversary of an event that changed the world. On that day in 1991, Soviet troops fired into a crowd surrounding the Vilnius television tower. But they did more than kill 14 Lithuanian demonstrators: They destroyed three assumptions that underlay what many in both Moscow and the West saw as the emerging post-Cold War world.

First, this shooting and the reaction of Lithuanians to it suggested something that many had thought impossible: that Lithuania and her two Baltic neighbors Estonia and Latvia were in fact going to be able to escape from Soviet occupation and recover their national independence within a short period of time.

Second, the Vilnius shooting pointed to something many had assumed could not happen: that the East European revolutions of 1989, revolutions that ended Soviet domination of that region, could and would spread via a Baltic bridge into the Soviet inner empire, leading to its disintegration and to the appearance of 12 new countries on the map of the world.

And third, it demonstrated something many world leaders were unwilling to acknowledge: that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was not prepared either to negotiate in good faith with the evergrowing number of popular movements his policies had allowed to emerge or to reimpose order through the massive application of force.

None of these developments or conclusions was immediately apparent either in Moscow or in Western capitals, both of which were focused on the imminent start of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But those developments meant that the unthinkable became the conventional wisdom and the impossible was transformed into the achieved.

A week before the shootings, on 6 January 1991, Gorbachev had dispatched Soviet security forces into Armenia, Moldavia, western Ukraine and the three Baltic republics nominally to enforce Soviet military draft laws but in fact as a show of force against the pro-independence and anti-Moscow political movements in all six places.

Throughout the following week, tensions between these Soviet troops and the populations they had been sent to control continued to rise, nowhere more sharply than in Lithuania. Then on Saturday night, 13 January, the Soviet soldiers fired into the crowd in the Lithuanian capital. And that country's leader, Vytautas Landsbergis, was convinced that Gorbachev planned to kill or imprison his entire government.

Soviet documents released later showed that such were in fact Moscow's intentions, but the kind of crackdown Landsbergis feared did not happen. On the one hand, one group of Soviet troops lost their way -- it hadn't been supplied with the necessary maps -- and never made it to the parliament building where the Lithuanian government was rapidly assembling a crowd. Moreover, the presence of Western journalists and diplomats in the parliament building guaranteed that any such action would be reported to the entire world.

And on the other hand, the Lithuanians showed a resolve that Soviet commanders were apparently not prepared to challenge, and Western leaders reacted sufficiently forcefully to convince Gorbachev that despite all the understanding these governments had shown to him, they would find it very difficult to deal with Moscow were there to be a Soviet version of Tiananmen Square in the Baltic countries.

After the Soviet troops fired on the crowd, it did not disperse as many might have expected. Instead, they began to sing an old Lithuanian hymn, and thousands of Lithuanians rushed to parliament square as a sign to Moscow that it would have to be prepared to kill far more than 14 of Lithuania's citizens if it wanted to block that country's national movement.

And even though Western leaders were working closely with Gorbachev in the international alliance against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, most of them were appalled by what the Soviet leader had done or at least was associated with. As he traveled to the Middle East for the last round of pre-war talks, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker spoke for many when he issued from his airplane a tough statement condemning what Moscow had done in Vilnius.

Moreover, the events in Vilnius suggested that despite 50 years of Soviet occupation, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had remained part of Europe and were thus in a position to become the bridge over which the ideas of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe spread into the Soviet Union.

A few Soviet officials understood this -- including Gorbachev's reformist advisor Aleksandr Yakovlev -- and hoped to allow the Baltic republics to go their own way much as the East Europeans had. Gorbachev was unwilling to do that lest other Soviet republics follow the Baltic lead, but by trying to hold on to them after they had signaled that they wanted to leave, Gorbachev in fact created a situation in which the Baltic revolution spread to the entire Soviet Union.

And perhaps most importantly of all, the killings in Vilnius that January night a decade ago and the killings of five Latvians by the Soviet Black Berets in Riga a week later destroyed much of the faith many Soviet citizens and many Western leaders had in Gorbachev, and ever more of both groups began to ask whether he could in fact succeed in his policy of trying to liberalize the Soviet state.

For many in both places, Gorbachev as a result of Vilnius appeared too willing to rely on a show of force rather than engaging in negotiations with his political opponents but more unwilling that his predecessors to use the amount of force that might have been necessary to suppress them totally.

Many who reached that conclusion decided that Gorbachev's days in power were now numbered. Those who wanted to move toward a political solution, like the massive crowds of Russians who protested against the Vilnius action in the streets of Moscow, increasingly turned to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin or to the leaders of the non-Russian republics. Those who wanted more force -- including senior officers in the security services -- became the leaders of what was to be the last act of the Soviet system, the failed coup of August 1991.

The world of January 2001 was in many respects defined by that night in Vilnius a decade ago, in a confrontation between a frightened leadership and a people whose faith in the rightness of their cause meant that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves in the name of freedom.

(The author at the time of these events was special adviser on Soviet nationality problems and Baltic affairs at the U.S. State Department in Washington.)

The date 13 January marks the 10th anniversary of an event that changed the world. On that day in 1991, Soviet troops fired into a crowd surrounding the Vilnius television tower. But they did more than kill 14 Lithuanian demonstrators: They destroyed three assumptions that underlay what many in both Moscow and the West saw as the emerging post-Cold War world.

First, this shooting and the reaction of Lithuanians to it suggested something that many had thought impossible: that Lithuania and her two Baltic neighbors Estonia and Latvia were in fact going to be able to escape from Soviet occupation and recover their national independence within a short period of time.

Second, the Vilnius shooting pointed to something many had assumed could not happen: that the East European revolutions of 1989, revolutions that ended Soviet domination of that region, could and would spread via a Baltic bridge into the Soviet inner empire, leading to its disintegration and to the appearance of 12 new countries on the map of the world.

And third, it demonstrated something many world leaders were unwilling to acknowledge: that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was not prepared either to negotiate in good faith with the evergrowing number of popular movements his policies had allowed to emerge or to reimpose order through the massive application of force.

None of these developments or conclusions was immediately apparent either in Moscow or in Western capitals, both of which were focused on the imminent start of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But those developments meant that the unthinkable became the conventional wisdom and the impossible was transformed into the achieved.

A week before the shootings, on 6 January 1991, Gorbachev had dispatched Soviet security forces into Armenia, Moldavia, western Ukraine and the three Baltic republics nominally to enforce Soviet military draft laws but in fact as a show of force against the pro-independence and anti-Moscow political movements in all six places.

Throughout the following week, tensions between these Soviet troops and the populations they had been sent to control continued to rise, nowhere more sharply than in Lithuania. Then on Saturday night, 13 January, the Soviet soldiers fired into the crowd in the Lithuanian capital. And that country's leader, Vytautas Landsbergis, was convinced that Gorbachev planned to kill or imprison his entire government.

Soviet documents released later showed that such were in fact Moscow's intentions, but the kind of crackdown Landsbergis feared did not happen. On the one hand, one group of Soviet troops lost their way -- it hadn't been supplied with the necessary maps -- and never made it to the parliament building where the Lithuanian government was rapidly assembling a crowd. Moreover, the presence of Western journalists and diplomats in the parliament building guaranteed that any such action would be reported to the entire world.

And on the other hand, the Lithuanians showed a resolve that Soviet commanders were apparently not prepared to challenge, and Western leaders reacted sufficiently forcefully to convince Gorbachev that despite all the understanding these governments had shown to him, they would find it very difficult to deal with Moscow were there to be a Soviet version of Tiananmen Square in the Baltic countries.

After the Soviet troops fired on the crowd, it did not disperse as many might have expected. Instead, they began to sing an old Lithuanian hymn, and thousands of Lithuanians rushed to parliament square as a sign to Moscow that it would have to be prepared to kill far more than 14 of Lithuania's citizens if it wanted to block that country's national movement.

And even though Western leaders were working closely with Gorbachev in the international alliance against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, most of them were appalled by what the Soviet leader had done or at least was associated with. As he traveled to the Middle East for the last round of pre-war talks, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker spoke for many when he issued from his airplane a tough statement condemning what Moscow had done in Vilnius.

Moreover, the events in Vilnius suggested that despite 50 years of Soviet occupation, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had remained part of Europe and were thus in a position to become the bridge over which the ideas of the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe spread into the Soviet Union.

A few Soviet officials understood this -- including Gorbachev's reformist advisor Aleksandr Yakovlev -- and hoped to allow the Baltic republics to go their own way much as the East Europeans had. Gorbachev was unwilling to do that lest other Soviet republics follow the Baltic lead, but by trying to hold on to them after they had signaled that they wanted to leave, Gorbachev in fact created a situation in which the Baltic revolution spread to the entire Soviet Union.

And perhaps most importantly of all, the killings in Vilnius that January night a decade ago and the killings of five Latvians by the Soviet Black Berets in Riga a week later destroyed much of the faith many Soviet citizens and many Western leaders had in Gorbachev, and ever more of both groups began to ask whether he could in fact succeed in his policy of trying to liberalize the Soviet state.

For many in both places, Gorbachev as a result of Vilnius appeared too willing to rely on a show of force rather than engaging in negotiations with his political opponents but more unwilling that his predecessors to use the amount of force that might have been necessary to suppress them totally.

Many who reached that conclusion decided that Gorbachev's days in power were now numbered. Those who wanted to move toward a political solution, like the massive crowds of Russians who protested against the Vilnius action in the streets of Moscow, increasingly turned to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin or to the leaders of the non-Russian republics. Those who wanted more force -- including senior officers in the security services -- became the leaders of what was to be the last act of the Soviet system, the failed coup of August 1991.

The world of January 2001 was in many respects defined by that night in Vilnius a decade ago, in a confrontation between a frightened leadership and a people whose faith in the rightness of their cause meant that they were prepared to sacrifice themselves in the name of freedom.

(The author at the time of these events was special adviser on Soviet nationality problems and Baltic affairs at the U.S. State Department in Washington.)