Imagine this scenario, if you will:

• While campaigning for a third term as the "president" of Russia, Vladimir Putin is stricken with a deadly poison and his face massively disfigured. Miraculously, he survives and goes on to win "election."

• Russian authorities identify the alleged assassin, a ranking figure in the Russian secret police. But before they can arrest him, he flees to America.

• America confers citizenship on the assassin, and when Russia demands extradition America refuses on that basis.

How do you think Russia would react?

RIA Novosti reports:

KIEV, July 16 (RIA Novosti) - Russia has refused to extradite a former Ukrainian security service deputy head suspected of involvement in the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko in 2004, Ukraine's top prosecutors said on Wednesday. The Prosecutor General's Office said that since Moscow considers Wolodymyr Satsiuk, or Vladimir Satsyuk, to be a Russian citizen, he cannot be extradited. Satsiuk is also facing abuse of office and forgery charges in Ukraine, which requested his extradition in April 2008. Ukraine has been negotiating with Russia over the extradition of three people who it says may have been involved in the Yushchenko poisoning, but the Russian Prosecutor General's Office said it had received no other extradition requests. Yushchenko became seriously ill in early September 2004, the day after attending a reception and dinner with Ukrainian security services leaders. He suffered from a series of symptoms, including back pain, acute pancreatitis and nerve paralysis on the left side of his face. After the illness, his face became heavily disfigured - grossly jaundiced, bloated and pockmarked. Many have linked Yushchenko's poisoning to a group of senior Ukrainian officials, including the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Ihor Smeshko, and his deputy, Satsiuk.

All of them are believed to have fled to Russia and received Russian citizenship.

It's barbarism, pure and simple. Russia, a G-8 member, is harboring assassins!

The brilliant Pavel Felgenhaur, writing in the Eurasia Daily Monitor:

In the past Russia strongly protested the expansion of NATO to include Central European states that were Soviet clients and former Warsaw Pact members during the Cold War, as well as the Baltic republics that were part of the Soviet Union. In the end, however, Russia backed down and accepted the inevitable shrinking of its effective sphere of influence. Now the rulers in Moscow seem to be ready for a major confrontation that includes the threat of military force against the pro-Western governments in Georgia and Ukraine, which aspire to join the alliance.

After a recent meeting between Russian and Georgian Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Mikhail Saakashvili in St. Petersburg, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists, "We told the Georgians that their desire to join NATO will not help solve the problems of Abkhazia and South Ossetia; it will lead to renewed bloodshed" (RIA-Novosti, June 6). Later Lavrov added in a radio interview, "We will do anything not to allow Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO" (Ekho Moskvy, April 8).

Speaking last week in Sevastopol in Crimea, the main base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov warned Ukraine that joining NATO would have serious consequences: "A complete disruption of military-industrial ties between Russia and Ukraine is inevitable, as well as the reduction of other trade and economic ties and an introduction of a visa regime." Ivanov implied that NATO would "force Ukraine to introduce a visa regime." Ivanov added, "More than 30 million Russians live outside Russia, and we are morally responsible for them" (RIA-Novosti, June 14).

Russian officials connect the possible future Ukrainian NATO membership with the fate of the Black Sea Fleet. Ivanov announced, "It is hard to imagine the Russian Black Sea Fleet without its main base; the fate of Sevastopol matters for all those who lived in the Soviet Union, it is our city." Ukraine's call for the withdrawal of the fleet from Crimea was perilous, because "it is dangerous to play not only with fire but also with history" (Itar-Tass, June 14).

Ivanov's rhetoric matches other recent official statements. Russia's permanent representative to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said in a TV interview: "The Black Sea Fleet simply does not have any other home; no Russian politician will agree for the fleet to leave Sevastopol, and this will not happen" (Vesti TV June 12). A rejection of Ukraine's NATO accession or the possible future withdrawal of the Russian fleet from Crimea after 2017, when the present lease of the Sevastopol base expires, are today part of Russia’s official foreign policy. Western assurances that Sevastopol will not be used as a NATO naval base after the Russians withdraw are not taken seriously. But there is a lot of time till 2017 and the Ukrainian NATO accession may not be swift, since today the majority of Ukrainians are against NATO membership and the government in Kyiv has promised a national referendum to decide on membership (RIA-Novosti, June 16).

Russia does not at present have the infrastructure on its own Black Sea coast to house the Black Sea Fleet, and building the needed facilities will require lots of time and money. What is worse, Russia does not have adequate military shipbuilding or ship-maintenance facilities on the Black Sea to keep a large fleet. The flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, the cruiser Moskva, has been repaired and modernized in Mykolaiv in Ukraine at a naval shipyard where in Soviet times all the aircraft carriers were built. Russia has managed to build several relatively small naval ships since 1991 (frigates and coastal patrol boats) in St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, but not enough to replace its rapidly aging navy. Without access to the Mykolaiv yard, there may not be much fleet left to withdraw from Sevastopol (Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye, June 12).

At present Moscow is using threats that Ukrainians will suffer if their nation joins NATO or if the Russian fleet is ousted from Sevastopol. At the same time, Russia has been supporting pro-Russian separatist feelings in Crimea and making territorial claims on Sevastopol. Moscow needs a pro-Moscow allied government in Kyiv or, if that is impossible, a separation of Crimea and Eastern and Southern Ukraine (with Mykolaiv), where millions of Russian speakers may either want to join Russia or form an allied protectorate.

The situation is different in Georgia, where a vast majority voted to join NATO in a referendum on January 5. There is no hope in Moscow that any anti-NATO pro-Russian forces may come to power in Tbilisi, and military action in support of separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia is being seriously contemplated (see EDM, June 12). The Russian Foreign Ministry has officially announced that Moscow refuses to discuss with Tbilisi the legality of the deployment of additional troops and armaments in Abkhazia, because the troops "prevented a Georgian blitzkrieg" (www.mid.ru, June 17). When substantial talks are essentially stopped while additional troops are deployed, it’s more than just a threat of the use of force.

The Baltimore Sun reports:

Hryhory Haraschenko tells the stories feverishly, gesticulating with veined hands. He hauls out newspaper clippings, witnesses' tales and pencil-drawn maps. He speaks like a man haunted by memories and by decades of forced silence.

Haraschenko, 89, is among a dwindling number of Ukrainians who survived the Soviet-era famine of the early 1930s. Like other survivors and some historians, he regards the starvation - known here as the Holodomor, or "death by hunger" - as an act of genocide engineered to wipe out the Ukrainians.

He wants it discussed and recognized by the world.

"Russia is afraid we'll accuse Moscow of creating this genocide and eliminating Ukrainian villages," he says. "They try to say that Russians were killed in this famine, but don't listen to them."

After decades buried in Soviet silence and smothered in official denials, the Stalin-era famine has emerged as a painful topic that festers at the heart of tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

The push for international recognition of the famine as genocide is being led by a new generation of Western-leaning Ukrainians, most visibly President Viktor A. Yushchenko. They believe that a declaration of genocide would bolster Ukraine's independence from Russia, helping it regain its sense as a separate country bonded by national tragedy.

'Russian history'

"At school, we had only the history of the Soviet Union, and, in fact, this was Russian history," said Stanislav Kulchytsky, a Ukrainian historian and famine scholar. "Ukraine has now gotten to know its own history. We're learning our victories and our tragedies. The picture of the past makes a person nationally oriented."

The battle to forge Ukraine's post-Soviet identity and allegiances has been fought on every level: internationally and internally, among different factions of a nation historically split between its allegiances to Russia and the West.

But no struggle has proved so bitter as the one over Ukrainian history, culture and language. In today's Ukraine - the country's name means "borderland" - the smallest gestures are freighted with meaning. Some Ukrainians mind visitors who refer to "the Ukraine" - an older expression - as though the nation were merely Russia's frontier.

'He is Ukrainian'

"He will speak Ukrainian," snapped an aide to a pro-Western lawmaker when asked whether his boss might speak Russian during an interview. "He is a Ukrainian, and so he will speak Ukrainian."

Ukraine has carried out an aggressive campaign to replace the Russian language, even shifting the spelling of the capital, Kiev, to the Ukrainian version - Kyiv. Meanwhile, teachers have begun to recast anti-Russian figures as varied as 18th-century Cossacks and World War II anti-Soviet fighters as positive historical figures or even heroes.

This trend has infuriated Russia, where the sense of Ukraine as a piece of Russia remains strong, and many are suffused with newfound nostalgia for the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Vladimir V. Putin, who became Russia's prime minister after his presidential tenure ended in May, has complained of Ukraine's recent historical reinterpretation.

"These unfriendly moves sadden the atmosphere of relations between our two countries," Putin, as president, wrote to his Ukrainian counterpart. "They could seriously impact bilateral cooperation in various ways."

The rawest nerve

The famine might be the rawest nerve of all.

This is what Haraschenko remembers: coming home from Young Pioneer camp and helping to harvest the grain, only to watch every last kernel be carted off toward Russia. The day the soldiers came through his house and confiscated every last bit of flour and milk. The hunger that grew relentlessly until the widow who lived next door killed her 4-year-old daughter and cooked the corpse to survive.

In the beginning, he helped to bury the other students' bodies, but soon the villagers got used to death, he said, and left the remains on the streets. At least 3.5 million Ukrainians died, and survivors were ordered by Soviet officials to keep their memories to themselves.

"The agents went through the houses and said, 'There was no famine. Forget it. Don't say a word,'" Haraschenko said. "If you talked about it, if you even said the word famine, you went to Siberia."

That's a far cry from today.

Request to Bush

During a luncheon toast here in April, Yushchenko asked President Bush to recognize the famine as an act of genocide.

"We will be immeasurably grateful," he said.

Bush stopped short. But he visited the famine memorial, a stone angel at St. Michael's gold-domed cathedral backed by signs reading, "Victims of the criminal deeds of the Bolshevik regime" and "the Ukrainian holocaust."

In 2007, Yushchenko pushed a bill that would make denying either the Holodomor or the Holocaust a crime punishable by prison time. Some Ukrainians, leery of damaging strained ties with Moscow, have criticized the president.

"It makes me feel like we are living in 1937, as if we could be talking and I say the Holodomor existed, and you say you have doubts, then I have to write a complaint and take it to the police department so you face charges," said Oleksandr Moroz, head of the opposition Socialist Party. "This is idiotic. We'll make our fellow citizens the enemies of one another."

Russia furious

But the rhetoric out of Ukraine has already infuriated Russia. Nobody is denying that millions of Ukrainians died when Stalin's regime stripped the peasants of their crops during forced collectivization. But officials in Moscow say that massive numbers of non-Ukrainian Soviet peasants, including millions in Russia, Kazakhstan and other parts of the Soviet Union, also starved to death under Stalin's rule. They reject the notion that Ukrainians were targeted.

"There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines," the Russian Duma said in an April resolution. "Its victims were millions of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country. ... This tragedy does not have, and cannot have, any internationally recognized indications of genocide and should not be used as a tool for modern political speculation."

Even Nobel Prize winner Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, who was exiled for his searing literary portraits of Soviet injustice, came out of retirement in April against the Ukrainians.

"This provocateur's cry of 'genocide' began to germinate decades later," he wrote in the newspaper Izvestia. "First, secretly, in the moldy minds of chauvinists maliciously set against [Russia], and now elevated to government circles of today's Ukraine."

NATO: Join or not?

The argument has intensified against the backdrop of looming tensions between the neighboring countries, which are tightly bound by ancient ties of religion and history.

Ukrainian opinion is divided over whether the country should work to join NATO, and many people here regard the question as an existential choice between Russia and the West.

"It's some kind of ultimate choice, strategic or even civilizational choice to be part of the West," said Oleksandr Sushko, director of Kiev's Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation. "Russia is very concerned now in our history, the names of our streets, who's considered a hero or not, the famine, what's written in our textbooks. This is the state of our relations. They are still living in their mental frame of a former empire."

Old memories

In a modest apartment with his wife and cat, Haraschenko knows exactly what he wants for his country. He has never forgotten the lifestyle he witnessed as a young soldier in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Those memories have lingered, fueling a nationalistic desire to see Ukraine detached from Russia's shadow and united with Western Europe.

"Here, to this day, we haven't achieved 1 percent of what they had already achieved at that time," he said. "I compare it to the current situation in Ukraine and I can say that they were further along."

But mostly, he wants to recount his memories of the famine.

"We all kept silent," he said. "And now there are just a few left who can tell these stories."

The Associated Press reports:

A gloomy Vladimir Putin wears a Czarist crown, clutching a bag full of dollars and a miniature television tower. Filipp Pishchik says this and similar cartoons, depicting the former president as a corrupt leader who stifles free speech, got him in trouble with authorities and forced him to leave Moscow last year for neighboring Ukraine. "Ukraine is just great," said the 37-year-old designer and architect. "Here there is hope."

Since the 2004 Orange Revolution ushered in a vigorous, sometimes chaotic democracy, Ukraine has become an island of freedom and tolerance in an ex-Soviet bloc still dominated by authoritarian regimes, and journalists, political activists, artists, and business professionals have flocked here. In Soviet times, a dissident wanting to live free had only the West to look to. Getting there was hard, the culture alien, the language foreign. Ukraine, however, is an easy visa-free destination for most, Russian is spoken and speech is free.

Rights groups complain that Ukraine is stingy with granting asylum, which guarantees the applicant's right to stay and work indefinitely. But still, the influx vividly illustrates how far the country's path has diverged from that of Russia, which by the time of the Orange Revolution had already begun rolling back democratic reform. The number of foreigners registered as living in this country of 46 million doubled to nearly 200,000 from 2003 to 2006, according to United Nations statistics; that does not include the unregistered. The number applying for political asylum rose from 1,800 in 2005 to 2,300 last year.

Pishchik said he moved here after architecture magazines stopped publishing his work, longtime clients left him — hinting they were forced to do so by authorities — and he got threats from security officials. The reason, he says, was the cartoons he displayed in galleries and on Web sites. Today, he lives in a spacious Kiev house loaded with exciting new projects and is married to a Ukrainian artist. "I tell all my friends that they all will end up here one day," Pishchik says.

Similar stories abound in today's Ukraine.

Yuriy Svirko, a 33-year-old journalist from Belarus, decided he'd had enough of President Alexander Lukashenko's iron-fisted rule after he was accused of attacking a presidential body guard and threatened with arrest. (He says it was the guard who attacked him.) Svirko arrived in Kiev right after the Orange mass movement overturned a fraudulent election and brought reformist Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency.

Ukraine today is awash in competitive elections, noisy street protests and heated debates on TV shows and occasional fist fights in Parliament. Opposition rallies are held under the windows of the president's office, and many have forgotten a time when TV channels were state-controlled. Savik Shuster had a TV political talk show in Russia until it was closed in 2004 as the Kremlin tightened the screws on media. Now he's in Kiev, hosting a similar program on a Ukrainian channel. "In Ukraine, freedom of speech still exists," said Shuster, 55. But for Russia today, "openness is like light for a vampire."

During the past two years, Belarusian expatriates have held an annual "Belarusian Spring" festival, featuring fare banned back home — movies, poetry readings, underground rock bands. This year's festival kicked off with a dozen activists racing down Kiev's main avenue on cross-country skis when snow was nowhere to be seen. It was a poke at Lukashenko, a winter-sports fan who every year makes government officials and professional athletes compete with him in a ski competition which he always wins. But rights groups say that while Ukraine is good at welcoming professionals, it is still inhospitable to relatively unskilled political refugees, granting only 3 percent of applications for political asylum, compared with over 30 percent in neighboring Poland.

Ulugbek Zainabudinov, an Uzbek opposition activist, fled to Russia after a bloody crackdown on an uprising in his country. But Russian authorities began arresting the refugees at the Uzbek government's request, so in 2006 he moved to Ukraine. That year, Ukraine deported 11 other refugees back to Uzbekistan, drawing harsh criticism from human rights groups. All the deportees have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, the groups say. "The very idea of freedom exists here and it is developing," said Zainabudinov said. "But I don't feel safe." His asylum application has been turned down, and fearing deportation, he is seeking refugee status in Western Europe.

Experts say Ukraine has neither the resources nor the political will to take care of asylum-seekers. Natalia Prokopchuk of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said Ukraine also does a poor job of helping asylum-seekers while their cases are being considered. Natalia Naumenko, spokeswoman for the State Department on Migration, counters that most applicants are illegal migrants caught en route to Western Europe. Dmytro Groisman of the Vinnytsia Rights Groups said the influx of asylum-seekers does not prove that Ukraine has developed into a tolerant and democratic society. Instead, he said, refugees simply had nowhere else to go. "When your apartment is on fire, you would jump anywhere — in the snow, in the water, from the 6th floor," Groisman said. "People are running where they can."

Olga Kudrina, 22, is one of the lucky few who received political asylum. Sentenced to prison for unfurling a Putin-must-go banner near the Kremlin, she fled to Ukraine and lives with her baby daughter in a tiny apartment in Vinnytsia, 160 miles southwest of Kiev.

Two colleagues from her banned National Bolshevik Party share her apartment in Vinnytsia and are seeking asylum.

One of them, Mikhail Gangan, 22, came here to escape arrest for breaking into a government building in Moscow and demanding that Putin step down.

"You live calmer, better here," said Gangan. "You won't see as many cops on the streets — you can walk down a street and not see a single one. In Russia that cannot happen."

Writing in the Moscow Times, Georgy Bovt explains the psychotic and malignant manner in which Russia has sought to deny the Ukrainian genocide its former rulers have caused:

This spring marks an anniversary that Russia will not commemorate. In fact, Moscow will make a point of ignoring it, as if the event had never happened. I am speaking of Holodomor, in which millions died of starvation in Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region in the spring of 1933. The famine began earlier, but reached its peak during those months. This year is the 75th anniversary of Holodomor, and Kiev will honor its victims as it has done in prior years.

This is far from being just a historical disagreement between Russia and Ukraine. It has spilled into the political arena as well. For example, the delegations from both sides have presented opposing resolutions to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. Kiev suggests that Holodomor should be considered an act of genocide against Ukrainians, whereas Moscow proposes honoring all of those who died from starvation in 1932 and 1933 -- not only Ukrainians.

The Kremlin argues that genocide is the killing of a population based on their ethnicity, whereas Stalin's regime annihilated all kinds of people indiscriminately, regardless of their ethnicity.

But if the Kremlin really believed in this argument, it would officially acknowledge that Stalin's actions constituted mass genocide against all the people of the Soviet Union. But this is highly unlikely. In fact, Russia's political elite avoid using the word "genocide" at all -- even though it is clear the Soviet authorities specifically targeted certain ethnic groups for repression, such as Crimean Tartars, Ingush, Chechens, ethnic Germans of the Volga region.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko first proposed classifying Holodomor as genocide a few months ago, and Moscow immediately objected. Perhaps the Kremlin views it as Ukraine's underhanded attempt to whip up anti-Russian sentiment at a time when Kiev is attempting gain admittance to NATO and the European Union.

Stalin's regime deliberately used hunger as a means of forcing peasants, regardless of their ethnicity, onto collective farms. But because Ukraine was the Soviet Union's breadbasket, the Ukrainian people suffered the most from Stalin's collectivization policy. From 2 million to 8 million people starved to death from 1932 to 1933. Nobody knows the exact figure because officials simply stopped recording the deaths in many regions.

It began with what was a naturally poor harvest in 1932. But in 1932 and 1933, Stalin's commissars were sent out to the villages. When residents resisted the forced relocation to collective farms, party officials seized every bit of food they could find -- including seeds. They also destroyed livestock, even cats and dogs, and trampled all edible plants growing near the villages. The authorities who were charged with enforcing Stalin's forced collectivization at the local level purposely deprived the villagers of food and even seized their farming tools to prevent them from growing more. The Kremlin claimed that these were necessary "educational" measures.

During the entire Soviet era, there was never any serious attempt to investigate the brutal and inhumane methods used in the forced collectivization project. It was actually U.S. historian Robert Conquest who, in 1986, wrote the most authoritative work on the subject, "The Harvest of Sorrow."

Even 16 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has still been no serious Russian investigation into Stalin's forced collectivization or Holodomor. On the contrary, the Kremlin, through its various media outlets, has tended to cast Stalin in a positive light during the past few years.

In my opinion, this explains Moscow's opposition to Yushchenko's effort to bring up the Holodomor issue. The problem is not so much that Ukraine is trying to create a standoff with Russia, but that the Kremlin has not completely severed itself from Stalin's legacy.

Clearly showing he knows he lost the battle over Ukraine in Bucharest, Vladimir Putin has now gone completely berserk with childish, ignorant, blind rage. The Moscow Times reports:

President Vladimir Putin hinted at last week's NATO summit in Romania that Russia would work to break up Ukraine, should the former Soviet republic join the military alliance, Kommersant reported Monday.

Putin "lost his temper" at the NATO-Russia Council in Bucharest during Friday's discussions of Ukraine's bid to join NATO, Kommersant cited an unidentified foreign delegate to the summit as saying.

"Do you understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a state!" Putin told U.S. President George W. Bush at the closed meeting, the diplomat told Kommersant.

After saying most of Ukraine's territory was "given away" by Russia, Putin said that if Ukraine joined NATO it would cease to exist as a state, the diplomat said.

Putin threatened to encourage the secession of the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, where anti-NATO and pro-Moscow sentiment is strong, the diplomat said, Kommersant reported.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who accompanied Putin at the summit, said Monday he did not hear Putin's purported remarks about Ukraine and could not confirm the report.

Putin also offered broader economic cooperation with Georgia's separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as Tbilisi sought NATO approval for eventual membership in the alliance.

In a letter sent to the leaders of the breakaway provinces Thursday -- when NATO members were deciding whether to grant Membership Action Plans to Ukraine and Georgia -- Putin said Russia would move beyond symbolic declarations and offer real economic support to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Just days before the summit, Moscow officially lifted long-standing embargoes on trade, transportation and financial transactions with Abkhazia.

France, Germany and several other NATO members opposed putting Ukraine and Georgia on the path toward NATO to avoid provoking Russia, and the alliance postponed consideration of their eventual membership.

Vladimir Socor of the Jamestown Foundation reports in his latest e-mail:

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has proposed that the European Union and Ukraine join a project for a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan via the Caspian Sea, South Caucasus, and Black Sea to Ukraine and EU territory. Tymoshenko termed this concept “White Stream” when presenting it to top EU officials during her January 28-29 visit to Brussels. It re-launches a concept originally outlined by Tymoshenko in 2005 during her first premiership to reduce Ukraine’s and the EU’s dependence on Russian-delivered gas at Russian-defined prices.

White Stream is coincidentally the brand name of a project outlined by the London-based GUEU White Stream Pipeline Company, with Georgian participation. It was presented last July at an energy conference in Tbilisi and again last October at the Energy Security Conference of heads of state and governments in Vilnius. The GUEU’s (Georgia-Ukraine-European Union) White Stream envisages a first-stage pipeline for Azerbaijani gas, via Georgia and the seabed of the Black Sea to the Crimea, with two options to reach Central Europe: either via Ukrainian or Romanian pipelines. White Stream’s second stage would carry Turkmen gas via Azerbaijan and Georgia to Europe across the Black Sea.

The two concepts clearly dovetail with each other, but there is no sign that they are coordinating with each other. Such lack of coordination could become mutually counterproductive. The same risk arises from insufficient communication by either group of transport planners with the gas producers in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

Originally a Georgian initiative, the London-based project has resulted in an engineering blueprint for the seabed section, which is the most challenging on the proposed pipeline route. White Stream envisages transporting Caspian gas -- from Azerbaijan in the first stage and Turkmenistan in the second -- through a pipeline that would branch off in Georgia from the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas export pipeline. The branch would become feasible, once the second phase of field development reaches full volume at Azerbaijan’s Shah-Deniz field. The Georgian pipeline section would run overland for approximately 100 kilometers, from a point west of Borjomi to the Black Sea coast near Supsa.

From there, the pipeline is projected to run some 650 kilometers in ultra-deep waters to Ukraine’s Crimean shore near Feodosiya, then cross the Crimean peninsula for some 250 kilometers, with two continuation options possible: either connecting with Ukraine’s mainland pipeline system, or continuing on the seabed to the Romanian coast for some 300 kilometers in shallow waters.

Several European engineers who had formerly worked for the Italian ENI/Saipem on the construction of the world’s deepest seabed pipeline, Blue Stream, are said to participate in GUEU’s White Stream project. White Stream’s deep-water construction would benefit from the technical experience gained when laying the ENI-Gazprom Blue Stream seabed line from Russia to Turkey. The White Stream project envisages using a J-lay barge of the same type as that used by ENI/Saipem, which was key to that technological accomplishment.

Ukraine is as indispensable as Georgia to this project. Tymoshenko outlined a Ukrainian vision of White Stream in Brussels to European Commission President Manuel Barroso, other top EU officials, and at a hearing in the European Parliament. Noting with concern that several pipelines currently under construction would increase the EU’s supply-dependence and price-dependence on Russia, Tymoshenko called for direct EU involvement in construction of oil and gas corridors via the Caspian and Black Seas, directly to Europe.

Tymoshenko underscored that this concept is closely interrelated with Ukraine’s goal to import oil and gas directly from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and provide transit for these commodities to EU territory. The trans-Black Sea pipeline would be key to Ukraine’s goal to cut dependence on Gazprom and its notorious intermediary RosUkrEnergo, she told the EU leaders. She urged them to proceed with the necessary investment decisions now, rather than waiting for “another 20 years.”

Ukraine can offer the spare capacity of its transit pipelines, which are underloaded already and will be substantially underutilized if Russia carries out its plans to reroute large gas export volumes from Ukrainian to other pipeline routes.

Given the latest Russian-inflicted setbacks to the EU’s Nabucco project, Tymoshenko portrayed the Ukrainian concept of White Stream in Brussels as a possible alternative to Nabucco. Such a conclusion is premature, however. Nabucco and the two dovetailing versions of White Stream are all necessary in order to stimulate Western investment in extraction in the Central Asian upstream as well as acceleration of production in Azerbaijan. Absent these transport options and the markets along their routes, Caspian gas production growth would slow down; and existing Russian pipelines would absorb growing volumes of that production, to the economic and strategic detriment of Europe. The GUEU and Ukrainian versions of the White Stream project need to proceed in synergy with each other and in coordination with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.

The Moscow Times reports on the breathtaking early triumphs of the Timoshenko government:

February is shaping up to be a big month for Ukraine, and President Viktor Yushchenko -- backed by a group of heavyweight allies in Davos -- said his country should emerge with flying colors.

On Feb. 5, the World Trade Organization's General Council will vote on Ukraine's long-awaited entry into the World Trade Organization -- a decision that could give Kiev an upper hand over Moscow as well as any European capital tempted to resort to protectionism to ward off global economic turmoil. Then Yushchenko will fly to Moscow on Feb. 12 for his first visit with President Vladimir Putin since Yulia Tymoshenko replaced the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych as prime minister.

Yushchenko, speaking Friday at a lunch on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum, gave few details about what he expected from the Moscow visit but indicated that he hoped for some resolution to issues that have strained relations, including gas transit fees and the price that Ukraine pays for Russian gas. "We would like to see new prospects for settling problems with Russia," Yushchenko told a restaurant overflowing with guests. Organizers had to turn away 250 people. But first is the Feb. 5 vote that Yushchenko will attend in Geneva. The WTO confirmed Ukraine's accession at a meeting Friday, clearing the way for the largely formal vote by the 151-member General Council. Ukraine will then have six months to pass the legislation that it agreed to as part of its entry. The country will become a member 30 days after that. "I have no doubt that Feb. 5 will be a great day for Ukraine and Ukraine's business partners," said Yushchenko, who has made WTO membership a priority since becoming president three years ago.

Speaker after speaker took to the lectern after Yushchenko to praise his initiatives and Ukraine's course. The loud praise was in stark contrast to last year's Ukrainian lunch at Davos, where Yanukovych was the guest of honor and faced a barrage of criticism from then-Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga and other guests over his more Russian-focused vision for Ukraine.

Former World Bank president James Wolfensohn applauded Yushchenko's efforts to bring Ukraine into the WTO as well as NATO and the European Union. "I think the steps you are taking would give encouragement to everyone," he said. Turning to Yushchenko's upcoming talks with Putin, Wolfensohn said, "We look forward to the Feb. 12 visit as another clarification in the role of your country." Tymoshenko is expected to visit Moscow in a few days to lay the foundation for Yushchenko's trip.

Yushchenko sharply defended Ukraine's desire to join NATO, a move strongly opposed by Russia. "We do not need anybody's authorization, agreement or their 'yes' or 'no,'" he said. "This is not against any country. It is a reflection of our national interests."

The president touted Ukraine's plans to privatize Ukrtelecom and stakes in around a dozen other enterprises this year, and he called on banks and consulting firms to bring their expertise to the table to ensure the sales' success. "We need partners," he said. He also said Ukraine would like to float 10 companies on the New York Stock Exchange this year.

Yushchenko won a ringing endorsement from Jean Lemierre, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. "Ukraine has a sound economy from a business viewpoint," he said, identifying the key benefits of doing business there as cheap energy and cheap labor. He cautioned that the benefits would not last forever and said the main bottleneck to economic growth remained a lack of infrastructure. Still, Lemierre praised the latest privatization plans and said foreign investors had "a huge appetite" for Ukrainian assets.

Among the hungry investors is Michael White, head of PepsiCo International, who first visited Ukraine as a college student in the 1970s. White said he was impressed with how much the country has changed and said Pepsi was putting its money where its mouth was, purchasing a local juice company, Sandora, for $542 million last year and switching from Malaysian palm oil to local sunflower oil at its regional potato-chip plant.

Fred Bergsten, a U.S. economist and co-founder of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, also gave Ukraine's economy high marks, saying robust emerging markets like Ukraine provided guarantees that the U.S. financial crisis would not spread across the entire world. "There will not be -- I repeat -- there will not be a world recession," he said.

Bergsten applauded Ukraine's march toward the WTO and said its accession would place it in a better position to defend its trade interests -- particularly against a growing threat of trade protectionism as EU countries consider ways to avoid economic fallout from the United States. The EU is Ukraine's biggest trade partner. "It is important ... that Ukraine is about to join the WTO," Bergsten said. Ukraine, Russia and Iran are the biggest countries outside the WTO. Russia has been trying to join for more than a decade, and European Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said in Geneva on Friday that he hoped Russia would enter the trade body this year, Reuters reported.

At the lunch, Yushchenko conceded that he had a way to go to reach his goal of "bringing Ukraine back to Europe." But he said his government was taking the right steps by, among other things, creating a new state agency to fight corruption among civil servants and ensure fair parliamentary elections. He noted that the vote last fall was the first in Ukraine's history to be declared democratic by international observers. "Ukraine is a young democracy, and one has to go to the first grade, then to the fifth grade, and then to graduate," Yushchenko said.

LR: Note how this man can freely admit that Ukraine still has work to do on democracy, without being ashamed or worried about foreign scorn. He's confident, because he's legitimate. Can we say the same about Vladimir Putin? Is he man enough to make a statement like this? Of course not.

The Ukrainian lunch at Davos, now in its fourth year, was hosted by Viktor Pinchuk, the billionaire son-in-law of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. The Ukrainian-themed menu included hors d'oeuvres made with slabs of salo, followed by bowls of dark-red borshch smothered in sour cream, honey-marinated beef stuffed with prunes and apples, and cherry vareniki for dessert.

There's more. The EU is on board!

The European Union supports Ukraine's attempt to revise its natural gas agreement with Russia, which would allow the country to sign a long-term accord, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said Tuesday. Tymoshenko, who took office Dec. 18, wants to scrap the country's natural gas accord with Russia, raise transit fees for Russian fuel exports to Europe and fees for Ukraine's gas storage and drop gas-trader RosUkrEnergo. She will visit Moscow Feb. 21 to revise the agreement. "We propose building a formula approach" to determine the gas price, Tymoshenko told a group of journalists in Brussels on Monday. "I have heard the support for this kind of negotiation here today. The EU is interested in forming a long-term pricing policy."

Tymoshenko also used the visit to stress the need for an alternative to the Nabucco project to deliver Central Asian gas to Europe and an EU donor group to help fund the modernization of Ukraine's pipelines, Interfax reported. Tymoshenko also said she wanted to diversify energy supplies to Ukraine. "For 17 years we have not built any diversified projects,'' Tymoshenko said. "We would like to have new transit Caspian-Black Sea corridor together with investors.'' She requested that the EU consider participation in the so-called White Stream gas project, which would pass the Caspian and Black seas through Ukraine to Europe, Interfax reported. "This project could be considerably cheaper and more effective, and we want Ukraine and the European Union to be partners in this project," Tymoshenko said, Interfax reported.

Russia supplies one-quarter of Europe's gas, of which about four-fifths travels through Ukrainian pipelines. In 2006, Russia sought to quadruple Ukraine's gas price, and Gazprom cut supplies in the first days of January 2006 after Ukraine rejected the demand. This resulted in shortages in countries including Hungary, Italy and Germany. "The market has to regulate everything," Tymoshenko said. "It has to be the market, not a political discussion." Russia doubled the gas price for Ukraine in 2006 and raised it by 37 percent last year and 38 percent this year. Ukraine increased the transit fee for Russia to $1.70 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas per 100 kilometers this year, compared with $1.60 in 2007 and 2006. "Starting in 2006, Russia has been raising prices of natural gas," Tymoshenko said. "On the other hand, the cost of transit remained almost unchanged."

At a news conference Tuesday in Brussels, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the bloc was planning to negotiate a free trade agreement with Ukraine, calling the accord a high priority. Mandelson said talks would start in the weeks after Ukraine joins the World Trade Organization. Ukraine on Jan. 25 received approval to become the WTO's 153rd member. Appearing at the same news conference, Tymoshenko asked EU officials to start work on allowing Ukraine to join the EU's electronic customs declarations in the fight against smuggling. Ukraine borders EU members Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. "I say 'yes' ... to the question of whether Ukraine is capable of forming solid, long-term and reliable stability," Tymoshenko told reporters after talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. "'Yes' to harmonious relations between the president, parliament and government and 'yes' to stability."

Anders Alsund jumps on the bandwagon:

After Ukraine's extraordinary parliamentary elections on Sept. 30, it took no less than 2 1/2 months to form a government, and it was confirmed by the slightest of parliamentary margins. The new coalition government headed by Yulia Tymoshenko, however, has started ambitiously and auspiciously.

The Ukrainian economy is in good shape with a growth rate of 7.3 percent last year. The stock market surged by no less than 120 percent last year, and it has barely fallen during the January turmoil. The new government's biggest achievement is to make Ukraine ready to join the World Trade Organization at a February 5 meeting of the WTO General Council. One month after the parliament ratifies the accession, Ukraine will become a full-fledged member of the WTO. This could boost the country's growth by one percentage point a year.

Ukraine's WTO accession is a joint accomplishment of the four last governments. The very last obstacle was a European Union complaint about the country's export tariffs, primarily on steel scrap. It has been relegated to the negotiations about a free-trade agreement with the EU, which are likely to be concluded before the end of 2008. As elsewhere in the region, the greatest economic concern is the high and rising inflation, as consumer prices rose by 16.6 percent last year. As a consequence, experienced Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk immediately tightened the budget by balancing it. Fortunately, no price controls or export controls are being discussed. Tymoshenko says that she has learned not to do so from her tenure in 2005. Tymoshenko's most worrisome campaign promise was to compensate Ukrainians who lost their bank savings in the early 1990s because of hyperinflation and to do so in the course of two years. Fortunately, the government has capped this compensation program at $1.2 billion, which is less than one percent of gross domestic product, and it has distributed the money swiftly and equally.

As in all democratic post-communist countries, corruption was the biggest concern during the election campaign. Wisely, Tymoshenko made it her key theme. In order to substantiate her promises to combat corruption, she has moved quickly on three fronts. The most obnoxious and conspicuous corruption was the previous government's practice of selling value-added tax refunds for exporters at a "commission" of 20 percent to 30 percent. Tymoshenko has appointed a competent former economy minister, Valery Khoroshkovsky, to head the tax administration and to sort that problem out. The customs problem, which Tymoshenko cleaned up in 2005, has again become one of her focal points of corruption, and she is set to repeat her prior success. The most intricate corruption is persistently in gas trade, which Tymoshenko is very knowledgeable about from her old business. The intermediary RosUkrEnergo does not appear to have any reason to exist. Nor does its half-owned Ukrainian subsidiary, UkrGazEnergo. The apparent purpose of these two nontransparent joint ventures is to siphon off money to a number of prominent Russians and Ukrainians. The costs of this boondoggle are so large that the Ukrainian state oil and gas corporation, Naftogaz Ukrainy, is on the verge of bankruptcy. We do not need to know the details to understand that something has to be done. Tymoshenko has moved to exclude these dysfunctional structures from Ukraine's gas trade. Fortunately, Gazprom chairman and Russia's president-in-waiting Dmitry Medvedev expresses the same view.

In the last two years, Ukraine has carried out minimal privatization. On Jan. 18, the new Ukrainian government published a list of 19 state-owned companies slated for privatization this year. The total value of the stakes to be sold is assessed at some $5 billion. Sensibly, the new government has abandoned its predecessor's tactic of selling very small posts, instead offering large majority posts in three major companies, including Ukrtelecom, Ukraine's old fixed-line monopoly. Year after year, Ukraine has prolonged a moratorium on the sale of private agricultural land, benefiting only large businessmen who have bought up tens of thousands of hectares. The new government has let this moratorium lapse, and it is intent on swiftly adopting the necessary legislation to facilitate land trade.

President Viktor Yushchenko, Tymoshenko and parliamentary Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk have signed an application for a Membership Action Plan to NATO in advance of the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April. This was somewhat surprising because Tymoshenko has avoided the topic. Together with WTO membership and a free trade agreement with the EU, the MAP, which may or may not lead to NATO membership, defines Ukraine's firm Western-oriented foreign policy.

The worst policy that Tymoshenko pursued in 2005 was reprivatization, but she seems to have learned that lesson as well, so far staying away from such a destabilizing policy. The new Ukrainian government has delivered a very impressive start, and there is strong hope that much more is to come. One outcome of the last parliamentary elections was that the three dominant parties share a broad market economic consensus. All three are democratic, center-right parties that are financed by big businessmen, most of whom are quickly gentrifying because the market values of their corporations surge with transparency and orderliness.

Several of the biggest Ukrainian businessmen have voluntarily abandoned transfer pricing and started paying taxes in full. They are also devoting large resources to charitable donations, mainly in education and health. Yet, as a consequence of scandals with big businessmen-cum-ministers, they are almost absent from the new Cabinet.

Ukraine has all along suffered from constitutional disorder. Although the constitution has not changed, improved practices are apparent. The dominant opposition party, the Party of the Regions, has set up a shadow government. The two coalition partners, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and Yushchenko's Our Ukraine, have divided the Cabinet posts so that Tymoshenko controls all economic appointments while Our Ukraine controls foreign policy, security and culture. An orderly balance of power between the president and the prime minister seems to be emerging out of their persistent power struggle.

Obviously, one month is far too early to pass any judgment on a government, but its start has been truly impressive. Ukraine sets an illustrative example for how Russia could have evolved if it had developed its democracy and market economy through competition among the oligarchs instead of abandoning democracy. Because of its more radical, market-based economic reforms in the 1990s, Russia still benefits from better legislation. Even so, property rights appear more secure in Ukraine now because of democracy's greater transparency and checks and balances.

The Jamestown Foundation's Vladimir Socor reports:

On January 16 Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, and Parliament Chairman Arseny Yatsenyuk made public a joint letter to NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, declaring Ukraine's readiness to advance to a Membership Action Plan (MAP) with NATO and requesting a decision to that end by the Alliance at its Bucharest summit in early April.

The three Ukrainian leaders' letter states that the country sees itself as part of the Euro-Atlantic security space; is determined to counteract threats to common security alongside NATO countries; and is committed to continuing its participation in NATO-led peacekeeping and anti-terrorist operations. The leaders state that progress already achieved within the NATO-Ukraine Intensified Dialogue constitutes a strong basis for advancing to a MAP.

Citing "deep and irreversible democratic changes [that] enable Ukraine to fulfill all the necessary criteria for NATO membership," the letter assures the Alliance that Ukraine would broaden and deepen reforms of the security and defense sector. Furthermore, the government intends to explain the merits of NATO-Ukraine cooperation more clearly to the Ukrainian public and significantly increase budget funding for such explanatory efforts. The people of Ukraine will in any case be "consulted [by the leadership] about the question of Ukraine's future membership in NATO."

Based on the country's readiness to undertake "new commitments" in its relationship with the Alliance, the three leaders trust that the upcoming summit would approve a decision whereby Ukraine would enter into a membership action plan with NATO (www.president.gov.ua, January 16).

Elaborating on the letter, Presidential Secretariat deputy chief (responsible for foreign policy) Oleksandr Chaliy told journalists that the key policy issue involves upgrading the format of NATO-Ukraine relations, after the 2004-2007 Intensified Dialogue has been fully utilized and by now almost exhausted its potential. Chaliy drew more explicitly than the letter a distinction between membership and the MAP process, which he described as one stage toward the ultimate goal of membership (Interfax-Ukraine, January 16).

Declining to forecast a time frame for attaining that goal, Chaliy underscored the need to develop internal political support in Ukraine for NATO membership. At the end of the MAP process, the membership issue will be put to a referendum: "This is the clear position of the president, government, and parliament." However, this would be a "consultative" referendum. Chaliy pointedly noted that joining NATO is a matter for nations, not just leaders or governments. Meanwhile, Ukrainian diplomats are now holding talks with "key" NATO member countries to develop support for a MAP decision at the Alliance's summit (www.president.gov.ua, UNIAN, January 16).

The three top leaders actually signed the letter to de Hoop Scheffer on January 11 (sending it presumably that day), but made it public on the 16th at the end of U.S. Senator Richard Lugar's visit to Ukraine. On January 10 the Tymoshenko-led cabinet of ministers announced its own action plan on foreign policy, including an unambiguously stipulated goal of full membership in NATO. However, the government's program also envisages that Ukraine's ultimate decision on membership would be taken "by referendum only" (UNIAN, January 10).

The imminence of NATO's summit clearly precipitated the Ukrainian leaders' letter, as the lead time to the summit is tightening and the allies' ability to work out a pre-summit consensus on this issue is becoming more problematic. In Ukraine itself, however, the governing coalition of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the Our Ukraine-People’s Self Defense bloc took office in December 2007 with a solid internal consensus regarding the goal of NATO membership. Yushchenko and his followers had been committed to this goal all along, although the president himself pursued it without consistency or resolve, allowing short-term partisan considerations at times to trump the strategic goal of joining or NATO and even decelerating cooperation programs. For her part, Tymoshenko embraced that goal late but convincingly during the home run to her second premiership, as stated in the landmark article she signed for the September-October issue of the U.S. journal Foreign Affairs and subsequent pronouncements.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's January 5 reelection, and the concurrent plebiscite that shows more than 70% Georgian public support for NATO membership, also encouraged the three Ukrainian leaders to send their letter to NATO. In debates within the Alliance from its 2006 Riga summit onward, supporters of membership action plans for Ukraine and Georgia have argued for a "package" solution to invite both countries to join MAPs at the Bucharest summit.

The letter and accompanying statements are replete with indirect references to the deficit of Ukrainian public support for NATO membership. Such support remains confined to some 20% of the overall electorate (stronger in western and weaker in eastern regions), according to public opinion surveys in the last few years. The support has actually declined to that level in the Orange revolution's aftermath. This situation explains not only the declared intent to launch more serious public information programs, but especially the reassurances that any decision on membership would ultimately be submitted to a referendum. Unsurprisingly, the presidency also envisages an escape clause whereby that referendum would be consultative.

Writing the Moscow Times, Yulia Latynina explains the difference between democracy in Ukraine and "democracy" in Russia:

On Oct. 13, there was a powerful natural gas explosion in Dnipropetrovsk, located in eastern Ukraine. About 30 people died. Ever since the explosion, almost every Ukrainian politician has attacked Viktor Vekselberg, the owner of DnipropetrovskGorGaz, which is the local gas company that may be responsible for the blast. Actually, Vekselberg owns only 50 percent of the company. The other half is owned by Mikhail Abyzov, but this is beside the point. Since Vekselberg is a public figure and a Russian oligarch to boot, he is a more attractive target to blame for the accident.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared that he would teach Russian oligarchs a lesson about "criminal liability, if they don't understand their moral responsibility." Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has "assembled a group of 10 lawyers that will force Mr. Vekselberg to pay for all losses caused by the accident."

Ukrainian Emergency Situations Minister Nestor Shufrych, a member of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's coalition, announced that he would press for nationalizing DnipropetrovskGorGaz if Vekselberg failed to reimburse the ministry to the tune of $20 million, the amount the government apparently spent handling the disaster.

The primary cause of the gas explosion is not known. It could have been caused by the dilapidated condition of gas lines, a high-pressure surge or tampering with gas meters by residents of the apartment building. People are lining up to hurl accusations at DnipropetrovskGorGaz. And the populist threats to nationalize the gas company are very disturbing. In the end, not a single Ukrainian politician has missed the chance to exploit the deaths from this tragedy as a personal public-relations opportunity or to promote the interests of their financial backers. And some are guilty of doing both.

"Is this the glorious democracy we were fighting for?" you might ask.

Yes. In fact, this is democracy in its best form. As a result of this public outcry, Vekselberg announced that he would pay the families of the deceased $100,000 each and $10,000 to each of the injured. It should be reiterated that the cause of the accident has not been established yet.

Do you recall how much was paid to victims after a similar explosion in Arkhangelsk took the lives of 60 people? I'll refresh your memory: The families of the deceased received 100,000 rubles (about $4,000) each.

And how much did the victims of the Dubrovka theater attack receive as compensation? In 2004, even the most persistent plaintiffs managed to win a maximum payment of only 327,000 rubles (about $13,000). And then there was the Moscow City Court ruling that increased the compensation for Alla Alyakin, a Dubrovka hostage, by 2 kopeks.

Contrary to what many think, democracy is not justice at all. It is all a bunch of lies, demagoguery and populism. It is also about politicians who exploit a tragedy -- and the public outrage that emerges as a consequence -- to grab shares of profitable industries under the false mantra of "justice."

But in this case, the result of this demagoguery and corruption is that Tymoshenko's political bloc will pay each victim 2,000 hryvnas ($395), while the government will allocate 5,000,000 hryvnas (roughly $1 million) to compensate the victims and help them acquire new apartments.

Democracy has a price -- an absolutely concrete price.

Compare the $100,000 that each victim in Dnipropetrovsk will receive with the additional 2 kopeks paid to Alyakina in Moscow. This clearly underscores the difference, in arithmetic terms, between

Writing on the op-ed pages of RIA Novosti Andrei Marchukov, PhD (History), a staff researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Russian History, claims that Russia is blameless in the Ukrainian famines under Stalin. Here's his "scholarly analysis" (pursuant to a request from a reader) with La Russophobe's running commentary.

The Soviet famine of 1932-33 was an act of genocide against Ukrainians. Kiev has been forcing this point on the world, the United Nations and Moscow for several years now, in a vast and aggressive campaign. The Famine (Holodomor, in Ukrainian) is an all-pervading ideological concept, a tool of public indoctrination. It is not only a tribute to the victims' memory but also a pressing political demonstration by present-day Ukrainian leaders, spearheaded against Russia as much as against the communist past.

LR: So, let's see if we understand. When Ukraine remembers its history, that is "indoctrination" but when Russia does it (using the youth cult Nashi as the instructor), that is just patriotism. Right?

The matter returned to the United Nations on October 15, when Ukraine submitted to a UNESCO conference a resolution demanding the greatest possible information about the Great Famine. In fact, this information is not withheld, even though the world does not regard the Famine as a deliberate genocidal act. While fully recognizing the Ukrainian tragedy, there is no explicit proof that the famine was provoked by the Kremlin and intended to exterminate the Ukrainian nation.

LR: By "no explicit proof" (the same thing Vladmir Putin says about Iran's nuclear bomb plans), he apparently means there's not document in which Stalin personally admits he caused the famine to kill off Ukrainians. There's no "explicit proof" that the U.S. has any intention to invade Russia, but Vladimir Putin is acting on that supposition. Did you notice Mr. Marchukov calling on Putin to show "explicit proof" before doing so? The world condemns Iran and seeks to sanction it, yet Russia ignores the world. It seems world opinion only matters to Russia when it agrees with Russia. And, by the way, if one might be so bold, where is Mr. Marchukov's "explicit proof" that "the world does not regard the Famine as a deliberate genocidal act"? Why are Russians allowed to make conclusions without showing "explicit proof" yet non-Russians must have it? And, do you notice that Mr. Marchukov is not prepared to say what action against Russia he would be prepared to support if "explicit proof" were given?

The holodomor concept first arose amongst the Ukrainian Diaspora. Many books and press publications appeared in the West in the 1940s-70s describing the Famine as a Kremlin plot to kill off Ukrainians and undermine the survivors' spirit. Public attention to the holodomor skyrocketed in the 1980s. This was the time when President Ronald Reagan was referring to the U.S.S.R. as the Evil Empire. Ukrainian emigres added fuel to the fire with their reminiscences and analyses of the holodomor. In 1984, the U.S. Congress established an ad hoc commission to investigate the causes of the Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932-33. Its 1988 Report to Congress described the famine as "man-made" and denied any causal connection with drought. "Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933," the report says. Perestroika, with its outspoken spirit, brought the concept to Ukraine. Mourning the millions starved to death went hand-in-hand with wrathful denunciations of genocide. Today's propaganda aims to make the holodomor part of the Ukrainian world-view. President Viktor Yushchenko called on politicians of his generation to "preserve historical memory and spare no efforts to make the world qualify the Famine of 1932-33 as genocidal".

LR: Correct us if we are wrong, but didn't this madman just get finished saying that the world didn't agree it was genocide? He's just shown formal evidence that it does. Where is his evidence from some other country, any other one, reaching the opposite conclusion? Is he suggesting that because this conclusion comes from the U.S. it is therefore wrong? Does that mean if the U.S. decided there was no genocide, it happened and Marchukov would admit it?

Why is such sensation whipped up over bygones? On the one hand, Ukrainian propaganda has found a satanic enemy, the epitome of Absolute Evil, and is now out to develop a guilt complex in Russians to make them feel morally and materially responsible for the tragedy. On the other hand, it seeks to make Ukrainians feel like innocent victims, and spread this assumption worldwide. Tellingly, Ukrainian leaders are ever more frequently referring to the Famine as the "Ukrainian Holocaust" - thus putting the U.S.S.R. on a par with Nazi Germany. Cardinal Lubomir Husar, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, concisely described the goal of the campaign: "Memory of the holodomor is what our nation shall stand on." Words of equal aptitude belong to former President Leonid Kuchma: "Ukrainian national consolidation has a long way to travel yet. We have made Ukraine. Now is the time to make Ukrainians."

LR: We wonder if Mr. Marchukov would adopt the same attitude towards the "bygones" of the Great Patriotic War, Beslan and Dubrovka. Does he lecture Russians, especially Vladimir Putin, that they mustn't discuss these bits of ancient history?

"Making Ukrainians" implies a new national ethic and mentality, with the idea of Ukrainians and Russians as two nations apart. What several Ukrainian generations firmly believed in has been turned on its head. The young regard their country's recent past as a time of colonialism, when Ukrainians were ruthlessly exterminated. It is hard to find a more graphic example than the Famine.

LR: "Several generations believed"? Correct us if we're wrong, but those are the ones that lived under the Russian dictatorship in Moscow's Kremlin, aren't they? Why are Russians allowed to engage in making Russians -- via Nashi for example -- but Ukrainians are not allowed to make Ukrainians? Is it because this card-carrying fanatic believes there is no such thing as Ukraine, that the nation is really just an appendage of Russia, as Russian pop icon Oleg Gazmanov sings in his hit song?

Was it really genocide or ethnocide against Ukrainians? The U.S.S.R. owed the terrible famine of 1932-33 to agricultural collectivization. The rapid creation of a thoroughly new type of farming went together with the cruel dispossession of well-to-do farmers, so-called "kulaks". Peasant resistance inevitably followed. Bloated grain procurement quotas envisaged total confiscations-seed, food and fodder grain. The 1932 quota for Ukraine was 400 million poods, or 6.4 million metric tons, but even the severest possible confiscations brought only 261 million poods, so extra procurements were launched, with searches, ruinous fines-and firing squads. Peasants were dying of starvation as early as October 1932, and the famine went on up to the next year's end.

LR: And yet, it was the Ukrainians who perished in famine, not the Russians, wasn't it? What an odd coincidence! Oh, the fickle finger of fate!

Those two years saw 2.9-3.5 million deaths from starvation in Ukraine alone, according to various estimates. Yet it was not ethnocide proper. Registry office statistics for 1933 show death rates in urban localities no higher than average, in contrast to an exorbitant death toll in the countryside not only in Ukraine but all over the Soviet Union. People were doomed not on the grounds of ethnicity, but merely because they lived in rural areas. Grain shortages were exacerbated by a rapid increase of the urban population. It swelled by 12.4 million nationwide in the four years 1929-32, and by 4.1 million in Ukraine within 1931, mainly because persecuted peasants fled their villages. Nothing could have been easier for the regime than to starve townspeople, who depended on food supplies from elsewhere for their survival. Yet, it was not done. The regime made do with harsh food rationing. Peasantry as a social class was the victim of the cruel policy. This point clearly follows from the geography of the Great Famine. It spread throughout the Soviet breadbasket areas-Ukraine, the middle and lower reaches of the Volga, the North Caucasus, the central part of the Black Earth Zone, the Urals, part of Siberia, and Kazakhstan - with a total population of 50 million. The Famine killed 6-7 million people nationwide. All Soviet peoples were victims.

LR: Half of those who perished were Ukrainian by his own admission, and he fails to state any number of ethnic Russians who lost their lives -- nor does he even attempt to deny that the non-Ukrainians were classifiable as enemies of Stalin.

Arguments cited to prove that the famine was a deliberate act of genocide do not hold water. Still, many Ukrainians do not want to turn the tragic page of history. This is understandable. If they did, public attention would turn to their own, present-day, policy and its dire fruit. The Ukrainian population shrank by 4.3 million in 1991-2003-3.6 million died, and over 1.2 million emigrated, while only 500,000 former emigres returned. If we extrapolate the figures to the end of 2006, the population decline exceeds 5.4 million-this without wars, famine, or the Kremlin's imperialism. Don't these statistics give food for uneasy thought?

LR: The inherent subtext of this garbage is that Mr.Marchukov would admit Russia was responsible and support appropriate sanctions against Russia if the evidence supported it. But there is not one word of "explicit proof" that he actually believes this to be found in the article -- nor is there one single word of criticism of either the Stalin dictatorship or the current Kremlin regime -- yet, this maniac has the gall to complain about propaganda issuing from Ukraine! Never once does he ask what Russia might have done to make Ukrainians hate Russia so much that they would engage in propaganda. He seems not to notice that Russia's alienation of the world is in fact much broader -- that only rogue nations like North Korea, Iran and Venezuela will give Russia the time of day. Meanwhile, he ignores the fact that after having had its lifeblood sucked as if by leech by Russia for decades and facing even today active Russian efforts to subvert its independence (especially the weaponization of energy resources), Ukraine is naturally suffering the consequences today. Yet, he asks Ukraine to ignore the horror that caused its current problems, just because it would be so much more convenient for Russia.

That's just plain crazy. This is what passes for "scholarship" from Russian "universities" today -- universities that are pawns of the Kremlin just as they were in Soviet times, universities that are swimming in corruption and are no more capable of giving a true liberal arts education than of finding the cure for Russia's own rapidly plunging population. Russia should get its own house in order before it dares to lecture other countries how they should live.

And the irony is simply breathtaking: When anyone in the West delivers such lectures to Russia, all they meet is outrage. Yet, Russia feels itself perfectly free to treat Ukraine, and other former Soviet slave states, exactly the same way.

Revolting.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Putin's Russia, once again, has a major amount of egg on its face, enduring yet another egregious foreign policy failure:

Yulia Tymoshenko, the firebrand leader of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, emerged as the big winner in parliamentary elections, an outcome that could bring fresh upheaval to relations with Russia.

It is unclear whether Ms. Tymoshenko will be Ukraine's next prime minister, but Sunday's vote has confirmed her as the driving force among the country's westward-leaning parties, and it appeared to give them enough seats in Parliament to form a government.

That would be a welcome result for Western leaders and Ukrainians who supported the 2004 Orange Revolution, in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested to overturn fraudulent elections. At the time, it appeared that democracy movements were sweeping across the former Soviet Union; they have become mired in infighting since then.

An Orange government would not likely be welcomed by Moscow, whose favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, lost in 2004 but returned to power as prime minister last year. As soon as Mr. Yanukovich took office, he halted Ukraine's bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Moscow opposes.

Ms. Tymoshenko has said she would seek to reopen negotiations with Russia over the price at which it sells natural gas to Ukraine and to shut out RosUkrenErgo, the opaque company half-owned by Russian state gas giant OAO Gazprom that handles the trade. Ukraine currently pays a little more than half the price some of its neighbors pay for gas, a result of negotiations Mr. Yanukovich conducted last year.

Ms. Tymoshenko's party, Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko, increased its share of the vote by 10 percentage points from the 2006 election to 32%, with three-quarters of the ballots counted, Ukraine's Central Election Commission said. That put her half a percentage point behind the Party of the Regions, headed by Mr. Yanukovich. Our Ukraine, the party of President Viktor Yushchenko, placed third, with 15%.

Blogger Paul Goble says that so-called "ethnic Russians" living in Ukraine have no use for Moscow; they've not forgotten the bad old Soviet days.

Ethnic Russians in Ukraine are overwhelmingly loyal to Kyiv, a reflection of both their experiences at the end of the Soviet period and the strides the Ukrainian government has made to create a political rather than ethnic nation in that country, according to a leading Moscow specialist on ethnic issues. Consequently, Sergei Markedonov argues in an article posted online this week, Moscow’s continuing efforts to exploit what many Russian officials and still believe is a significant dividing line within Ukraine are doomed to fail and may even backfire.

On the one hand, Markedonov’s conclusions resemble those of Kremlin aide Modest Kolerov who in June 2006 urged that Moscow recognize that “there are no pro-Russian forces in the post-Soviet space” and that those who present themselves as such are marginal figures who lack any support in the countries where they now live. But on the other, the Moscow analyst’s remarks this week are a significant extension of those ideas because they directly address the situation in Ukraine, a country that, in Markedonov’s words, has always occupied “a special role” in Russian thinking and “Soviet nostalgia.”

The creation of Ukraine in its current borders, Markedonov reminds his readers, was the work of Joseph Stalin who added the six western oblasts to the Ukrainian SSR at the end of World War II and Nikita Khrushchev who transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. As a result, Ukraine even in Soviet times had an ethnically diverse population, and Ukraine itself represented “an imagined community,” one in which ethnic Ukrainians for nationalist reasons and ethnic Russians there as the result of their specific life experiences with Russians from the RSFSR found a great deal of common ground. Ukrainian nationalist sympathies in the late Soviet period are well-known, but Markedonov offers an interesting detail: Vitaliy Shelest’, the son of Ukrainian party boss Pyotr Shelest, repeatedly read and accepted most of the arguments of Ivan Dzyuba’s classic “Internationalism or Russification.”

But what the Moscow analyst says about ethnic Russians in the Ukrainian SSR is even more important. Markedonov, a native of Rostov, said that in the 1970s and 1980s, ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine were horrified by and viewed themselves as very different than the RSFSR Russians who traveled there to buy food. And those experiences rather than some misplaced optimism about the future explain why ethnic Russians in the eastern portions of Ukraine voted for the independence of that country from the Soviet Union almost as enthusiastically as ethnic Ukrainians did. Such attitudes, however, might not have mattered much if the post-Soviet Ukrainian leadership had sought an émigré-based ethnic national state, as some Ukrainians hoped. But instead, Kyiv has actively promoted the creation of “a political Ukrainian nation,” one with a place for ethnic Russians as well as ethnic Ukrainians. This process, Markedonov continues, is “far from its completion,” but he argues that Moscow must recognize and base its policies toward Kyiv on the reality that over the last 16 years, “the Kyiv elite has been able to do a great deal to overcome the ethno-cultural split of the country.” By acting in this way, the Moscow analyst says, Ukrainian leaders have been able to prevent their country from falling into the difficulties in which Georgia or even Moldova have found themselves and “what is most important” have been able to “create the traditions of a civilized transfer of power and the achievement of compromises.”

Since 1991, Ukraine has had three presidents. It has had even more prime ministers. And it has a political system in which compromise has been enshrined as a political virtue, something not found in many other post-Soviet states, including the Russian Federation. As a result, Markedonov concludes, “the state in Ukraine exists, and a single political nation has become to be formed.” And the sooner that people in Moscow understand this, the batter” instead of continuing to pursue policies based on assumptions that are no longer true if they ever were.

Julia Tymoshenko's blog reports that Kremlin shil Viktor Yanukovich is attempting to pilfer state assets:

Representatives of the political forces -- participants of so-called "coalition" and officials of Yanukovych government -- realize that afterthe conducting of the early elections in Ukraine their rule will step back into history. Just for this reason, having the feeling that their corruption charts are crashing, they frankly appropriate and sell out profitable objects of the Ukrainian economy.

Overwhelmed with an unrestrained desire for personal profit, officials of Yanukovych government are ready to sell all state enterprises together. After a successful transaction with "Luganskteplovoz," after which Office of public prosecutor brought a lawsuit, there was an attempt at selling "Ukrtelekom." In the case of aa sale of "Ukrtelekom" -- the monopolist in the field of electronic communication in the state -- unprotected segments of the Ukrainian population (disabled, war veterans, ordinary pensioners) would be deprived of the opportunity to use a telephone forever.

During the last months of its activity, the Cabinet does everything possible to appropriate the most attractive economic objects and concentrate them in the ownership of the closest comrades-in-arms, in particular those enterprises which provide light and warmth for the Ukrainian houses.

The bright evidence of this is the last decision of Yanukovych government, which allowed one of the biggest power companies in Ukraine "Dniproenergo" to isssue shares. As a result, the state share will drop down from 76% to 50%. In this case, share of companies which are controlled by the known bilionnaire Akhmetov actually gives control over "Dniproenergo" management. Akhmetov’s companies beforehand bought up 8,8% of "Dniproenergo" capital, which allows them to break any meetings of shareholders and depreciates team shares by 87%.

The plan of actual theft from the national property of "Dniproenergo" foresees buying up of this company debts before other persons for the amount of USD 200 million and further exchange of these debts for 26% of "Dniproenergo" capital within the additional issue of shares, to which only companies controlled by Akhmetov will be admitted.

Cynicism and impudence of Cabinet actions are reflected in the fact that market value of the company makes at least USD 1 billion 750 million; 26% makes USD 455 million. Thus, in case of successful conducting of this transaction, our state loses about USD 500 million, and also control over one of the main power companies of Ukraine. Except for that, small stockholders, mainly workers of this company, will be deprived of their rights for the part of the company profit.

According to BYUT infomration, it is planned that the only buyer of 26% of "Dniproenergo” will be "Donetsk Fuel Energy Company," which belongs to Renat Akhmetov.

In connection with this Yulia Tymoshenko bloc appeals to President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko with a requirement to stop immediately criminals who are selling out strategic economic objects of the state. We require to bring to trial the officials of Yanukovych government whose actions endanger power safety of Ukraine.

Kommersant reports on a meeting last Thursday between Vladimir Putin and his alter ego in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich. It seems to have turned into a Keystone Cops affair, and reader "Elmer" observes

You might note the comment about the meeting starting on time (a miracle!) and a supposed gaffe committed by Yanuk - he sat down before Putin did. Or rather, seems to have plopped himself down into a chair. Ukraine's parliament has been disbanded, and new elections are set for September 30. Key comment - Putin's, and the reporter's, beffudlement and bemusement over Ukraine being in "crisis." Apparently, to Putin and his supporters, a crisis is when elections come up. Note also the reference to the "older brother" providing understanding and advice to the "younger brother." This is a left-over piece of russkie chauvinism, dating way back to tsarist days, and carried through into sovok times. Is Putin pining for a Russian empire? You bet.

Crisis Pays a Visit to Stability

Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych met with Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday during his visit to Moscow. During his meeting with Viktor Yanukovych, Vladimir Putin made a stab at understanding who in the Ukrainian government is in the opposition and who is in the coalition. Kommersant special correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov has the details from their meeting.

The meeting between the Ukrainian prime minister and the Russian president began precisely at the appointed hour, at 19:00 Moscow Time, which is an unprecedented occurrence not only in the relationship between Ukraine and Russia but also in Russia's relationship with any foreign government in recorded history.

Vladimir Putin greeted Mr. Yanukovych on the second floor of the presidential residence outside Moscow and offered him a seat in a the closest armchair. Mr. Putin's own chair was further away, and Mr. Yanukovych sat firs – in fact, he simply threw himself down in the chair without waiting for Vladimir Putin to make it over to his own seat. He seemed to be playing at musical chairs, the game in which there's always one less chair than the number of children and everyone has to hustle to get a chair so as to not disgrace themselves in front of the other players.

It would seem that the episode meant absolutely nothing at all. And yet Vladimir Putin, accustomed to rigid adherence to the iron protocol of the Kremlin (which I firmly believe includes a clause stating that the Russian president shall never arrive anywhere on time), looked briefly disgruntled. And suddenly that episode became a gross violation of protocol.

"Frankly speaking, we look with sympathy at what is happening in Ukraine," said Vladimir Putin, clearly still reeling a bit after the curve ball thrown by the Ukrainian prime minister's gaffe, "since all recent indications showed that economic growth and real improvement in the social sphere had started, and now the country has again run into political problems that need to be gotten through… But we are counting on our primary partner in the post-Soviet space, and in general one of our main economic partners, to deal with these problems as quickly as possible. Everything will pull through, it will happen in due course…we hope within the framework of the law and the existing constitution…"

Vladimir Putin spoke to Viktor Yanukovych like an older brother, one who is concerned about what's going on in his younger brother's life but who also finds it difficult to understand how the guy can live in such revolting disorder. An older brother, with his certainty about tomorrow, who could never even imagine such a thing.

"Unfortunately, we are going through the next stage of the political crisis that began almost at the very beginning of April," said Viktor Yanukovych gloomily. "The main thing that we have managed to achieve during that period – and we believe it to be a big achievement – is that all branches of government are operating within the law."

Then he realized that maybe that isn't quite the whole truth, and that maybe he should own up to his older brother.

"But there are still unresolved questions that need to be resolved, mainly by the opposition," he added, his facade crumpling. "It is these questions that basically open the door to holding legal elections. That was our first demand, and the second demand of the coalition is that if the elections are held, they must be transparent and clean…"

"You don't have an opposition!" interrupted Vladimir Putin. "All of you are in the government! Who is in the opposition? I can't figure it out for the life of me. Everybody's in power over there."

The older brother appeared to be dissatisfied with the mess into which he had been forced to dive for the sake of close family ties.

"I remember very well the conversation that I had with you, one of the first, when you asked what the constitutional reform is," began Viktor Yanukovych hastily. "It is to some extent the flaws in the constitutional reform that we need to resolve, and I think that in any case the question of whether there will be elections or not is open, because the balance of power creates the conditions for it to be effective as whole and because it's not possible for any of the branches of government to interrupt their work."

If someone had tried to delve into what Viktor Yanukovych was talking about at this point, he probably wouldn't have gotten that Mr. Yanukovych is talking about the dissolution of the legislature. All the more so because the prime minister had managed to confuse himself.

"In that case, the chain is broken," he said without a pause, "and basically the country cannot live in those conditions. That's what has happened now in Ukraine."

So it turns out that Ukraine cannot live anymore. And then, of course, the question arises as to what physical state Ukraine is currently in. It turns out that it's in a coma.

"But in addition to that, all of these processes are taking place peacefully," continued Viktor Yanukovych. "We have not allowed any clashes or civil strife. Although we cannot really call that a big achievement…"

It was long past time for him to stop talking. Every word could be used against him.

"We're just glad that human blood wasn't spilled…" said Viktor Yanukovych, and his eyes became warm and even somehow radiant. "We believe that crises come and go, but life goes on!"

The Moscow Times reports that Russia has no problem dismantling and moving the war memorials of other countries, yet it will not allow other countries that privilege when Russian memorials are at issue. Truly, this type of hypocrisy is the hallmark of a barbaric, uncivilized nation.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry on Friday demanded an explanation from Russia over the removal of a monument to a World War II pilot. The monument to Vasyl Poydenko in the Moscow region town of Aprelevka was pulled down earlier in the week. The monument, a stylized pair of broken wings about 5 meters across, was taken down as part of a project to widen the Moscow-Kiev highway but will be re-erected after the construction is completed, Russian officials said. The Ukrainian ministry's note demanded that Russia state its official position on the monument. A decision by Estonia to relocate a war monument last month sparked days of clashes in Tallin and a sharp condemnation from Russia. Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said Friday that it was up to Moscow to ease tensions: "If relations will improve, then 90 percent of it is up to Moscow."

No sooner has Viktor Yuschenko won a stunning victory in Ukraine, forcing early elections to decide whether pro-Russian or pro-democracy forces will govern the country instead of relying on the backroom politics favored by Viktor Yanokovich, than suddenly we learn about renewed efforts to kill Yushchenko and other members of the Orange Coalition, undoubtedly fometed by the Kremlin. See Publius Pundit for a worrying critique of a report on the developments in Kommersant. The Washington Times reports:

Backers of a political rival have been plotting to assassinate supporters of Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, a top aide said Friday. Valery Heletei, head of the Presidential Secretariat's service for law enforcement agencies, told a news conference that papers identified the alleged victims, Yulia Tymoshenko, leader of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and Viktor Baloha, head of the Secretariat, by their initials, Interfax reported. Heletei said the alleged assassination plot was being planned by backers of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. "It is clear from these schemes who plans to provoke, and not only provoke but execute, murder and in what way," Heletei said, Interfax reported.

Writing in the Washington Post, columnist Anne Applebaum exposes the fraud that is Russian "democracy" by comparing it to Ukraine:

And now, alert readers, it is time for a test: Here are two demonstrations representing two political movements that took place recently in two neighboring countries. For which country should fans of "democratization" cheer loudest?

Example No. 1: This demonstration took place in Moscow on Saturday. More precisely, it took place on Pushkin Square, legendary site of Soviet-era dissident meetings. Some 2,000 to 3,000 people came to show their opposition to the Kremlin, and they were greeted by some 9,000 club-wielding riot police officers. About 200 people were arrested, including Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion whom Pravda described as "a political pawn who has sold his soul to the traitors who plot Russia's demise." Later, Kasparov was charged with "shouting anti-government slogans in the presence of a large group of people."

Example No. 2: This demonstration began in Kiev some days ago and continues. More precisely, it is taking place in the Maidan, also called Independence Square, the legendary site of the Orange Revolution protests of 2004. The organizers are the anti-Orange, pro-Russian Party of the Regions. Their goal is to prevent Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko from calling new elections. At their zenith last week, the protests attracted between 35,000 and 70,000 people, depending on whose estimate you prefer. They were not attacked by riot police. No one has been arrested.

Now, there are some inherent difficulties in judging the merits of these demonstrations, particularly if you are looking for good guys and bad guys. For it is true that the Russian demonstrators are, in their own words, fighting for freedom of speech, the press and association; that they oppose President Vladimir Putin's increasing authoritarianism; and that they deplore his virtual elimination of political opposition. It is true that there are worldly, well-connected, well-known English speakers in their ranks. It is also true that they enjoy very little popular support, in part because the Russian media portray them, as the newspaper Izvestia did, as a tiny group of malcontents, probably paid from abroad, who deliberately provoked a fight with the peaceful authorities.

The Kiev demonstrators, by contrast, oppose the Westernization of their country, dislike the idea of Ukraine growing closer to NATO and the European Union, and generally wish for a return to the days when their country was a client state of Russia. Most of their supporters are provincial, not so well connected and probably don't speak English. There are no world chess champions among them. Nevertheless, they do enjoy an important measure of popular support: Although it does seem that their demonstration isn't nearly as much fun as the Orange Revolution was -- one observer described the demonstrators as "silent, poorly dressed throngs of mostly younger men shuffling along Hrushevsky Street under blue flags" -- their leader, Viktor Yanukovych, is in fact the elected prime minister of his country, and they did vote for him in democratic elections.

It's a tough choice, I know: Intuitively, one wants to see brighter prospects for democracy in Russia. The Russian opposition is brave, its cause is admirable, and its members and methods are familiar. Unfortunately, the opposition's protest is not evidence of democratization in Russia but rather of its absence. The truth is that the Russian authorities have, through censorship and intimidation, largely eliminated genuine political debate in their country. As the police reaction to Saturday's demonstration well illustrates, even the tiny number of people who want to maintain some kind of public presence outside the mainstream must now be prepared to encounter violence.

By contrast, Ukraine, though frequently condemned as a disorganized political basket case, does slowly seem to be transforming itself into a country where people can at least choose from two clear political options, after a more-or-less open debate. Yushchenko's decision to call for new elections is indeed controversial. It is, however, being examined by the Ukrainian Constitutional Court, and all sides have agreed to abide by the court's conclusions. Yanukovych's call for demonstrations in Independence Square was a stunt. However, the stunt was legal, nonviolent and one that he has every right to try.

To put it crudely, overly simply and in language everyone can understand: Ukraine, for all of its multiple faults, is a free country in which anti-democratic forces can demonstrate. Russia remains an authoritarian country in which democratic forces are beaten up and arrested.

Myself, I wish the Russians luck -- but at the moment, I'm cheering loudest for Ukraine.

LR: us too!