It's been a good week for Moscow vis-a-vis ties with their Slavic brethren in Ukraine. First, the Kremlin secured a 25-year extension to the lease for its Black Sea fleet. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin smirked smugly as Ukrainian lawmakers rocked and socked amid the a haze from smoke bombs to ratify the extension, which opposition gadflies blasted as a sellout of Ukraine's sovereignty. For Russia, Yanukovich was paying immediate dividends. But he wasn't finished. Now, Yanukovich has had a rethink on the Holodomor, the Stalin-era 1930s famine that Ukrainian patriots, as well as more than a dozen countries, have classified as a genocide.Yanukovich said that Holodomor was “a consequence of Stalin’s totalitarian regime,” but cannot be called genocide against any particular nation, since mass famine was a tragedy for all countries in the Soviet Union.
Fisticuffs, smoke bombs, and a legislator hiding behind an umbrella to avoid the barrage of eggs hurled his way. Such was the scene Tuesday in Kiev, where Ukraine's law givers convened to ponder whether to allow Russia's Black Sea fleet to stay moored at Ukraine's port of Sevastopol for an addition 25 years. The decision by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich was a Faustian bargain. Ukraine, tipped to the economic edge by the global financial crisis, is desperate to save money any way it can. In return for the Black Sea fleet lease extension, Moscow is dropping gas prices to Ukraine about a third. However, many Ukrainians, the more patriotic in the Western parts, see the pact as nothing more than a loss of sovereignty and act of treason.
