07-12-2013 14:00
Тимоти Снайдер о ситуации в Украине
Would anyone anywhere in the world be willing to take a truncheon in the head for the sake of a trade agreement with the United States?
This is the question we Americans might be asking ourselves these last few days, as we watch young Ukrainians being beaten in Kiev for protesting their own government’s decision not to enter an association agreement with the European Union. The accord, which was to be signed on November 29, offered Ukraine access to the world’s largest market. But more importantly, it seemed to hold out to Ukraine’s youth and middle classes a symbolic assurance that a future of normal, civilized, European life awaited. When that promise was not kept, thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets of their capital. After some of them were assaulted by riot police on November 30, hundreds of thousands more have gone into the streets, in Kiev and around the country.
[...]No matter what happens now, the Yanukovych presidency will likely be remembered as a disaster. He has more support in the south and east of the country than elsewhere, but nowhere near enough to make a credible run for high office a second time. His chances for reelection depend upon chicanery (one potential opponent, Julia Tymoshenko, is in prison, another, Vitaly Klitschko, has been excluded from eligibility by an obviously ad personam law). If Yanukovych were willing to cede power now, it might be less risky than trying to wait more than a year to lose the next elections. The winners of the next elections might not offer the kinds of guarantees to his own security and fortune that he could likely get now. But it seems unlikely, for the moment, that he would agree to leave office.
Short of that, however, the Ukrainian constitution may offer a way out. The parliament could abolish the strong presidency that is currently in place. Far more in the interest of the country (and of course also the parliamentarians) would be a system of more conventional parliamentary democracy, in which the president would play a symbolic and ceremonial role while the prime minister would serve as a true executive. In general, countries with this form of government have been more successful at making democratic transitions. Such a constitutional transformation in Ukraine could allow Yanukovych to stay on and save face, while giving his de facto successor, the next prime minister, the chance to release Tymoshenko and sign the association agreement with the EU. In such a scenario Yanukovych can leave the scene as a statesman, and without fear that he will be pursued by a successor with the same kind of inordinate power that he himself has wielded.
Ну привет. Тут у нас, знает...
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