Yevgeny Magda
Photo from UNIAN
During these New Year’s holidays, the Ukrainian
society was vigorously tested for its readiness to restore relations with Russia.
The Ukrainian President, Prime Minister and Parliament Speaker have each made
it clear in their public addresses that the country had already passed the
worst stage of the crisis.
A sort of a dessert to the festive menu of Ukrainians
was served by Viktor Pinchuk and Vasily Filipchuk. One of the richest people of
Ukraine and a renowned expert on international affairs, accordingly, have
offered Ukraine to seek more intensively the way to reconcile with Russia,
effectively recognizing Donbas the Russian territory and forgetting (for
several decades at least) about the possibility of joining the EU and NATO.
It should be
noted that these proposals were announced against the backdrop of a significant
cooling of relations between Kyiv and Brussels as well as discontent of many
Ukrainians with how the country is developing, according to sociological data.
The messages by Pinchuk-Filipchuk highlight one of the major trends of 2017:
proposals to seek understanding with Russia will cease to be a prerogative of
Kremlin-oriented opposition figures.
Instead, these theses will be injected into the
general socio-political discourse. And this will not be those fanatics wearing
pro-Putin T-shirts who will be the main voices of this campaign but rather some
quite respectable figures. Stunned by Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S.
presidential race, the Ukrainian political elites could be retracted into this
discourse under the pretext of the need for self-preservation, because there
are not so many examples of political self-sacrifice of Ukrainian people’s
servants today.
Ukraine’s Presidential Administration after a brief
pause has responded to Viktor Pinchuk with a column by deputy chief of the
president’s staff Kostyantyn Yeliseiev published by The Wall Street Journal,
where he marked the so-called "red lines" Ukraine would never cross
in the issue of Russian-Ukrainian settlement. Petro Poroshenko in his New
Year’s address stated that country had already passed its worst stage of the
crisis. Meanwhile, the attempts will continue to compromise the Head of State
with the notorious "Onishchenko tapes", in which the Russian trace is
seen more and more clearly.
Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman intends to make the
year of 2017 a period of economic growth and quality development of Ukraine. It
is quite a challenge given Ukraine’s current status of a European outsider in
terms of the average wage, and at the same time – a leader in terms of
corruption. An increase in the minimum wage can’t be enough but the government
has a few more months before its one-year indulgence term expires for laying
the foundations of economic growth.
It seems it won’t be able to do without the creation
of conditions for the development of the middle class. In other words, a
long-promised de-oligarchization is needed, capable of changing the levers of
economic power.
Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy believes that a
scenario of early parliamentary (and presidential) elections is being imposed
from the outside. Although there is a grain of truth in the words of the head
of parliament, the lawmakers are also partly to blame of the relevant public
attitude arising as they have not been pampering their voters with too great a
performance throughout the whole year. By constantly emphasizing the status of
a country at war, it would be difficult to achieve efficient work operation of
the parliamentary coalition.
Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (of Kyiv
Patriarchate) Filaret is assured not only in the rightness of the struggle for
the liberation of Donbas (his historical homeland) from the occupation but
also in the possibility of creating of an independent church in Ukraine in the
near future. It is interesting how thismay be affected with the "Drabinko
case", where the investigation is focused on MP Vadym Novinsky, one of the
main sponsors of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. By the way, the
creation of a local church in Ukraine - a powerful argument in countering
Russia’s hybrid aggression, while Moscow is trying by all means to prove the
futility of the Ukrainian state as such.
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