Tymo Shoots Verbal Ammo at Reporter

Pravda has captured a moment of tension that spiced up Tymoshenko’s meeting with the Ukrainian diaspora in Washington.

The provocative question came from an RFE/RL reporter who has tortured Tymo with inquiries on whether she feared detention by American law enforcement due to her past involvement with Pavlo Lazarenko, the exiled former Ukrainian PM whose trial is nearing the end in California.

This time the reporter asked her how she was going deal with the thugs in the PRU while consorting with such controversial figures as Feldman and Hubsky, at which point she became visibly distressed.

What followed was an awkward attempt to regain composure using a two-pronged rebuttal that included self-victimization and ad hominem components.

Ми вішаємо мітки на людей, не розбираючи їх сутності. Запорукою того, що наша команда ніде не схибить, не відступить на жоден крок від стратегічного шляху є моє власне ім'я і моя власна позиція.

І я буду крок за кроком руйнувати опорних людей Партії регіонів на сході, я буду перевербовувати і забирати кращих організаторів процесу, і забиратиму їх для того, щоб вони не працювали на їх перемогу. Бо я вважаю, що перемогу ми отримаємо тоді, коли переконаємо людей на сході, що Партія регіонів – це не їх партія.

А ця молода людина на першій публічній зустрічі, яку я мала, він перший вирвався з запитанням "що ж ви сюди так довго не їхали, тому, що ви є подільник Лазаренка і ви не їхали, бо боїтеся, що вас заарештують". Я хочу вам сказати, я просто не хочу, щоб ви й 10% пройшли з того, що пройшла я, моя родина і моя команда. Бо я бажаю вам добра, але не будьте чорним піаром в Вашингтоні проти України. Бо це чорний піар не проти мене, а проти України. Але я звикла до цього. Я заздалегідь пробачаю всі провокації, які є, були і будуть в майбутньому.

We put labels on people without looking into their substance. The guarantee that our team will not err and will not stray a single step from the strategic course is in my good name and in my personal stance.

And step by step I will destroy the PRU henchmen in the east, I will woo away and reclaim the best talent in organizational matters, and I will reclaim them so that they do not work to precipitate a victory for the PRU. For I believe that we will win only when we convince the people in the east that the Party of Regions is not their party.

And this young man here, during the first public meeting I had, he was the first and he came up with this question, “So what took you so long? Is it because you’re Lazarenko’s accomplice and you’re afraid of being arrested?” I want to tell you that I simply don’t want you to go through even 10 percent of what my family, my team, and I have been through. I wish you well, but don’t be a smear campaign here in Washington against Ukraine. For this is not a smear campaign against me, but one against Ukraine. I got used to this. I forgive all the attacks in advance — those that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur.

The reporter drew catcalls from the Ukrainian American audience, which took the question a bit too personally, without giving thought to its merits. The way Tymo tried to make a sport out of shooting the messenger leaves no doubt that the guy hit the right spot.

Doesn’t the public have the right to know how, in the event of her comeback, she is going to manage her lyubi druzi?

If she wasn’t in the mood for a frank discussion, she should have injected humor into the situation, with something like, “Lazarenko? Let me think, why don’t you call Lt. Colombo and let him check things? I’ll be in touch.”

Instead, she threw a tantrum, exhibiting the very character flaws she has always trashed in Yushchenko.

NSNU Convention Ends; Lyubi Druzi Diluted, Not Defrocked

They did it? No, they didn’t. Not much progress was been made in reinventing the party that once had symbolized progress itself. Instead of going to the core, NSNU let itself be satisfied with cosmetic changes.

Although far from straight talk, the atmosphere at the Saturday NSNU Convention was devoid of grandiloquence. Perhaps the realization that the NSNU needs help is starting to sunk in.

But that subtle mood change didn’t help much. During the three-week recess, the lyubi druzi must have pulled quite a few strings to secure their survival.

Their polished plea for mercy — augmented with ominous references to outside forces willing to drive a wedge between the two wings of NSNU (reform and counter-reform, presumably) — kept them from being cast overboard.

It’s funny how these number crunchers, who viewed the Orange Revolution and the Anticrisis Coalition as investment projects, can weather any storm.

Tymoshenko — one of the sharpest-witted politicians and definitely one with the balls — coined the lyubi druzi term when she made a mockery of Yushchenko’s vocabulary. Soon, it became the killer brand that made NSNU bleed profusely in the March parliamentary election, and even more so during NSNU’s summer fling with the enemies of the Orange Revolution.

No matter how hard we crave their disempowerment, the lyubi druzi always have a health pack.

Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko attended the Convention as a guest. (Even though BYuT has painted him as a tame tiger — tethered to the PRU — “Robocop” drew “friendly fire” after the event. Yanukovych strongly advised Lutsenko to make a choice between holding the office and maintaining a political profile. Keeping the “untouchables” in line poses quite an ego challenge for a micromanager like Yanukovych.)

At the Convention, Lutsenko unveiled his vision. The man reportedly wooed by Bezsmertny for the NSNU chairman position called for disaggregating NSNU and realigning it with the grassroots support base. As a way to deal with the successor problem, Lutsenko introduced the concept of primaries, something of a blood curdling chimera for the lyubi druzi. However, he neither identified himself with the Democrat nor with the Republican platform.

On hearing this, the lyubi druzi refused to suffer in silence. Petro Poroshenko, the face of the brand, said he couldn’t stomach the word primaries because of its foreign-ness. He also came up with the idea of annulling the Politreforma, as the elixir of NSNU’s fitness.

Well, all things being equal, that would be the wrong place to start. Even if the anti-Politreforma movement somehow galvanizes NSNU, as the lyubi druzi hope, it risks becoming an idée fixe that will eclipse the real problems that need to be confronted. These problems come from within; the Politreforma per se has nothing to do with them. Indirectly, though, it stands a good chance of catalyzing the disintegration of NSNU, in the event the real issues remain untackled.
With no one to fill the ideological vacuum and to repair the badly broken navigation system, the inertia and impotence of the lyubi druzi will consign their special interests club to the dustbin of history.

If that’s not the hotel of their choice, Snoozers should stop to think about their current standing. The truth is, excommunicated from the nipples of the government and despised by the grassroots supporters it has lost, NSNU is in the middle of nowhere. The end of NSNU as we knew it, when we marched with it in 2004, has eluded no one.

Katerynchuk quit. Of course, he didn’t buy the lyubi druzi’s problem externalization argument. Nor did he succeed in pushing the envelope at the convention. His recovery recipe: Put ideas first, not interests. He that he’s through with NSNU, he has a free hand in pushing his creative destruction initiatives

The Council added 29 new members. However, the jury is out on the question of whether this body of 214-member body will better represent local chapters or whether it will simply dilute responsibility.

The Convention continued well into the evening, and delegates who had same-day return tickets had to leave. Before the Convention drew to a close, a valedictory vote of “unsatisfactory” performance was passed, a don’t-give-up-on-us message to voters.

NSNU has a lot of awareness-raising to do before it lets someone special breathe new life into it.

Until then, it remains a rubber stamp for Yushchenko’s vainglorious fantasies, a leaderless bureaucratic backwater — half-dead, half-alive.

What’s in It for Ukraine?

The U.S. midterm elections have returned results that President Yushchenko can relate to. In this spiritual exercise, he should ask himself a couple of questions.

Question 1: Does Yushchenko still believe that being opposed by Parliament, by its own nature, contradicts the founding the principles of government?

As a Reagan White House intern, First Lady Kateryna Yushchenko probably never kept her husband in the dark about this not being true. That dealing with hostile legislatures is normal practice for Western leaders demands no further explanation. Needless to say, the piece of evidence America has just provided us with casts the local “lyubi druzi” school of thought in a less intellectually appealing light. It was those oppositionphobic gentlemen who posed as maids of honor to Yushchenko, their lucky star, whose marriage by arrangement to Yanukovych would have multiplied their fortunes.

Question 2: Does Yushchenko expect Bush to nurse his own Universal of National Unity?

When Yushchenko — obsessed with justifying his tango with “bandits” and “vote riggers,” as he once had gently termed them — came up with that political prenup of his, the only person he fooled was himself. And that summer coalition fling cost him dearly, by putting him in cahoots with individuals his voters had revolted against in the thing called the Orange Revolution. As the NSNU Convention reopens this Saturday, the patient is a bureaucratic mammoth debilitated with the special interest contagion, severely disconnected from its grassroots support group, stuck in single-digit territory. NSNU is a four-letter word, period.

No sooner had the Democrats uncorked their champagne than Moscow pocketed its pride and rushed to sign a bilateral protocol with the U.S., on concern that, with Dems taking both the House and the Senate, it may be grounded in the WTO limbo for a long time.

That explains why Moroz has been working against the clock on WTO-related legislation while steering clear of the NATO issue. The accounting formula behind the $130 price tag seems to be written on the walls: “NATO, for this you’ve paid us; WTO, for that you haven’t.”

The D-Day hardly spells a Moscow-centric U-turn on the Hill with regard to Ukraine. In fact, friends of Ukraine can even be found among the surviving Republicans like Richard Lugar, John McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
What it does spell is bad times for the bad guys.

By the way, there’s a ruling party in Ukraine that, behaviorally, has established itself as a much uglier version of everything that’s wrong with the GOP. For reasons outlined above, that party should watch itself very carefully. Otherwise, its day of reckoning, too, will come.