Ukrainian Premier Escapes Assassination

A remote-controlled bomb planted in an underground drainpipe here damaged Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko’s armored car Tuesday in what officials called an assassination attempt.

Lazarenko and two bodyguards suffered slight injuries in the blast, which occurred as the prime minister was en route to the airport for a flight to the coal-mining Donetsk region to hear a report by government investigators on embezzlement of state funds meant for miners’ wages.

The scandal has set off a wave of strikes.

Vasyl Durdinets, Lazarenko’s first deputy, said the attack in the Ukrainian capital was intended to thwart the investigation. “Forces who fear law and order are embarking on fierce resistance,” he told reporters.

After a delay caused by the bombing--the first attempt on the life of a high-ranking official in post-Soviet Ukraine--Lazarenko flew to Donetsk to hear the report by investigators. Then he canceled a meeting with mayors from the region and returned to Kiev.

The 43-year-old prime minister, appointed by President Leonid D. Kuchma in May and confirmed by parliament last week, has vowed to close unprofitable state-owned and state-subsidized mines in the country’s notoriously mismanaged and politically powerful coal industry.

In 1993, striking miners forced early presidential and parliamentary elections and won themselves the highest wages among public employees in Ukraine.

But those salaries haven’t been paid since March, prompting miners last month to stage sit-down strikes on roads and rail lines. They are demanding immediate payment of nearly $400 million in back wages.

Determining what happened to the more than $2 billion in mine industry subsidies since January is one of the government investigators’ tasks.

Although the timing of Tuesday’s bombing suggested a connection to the coal scandal, lawmaker Olexandr Elyashkevych said: “The prime minister has many adversaries who don’t want to see him in this office.”

Security officials said Lazarenko has received eight death threats since 1992, when he became the chief executive of Dnipropetrovsk, a region of southeastern Ukraine.

State television downplayed Tuesday’s bombing. But the chairman of parliament’s commission on organized crime, Hryhory Omelchenko, predicted an increase in terrorism arising from Ukraine’s economic crisis, although he said bombings such as Tuesday’s usually arise from turf wars between criminal gangs.

In any case, the bombing shattered Ukraine’s budding sense of national self-confidence, which got a boost last month with the adoption of a post-Soviet constitution.

“Before, Ukraine was notable for a very tranquil development of events, where differences were settled within the framework of democratic norms,” Elyashkevych said.

Officials and foreign observers often contrast Ukraine’s peaceful politics with violence in neighboring Russia. Ukraine settled a separatist revolt in Crimea without the blood spilled by Russia’s 19-month-old war in breakaway Chechnya. And Kuchma didn’t send tanks to his parliament, as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin did to his in 1993, when it balked at adopting the constitution.

“We’re used to such things happening in Moscow,” said unemployed engineer Valentyna Kolesnyk when told about the bombing. “But life here is usually quiet, like in a village.”