Trying to Quell Crisis, Ukraine President Fires Top Officials

The proWestern government that swept to power in Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” collapsed Thursday when President Viktor Yushchenko fired his popular prime minister and accepted the resignation of other key political allies, struggling to quell the most serious political crisis of his 7-month-old administration.

Paralyzed by fierce infighting among his supporters and stung by allegations of corruption involving the new democratic government, Yushchenko emptied the top tiers of his rancorous administration in an attempt to reassert leadership of this tumultuous nation of 48 million on the eastern edge of Europe.

“The team’s unity, unfortunately, has become an extremely acute problem. Interpersonal conflicts have ... begun to affect state affairs,” Yushchenko said. “It is very difficult, but today I must remove this Gordian knot.”

The president said he would appoint liberal economist Yuri Yekhanurov, a longtime ally and former economy minister, to head a new government as acting prime minister. Yekhanurov, an early architect of Ukraine’s post-communist privatization program, is governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region in eastern Ukraine.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the sacked prime minister whose popularity has been one of Yushchenko’s most valuable weapons, signaled that she would join the opposition in March parliamentary elections that will determine whether the pro-reform team can hold on to power and continue Ukraine’s drive toward European Union membership.

“She’s not going to work with Yushchenko,” her spokesman, Vitaly Chepinoga, said in a telephone interview. “Because Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko see the main strategic ways of developing the country in a completely different way.”

The firings followed months of increasingly uneasy relations between the president and Tymoshenko, whose populist moves to raise pensions and salaries, tax businesses, reverse shady privatization deals and control gasoline prices have been blamed for stifling economic growth and undermining Yushchenko’s free-market policies.

Soaring food and energy prices have led to widespread public disenchantment, further fueled by the resignation of two top Yushchenko aides who claimed the president had allowed the new government to become tainted by the presence of several corrupt senior advisors.

A recent poll of Ukrainians by the Kiev-based Razumkov Center found that only 37% of respondents thought the new authorities were better than those tossed out when hundreds of thousands of Yushchenko supporters swept into the streets last fall and demanded new elections, which unseated Viktor Yanukovich, a former prime minister.

“This research is a confirmation that our society is gradually growing free of its illusions,” Yuri Yakymenko, head of the Razumkov Center’s political office in Kiev, the capital, said in a telephone interview. “After the Orange Revolution, we had very high public expectations. At first, those expectations gave huge support both to the president and to the government.

“But later, the activity of the government itself, and especially the conflict right in the center of power, all of this slowly rid the public of these expectations.”

Even so, Yakymenko said, public support remains substantially higher than it was for Yanukovich or former President Leonid D. Kuchma.

The crisis has gradually emerged not only out of the widening policy gap between Tymoshenko and Yushchenko but also from a sharp rift between the former prime minister and Petro Poroshenko, a wealthy chocolate manufacturer who resigned Thursday as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.

Analysts said Poroshenko had quietly angled to force Tymoshenko out and take her place as prime minister.

Meanwhile, presidential chief of staff Oleksandr Zinchenko unleashed a firestorm this week when he resigned and accused “a small group of adventurists” outside the president’s inner circle, notably Poroshenko, of corruption.

“Corruption and bribery are again escalating. In many cases, the scale surpasses that of the past,” Zinchenko said at a news conference Monday.

“They have set up their own clan, they have orchestrated an information blockade of the president and pushed him into a virtual, unreal world,” he said. “Step by step, they are implementing their plan to use power for their own enrichment, to privatize and to grab everything they can.”

Poroshenko has denied the allegations, and Yushchenko appeared to defend him Thursday, even as he moved to dismiss the government.

The president said a deal brokered Wednesday night that would have removed only a few ministers fell through when squabbling officials squandered the opportunity overnight.

The key question now is how Yushchenko will move toward the parliamentary elections next year, considered crucial because new election reform laws will transfer much of the president’s power to parliament. Most analysts believe the chief of state cannot win a legislative majority without being allied to Tymoshenko’s party.

“I would like them to stay in the pro-government team,” the president said, referring to both Tymoshenko and Poroshenko as “friends.”

Many analysts said it was too early to predict a final split between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, and most did not rule out an election in which the two politicians would run separate but friendly campaigns.

“Without Tymoshenko’s support, clearly, Yushchenko never would have become president,” Yulia Mostovaya, assistant editor of the respected liberal weekly Zerkalo Nedeli, said in a telephone interview. At the same time, she said, Yushchenko has his own wide base of support.

“He has actually created his own power, building it up on a basement of wealthy, financially strong tycoons, and that’s what he’s going to bring to the parliament elections,” she said.