UKRAINE: RADA SPUTTERS TO A CLOSE AS ATTENTION

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 KYIV 001515

SIPDIS

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 06/21/2017
TAGS: PGOV PREL UP
SUBJECT: UKRAINE: RADA SPUTTERS TO A CLOSE AS ATTENTION
SHIFTS TO THE CENTRAL ELECTION COMMISSION

REF: A. KYIV 1458


B. KYIV 1507

C. KYIV 01458

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Classified By: Deputy Chief of Mission Sheila Gwaltney for reasons 1.4(
a,b,d).


1. (C) Summary. Speaker Moroz closed the Rada's aimless
plenary sessions on June 19, clearly under some pressure by
Party of Regions leaders and despite earlier vows by
Socialists and Communists to continue sessions into July.
Moroz read a letter to the Rada written by PM Yanukovych in
which the PM thanked the MPs for all their hard work in the
Fifth convocation, implying the convocation was closed,
although technically MPs continue "constituent work" until
June 27. The Speaker later suggested while on a provincial
trip to Zhytomyr that MPs could return to the Rada June 27 to
vote on constitutional amendments to limit Presidential
authority, but few consider Moroz to be capable of derailing
the political compromise. The main focus of political
developments has shifted to the Central Election Commission
(CEC),as technicalities remain unresolved on the path to new
elections September 30, including the CEC's standing to annul
Our Ukraine (OU)'s 2006 electoral bloc list, removing final
challenges to the Rada's lack of a quorum, and the alleged
lack of CEC plenary meetings since the sitting of the new,
politicized CEC at the beginning of June. President
Yushchenko, PM Yanukovych, and CEC Chair Shapoval met June 20
to discuss a way ahead. On the margins, questions continue
to percolate both about the viability of an orange megabloc
in the new elections and about the status of the
Constitutional Court judges Yushchenko fired at the end of
April/beginning of May.


2. (C) Comment. Shapoval's reluctance to hold a CEC meeting
suggests that he is concerned that the majority of CEC
members (affiliated with Regions and the coalition) could
throw a wrench into the final implementation of the May 27
political compromise by refusing to abolish the OU electoral
list and instead voting to seat 32 OU electoral list
candidates associated with Minister of Economy Kinakh's Party
of Industrials and Entrepreneurs as MPs on the OU quota, thus
restoring the Rada's 300 MP quorum. All sides have indicated
that a political agreement to dissolve the OU list would take
care of this roadblock. Regions leaders such as Yanukovych,
Bohatyerva, and Akhmetov have indicated elections will
happen, but some Regions MPs, including deputy faction
leaders, and Emergencies Minister Nester Shufrych, slated to
join the Regions 2007 electoral list, continue actively to
question whether elections will be held. It remains unclear
whether the June 20 meeting between Yushchenko, Yanukovych,
and Shapoval helped to resolve the uncertainty and allow the
CEC to move forward. Moroz continues his undignified descent
into irrelevancy; his Zhytomyr press conference also included
the warning that Yushchenko's team would attempt a "legal
formalization of dictatorship" in its own effort to change
the Constitution, placing him in the rhetorical camp of
Putin, who claimed earlier in June that "tyranny" was
approaching in Ukraine. End summary and comment.

Rada Sputters Into Vacation
--------------


3. (SBU) Despite Moroz's continued attempts to keep the Rada
in session as long as possible, with the calendar formally
scheduled to end July 13, he announced June 19 that it would
be the last day of plenary session. The Rada would move into
a week of constituent work--which most MPs treat as vacation
or time to tend to personal business interests--before the
Rada officially closed June 27, allowing for preparations for
the upcoming OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (to be held July 5-9
in Kyiv). He read a letter from Yanukovych that said that
the Fifth convocation of the Rada had carried out important
government reforms and worked well with the Cabinet.
Yanukovych expressed regret that their work had been cut
short, thanked them for their efforts, and said the
parliament finished its work on a positive note. The same
morning, Moroz also read out the resignations of seven more
opposition MPs, five from BYuT and two from OU (including
2004 Eurovision winner Ruslana) bringing the total number of
resignations to 162.

CEC Caught in New Tug of War
--------------


4. (C) The center of the Ukrainian political maelstrom has
shifted from the Rada to the CEC in the past two weeks.
Chairman Shapoval has still not convened a first CEC meeting
since it was reconfigured at the beginning of June to give
Regions and the coalition an 8-7 majority of commissioners,

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despite insistent calls from the coalition that he do so
immediately. (Note. The new CEC met once with the Border
Guards to discuss electoral lists, but this was not
considered to be a formal CEC session. End note.) The
coalition commissioners have three times convened meetings on
their own and then complained that the pro-presidential
commissioners did not show up (a quorum of ten commissioners
is needed to meet; eight votes are required to pass a
decision). Shapoval told us June 12 that legally the CEC
could not annul the Our Ukraine party list, because the old
parliamentary law--which had allowed the CEC to cancel party
lists--had itself been canceled when the amended law was
adopted by the Rada on June 1, but the new law was written in
a way that it would not come into force until August 1 (ref
A). In the Ukrainian system, government bodies are allowed
to do only what is written down in law or regulation; the
absence of a law saying the CEC can cancel party lists
legally prevented it from doing so.


5. (SBU) Deputy Head of the Presidential Secretariat
Stavnychuk, who until the recent reshuffle was deputy Chair
of CEC, reiterated this at a press conference on June 18,
although she added that the CEC also did not have the power
to move anyone else from the list up into the Rada because of
the absences of an in-force CEC law. Although the Kyiv
appellate court on June 15 upheld a lower district court
ruling ordering the CEC to reconsider OU's request to cancel
their list, Shapoval and Stavnychuk have indicted the court
ruling is irrelevant without a political agreement to
dissolve the list, despite the law and legal gray zone of
timing. (Embassy Comment. Bottom line is that in the
absence of a clear legal solution, a political decision will
have to be made at some point in order to cancel the OU list
to move ahead toward September 30 elections. End Comment.)


6. (C) The coalition commissioners also have criticized
Shapoval for unilaterally allocating responsibility for
different oblasts to different commissioners. However, the
law on the CEC states that the proper procedure for dividing
regional responsibilities among CEC commissioners is for the
Chairman to make the decisions; previous chairs have wielded
this right without challenge or controversy. Our review of
the assignments suggests that, for the most part, Shapoval
put the coalition commissioners in charge of eastern and
southern Ukraine, and the pro-presidential commissioners in
charge of central and western Ukraine. In contrast, for the
2006 cycle, a commissioner disliked by Regions oversaw
Donetsk, which helped minimize fraud, according to one
seasoned observer.


7. (SBU) Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Shapoval met June 20 to
discuss ways to facilitate the CEC working and preparing for
elections. According to the press, Yushchenko expressed
alarm over the current activity in the CEC and said political
pressure on the CEC was unacceptable. He urged the situation
to be resolved though talks and hoped that a constructive
position on Yanukovych's part would settle the situation and
allow the CEC to start working. Yanukovych did not issue any
comments. After the meeting, Yushchenko went on national
television to urge that the next Rada abolish blanket
immunity for parliamentary deputies.

Regions Slowly Moving to Prepare for Elections
-------------- -


8. (SBU) Key Regions leaders--Yanukovych, Bohtyreva,
Kolesnikov, and Akhmetov--have begun talking publicly as if
new elections are a given. (for Akhmetov's comments, see ref
B.) Yanukovych, while in Luxembourg June 18, talked about
his hopes for the newly elected Rada. In addition, Regions
deputy faction head Chechetov said that the Party's Political
Council had met to discuss election preparations; they would
meet again June 27 to set a date for a party congress to draw
up a party list, probably in early August. However, other
Regions leaders have still signaled reluctance to move to
elections. On June 20, fellow deputy faction leader
Oleksandr Yefremov told the press that his party did not see
grounds for elections. Several days earlier, Emergencies
Minister Shufrych, a key member of the 2004 Yanukovych
election team who is slated to join the Regions list for
2007, expressed similar views in a provincial visit.


9. (C) Comment: These conflicting signals could reflect
ongoing concerns by Regions MP backbenchers mentioned to us
by Tymoshenko June 13 about a lack of assurances of their
place on the new party list from Akhmetov, Klyuyev, or
Yanukovych (ref C),the trio which Tymoshenko has long
maintained represent the primary power centers in Regions.
Press speculation also notes that Yanukovych may have no
assurances that he will be PM again, either from Yushchenko

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or Akhmetov, which could contribute to his personal
reluctance to fully embrace the path to elections, even as he
realizes that there are no good alternatives.

Orange Megabloc Faltering
--------------


10. (C) Continued disagreements over list quotas, the bloc
name, and the platform between presumptive election partners
People's Union Our Ukraine, People's Self-Defense, and
Pravitsya (Union of Rightist Forces) have held up the
formation of a joint election bloc. PSD leader Lutsenko said
on June 18 that his movement will only join the bloc if they
agree before July 1 on how to allocate Cabinet and Rada
leadership positions, and agree not to make issues like
Russian language and NATO part of the campaign. In
particular, he said that PSD wanted economic and
law-enforcement positions in the new government. OU MP
Kluchkovskiy said on June 19 that he thought they would reach
an agreement on a new name by June 22; other OU leaders
insisted "Our Ukraine" needed to be in a "short" bloc name.
One Pravitsya leader, Yuriy Kostenko, said the parties had
not discussed the top ten names on the list yet. OU leader
Kyrylenko said in the end, Yushchenko would pick the list's
top ten. Defense Minister Hrytsenko, assumed to be one of
the top names on the new list, publicly asked the three
parties to stop announcing ultimatums.


11. (SBU) OU MP and pop star Ruslana bemoaned the ongoing
infighting in OU among the "big egos" to Ambassador on June

19. She thought that in the end, Lutsenko would run
separately. OU MP Prokopovych suggested the same to
Ambassador separately June 19, claiming private polling
suggested that OU and Lutsenko running in parallel could gain
more votes than as a unified bloc, since they appeal to
different electorates.


12. (C) A second concern that may be hindering orange
cooperation is the rumor that Yushchenko and Akhmetov have
already reached an accommodation on an Our Ukraine-Regions
coalition after the election. A French diplomat told us on
June 21 that MP Katerynchuk, a key Lutsenko ally, had told
them that everyone believed that the President had already
committed to a coalition with Regions. Deputy Rada Speaker
and BYuT MP Tomenko told Unian wire service on June 21 that
BYuT had similar suspicions--that Yushchenko and Akhmetov had
cut a deal. Tomenko was very clear that BYuT would never be
in a coalition with Regions. Katerynchuk, according to the
French diplomat, was more circumspect about the future of the
coalition of democratic forces, but it is hard to imagine
that he and Lutsenko would agree to join with Yanukovych and
Regions, although they could conceivably find a way to
cooperate.

Constitutional Court (CC) Resignations or vacations?
-------------- --------------


13. (SBU) In another blip, there has been renewed controversy
over whether two of the three judges Yushchenko previously
fired in late April/early May, but who have remained in their
positions at the CC on the basis of local court rulings, have
now resigned. The presidential website posted new
presidential decrees on June 14 canceling the President's old
decrees firing Judges Pshenychniy and Ivashchenko and
accepting their resignations instead. However, the decrees
were quickly removed from the website amid explanations of a
technical error. The decrees were reissued June 19 along
with a firmer statement from the Presidential Secretariat
that the two judges had resigned. However, the CC press
service on June 20 said that they had no information about
any judges resigning. On June 19, CC Judge Bryntsev stated
that Stanik and Pshenychniy were on leave. The CC issued two
rulings June 19--on amendments to the law on political
parties and some provisions in the 2007 budget--with only 13
judges in the session; Pshenychniy was not present.


14. (U) Visit Embassy Kyiv's classified website:
www.state.sgov.gov/p/eur/kiev.
Taylor