Kuchma accuses opposition over protests
By Philippe Coumarianos
KIEV (AFP): Beset by scandal and targeted by mounting unrest, Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma has shown he will not go without a fight, throwing a leading dissenter into jail and accusing opposition leaders of seeking to stir up a dangerous conflict.
The arrest of former deputy prime minister Yulia Timoshenko on smuggling and forgery charges is a "major setback" for the opposition movement, a leading commentator said Wednesday, after Kuchma said he would use "all legal means" to quell the protests.
Timoshenko is a "rich and charismatic personality, capable both of financing the protest movement and of uniting people from differing backgrounds. Without her, the coalition may break up and lose its strength," Olexander Dergachov of the review Political Thought said.
Arrested Tuesday, Timoshenko was charged last month with forging documents and hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from a gas import deal, but had been allowed by prosecutors to go free.
She had been increasingly seen as a figurehead of the mounting protest movement.
But late Tuesday Kuchma issued a statement, cosigned by Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko and parliamentary speaker Ivan Plyush, accused the opposition of seeking to "plunge the country into a whirl of damaging passions."
Clearly hinting at a possible escalation of the stand-off between police and demonstrators that has seen some 5,000 protesters take to the streets of Kiev, Kuchma expressed his "determination to resist destructive forces ... that show all the signs of psychological warfare."
He denounced "politicians and political forces who care for nothing but their own interests and ambitions ... (and) are stirring up an atmosphere of hysteria and psychosis ... to shatter lawful state institutions so as to attain power."
The wave of protests, which has brought thousands into the streets in recent days, was triggered by claims that Kuchma was involved in the murder of a journalist, Georgy Gongadze, whose headless and charred body was discovered in November.
A tape recording purportedly caught Kuchma ordering the disappearance of Gongadze, 31, the founder and editor of a Russian-language online newspaper, though Kuchma says the tape has been edited to distort his words.
The mass rallies have given rise to speculation that Kuchma's hold on power was slipping.
Additional pressure was applied by a European Union delegation Tuesday which met Kuchma to discuss press freedom, one of whose members called for "a complete and transparent inquiry" into Gongadze's murder.
But Kiev was able to draw comfort from the visit by Vladimir Putin on Monday, when the Russian president maintained a studied neutrality.
The Ukrainian leaders sought to downplay the gravity of the situation, referring to a "hullabaloo" and "momentary anomaly that would not determine the future of Ukraine."
And on Wednesday there was business as usual in Kiev, with Anatoly Oryol, first deputy chief of the presidential staff, recalling Ukraine's European ambitions at a press conference.
Responding to opposition charges that Putin had sought to exploit Kuchma's present difficulties to draw Ukraine closer to the Russia-Belarus union -- a loose association between the two former Soviet republics -- Oryol said Kiev would have "nothing to do" with the union.
"Ukraine's choice is Europe, and we cannot accept that being put into question," he said.