The wheels are turning on the International Monetary Fund (IMF)’s agreement with Ukraine on financial assistance. This plan is worth $14-18bn (£8.5-£11bn) over the next two years. As predicted, and feared, this agreement involves many ‘conditions’, the first of which is a cut in energy subsidies to consumers. Ukraine's interim government has agreed to raise domestic gas prices by 50% in its effort to secure the IMF aid package. The country is in a dire economic situation, thanks to decades of corrupt leadership. But international economic plans only cause the people to continue suffering. Yet what are the options available for this new government, within the global political-economic system we live in?
In spite of Maidan calling for a change in the ‘old guard’, a change in the years of corrupt leadership, Yulia Tymoshenko has declared her intention to run for president in the 25 May elections. It is expected that the Batkivshchyna party will support her candidacy at the party’s convention on 29 March. Let us hope that Maidan can continue to fight against this, and that she will not, yet again, rise as the ‘least worst option’. Tymoshenko has always been entrenched in the corrupt system of Ukrainians political and economic elite. She is not what many in Maidan fought for.
More of the wounded from the violence on the 20th February in Kyiv continue to die in hospital. In Crimea, reports continue of torture and beatings of Ukrainians, including army personnel, community leaders and journalists.
The Crimean Tatar communities continue to organise their resistance to the Russian occupation and annexation of their territory. They are holding a meeting on the 29th of March to discuss plans.
Meanwhile, the United Nations General Assembly reaffirmed Ukraine’s unity and territorial integrity by adopting a measure that underscored that the mid-March referendum in Crimea that led to the peninsula’s annexation by Russia “has no validity”.
The Assembly resolution makes explicit reference to the primacy of the UN Charter’s call for the preservation of the unity and territorial integrity of all UN Member States, and also recalls the 1994 Memorandum on Security Assurances in Connection with Ukraine’s Accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russian, and other bilateral agreements between Ukraine and Russia. However, the UN GA resolution remains non-binding.
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