Repressive Resolution: US Congress Prepares to Close Borders to Yanukovych

Ukraine is one step from international isolation. After a fairly harsh resolution by the European Parliament against the country’s government, American politicians got “up in arms.” The U.S. Congress suggested recalling the U.S. ambassador from Ukraine and forbidding the entry of President Viktor Yanukovych, General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka and other leading figures of the country from entering the territory of the U.S.

American Sen. James Inhofe, who sponsored the sanctions against the current Ukrainian authorities, sent the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a draft resolution, which proposes the following:

* Calls on the Yanukovych administration to release Mrs. Tymoshenko immediately for medical reasons.

* Urges the Department of State to withdraw the United States ambassador to Ukraine and suspend operations at the United States Embassy in Kiev until the release of Mrs. Tymoshenko.

* Calls on the Department of State to institute a visa ban against President Yanukovych, Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka and other officials responsible for Mrs. Tymoshenko’s imprisonment.

* Calls on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to suspend all cooperative agreements with Ukraine.

* Urges the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe not to recognize Ukraine’s scheduled 2013 chairmanship of the organization until the release of Mrs. Tymoshenko.

This is not the first time that the U.S. has sharply criticized the Ukrainian authorities. Not long ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for the release of the ex-prime minister from prison. “The United States is deeply concerned by the treatment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and other imprisoned members of her former government. The photographs of Mrs. Tymoshenko released by the Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman further call into question the conditions of her confinement. … We continue to call for her release, the release of other members of her former government and the restoration of their full civil and political rights,” Clinton announced at the beginning of May.

This situation was complicated even at the NATO summit in Chicago. Despite the fact that President Viktor Yanukovych sat between the leaders of the U.S. and Great Britain at the summit, the Ukrainian guarantor could not talk with his American colleague, Barack Obama. This led experts to speak of an unofficial boycott of the Ukrainian government by the Western leaders, particularly the U.S. president.

Nevertheless, Ukrainian political scientists are certain that the plan proposed by the American congressman is impossible to realize — so far, at least.

“One must separate the positions of Europe and the U.S. The European position is embodied in the resolution, although I do not rule out that it could have been harsher, especially considering what the hysterical European press wrote. And the words of Angela Merkel about dictatorship, after they seated Yanukovych between the British and U.S. delegates, that looks like the U.S.’ answer to the Europeans: ‘We don’t consider Ukraine a dictatorship,’ because they don’t sit next to dictators,” the head of the Kiev Center for Political Studies and Conflict Research, Michail Pogrebinskij, tells Focus.

And he advises that no attention be paid to challenges like James Inhofe’s. “The fact that there is a deputy who wants something means nothing. We also have politicians who have particular positions. ‘Stupidity is not the absence of a mind; it’s that kind of mind,’ said the mathematician Yuri Manin. The U.S. position is expressed only by the administration of the president or the U.S. State Department,” he emphasized.

The deputy head of the Situations Modeling Agency, Oleksiy Golobutskiy, explains the demands put forth by the American congressman as a manifestation of political struggle within the U.S. “They have the election campaign. If this is a strategic issue for the Europeans, it is a political issue for the Americans: There is a large Ukrainian diaspora there, and they must not forget who[m] they vote for. There are serious lobbyists for the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. Congress for that very purpose,” the expert noted in his comments to Focus.

However, the director of the Institute of Global Strategies, Vadim Karasyov, considers all of this to be a signal for Ukraine and thinks if the policy of our leaders does not change, then the position of James Inhofe will become the overall position of the U.S. government.

“The signal has been given. In America, they will attentively follow the tendencies, maneuvers and pronouncements of the Ukrainian authorities, and the unwillingness to systematically solve the problems caused by the Ukrainian authorities themselves. If Ukraine does not pass the test of democratic elections, then a similar type of signal will be given — not by individual congressmen, but by Congress. And that will be a consolidated position of the American Congress and the American authorities,” the analyst explained to Focus.