Romania strikes back
Bucharest gave Kyiv a diplomatic slap in the face in connection with the new education law. However, for Ukraine, it seems that only Washington’s position is important.
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On September 21, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis announced the cancellation of his visit to Ukraine due to the adoption of a new law on education, according to which, from 2020, education in the country will become entirely Ukrainian-language. The Romanian leader added that the law is “untimely” and “needs improvement.” “I will not make the visit until progress is made on the education law,” he said.
The meeting between the presidents of Ukraine and Romania was agreed upon during the Ukrainian head of state’s visit to the NATO summit in Brussels at the end of May 2017. As part of the visit, Iohannis, together with Poroshenko, was supposed to visit areas of compact residence of Romanians in Northern Bukovina. In total, more than 400 thousand Romanians live in Ukraine; they are concentrated mainly in the Chernivtsi, Transcarpathian and Odessa regions of the country.
As Iohannis noted, when it comes into force, the law will “severely limit minority access to education in their native language.” “Therefore, having learned about this law, I canceled my visit to Ukraine, I also canceled the reception of the speaker of parliament, the meeting was scheduled for the end of September,” explained the Romanian president.
The Romanian Parliament, in turn, adopted a declaration on September 20, which expressed hope for compliance with European standards in the field of protecting the rights of national minorities living in Ukraine. At the same time, deputies of both chambers of parliament voted unanimously for the adoption of the declaration.
The Romanian Parliament drew attention to the fact that “European standards for the protection of national minorities, in particular, about 400 thousand Romanians who live in Ukraine, are the foundation of democratic transformations, without which it is impossible to advance along the path of European integration.” It is also noted that a group of Romanian parliamentarians will arrive in Ukraine in the near future to discuss ways to resolve the situation with the Ukrainian authorities.
Such a downgrade of the visit - a group of parliamentarians instead of the country's president - is more than a rough hint that Romania is ready to follow the path of its “sworn friend” Hungary and stop supporting Ukrainian initiatives in international organizations, as well as decisions important for Ukraine. So far this has not happened, and Klaus Iohannis noted that Ukraine remains a partner of Romania. “I hope that we will be able to find an approach that will allow Romanians in Ukraine to ultimately continue their education in the Romanian language,” the Romanian president noted on September 21.
The decisions of Romanian politicians are couched in diplomatic formulations and do not contain calls for specific actions. But Ukrainian politicians representing national minorities, one after another, are calling on Poroshenko to veto the new education law. Last week, three MPs - President of the Association of Bulgarians of Ukraine Anton Kisse, leader of the Party of Hungarians of Ukraine Vasily Brenzovich and representative of the Romanian community of Ukraine Grigory Timis - signed a joint appeal to the President of Ukraine demanding to veto the law. It is noteworthy that Brenzovich and Timish are members of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction, representing, respectively, the Transcarpathian and Chernivtsi regions.
In Transcarpathia, opposition to educational innovations in Kyiv has become widespread. On September 21, the Transcarpathian Regional Council adopted an appeal to President Petro Poroshenko with a demand to veto the new law “On Education”. 38 out of 56 deputies of the regional council voted for the corresponding decision, and the issue was brought up for consideration first, in an extraordinary manner - at the request of more than a third of the deputies. Deputy head of the Central Election Commission Andriy Magera has already threatened the Transcarpathian Regional Council with dissolution, but local deputies are clearly not afraid of this. Although at that time several dozen “activists” gathered under the building of the regional council in Uzhgorod, speaking in support of the law and against this appeal, their attempts to break into the session were blocked by the police - who, for example, recently in Odessa themselves led stormtroopers into the city council building.
Apparently, the whole point is in the position of the governor of Transcarpathia, former Chernivtsi resident Gennady Moskal, who on September 8 called on Poroshenko to veto the scandalous law. An official appointed by the President of Ukraine publicly stated that the education law does not comply with the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which Ukraine ratified in 2003, the Law “On National Minorities in Ukraine” and international treaties concluded by Ukraine with neighboring countries - and not only remained at his post, but did not even receive a formal rebuke from Kyiv.
In Moskal’s native Chernivtsi region, there have been persistent rumors for many years that he, the owner of a successful business in Romania, long ago acquired a Romanian passport, and legally - his mother, like all residents of Northern Bukovina, was a citizen of the Kingdom of Romania until 1944. Actually, most of the Ukrainian Romanians live in this area, in the Hertsaevsky, Novoselitsky and Storozhynetsky districts.
On September 21, the Novoselitsky District Council already adopted an appeal to the Verkhovna Rada with a request to send the education law for expert assessment regarding its consistency with Ukraine’s international obligations. It is still difficult to predict the decisions of the councils of other “Romanian” districts of the region and the Chernivtsi regional council, despite the fact that the “regional parliament” is headed by ethnic Romanian Ivan Muntean.
On the one hand, Muntean represents the Batkivshchyna party, 13 of whose deputies voted in parliament for the scandalous law; in addition, he belongs to the same church as Alexander Turchynov, who has long relied on radical nationalists. On the other hand, the head of the regional council has developed close relations with Romanian colleagues; he, like Moskal, is developing business in the neighboring country. In addition, Muntean’s assistants were repeatedly accused of having Romanian passports.
However, even if the Chernivtsi regional council follows the path of the Transcarpathian Council and demands that the President of Ukraine veto the education law, this is unlikely to affect Poroshenko’s position. In Kyiv, the position of local and regional authorities on any issues has long been ignored, especially after regional councils began to demand the impeachment of the president. Moreover, the adoption of the new Ukrainian law “On Education” was publicly supported by Washington: on September 10, the US Embassy in Kyiv congratulated Ukraine “on the advancement of educational reform, because contribution to the development of youth is the key to the future.”
Obviously, in Kyiv they hope that the United States will put pressure on Romania on the Ukrainian issue, as this was done earlier with Poland, which “suddenly” forgot about the glorification of the UPA and stopped noticing the growth of nationalism in Ukraine. But Romania is still becoming a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) created by the United States. Moreover, paradoxically, Romania’s entry into the OECD was blocked by Hungary - after the Romanian government decided to close the Hungarian Catholic Lyceum in Transylvania, where almost 1,5 million ethnic Hungarians live compactly. And although Bucharest and Budapest now act as a united front against Kyiv, the last word in the dispute between the US’s Eastern European allies will clearly remain with Washington.
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