Re-Packaging of Almost Finished Infrastructure Projects Creating the Illusion of Progress in Kiev (?)

A transport infrastructure revolution for Ukraine is long overdue

At first glance, there seems to be a bonanza of new transport infrastructure across the capital. There’s the so-called ‘new bridge’ in Podil (it’s a flyover), the apparent completion of the Moscow Square road junction works, a new terminal at the airport and at least THREE rail-related projects. Terminal F at Boryspil airport is nothing spectacular compared to, for example, the outstanding terminal the Portuguese built in Porto for Euro 2004 but, let's face it, for Ukraine it's not bad. The new government’s eagerness to take photo opportunities at these recently completed transport projects is understandable.

Party of Regions advertising for the local elections featured the newly ‘completed’ new railway bridge across the Dnipro in Kiev. The tv screens in the carriages of the Kiev metro (which show, among other things, animal funnies, anecdotes and news shorts) have in recent months contained newsreels highlighting the progress of various projects, including road repairs, a new Kiev suburban railway station at Livy Bereg and the President travelling on the inaugural train on the newest section of Kiev’s metro (it's not yet open to the public). An item this week shows workers busily laying tarmac with the benign communist-sounding headline ‘preparing for the winter’. At the reopening of the renovated fast tram line on the west side of the city, Prime Minister Azarov, in the paternalistic style beloved of the Kremlin, says to his workers "let's finally commission it on March 1".

However, on visiting the tramline myself today, it seems there is quite a bit of finishing to be done, and the reopening might have been slightly premature. At least three of the stops are still closed and nowhere near completion, and over half of the stops that are open are only partially completed, with passengers effectively standing in the middle of building sites waiting for their trams. Not that the work carried out isn’t, in its way, impressive. The newly renovated trams are clean and more modern looking, if not quite comfortable as such, and each tram includes a low floor section in the middle, which is reached by level access from proper platforms. Platforms for tram stops are of course standard practice across most of Europe but in Ukraine, where its customary to just clamber up from the trackside, it’s almost a revolution (I should however mention that, as almost none of the stations have step-free access, it will be of little use to the truly mobility-impaired, but now I'm getting fussy). The stations that are completed are nicely done, with metro station style barriers. But of course all these technical plusses were not thought up in the past 8 months of the Yanukovych administration, and in fact were by some miracle carried out under Kiev's much-maligned mayor Chernovetsky, who is now rapidly being sidelined under the new regime.

Being honest, transport construction projects is not an area of knowledge in which the average person in the streets excels. From my own experience having a degree in transport and logistics and working in transport journalism, the general public has little idea how long it takes to bring an infrastructure project from planning to completion. So it’s actually quite easy to persuade people that this has all been done in the last 8 months. And in a way, it has. We’ve become accustomed here to living with seemingly perpetual building sites, with often little sign of work being carried out. The sight of the Olympisky stadium complex with workers scurrying all over it is quite the culture shock in Ukraine. But we all know why construction projects here tend to drag on. It is normally a safe bet that somebody is laundering money through these sometimes lavish and leisurely-paced construction projects. A former close associate of Yanukovych-the now deceased former railways minister-is said to have performed a similar trick in the extensive reconstruction of some of the country’s railway stations.

The point is that the previous powers that be left plenty of partly-finished projects lying around which, with a kick up the arse to the relevant people, could pretty easily be turned into finished projects. And it’s nice to see these projects being completed rather than continuing to drag on. I remember hearing that the Moscow Square works were going to drag on into 2012, the year that, more than ever before, Kiev will be on show to the rest of Europe. So, credit where credit is due to the new government.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The new railway bridge, which incorporates a new road crossing, is not in fact complete. The sole user of another drawn out construction project, a double deck metro and road bridge via the north end of Trukhaniv island, is apparently the presidential motorcade. The fast tram line still requires work and there is a new terminal at Boryspil to complete for Euro 2012. And visitors to the country will not pull any punches with what they see when they get here.

What we don’t want to see is infrastructure development that is in fact more spin than substance. President or Prime Minister Putin (I’m not sure which, let’s just say ‘leader’) apparently once carried out an opening ceremony for a section of the Trans-Siberian highway which in fact couldn’t be driven across due to a number of uncompleted bridges. And if healthy oil and gas revenues doesn’t buy you decent infrastructure, I don’t know what will.

Ukraine needs to take a serious look at infrastructure provision for the future. Kiev’s ‘Miska Elektrichka’ project is a good start (it’s actually ‘elektropoyizd’ in Ukrainian, but granted that wouldn’t be as catchy). Talk of a real suburban rail system for Kiev which aims to replicate the situation in other European cities is really encouraging, and one only dreams that it might be of the pedigree of the S-Bahn systems in Germany or the RER in Paris.

Ukraine also needs motorways. It was a stroke of genius to make a section of motorway from Boryspil airport to Kiev to impress visitors, but anyone who has driven beyond the airport turning will know that this is not the situation throughout the rest of the country. Private companies would gladly come to Ukraine and construct toll motorways, as long as land could be compulsorily purchased and as long as those companies could be left to get on with it. Alas, the reality would be that murky figures would come out of the woodwork demanding that the work be carried out by Ukrainian companies and most likely planned to proceed at the leisurely pace that I described earlier. The result however, is little progress on building a motorway network for Ukraine, and many investors who will stay away if there isn’t one.

The other thing the country needs, but which admittedly sounds pie in the sky, is high speed rail (you must forgive me if the article from here on indulges my transport interests). Technically it wouldn’t be too difficult to do. Ukraine has open country that would require few tunnels or viaducts, there’s no need for expensive TGV-type trains-even 200km/h trains would be a lot quicker than anything currently running in Ukraine. Electrification has proven to be a lot cheaper per mile than in other countries. And the basic fact is that the current rail network doesn’t meet a lot of the country’s needs. There is no direct line from Kiev to Odesa for example, and a new line to Poland which allowed Warsaw to be reached in 4-5 hours, Berlin in 6-7 etc. would bring Kiev tangibly closer to Europe. They’re even developing high speed rail in Turkey, so why not Ukraine? Having said all that, I don’t expect any movement on this for a good 10 years or so.

Much more likely is arrival in Kiev of Russia’s fancy-looking Sapsan trains, but beyond the sexy lines, we shouldn’t get that excited about this. The Sapsan trains, which mainly do the Moscow-St. Petersburg run at present, are a derivative of the Siemens ICE/Velaro which operate in Germany, France and Spain at 300 km/h, yet there is not one single stretch of track in Russia where this speed is possible, the maximum being 200 km/h on some sections. That’s an incredibly expensive train to be using at only two thirds of capacity. The purchase of the trains is almost certainly a crony capitalist offshoot of the Nordstream gas pipeline deal, and it seems a small price to pay for being able to plug an umbilical gas chord into Europe’s largest economy. A Russian Railways employee even warned friends not to travel on the trains as they are travelling on infrastructure not even properly modernised for these speeds.

But the point is, to Joe Public, a train is a train, and Sapsan will no doubt start running to Kiev to much fanfare. And thus the potential for spin amongst the unwitting general public is endless. But if we see real modernisation here in the next 5 years, I will cheerfully eat my words. Finishing off a few odds and ends is a good start, but more of the same please!

Indulging my trainspotter instincts, here is a suggested high speed rail network for Ukraine (I know, I know, dream on...):

More on Ukraine's local election...

Free and fair?

Predictably, Tymoshenko has cried foul over the election results, and one might feel that, whilst she most likely does have a case in some instances, that she'll be looking to take any crumbs of hard evidence to her advantage. Batkivshchyna are demanding recounts and even re-votes in some areas. If accusations can be proven with hard evidence, then fair enough, but that has to be considered a big 'if' if Ukraine's politicised courts are to be involved. Former president Yushchenko has in contrast soberly accepted the results for his Our Ukraine party.

Outisde reaction continues to err on the side of caution where criticism is involved. The Council of Europe has endorsed the elections as free, but has said that Ukraine's election law is faulty, and have offered to assist Ukraine in drafting a new one. That's all well and good but, assuming Ukraine takes their advice and makes a better law, we won't see it in action until the next round of local elections for these precints in five years time, and who knows what the landscape will be then? In the meantime, if these elections have produced unsatisfactory provision of local offcials, they now have five years to repent at leisure. That will seem rather soft to some.

The CIS countries have given the elections the thumbs up and little criticism has been heard from Russian monitors (although given that many of the equivalent officials in Russia are not even directly elected, you have to ask what wisdom they have to impart to Ukraine on the subject). An extremely interesting aspect to this election has been the situation in Crimea, where several pro Russian unity parties have complained of being marginalised by the Party of Regions, an odd twist to the more easterly direction of Ukraine's current politics. So for some 'pro-Russians' (it's actually quite a careless term), perhaps the democracy of the past five years wasn't so bad after all (?).

Domestically, the Central Election Commission shares the Council of Europe's view that the law on local elections needs to be changed but doesn't see grounds to doubt the results. The western-funded Committee of Voters of Ukraine says that long queues were the biggest problem and that violations were 'not systemic' (either that, or the manipulators have adopted a less conspicuous 'mix and match' approach to vote-rigging).

There has of course been serious criticism. US-funded NGO Opora in its monitoring of the elections has said that that there were simply too many violations for the elections to be considered fair. These could be dismissed as one organisation's take on the elections, but repeated crashes of the organisation's website just as the process of compiling evidence of violations was gathering pace, does appear suspicious, and rather raises the suspicion that there is indeed something to hide in some quarters. It is perhaps slightly reminiscent of the cyber attacks on Estonia during the 2007 war memorial row.

So make of it all what you will...

Ukraine's Local Elections: Valid Conclusions Elusive

There's a temptation to avoid the issue of the local elections completely, to dismiss it as either an irrelevance or just a massive dog's dinner. Where do you start? Well, one has to start somewhere...

At first glance the results seem to be yet another triumph in the relentless onward march of the Party of Regions machine. Across the country, with results yet to be declared in most cases, the President's party is believed to have won 36% of the vote across the nation, trouncing it's nearest rival, Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna by a margin of three to one. But whether this is a success rather depends on what the endgame is, of which we know little. In most European countries the governing party would be jolly pleased with 36% of the vote, so if we are following the European democratic model, all well and good. However, if the aim is to replicate the success of Putin's United Russia, this result suggests that there is rather a long way to go. It shows that the Party of Regions has a robust support base behind it, mostly in its heartlands, but doesn't suggest the support is keeping up with the level, for example, of billboard advertising or positive television coverage.

The electoral landscape has definitely changed. There was no sign on the streets of Kiev this time of the previously ubiquitous tents representing an apparent array of choice. Most billboard advertising around the city seemed, anecdotally, to be for the Regions and Yatsenyuk's 'Front for Change', which is looking more and more like Ukraine's answer to the pro-Kremlin 'Just/Fair Russia' party, even having to deny rumours that it is to merge into the Regions. The Regions must be delighted that Tihipko's 'Strong Ukraine' doesn't seem to have fared strongly at all, a step backwards from his double digit first round showing in the presidential election.

Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda's strong showing in Western Ukraine will concern many observers. However, whether this stands to have any truly grave consequences remains to be seen. After all, again looking from a European perspective, the success of the far right is not a trend unique to Ukraine, and Svoboda can join a long list (Jobbik in Hungary, the Slovak National Party, the BNP in the UK, Austria's very own 'Freedom' party etc. etc.). The west of the country might feel that it was abused and taken for granted by 'Orange' politicians whose real interests were far from the Carpathians. Nationalist parties always do well out of any feeling from a part of the electorate that it has been marginalised, and they do well in fringe elections, such as local (as, in the EU, European elections). 31% in Ivano-Frankivsk and 32% in Ternopil seems very high but it could be seen just as a cry for help in what are, for Western Ukraine, uncertain times. One might even sympathise as many in the region most likely consider themselves targets of state-sponsored racism, if the rants of the current education minister are anything to go by. From a more Russia-based political perspective, Zhirinovsky has always been tolerated, the difference being that the overlap with Kremlin sympathies is non-existent between Svoboda and authorities here. Again the Regions win, as those of the ilk of Tabachnyk et al get to paint the 'Galicians' as destructive 'anti-Ukrainian' fascists or whatever.

More attempts at conclusions to follow, perhaps...