This interview was recorded at the height of the Maidan uprising, in January of 2014. Just weeks later, Crimea would be annexed — a possibility unimaginable at the time of this conversation.
It was a volatile time, marked by rapid and unprecedented changes that would permanently reshape Ukraine’s path forward.
Listening now, it offers insights into how people perceived the stakes before history took its unexpected and shocking turn. Drawn from expert knowledge and sharp analysis of historical patterns set against the unfolding events of the time, these perspectives remain relevant today.
The transcript and audio preserve that immediacy, unfiltered by hindsight.
Scroll down to listen to the full recording and/or read the transcript of this vintage interview.
Transcript:
Pawlina: Mirko Petriw is a frequent guest here on Nash Holos. He lives in Vancouver and is the author of two spy thrillers set in Ukraine which have had an uncanny way of actually predicting the future and we’ve been seeing history jump off the pages of his novels. Quite eerie. He’s also the president of the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress Vancouver branch and of course is very much on top of events and the political machinations going on in Ukraine. He kindly agreed to speak with us again to give us an update on the rapidly changing situation in Ukraine. We spoke by phone yesterday evening.
Mirko, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mirko: Thank you very much, Paulette. Glad to be here.
Pawlina: Now, last time we talked, or one of the last times we spoke, was about something that you had discovered which nobody else was talking about at the time because it wasn’t, there was nothing in the English language press. You’d found a lot of information in the Ukrainian and Russian language press about shale gas in Ukraine and now lo and behold today you just sent around an email with a link to an English language story in the Kyiv Post.
Mirko: Exactly, the Kyiv Post story basically talks about Russia’s support of and financing of anti-shale gas movements in Ukraine. So basically that ties right in with what we were talking about a month ago. It is a month ago. It was the 15th of December that we last talked. But back then we talked about the fact that the shale gas finds in Ukraine will make Ukraine energy independent in a half dozen years and potentially could make Ukraine a natural gas supplier.
Pawlina: Bye-bye Gazprom!
Mirko: Well, exactly, Gazprom is absolutely panicking over that. Conversely, Merkel likes having an alternative source. They’re trying to wean themselves off Russian gas. Now we’re talking about Germany here. So having Ukrainian natural gas as an option would be absolutely wonderful. So all of a sudden Europe became interested in Ukraine and conversely Putin started a phenomenal campaign of blocking any attempt by Ukraine to enter into an association agreement with the European Union.
Pawlina: Well, what I find really interesting was I read that article and all of the arguments that Putin… I don’t know if it was Putin who was the Russian government official that was talking about all these anti-fracking. It was very, very reminiscent to the dialogue that’s going on in the West about fracking. Now, I’ve spoken to somebody who is a world expert in drinking water treatment. I happen to be married to him. And I was having a conversation with somebody on Skype and he overheard it…”you know fracking is bad, fracking will pollute the water supply…” And of course, this is somebody who, as I said, is a world expert on drinking water and the treatment of it. And so he knows about aquifers and he knows about what fracking can do. And he said fracking actually takes place so far below the watershed that there is virtually no danger at all of anything seeping back up into aquifers because there’s just that much space between the, you know, where they are doing the fracking and where the aquifer lies. So, but of course, people don’t know this. And what I read was very much, you know, there was propaganda here in the West as every bit as much and it’s identical. And that’s very troubling to me.
Mirko: Well, fracking and shale gas have become a bit of an energy revolution in the last few years. It’s going to make the U.S. energy independent, at least as far as natural gas is concerned. Canada always was, so it’s just more of the same. It is dropping or will be dropping the price of natural gas. It’s a good thing all around. I mean, unless you’re trying to sell natural gas at the kind of prices that Putin and Timoshenko agreed to, the $450 per thousand cubic meters, that was a little bit of a joke.
Pawlina: So they have a little bit of an interest, kind of like the oil cartel and keeping the prices high.
Mirko Oh, exactly right. Now, this is threatening to break that up totally for Gazprom.
Pawlina: Right. Well, I mean, and I really wonder if they’re just wanting to take over or dominate or at least have a very, very prominent role in the energy industry in the world.
Mirko: Well, whether we’re talking about the world or not, but he certainly wants to be dominating Ukraine at the time that the shale gas becomes available. So as I mentioned, we’re still about six years away from that. But by that time, Russia wants to be totally in command. And that brings us to some of the things that have happened this week in Ukraine.
Pawlina: Yeah, I wanted to get to that. Brutal.
Mirko: Yes, it was brutal. It was the 16th. That’s two days ago, Thursday, the 16th of January. The Yanukhovych regime passed a series of laws in a surprise move. In fact, the parliamentary schedule called for some budgetary discussions. And I guess the budget was going to be the subject. And he snuck this thing in. It was written and prepared by the president’s office. The president’s administration slipped this piece of legislation in. The voting mechanism, the electronic voting mechanism, wasn’t working. So the vote was by a show of hands. So all kinds of hands flew up. The interesting thing is registered members of parliament that were present, the number is 119. The vote for is recorded as 236.
Pawlina: So that’s an interesting math. That’s interesting.
Mirko: Very, very interesting Ukrainian parliamentary math. I mean, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. You can almost be sure that every single piece of legislature that was passed by Ukraine’s parliament was done in this flaky way. Usually, using the electronic system, one deputy or one member of parliament would vote for three or four others with their voting cards electronically. And it generates the kind of number. Well, here with a show of hands, the actual count of hands I’ve seen from photographs is barely over 100. It’s barely over 100, which jives with 119 that were present. Mostly opposition wasn’t there, obviously. But anyways, the law itself is clearly aimed at ending the Maidan protest movement in no particular order. It provides penalties or jail sentences for criticizing the government, because that’s called slander. You can be jailed for driving in a convoy of five or more cars. Erecting tents is illegal, erecting, or without a permit, I guess, erecting stages such as they have at Maidan is illegal. It is illegal to wear helmets and face masks. Speaking of helmets, since the beatings that we talked about the last time we talked, construction helmets had become very, very fashionable in the MKU. You show up in a Maidan wearing a construction helmet or a bicycle helmet or a motorcycle helmet, any kind of helmet, just for protection. We saw a week ago what happens when you don’t wear that protection. Minister of the Interior Yuri Lutsenko was somehow placed himself between demonstrators and the police. And next thing you know, he took eight blows to the head, lost consciousness, and spent several days in the hospital. Not a very pretty sight, but he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Oh, he was wearing glasses. Those were broken too. So anyways, but now helmets are illegal. What else happened? Oh, if you’ve got a Facebook page and you have five or more friends, you’re a broadcaster and you need a license. OK? Any organization that receives funding from abroad has to register as a foreign agent, which, of course, breaks the point since Ukraine just recently received a promise of $15 billion from Moscow. Does the Ukrainian government have to register as a foreign agent? Which, in fact, it is. I think that’s almost a moot point. But Ukraine’s government is very much an agent of the Kremlin these days. There was a few people that quit. There were a few people that were fired as a result of this legislation or simultaneously with that. The army general of the of the infantry, he was fired. The president’s chief of staff, Lovitchkin, was fired. I mean, he’s now become an advisor, but he lost his position as chief of staff. The new chief of staff is, surprise, surprise, Victor Medvedchuk. That in itself should say an awful lot. If you follow or if one follows Ukrainian politics over the last couple of decades. And Medvedchuk showed up on the scene around the year 2000. This is right in the middle of the of what I call the Gongadze-Melnychenko scandal. Gongadze was the journalist who disappeared and whose body was later found without a head. And Melnychenko is the person that claims to have recorded then president Kuchma’s in-cabinet meetings and discussions and had had some some recordings of Kuchma saying nasty things about about Gongadze. But anyways, as a result of that, Kuchma lost favor in the West. And I know we mentioned that on a previous broadcast. And instantly after that, his chief of staff was Victor Medvedchuk. Victor Medvedchuk is also the godfather, literally the godfather of Medvedev’s children.
Pawlina: Oh? The Russian prime minister …?
Mirko: Medvedev being the Russian then the prime minister, then the president, now the prime minister of Russia. So they’re very close relatives and definitely somebody that has been working unashamedly for the Kremlin. Well, he is now Yanukovych’s chief of staff. So you could just see how all the pieces suddenly got moved into place here to to do a nasty crackdown on the protest movement. And at the same time, you know, kind of ends with any hopes of Ukrainian independence, never mind association membership in the European Union.
Pawlina: Now, I’ve been speaking with with some people who say that maybe because this is this is not an election time, this is just something that presidential parliamentary changes that there are legitimately entitled to do until and there’s an election coming up next year. So, you know, people have said, well, maybe, you know, the time to really agitate is the next election. But I was speaking with somebody who is actually a friend of of Gongadze and lives in Victoria now. A friend had him on the air on her program here on Wednesday evening. And what he was saying is that the election rigging that goes on under the noses of the election observers is an absolute farce. It’s not actually under the noses because the election observers are trained to avoid any kind of confrontations or problems. And they go home at the end of a certain, you know, in the evening at their shift ends, they go back to their room and go to sleep. And that’s when the vote rigging actually happens. The stuffing of ballots and all kinds of stuff goes on at the polling stations when there are no observers there to observe anything.
Mirko: Exactly right.
Pawlina: So there’s not really any point really in waiting till the next election, because it’s just it’s just a waste of time, right?
Mirko: Well the energy that we saw on the Maidan would be totally depleted after 12 months. And the government would have 12 months to arrest anybody’s face that they could recognize. And they’ve got film of just everybody, which is why people started wearing ski masks, of course, along with the helmets. They they have they recorded license plate numbers of anybody that participated in some of the automotive demonstrations where, for example, they drove to the Yanukovych residence or close to it. Those people, about a hundred of them, have already lost their driver’s licenses. I mean, it’s an infraction, obviously, as you can see.
Pawlina: What about the guys that ran Tetiana Chornovil off the road? Do you think they they lost their licenses?
Mirko: Very good point. Very good point there, because the license plate is visible and at least one of the two ruffians is recognizable. And yet that whole case has just been swept under the rug right now. You’re not hearing very much. Even though there was a maximum of three people involved, they arrested five. And so it’s called the shell game. So by the time it all comes out, though, they’ll be charging the wrong person. And that person will prove to be innocent, of course.
Pawlina: What do you see…?
Mirko: But that’s a separate question right now. The issue right now is and it’s kind of strange because, you know, prior to this legislation, the Midan was losing energy. I mean, it is impossible to keep tens of thousands, but never mind hundreds of thousands of people up on their feet day in and day out for two months. And it’s been six or seven weeks already.
Pawlina: Dead of winter.
Mirko: And the dead of winter, too.
I mean, there’s nothing pleasant about this.
Pawlina: Yeah, it’s cold.
Mirko: And yet the interesting thing is every time there was any kind of violence or shoving with the police, additional people would show up instantly. I mean, they would just phone each other. And next thing you know, you’d have a couple of thousand more people. So actually, it’s been the conflicts with the police that actually brought people out to the Midan. So I think this legislation is going to have much, much the same effect and could bring things to a head. Things could get, well, if not ugly, then certainly very, very interesting in the next few days. I was privy to a string of emails between two people in Kyiv. They’re actually Canadians. And apparently the medical doctors were called in for an extra shift for this weekend, anybody, all the hospitals in the area of the Maidan, so they were brought in, there is a huge number of police just outside of the Maidan area. So the attack is certainly pending, to say the least. Something is being prepared. Of course, all of that could also be misinformation. We talked about that, but certainly the stress level is up.
Pawlina: Well, you know, and things are changing on a day-to-day basis. We’re actually recording this interview almost 24 hours before it’s going to be going to air. So when people are listening to this, you know, on the live broadcast or a little bit later on the podcast, it could be completely different.
Mirko: Something could have happened.
Pawlina: Yeah, exactly. So hopefully, I’d like to invite you on our Nanaimo edition on Wednesday to give us another update, if you wouldn’t mind. Vancouver listeners can tune in and catch that broadcast as well, and also can catch the podcast. But in three days time, it’s amazing what can happen.
Mirko: That’s quite right.
Pawlina: Yeah. And you have, as I said at the beginning, that you have an uncanny way of predicting the future. So I’d like to continue to get your analysis and your prognostications.
Mirko: The key here is a good understanding of the past. I think a lot of people who aren’t Ukrainian, aren’t involved in things that are Ukrainian, don’t quite understand how there can be an anti-Ukrainian government of Ukraine. It seems to be a nonsensical, yet that is exactly what we have. And we kind of have to go back in history a little bit. One thing I should mention before we stop this conversation, four days from now on the 22nd is Ukrainian Independence Day and the Day of Ukrainian Unity. And what that goes back to is 1918, January 22nd, Ukraine declared independence from the Russian Empire. A year later, Western Ukraine joined with the rest of Ukraine on that date. It is quite interesting that today in Ukraine, they’ll talk about Day of Ukrainian Unity, which is the Unity Day on that date, but not Independence Day. For Ukrainians, in Ukraine, Independence Day, they’re taught is the 24th of August, 1991. The history of 1918 is blotted out, kind of a little bit of a memory hole there. So independence didn’t happen, but there was unity in 1918.
Pawlina: Interesting.
Mirko: And so, and that is also a day where people have been called out to protest and demonstrate. So if it doesn’t happen on Sunday, it will happen on 22nd.
Pawlina: And that’s Wednesday.
Mirko: Yeah, that is a very good day for your broadcast. You’ll be right on top of things
Pawlina: Be very interesting to keep our eye on that and follow that story.
Mirko: Thank you very much.
Pawlina: Well, thank you. And we’ll talk to you Wednesday.
I was speaking with Mirko Petriu of the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress Vancouver branch. We spoke by phone yesterday evening. Mirko will be back on Nash Holos Wednesday on the Nanaimo edition of Nash Holos and that’s on 101.7 FM CHLY Radio Malaspina and streaming online at chly.ca.
This is Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio on AM 1320 CHMB Vancouver.
