ABSTRACT
A central argument of this book is that the nature of its political arrangements affected Ukraine’s management of its energy dependency and its ability to develop a consistent energy policy, as well as the opportunities available for the realization of Russian energy interests in the country. To analyze this, a first step involves characterizing the political system and its implications in terms of establishing certain patterns of interest articulation and policy-making. In this chapter, we analyze the general aspects of this question, that is, how Ukraine’s political system under President Kuchma affected policy-making in general; Chapter 6 discusses the system of energy policy-making more specifically. Here, we look at the nature of the Ukrainian political system between 1995 and 2004, and trace how its specific features affected interest articulation and policymaking. We look at three important elements of this system-the de facto system of interest articulation, the role of the executive, and the role of the parliamentwhose interaction largely determined the way politics and policy-making were de facto conducted in Ukraine.
