The new Ukrainian government continues to contend with the fall out from the dealings of the last Kuchma regime. I mentioned yesterday that Yushchenko has shown a tendency to fall into a kind of minor-league imitation of his predecessor when reporting on his government’s actions. David Crouch notices the same thing:

The suicide two weeks ago of former interior minister Yuri Kravchenko, a key witness in investigations into the outgoing leadership’s criminal exploits, has been widely blamed on the government putting its own interests before the legal process – a hallmark of ex-president Leonid Kuchma’s years in power.

Mr Yushchenko’s announcement on March 1 that the murder four years ago of opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze had been “solved” – before the case had gone to court and with many questions still unanswered – met with widespread scepticism in the press and from Gongadze’s family. On March 8, President Yushchenko dismissed calls for the general prosecutor to resign over his handling of the case.

Under Mr Kuchma, Ukrainians became accustomed to declarations that high-profile crimes had been conveniently solved, only for officials later to retract their claims in the face of new evidence.

The sale of what now looks like 18 nuclear X-55 missiles to Iran and China is finally getting noticed by a part of the MSM, even if US reporters have yet to really wake up on this story. This dovetails with Kuchma’s decision to join the coalition in Iraq to deflect US criticism of Ukraine’s sale of radar systems to Saddam.

You can read more here, including a picture of the missiles in question. Not exactly up to Robert’s babe pictures, but oddly provocative.