Ukraine faces collapse, warns Kuchma

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukraine's under pressure President Leonid Kuchma says his country faces collapse because of the furore over the kidnap and killing of an opposition journalist.

In a newspaper interview, Kuchma denies ordering officials to "deal with" critical Internet journalist Georgiy Gongadze.

But the charge has led to politicians on both the left and right calling for Kuchma to step down amid growing street demonstrations demanding his resignation.

The street demonstrations began as secret tapes surfaced, along with allegations of Kuchma's complicity in the disappearance of the journalist.

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Kuchma says he had nothing to do with the journalist's disappearance and condemns the political turmoil it has triggered.

The Ukrainian leader acknowledged to the Den newspaper that a headless corpse found outside Kiev last November was almost certainly that of Gongadze.

The scandal threatened to blow Ukraine, located between Europe and Russia, off its course of integration with Europe, the newspaper quoted the 62-year-old leader as saying.

"I consider that if this crisis is supported, especially from outside, it could lead to only one thing: the collapse of Ukraine," he told the daily in an interview. "This is the moment of truth for Ukraine."

Tension in the ex-Soviet republic has been further heightened by Tuesday's arrest of a leading Kuchma opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, who is accused of bribing a disgraced former premier with $79 million when she was head of a gas firm.

Tymoshenko, sacked by Kuchma in January, says the probe of her business affairs in 1995-97 is politically motivated, and linked to her attempts as a minister to root out corruption in the energy sector.

Opposition groups said they would step up protests after Tymoshenko, 40, spent her first night in a Kiev jail.

The Gongadze case has provoked statements of concern from the United States and the European Union, adding to the pressure on the beleaguered president. Kuchma repeatedly said he had always tried to guide Ukraine on a "European path."

The three-month old scandal prompted Kuchma, first elected in 1994, to make a rare appeal to the nation for calm on Tuesday with his reformist Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko and the parliamentary speaker.

In the newspaper interview, Kuchma also criticised the security services for bugging his office and explained foul language on the tapes as his "managerial" style of dealing with officials.

Prosecutors initially dismissed the tapes, published last year, as fakes. They have since said the recordings, made by a former SBU (ex-KGB) security service officer, consisted of genuine footage which was edited to change its meaning.

"I've already said it many times: I'm a manager and have a factory manager's vocabulary," Kuchma said, apparently referring to the tapes in which a voice similar to his punctuates a mix of Ukrainian and Russian with expletives.

"If someone somewhere reports to me, then I may just 'let rip' -- I don't shirk from that," he said. "It's hard at my age to avoid such sometimes unliterary language, because it sometimes helps more than other kinds."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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