LONDON, 17 October 2005 — Those who doubted how revolutionary Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” would turn out to be have no reason for pleasure now. The massive disappointment felt by tens of thousands in Kiev, which recent visitors report, far outweighs any intellectual satisfaction there is in having predicted that Viktor Yushchenko’s assumption of power would not transform the country, politically or economically. Indeed, “realists” like myself were also wrong. We did not expect things to unravel so fast.
So when Ukraine’s president comes to London today to receive the Chatham House prize from Queen Elizabeth, it will be as much less of a hero to his supporters than nine months ago. The prize was awarded mainly for his keeping the country at peace while performing a balancing act between Russia and the West. He is not being honored for his domestic record, which has been mediocre. Like the ex-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, Yushchenko has become a child of the Soviet system who is more popular abroad than at home.
The indictment is long. The winning coalition that orchestrated last winter’s street protests collapsed in disarray last month. Leading members accused each other of corruption. Inflation has risen while the rate of growth has fallen by half. Promises to reverse the crony privatizations of the 90s have not been kept. Had the disagreements centered on serious policy issues, the regime’s splits might not have damaged Ukraine’s image much. The country has hard choices to make over the pace and scope of reform. But the row that led to the departure of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, the heroine of last winter’s barricades, was a sordid squabble among rival oligarchs — exactly the scenario skeptics warned of last year.
Far from being motivated by a genuine wish to promote democracy, many leading Yushchenko-backers only wanted to grab a greater share of the post-Soviet pie. The government crisis came to a head over a lucrative ferro-alloy plant in Nikopol. Initially taken over by Viktor Pinchuk, the son-in-law of Yushchenko’s predecessor, Leonid Kuchma, it was reallocated after several conflicting court orders to an oligarch backed by Tymoshenko, herself a multimillionaire from earlier privatization deals. Charges flew that the judges had been unfairly leaned on. There was also a power struggle between Tymoshenko as prime minister and Yushchenko’s friend, the tycoon Petro Poroshenko, who served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
Ukraine’s Parliament is also a playground of oligarchic interests. Dmitriy Vydrin, the director of the European Integration and Development Institute in Kiev, was quoted as saying this summer: “When you look at what is happening in Parliament, you see too many factions which are still being influenced by the big businesses. The government has not pushed through enough changes or reforms to break those links.”
Ukraine under Yushchenko remains what it was when he took office — a pseudo-democracy and a pseudo-market economy where neither the rules of business nor of political competition are transparent, fair and honest. Access to power is blocked to those outside the newly rich managerial elite from Soviet times. Transparency International puts Ukraine several notches higher on its corruption list even than Russia.
Reforming a system of this kind is not easy, but Yushchenko has done nothing to improve the climate of impunity. No oligarch has been charged with tax or other violations that could lead to prison. Desperately seeking a parliamentary majority to approve his new prime minister, Yushchenko even signed a memorandum of understanding last month with Viktor Yanukovich, the man he defeated last December who was widely accused of rigging the first two rounds of the presidential election.
Fury over false counting was the key issue that fueled last year’s protests. Hundreds of thousands wanted European standards of democracy and persuaded themselves they would get them. No wonder many now feel their man’s election morality is no better than his opponent’s. As part of his understanding with Yanukovich, Yushchenko promised his former rival immunity from any charges of electoral fraud.
Yushchenko has also failed to make serious headway on the issue he once named as a touchstone of democracy — the case of Georgy Gongadze, an investigative journalist who was decapitated in 2000. The alleged killers, three policemen, are in jail, but no trial is going forward. Senior figures from the Kuchma days who are alleged to have ordered the crime, and are still useful in shoring up Yushchenko’s power, remain at large.
A second touchstone is the plan to reduce the president’s power next year and give Parliament the right to name the prime minister. It was agreed last winter as part of the compromise that ended the street confrontations. With parliamentary elections due in March and a strong chance that Tymoshenko, now Yushchenko’s opponent, will win a majority, will the president implement this change? As president, he will only control defense and foreign policy.
The final issue is foreign policy. Western governments that funded or backed Yushchenko’s victory directly and through civil society channels hailed it as a black-eye for Russia and a “seismic shift westward in the geopolitics of the region,” in the words of Adrian Karatnycky of the US organization Freedom House. Ukrainians expected easier EU entry, but the EU has not opened its door any wider. On relations with Moscow, Yushchenko has been pragmatic. He knows he has to import gas from Russia. Ukraine has little room for maneuver and, unlike Tymoshenko, who was hated in Moscow, the new prime minister says Kiev does not want to jeopardize ties to its eastern neighbor.
The main difference since Yushchenko came to power concerns NATO. Near the end of his term Kuchma came out against Ukraine joining, as did Yanukovich. Yushchenko took the opposite line — one reason why Washington wanted him to win. But polls show that while most Ukrainians aspire to join the EU, the majority are against NATO. They probably see it as unnecessary and potentially destabilizing.
Will Yushchenko halt preparations to join, or continue on the grounds that Ukrainians need to be “educated” to see the alliance’s value? This too is a test of whether those who exploited the romantic excitement of the “Orange Revolution” are the democrats they claimed to be last year to be.
