Ukraine: elections won’t end the ‘new cold war’

This time last year the foreign ministers of Poland and Sweden had just visited Ukraine, met President Viktor Yanukovich and praised the "great progress" his country had made in preparing to sign a landmark trade and political pact with the European Union.

They told him how much they wanted Ukraine to take the final, crucial steps that many believed would seal its historic pivot away from Russia and towards the West, but they warned that there could still be a serious slip between cup and lip.

“The time for bluffing is over on both sides now. It’s time for action,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, then Polish foreign minister, noting that barely a month remained until a planned signing ceremony with EU leaders.

“The clock is ticking and time is running out,” added Carl Bildt, his colleague from Stockholm. “We are now approaching crunch time.”

The crunch, when it came, was bigger than anyone expected, and it changed Ukraine forever. The crisis that began last year is still biting deep into the country, deep enough to change its borders, allegiances and very identity.

Tomorrow this divided, bloodied and near bankrupt state will choose a new parliament, in an election as tumultuous as the recent fate of its 45 million people.

Yanukovich’s last-minute refusal, last November, to sign the EU pact, and his subsequent turn back to Russia for financial help and support, triggered student protests that were brutally put down by riot police on Independence Square in Kiev.

Pictures of those scenes enraged much of a nation that, until then, had seemed weary of activism and of the kind of radical upheaval that they had tried with the 2004 Orange Revolution, which had ultimately failed and brought Yanukovich to power.

But the apathy was illusory. Ukrainians shrugged off their cynicism and roused themselves in an anti-corruption, anti-Yanukovich and pro-western protest movement that swept away the old guard.

Almost three months of rallies that centred on Independence Square – or “Maidan” – ended with more than 100 protesters and several police officers being shot dead, Yanukovich and his closest allies fleeing to Russia, and reformists taking power. “Maidan” has become a byword for this revolution.

But before those reformists’ nameplates had been fixed to the doors of ministerial offices Russian forces were fanning across Crimea, seizing official buildings and surrounding Ukrainian military bases; after a controversial referendum the Kremlin formally annexed the Black Sea peninsula in March.

Within weeks pro-Moscow protesters were storming key buildings in the industrial east of Ukraine, and heavily armed rebels had declared that the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk were breaking with Kiev and wanted to join Russia.

The war that ensued has killed more than 3,600 people and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes, making many eastern Ukrainians swear never again to live with Kiev, and fuelling hatred of Russia in much of the rest of the country.

Relations at their worst

Relations between the Kremlin and the West are at their worst for decades. Both will watch the election with intense interest, but nobody expects that it will create their ideal Ukraine or ease what some are calling a new cold war.

The election race reflects the turbulence of the times, and anti-corruption activists and camouflage-clad fighters from the war in the east are set to sweep from parliament an old coterie of silk-suited businessmen with close ties to Russia.

Polls suggest that pro-western parties that play up their patriotism will dominate the next legislature, and the new Opposition Bloc, which is home to several old allies of Yanukovich, may not even secure the 5 per cent of votes it needs to enter parliament.

Crimea and eastern Ukraine formed a stronghold for Yanukovich’s Regions Party and the communists, the country’s main Russia-friendly forces. Voting will not take place on the peninsula or in rebel-held parts of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The upshot will be the disenfranchisement of several million voters, their deeper alienation from the rest of Ukraine, and rejection of the ballot’s legitimacy by Crimea, by the eastern rebels and possibly by their backer, Russia.

Candidates for Opposition Bloc – who tend to lambast the government while studiously refusing to place any blame on Russia for Ukraine’s crisis or for helping the separatists – have been roughed up on the campaign trail, and claim that pro-Kiev volunteer battalions will influence voting at some polling stations.

Leading figures from several battalions have been given prominent places on a number of party lists, featuring heavily in campaigning that has focused on the conduct of the war, relations with Russia and the parlous state of Ukraine’s economy.

Some analysts fear that the presence of these military men and volunteer fighters in parliament will feed currents of ultranationalism and populism, which may only divide the country further and hamper difficult but vital reforms.

Others, such as Svitlana Zalishchuk, an activist who is running for President Petro Poroshenko’s party, insist that such figures must have a political role during a time of conflict and upheaval.

“We have to involve military forces and the battalions in politics, in part to bring them off the streets and stop them potentially being a destabilising factor there,” she says.

“The military elite and battalion commanders will help transform dialogue in the corridors of power. They are experts in their fields, and will be a vast improvement on some previous deputies.”

Like candidates for most of the main parties, Zalishchuk sees the election as a continuation of the revolution, and expects it to create a parliament that is properly attuned to the country’s current needs and prepared to tackle vital issues.

“It will help us advance essential legislation, in judicial, legal and anti-corruption reform,” she says. “We needed key reforms in the months after Maidan, but the old parliament couldn’t do it. This election will solve that.”

Poroshenko’s party, which includes anti-corruption campaigners, activists like Zalishchuk, well-known journalists and the battle-hardened fighters, is expected to win the election comfortably.

Billionaire magnate

But that predicted victory – for a party led by a billionaire chocolate magnate, backed by another oligarch and regional governor, Igor Kolomoisky – will highlight a paradox at the heart of Ukraine’s revolution and reform drive.

The Maidan uprising was a rejection by the Ukrainian people not just of Yanukovich, his cronies and his allies in the Kremlin but also of corruption at all levels and of the domination of politics and business by a small elite of tycoons.

With Poroshenko as president and Kolomoisky running the key eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk, it is clear that the revolution has not entirely changed the way Ukraine is run, even if the faces and political preferences are very different.

Campaigning in the patriotic heartland of western Ukraine, Dmytro Yarosh, leader of the nationalist Right Sector group, says the new parliament would still be “around 70 per cent filled with old faces”, even if Yanukovich’s allies are ousted.

“But the new 30 per cent will be able to do many things. They will be fighters steeled by Maidan and by the war. So the situation can change for the better,” Yarosh says.

He also says that the new parliament, government and President Poroshenko should remember the main lesson of Maidan: that officials must serve the people, and will be removed by the people – one way or another – if necessary.

“We won’t let [Maidan’s gains] be stolen,” says Yarosh, dressed in fatigues and ringed by bodyguards. “Too much blood has been shed in the name of freedom and independence for that to happen,” he adds, telling Ukraine’s old political elite to forget about trying to retake power.

“We won’t allow them to take revenge. “We will neutralise any such attempts.”