Ukraine's border jewel sees its future in Middle Europe

Lviv Letter:Even in a country whose name means "borderland", the Ukrainian city of Lviv - previously Lwow, Lemberg and Lvov - has always lived close to the cutting edge of history.

After 751 years, many of them tumultuous, Lviv is being slowly polished for presentation to the world as Ukraine's architectural gem, even while it takes a buffeting from the political storms blowing through the country.

The medieval capital of the Kingdom of Galicia, Lviv was seized by the Polish king in 1349, and remained a jewel in his crown for more than four centuries, before the Russians, Austrians and Prussians carved up his dominions in 1772.

As the main city of Austrian Galicia, of which Krakow to the west was also part, Lviv joined the likes of Prague, Budapest and Vienna in the Habsburg Empire, and its polyglot population of Poles, Jews, Hungarians, Germans and Ukrainians thrived in a bustling hub of one of the main European trade routes.

Under the Austrians, Ukrainian Lviv and Polish Lwow became Lemberg, and remained so until the defeated Habsburg empire was dismantled after the first World War, when soldiers loyal to the upstart Western Ukrainian Government briefly secured the city as the capital of what they hoped would be a long-awaited free and independent Ukraine.

As a predominantly Polish city, however, Lviv rose up against Ukrainian nationalists who were heroes to most people in the surrounding countryside, and the rebel city was reclaimed by reconstituted Poland soon afterwards and brought back under Warsaw's rule.

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he secretly agreed to share control of eastern Europe with Josef Stalin, and the city fell inside a Ukraine that was now just one of 15 Soviet republics, with the spelling of its name being Russified to Lvov.

Only when Moscow's empire collapsed again in 1991 did Ukraine win independence, but Lviv was not destined for quiet retirement from the stage of world events.

Decades of resentment towards Kremlin rule exploded in Lviv with the 2004 Orange Revolution, when it was the first city to annul rigged election results and sack officials appointed by the central government in Kiev.

This September, the city of 800,000 people gave an overwhelming mandate to the leaders of the Orange Revolution - president Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko - to reform their broken alliance and oust a government led by their old enemy, Viktor Yanukovich.

To many people in Lviv, Yanukovich is a gruff Moscow stooge from benighted eastern Ukraine, where Russian is the language of choice and heavy industry dominates.

Tymoshenko, however, has crafted herself into the darling of western Ukraine.

A strong critic of the Kremlin, she accuses Yanukovich and his "oligarch" allies of misrule and corruption, and delivers her diatribes in Ukrainian from beneath an ash-blonde peasant braid that has helped her woo this patriotic, traditional farming region.

This tough former businesswoman, whose success in the cut-throat world of post-Soviet energy dealings saw her dubbed the Gas Princess, also urges her compatriots to turn away from Russia and look westto a European Union that starts just 70km from Lviv.

In the east, Tymoshenko is seen by many as a reckless megalomaniac, spouting populist slogans, stoking animosity with Moscow and playing on the strong nationalism in western Ukraine that has fuelled pogroms down the centuries against Jews and Poles.

This week Yushchenko said animosity between Ukraine and Russia, and western and eastern Ukraine, was fed by anger over the 1932-3 famine in which some 7.5 million Ukrainians died after Stalin set impossible grain targets and confiscated food from the country's farmers to break their independent spirit and resistance to collectivisation.

Ukraine's parliament has decreed that the famine was genocide against the Ukrainian people, a decision deplored by Yanukovich and Russia, a country that looms over eastern Ukraine but feels remote beneath the chestnut trees that line Lviv's main square. Here, the talk is of investment by Polish and German firms, and tour groups from both countries ogle the renaissance, baroque, rococo and neo-classical facades that grace Lviv's magnificent old town, which has survived centuries of invasion and occupation to become a Unesco World Heritage site.

The people of Lviv feel central European, and insist that Mitteleuropa will not be complete without their graceful city back in it.

They are looking forward to Tymoshenko emerging from arduous coalition talks as their new prime minister, and returning Ukraine to the heart of Europe: quite a burden of hope - and quite a transformation - for the Gas Princess from Dnipropetrovsk, a mostly Russian-speaking industrial city far to the east.

Reuters adds: Parties linked with Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" formed a wafer-thin majority coalition in parliament yesterday, with former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko due to get her job back once a government is formed.

The coalition, with only a single vote to spare, was created after weeks of tense negotiations between the two parties associated with the mass 2004 protests.