Ukraine the loser as Viktors battle for Tymoshenko alliance

Five years after the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians are poised to pass a damning verdict on its leaders, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLINin Kiev

TOMORROW’S presidential election is likely to end the top-flight political career of Viktor Yushchenko, the man swept to power on the back of huge demonstrations in winter of 2004-5, but who has failed dismally as head of state. He faces a trouncing at the ballot box, and his humiliation will almost certainly be sharpened by the triumph of Viktor Yanukovich, the villain of the piece five years ago when his blatantly fraudulent election “victory” brought Ukrainians on to the streets in furious protest.

Between the two Viktors stands Yulia Tymoshenko, who led the Orange Revolution with Yushchenko but has been bickering with him ever since. She could now be forced to seek a power-sharing deal with Yanukovich, an arrangement she scorned at her political peak.

Millions of Ukrainians believed the Orange Revolution would herald an era of unprecedented prosperity, independence and national pride for a country that for centuries had been dominated by its great neighbour, Russia.

They expected Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, as their new president and prime minister, to form a “dream team” capable of prising Ukraine from Moscow’s grip and moving it towards the European Union, while purging corruption in business and politics and attracting major foreign investors.

Instead, Ukrainians were forced to watch their leaders squabble and scrap for power, paralysing vital reforms and scaring away investment, as shady tycoons flourished, Yanukovich rebuilt his popularity and a Russia awash with petro-dollars reasserted its regional authority.

Tomorrow they will vote against the backdrop of economic disaster. Ukraine is one of the countries hardest hit by the financial crisis, and is being watched closely by an EU and a US that have grown frustrated with its leadership and have gone cold on the prospect of its European-Atlantic integration.

A former economist and central banker, Yushchenko (55), ultimately proved unable to outmanoeuvre the wily Tymoshenko, to defeat the hydra-headed political and business elites that oppose him, or to find a modus vivendi with both the EU and Russia. Over time, he began to appear obsessed not with beating his resurgent old enemy, Yanukovich, but with crushing his on-off ally, Tymoshenko, and attacking every Russian element of life in Ukraine.

He enraged Russia by defining as genocide the man-made 1930s famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union, and by demanding that the Russian Black Sea fleet leave its base on Ukraine’s coast when its lease runs out in 2017.

Moscow has accused him of sending fighters and weapons to Georgia during its war with Russia in August 2008, and of being responsible for disputes that twice led to disruptions in Russian gas supply to the EU, badly damaging the Kremlin’s reputation as an energy exporter.

Allies of Yushchenko say he is simply defending Ukraine’s interests against a bullying neighbour, one that refuses to extradite people accused of involvement in the suspected dioxin poisoning that almost killed him before the 2004 election, leaving him badly scarred.

But his confrontations with Russia have ultimately crippled him, not only by making an enemy of the country with the most political, economic and social influence over Ukraine, but by alienating the vast eastern and southern swathes of Ukraine where Russia is the first language.

It is in this region – which for centuries was part of Moscow’s empire while western Ukraine moved between Lithuanian, Polish and Austrian control – that Yanukovich has his power base, in industrial cities such as Donetsk and Kharkiv and the mostly ethnic-Russian peninsula of Crimea.

Yushchenko’s fixation with Russia has meant he can be depicted as an increasingly isolated and radical nationalist, while Yanukovich has broadened his policy platform and improved his shaky spoken Ukrainian in a bid to appear less Russian. Tymoshenko, meanwhile, has softened her anti-Kremlin rhetoric and fostered better relations with Moscow’s leaders.

YANUKOVICH’S GREATEST electoral weapons, however, are the glaring failures of his old adversaries. They feuded while Ukraine’s economy collapsed, and their disagreements have prompted the International Monetary Fund to suspend payment of an €11 billion emergency loan. The two people hailed as heroes in the West for leading the Orange Revolution have frittered away their political capital with the EU and US on a power struggle whose only beneficiary is the man who was once their greatest mutual enemy.

“Ukraine has gone from being a darling of the EU to a complete and utter nightmare,” says Tomas Valasek at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “A few years ago most EU states were convinced it should be in the European Union within a few years. All that has changed.”

Yanukovich is expected to win tomorrow’s ballot easily and a second-round run-off against Tymoshenko. Yushchenko claims they are planning to rule together, as president and prime minister respectively, according to an agenda drawn up by the Kremlin. Five years after his humiliation, revenge is already tasting sweet to Yanukovich.

“We must decide what country we want to live in,” he told supporters on the campaign trail. “Will it be the one in which we have been living these past five years, a country of permanent crises, a country that is both politically and economically unstable?

“Why did 46 million Ukrainians have to watch, for five years, a free show put on by two leaders? Political, economic and social crisis – that is the legacy of this team . . .

“Do we want to continue to ruin our country and humiliate 46 million Ukrainians?”

Yushchenko claims Tymoshenko will do anything to secure absolute power, while Tymoshenko has accused Yanukovich of preparing “monstrous” electoral fraud to seize the presidency.

Demonstrations and court cases are far from unlikely after the ballot, which, the latest polls suggest, could see Tymoshenko challenged for second place by businessman Sergei Tigipko.

Unlike most people in the former Soviet Union, Ukrainians enjoy a vibrant, critical media and a combative political scene. But they have little else for which to thank the Orange Revolution.Such is their disillusionment that some Ukrainians are trying to sell their electoral ballots online, and one candidate has changed his name to the equivalent of “Against All” to attract the protest vote.

“I knew it would end badly,” Yanukovich said at a recent rally. “But I never imagined it would be so bad.”