Yuschenko: historical times

19 May 2007

Yuschenko is impatient with this critique. ‘I think this is just a romantic dream of a sunny country,’ he snaps. Given the mess he inherited — the deep divisions between the two sides of the country, the pressure of imminent parliamentary elections and the sustained economic warfare from Moscow — he has a good case to make. But he is also missing the point. Through his poisoning and Lazarus-like revival, Yuschenko became a metaphor for his country’s future, promising his compatriots re-birth and renewal. But the former banker — who is decent but surprisingly uncharismatic — was doomed from the start. As his able defence minister, Anatoliy Hrytsenko, says, ‘Expectations were too high — even if we had been able to establish a government with the best managers in the world, we would have failed’.

If Yuschenko does fail, it will have implications far beyond his country’s borders. In the middle of Independence Square there is a glorious piece of post-Soviet kitsch — a gilded sundial that shows the distance to other cities around the world (Brussels is 1,883km; but Moscow is only 771km). Both capitals are watching Kiev carefully — trying to understand which way the country will go. As one senior EU official points out, ‘If you want to change Russia — it will be through Ukraine. Ukraine is like us — you can feel it when you are there.’ Hryhoriy Nemyria goes even further, calling Ukraine’s dilemma a ‘civilisational choice’. In a very real sense, Kiev is the latest frontier in the struggle between European values and autocracy. Where the Balkans were the moral centre of the European project in the 1990s, today it is in Ukraine that Europe is on trial.

If democracy fails here, it will be a colossal failure for the European project — marking an end to the transformative power that changed regimes in central and eastern Europe without firing a single shot. What is more, EU interests are at stake as well as values: 85 per cent of Europe’s gas travels through Ukrainian pipelines. Yulia Mostovaya calls her country ‘Europe’s throat’ — unless we defend it we could find ourselves strangled by Putin’s iron fist.