Yearning to breathe free

Radek Sikorski says Russia is using strong-arm tactics to see that its man is returned in Ukraine’s presidential elections

The architecture of Independence Square in central Kiev is late Brezhnev but the ambience is Prague 1989. Groups of people stand around tables scattered with the propaganda of the various candidates, or make impassioned speeches to cameras. The atmosphere of a genuine election, one in which the outcome is uncertain — so rare now in the former Soviet Union — is unmistakable. Boys and girls with orange scarves hand out campaign leaflets. It’s cool to be political and there is a sense of hope, urgency and foreboding that I last witnessed when I was their age during the Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980. Several of them told me that if this election is lost, their only choice is to emigrate. ‘You are our last hope,’ one middle-aged woman told us, a group of international observers watching the election. The hope that the democratic, all powerful ‘West’ can accomplish a miracle also sounded familiar.

They are right to be worried. The goons are lurking in the background, and this is not a metaphor. Foreign delegations are followed by young men with short hair and leather jackets in only one instance of the unprecedented way in which state power is used to manipulate this election. The instances of cheating are just too numerous to allow a charitable explanation. Famously, the main challenger, Viktor Yushchenko, fell mysteriously ill the day after he ate supper with the country’s intelligence chief and now looks 20 years older, his face twisted and swollen as if he’d been burned by napalm. Opposition rallies have been disrupted with electricity cuts or prevented from happening at all by arbitrary cancellations of rented facilities or of scheduled train and bus services. Government- and Russian-owned media pump blatantly biased propaganda devoting, according to independent observers, about 80 per cent of the time to promoting the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych.