The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  In late October 2004, when Ukrainians went to the polls to choose among twenty-four presidential candidates, Yushchenko was in the lead, with Yanukovych a close second: each received close to 40 percent of the vote. They then proceeded to the second round, with Yushchenko gaining the support of most of the voters whose candidates did not make it to that stage. Following the second round of voting on November 21, independent exit polls showed Yushchenko clearly in the lead, with 53 percent of the popular vote against Yanukovych’s 44 percent. But when the government-controlled electoral commission announced the official results, most Ukrainian voters were in for a surprise. According to the official report, Yanukovych had won with 49.5 percent of the vote over Yushchenko’s 46.9 percent. The official results were rigged. As telephone intercepts of discussions between members of Yanukovych’s campaign staff showed, they had tampered with the server of the state electoral commission to falsify election results submitted to Kyiv.

  Yushchenko’s supporters were outraged. An estimated 200,000 Kyivans came to the Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square, to protest the election fraud. The Orange Revolution, which received that name after the official colors of Yushchenko’s presidential campaign, had begun. In the following days and weeks, with protesters coming from the rest of Ukraine, the number of participants in rallies swelled to half a million. As television cameras transmitted images of the Maidan protests all over the world, European viewers discovered Ukraine for themselves, seeing it for the first time as something more than a distant region on the map. The images left no doubt that its inhabitants wanted freedom and justice. Europe and the world could not stand aside. Backed by voters, European politicians involved themselves in the Ukraine Crisis and played an important part in its resolution. The key role went to Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who convinced President Kuchma to throw his support behind the decision of the Constitutional Court to annul the official results of the elections as fraudulent.

  On December 26, 2004, Ukrainians went to the polls for the third time in two months to elect their new president. As expected, Yushchenko won with 52 percent over Yanukovych’s 44 percent—results close to those of the independent exit polls conducted during the second round of the elections. The Orange Revolution got its president. But could he fulfill the promise of the revolution—to bear down on crony capitalism, free the country from corruption, and bring it closer to Europe? Yushchenko believed that he could. His road to the transformation of Ukraine led through the European Union.

  President Yushchenko made foreign policy his priority and confided to one of his aides that joining the EU was a goal worth living for. Ukrainian diplomats did their best to capitalize on the positive image of Ukraine created in the West by the Orange Revolution and to jump on the departing train of EU enlargement—in 2004, the European Union accepted ten countries as members, seven of them former Soviet satellites and republics. It was too late: the train had left the station. While the European Parliament voted in January 2005 in favor of establishing closer relations with Ukraine with an eye to future membership, the European Commission, which made decisions on enlargement, was much more cautious. Instead of starting negotiations on accession to the union, it offered Ukraine a plan for closer cooperation.

  The locomotive of history did not take Ukraine into the EU along with some of its western neighbors in the wake of the Orange Revolution for several reasons. Some of them were beyond Kyiv’s control. Germany and other major stakeholders in the union were worried about the economic and political consequences of the enlargement that had already taken place. They added insult to injury by questioning Ukraine’s status as a “European state.” But the main reasons for Kyiv’s failure to join the European club of democratic nations had to do with Ukraine itself. The post-Orange years were full of internal contradictions. Major achievements mixed with spectacular failures of government policy.

  The new government stopped the persecution of political opponents and provided guarantees of freedom of expression for citizens and the media. Economically, Ukraine was doing better than might have been expected. Between 2000 and 2008, when its economy felt the impact of the global recession, the country’s GDP doubled, reaching $400 billion and surpassing GDP figures for 1990, the last full year of the USSR’s existence. But the Yushchenko government failed to make Ukraine a fairer place in which to live and conduct business. It did precious little about rampant corruption. On top of that, the constitutional changes to which the Yushchenko camp agreed in December 2004 to cancel the fraudulent elections made the country difficult to govern. According to the amendments demanded by Yanukovych’s supporters and accepted by Yushchenko, the president lost the right to appoint the prime minister, who, now elected by parliament, emerged as an independent actor in Ukrainian politics. Neither the president nor the prime minister had enough power to implement reforms on his or her own, and Yushchenko had a hard time finding common ground with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, his former revolutionary ally.

  By the time Yushchenko’s term came to an end in early 2010, there was broad disappointment with his rule. His rivalry with Tymoshenko had turned Ukrainian politics into an interminable soap opera, discrediting the cause of reform and European integration. The president’s attempt to build a strong Ukrainian national identity by promoting the memory of the 1932–1933 Great Ukrainian Famine and celebrating the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the Soviet regime failed to translate into broad electoral support. In fact, memory politics divided Ukrainian society. Especially controversial was Yushchenko’s posthumous “Hero of Ukraine” award to Stepan Bandera, leader of Ukrainian radical nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s. The Bandera affair provoked a strong negative reaction not only in the east and south of the country but also among the Ukrainian liberal intelligentsia in Kyiv and Lviv and alienated European friends of Ukraine. Yushchenko, observers said at the time, was trying to bring Ukraine into Europe, but he had in mind the Europe of the turn of the twentieth, not the twenty-first, century.

  Not only Ukraine but the whole post-Soviet region was lagging behind, trying to manage the transition from imperial subject to independent state that the countries of central Europe had resolved nearly a century earlier. Very soon, Ukraine would find itself in a crisis that reminded many of the problems of the nineteenth century. That crisis would bring foreign intervention, war, annexation, and the idea of the division of the world into spheres of influence. It would also test Ukraine’s resolve to remain independent and challenge the key elements of its national identity.

  chapter 27

  The Price of Freedom

  Bohdan Solchanyk came to Kyiv from Lviv by train early in the morning of February 20, 2014. A twenty-eight-year-old historian, sociologist, and budding poet, he taught at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and was working on a doctoral dissertation on electoral practices in Ukraine with an adviser at the University of Warsaw. Solchanyk was not on a research trip when he stepped onto the pavement of the Kyiv railway station on that cold day in February. Elections were not taking place in Kyiv: revolution was. He had dreamed about it back in 2008, when he wrote the poem “Where Is My Revolution?” in which he expressed his generation’s disappointment with promises made during the Orange Revolution of 2004 but never fulfilled.

  Now a new revolution had come to Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of people once again pouring into the streets of downtown Kyiv in late November 2013 to demand reform, the end of government corruption, and closer ties with the European Union. Solchanyk felt that his place was among the protesters in Kyiv. February 20 marked his fourth foray into the revolution, which turned out to be his last. A few hours after his arrival in Kyiv, sniper fire killed Solchanyk along with dozens of other protesters. In death, he would become one of the “Heavenly Hundred”—more than one hundred protesters killed in Kyiv in January and February 2014. Those killings ended twenty-two years of generally nonviolent politics in Ukraine and turned a dra
matic new page in its history. The democracy peacefully acquired in the final days of the Soviet Union and the independence won at the ballot box in December 1991 would now require defense not only with words and marches but also with arms.

  The events leading up to the mass killings of protesters on the Maidan began in February 2010 with the victory of Viktor Yanukovych, the main target of the Maidan protests of 2004, in the presidential elections. The new president began his tenure by changing the rules of the political game. His ideal was a strong authoritarian regime, and he tried to concentrate as much power in his own hands and those of his family as possible. He rewrote the constitution by forcing parliament to cancel the 2004 amendments and yield more power to the presidency. Then, in the summer of 2011, he put on trial and jailed his main political opponent, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, for signing a gas deal with Russia that was harmful to the Ukrainian economy. With power concentrated in his hands and the political opposition silenced or intimidated, Yanukovych and his appointees focused their attention on the enrichment of the ruling clan. In a brief period, Yanukovych and the members of his family and entourage accumulated huge fortunes, transferring up to $70 billion into foreign accounts and threatening the economic and financial stability of the state, which by the autumn of 2013 found itself on the verge of default.

  With the opposition crushed or co-opted, Ukrainian society once again pinned its hopes on Europe. Under President Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine had begun negotiations with the European Union on an association agreement, including the creation of a free economic zone and visa liberalization for Ukrainian citizens. The hope was that, once signed, the agreement would save and strengthen Ukraine’s democratic institutions, protect the rights of the opposition, and bring European business standards to Ukraine, reining in the rampant corruption spreading from the very top of the state pyramid. Some oligarchs, fearing the growing power of the president and his clan and wanting to protect their assets by establishing clear political and economic rules, supported the EU association agreement. Big business also wanted access to European markets and dreaded the possibility of being swallowed by Russian competitors if Ukraine were to join the Russia-led Eurasian Customs Union.

  Everything was ready for a signing ceremony at the EU summit in Vilnius scheduled for November 28, 2013. Then, a week before the summit, the Ukrainian government suddenly changed course, proposing to postpone the signing of the association agreement. Yanukovych went to Vilnius but refused to sign anything. If the European leaders were disappointed, many Ukrainian citizens were outraged. The government had broken promises given throughout the previous year, dashing hopes for a better European future. Those were the feelings of the men and women, mainly young, who camped out on the Maidan, Ukraine’s Independence Square, on the evening of November 21, after the government announced its refusal to sign the agreement. Yanukovych’s aides wanted to put an end to the protests as soon as possible in order to head off a new Orange Revolution. On the night of November 30, riot police brutally attacked the students camping on the Maidan. That was the one thing Ukrainian society was not prepared to tolerate. The next day, more than half a million Kyivans, some of them parents and relatives of the students beaten by the police, poured into downtown Kyiv, turning the Maidan and its environs into a space of freedom from the corrupt government and its police forces.

  What had begun as a demand to join Europe turned into the Revolution of Dignity, which brought together diverse political forces, from liberals in mainstream parties to radicals and nationalists. Once again, as in 2004, the protesters refused to leave the streets. In mid-January 2014, after weeks of peaceful protest, bloody clashes began between police and government-hired thugs on the one hand and protesters on the other. The violence reached its peak on February 18. In three days, at least seventy-seven people died—nine police officers and sixty-eight protesters. The killings caused a sea change both in Ukraine and in the international community. The threat of international sanctions forced members of the Ukrainian parliament, many of whom were concerned that the sanctions would affect them as well, to free themselves from fear of presidential reprisal and pass a resolution prohibiting the use of force by the government. On the night of February 21, with parliament against him and the riot police gone from downtown Kyiv, President Yanukovych fled revolutionary Kyiv. The Maidan was jubilant. The tyrant was gone; the revolution had won. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Yanukovych, appoint an interim president, and install a new provisional government headed by the leaders of the opposition.

  The protests in Kyiv surprised political observers, as they presented an unusual case of mass mobilization inspired by issues of foreign policy. The protesters wanted closer ties with Europe and opposed Ukraine’s accession to the Russia-led customs union.

  Russian aspirations to dominate Ukraine were an important factor in the protests on the Maidan. President Vladimir Putin, who had led the Russian government since 2000, first as president, then as prime minister, and then again as president, had gone on record characterizing the collapse of the USSR as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. Before returning to the presidential office in 2012, Putin proclaimed the reintegration of post-Soviet space as one of his primary tasks. As in 1991, that space was incomplete without Ukraine. Putin wanted Yanukovych, whom he had supported in the presidential elections in 2004 and 2010, to join the Russia-led customs union—the basis for a future, more comprehensive economic and political union of the post-Soviet states. Yanukovych had made concessions to Russia by prolonging the Russian lease of the Sevastopol navy base for twenty-five years, but he was not eager to join any Russia-led union. Instead, in a failed attempt to counterbalance growing Russian influence and ambition, he edged toward association with the European Union, preparing to sign the agreement.

  Russia responded in the summer of 2013 by initiating a trade war with Ukraine and closing its markets to some Ukrainian goods. Moscow used both sticks and carrots to stop Ukraine’s westward drift. Among the carrots was the promise of a $15 billion loan to save the cash-strapped and corruption-ridden Ukrainian government from imminent default. The first tranche of that money arrived after Yanukovych refused to sign the EU association agreement. But the protests on the Maidan changed the Kremlin’s plans. According to an investigation conducted later by the Ukrainian security service, the snipers who opened fire on the Maidan and killed dozens of people on both sides of the divide, leading eventually to the ouster of President Yanukovych, came from Russia. In early February 2014, a suggestion to take advantage of the internal Ukrainian crisis in order to annex the Crimea, then destabilize and eventually annex parts of eastern and southern Ukraine to Russia, was making its way through the Russian presidential administration. Judging by subsequent events, the proposal did not languish in obscurity. According to President Putin, he personally made a decision to “return” the Crimea to Russia at a meeting with his political advisers and military commanders on the night of February 22, 2014.

  Four days later, on the night of February 26, a band of armed men in unmarked uniforms took control of the Crimean parliament. Under their protection, Russian intelligence services engineered the installment of the leader of a pro-Russian party, which had obtained only 4 percent of the vote in the previous parliamentary elections, as the new prime minister of the Crimea. Then Russian troops, along with mercenaries and Cossack formations brought from the Russian Federation at least a week before the start of the operation, blocked Ukrainian military units at their bases with the assistance of locally recruited militias. As the new Ukrainian government struggled to take control of the police and security forces previously loyal to Yanukovych, the Kremlin sped up preparations for a complete takeover of the peninsula by hastily organizing a referendum on its fate. The new government of the Crimea cut off Ukrainian television channels, prevented the delivery of Ukrainian newspapers to subscribers, and unleashed propaganda for the separation of the Crimea from
Ukraine. Opponents of the referendum, many of them belonging to the Crimean Tatar minority, were intimidated or kidnapped.

  In mid-March 2014, the citizens of the Crimea were called to polling stations to vote for reunification with Russia. The results of the Moscow-endorsed referendum were reminiscent of Brezhnev-era polls, when the turnout was reported as 99 percent and the same figure was given for the percentage of voters supporting government candidates. It was now claimed that 97 percent of voters had supported the unification of the Crimea with Russia. In Sevastopol, local officials reported a pro-Russian vote amounting to 123 percent of registered voters. The new Crimean authorities declared the total turnout to be 83 percent, but according to the Human Rights Council attached to the office of the Russian president, less than 40 percent of registered voters had taken part in the referendum. On March 18, two days after the referendum, Vladimir Putin called on the Russian legislators to annex the Crimea as an act of historical justice, undoing part of the damage done to Russia by the disintegration of the USSR.

  The Ukrainian government in Kyiv did not recognize the referendum but was in no position to do much about it. It ordered its troops to withdraw from the peninsula, unwilling to risk war in a country still divided by the political turmoil of the Revolution of Dignity. The Ukrainian army, underfunded for decades and with no experience of warfare, was no match for the Russian Federation’s well-trained and equipped troops, who had fought a prolonged war in Chechnia and mounted the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. Kyiv was also busy trying to stop Moscow’s destabilization of other parts of the country. The Kremlin demanded the “federalization” of Ukraine, with the provision that every region would have veto power over the signing of international agreements. Russia did not just want the Crimea; it was trying to stop Ukraine’s movement toward Europe by manipulating local elites and populations in the east and south of the country.