ON SATURDAY 22 FEBRUARY 2014, KIEV woke to a wet, grey dawn. After several days of bloody clashes that had turned the Ukrainian capital into a killing field, the police had vanished. The presidential buildings were empty and unguarded. The dreaded Berkut special police, whose name had become synonymous with brutality, had disappeared without a trace. The centre of the city was now in the hands of the protesters. But was this victory, or just a lull while the security forces regrouped? And most importantly, where was President Viktor Yanukovych? Disgraced after the rigged election of 2004, the villain of the Orange Revolution had bounced back to secure re-election in 2010. But now he had again fallen victim to the popular will and fled his capital.
The mood on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the symbolic headquarters of the protesters, was jubilant. Three months of street protests against Yanukovych’s attempts to orientate his country towards Russia rather than Europe had ended in victory for what became known as the Euromaidan. Yet joy was merged with sorrow at the death of protesters, who were venerated as the ‘Heavenly Hundred’. The Ukrainian parliament, which had turned against Yanukovych earlier in the week, declared the absent president unable to fulfil his duties and set elections for 25 May to choose a successor.
The same day, twelve miles north of Kiev, on the banks of the Dnieper, the gates of Yanukovych’s Mezhyhirya palace were flung open to reveal a classic example of dictator chic, with a mock-Spanish galleon, golf course, museum for classic cars and a petting zoo complete with ostriches. Ordinary Ukrainians who came for a glimpse of their former leader’s home were amazed, as one reporter put it, to find ‘a display of wealth and vulgarity that was part presidential palace in the style of the former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, part the crazed whimsy of Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch’.1 Even more intriguing were the documents found floating in the water in a reservoir in the grounds of the estate, some of which were partially charred after a last failed attempt to burn them. They provided an insight into the workings of the regime – ranging from details about how the president’s estate was funded to detailed plans, never implemented, to deploy the army to clear the Maidan of protesters. Their presence was a sign of quite how frantic the final moments of the regime had been.
That afternoon, Yanukovych, who had slipped away quietly in the night, appeared on Ukrainian television, apparently from the eastern city of Kharkiv, near the Russian border. Insisting that he remained the legitimately elected president, he claimed that he had been forced to leave Kiev by a coup and was not planning to resign. ‘What is happening today, mostly, is vandalism, banditism and a coup d’état,’ he said. ‘I will remain on the territory of Ukraine.’ It later transpired that his message had been recorded several hours earlier.
Events were moving fast, however. That evening, Yulia Tymoshenko, the braided-haired heroine of the Orange Revolution, who had been jailed in October 2011 for embezzlement and abuse of power, was released from the hospital in eastern Ukraine where she had been held under police guard. Confined to a wheelchair by a back injury, she appeared on the stage in the Maidan calling her audience ‘heroes’ and added: ‘I was dreaming to see your eyes. I was dreaming to feel the power that changed everything.’ Despite the cheers and cries of ‘Yulia’ from the crowd, others seemed suspicious of a woman closely identified with Ukraine’s bad old ways. It was time for a new leader. Meanwhile, in an ominous foretaste of what was to come, a rally was held in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, home of the Russian navy’s Black Sea Fleet. The protesters there demanded ‘reunification with Russia’.
The events that culminated in Yanukovych’s flight from Kiev were among the most dramatic to have taken place on the territory of the former Soviet Union. They were also the most divisive. According to the Western narrative, this was an uprising by freedom-loving people against a corrupt and increasingly authoritarian leader who was systematically looting the country and selling out to Moscow. Russia saw things differently: a group of neo-fascists had overthrown Ukraine’s legitimate government and seized power, egged on by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies determined to remove the country from the Kremlin’s sphere of influence.
THE ROOTS OF THE CRISIS LAY a decade earlier in the Orange Revolution and the failure of those it brought to power to satisfy the hopes that had been raised. The revolution’s hero, Viktor Yushchenko, had become president, determined to turn Ukraine towards the West and root out the corruption that had long plagued Ukraine, but he had proved an ineffective leader and was locked in an almost permanent power struggle with Tymoshenko. The situation was worsened by the global economic crisis, which sent the Ukrainian GDP tumbling by fifteen per cent in 2009.
In the meantime, the other Viktor, Yanukovych, the man whom Yushchenko had beaten in 2004, was climbing in the polls, thanks in part to help from a group of American political consultants. Among them was Paul Manafort, a long-time American Republican strategist, who had worked for various dubious foreign figures such as Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and who in 2016 would briefly head Donald Trump’s US presidential campaign. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions was ‘working to change its image from that of a haven for mobsters into that of a legitimate political party’, John Herbst, the US ambassador, observed in a cable later published by WikiLeaks.
What Herbst described as an ‘extreme makeover’ worked. Under Manafort’s tutelage, Yanukovych’s rambling communist-style speeches became snappier and his bouffant hairdo, a favourite of Soviet apparatchiks, was replaced with a sleeker style. In the presidential election of January 2010, he topped the first round with 35.32% in a crowded field of eighteen, way ahead of Tymoshenko, who was in second place with 25.5%. Yushchenko scored just 5.45% – the worst result of any sitting president in history. Yanukovych then went on to beat Tymoshenko by 48.95% to 45.47% in the run-off. The result showed a country as divided as ever: Tymoshenko prevailed in the predominantly Ukrainian-speaking north and west, but Yanukovych dominated the largely Russian-speaking south and east. With Ukrainians yearning for stability, Yanukovych had managed to portray himself as a moderate professional able to unify the country. It was a remarkable comeback from the days when eggs were being thrown at his head.
Yanukovych’s first trip abroad was to Brussels. But he was also keen to repair relations with Moscow, which had soured under his pro-Western predecessor: in April he signed a deal with Medvedev to extend from 2017 to 2042 the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s lease on its base in Crimea, in return for a discount on Russian gas supplies. Two months later, the Ukrainian parliament approved a law proposed by Yanukovych that abandoned the previous administration’s goal of ‘integration into Euro-Atlantic security and NATO membership’. Ukraine might cooperate with the Western Alliance, but not join it or any other military bloc. Yet hopes of a fresh start soon proved illusory. Rather than fill his government with professionals and technocrats, Yanukovych appointed associates from his home region of Donbass, Ukraine’s rust belt, who had little experience of democracy and lacked the know-how to run a market economy. Proposed economic reforms did not materialise. Nor did he succeed in re-establishing the delicate balance in Ukraine between East and West.
During his time in office, Yushchenko had alienated Russian speakers by pushing Ukrainian language, culture and identity: he highlighted the Holodomor, the man-made famine of 1932–3 blamed on Stalin, and bestowed the title ‘Hero of Ukraine’ on Stepan Bandera, the Second World War nationalist leader denounced in official Soviet history as a Nazi puppet. Under Yanukovych, the pendulum swung back too far in the opposite direction: one of his first actions was to sign a law allowing Russian to be used alongside Ukrainian in courts, schools and other government institutions in parts of the country that wanted it. This led to fist fights in parliament and violent protests on the streets, but thirteen of Ukraine’s twenty-seven regions, mostly in the industrial eastern parts of the country, quickly adopted Russian as their second official language. Yanukovych also turned on Tymoshenko, who was jailed for abuse of power during her time as prime minister under Yushchenko, after a trial roundly condemned as politically motivated.
Curiously, as Yanukovych’s problems mounted and his popularity slumped, he initially looked to Europe for a way out, reviving talks begun by his predecessor with the European Union, which had stalled after he came to power over concerns in Brussels about Ukraine’s flawed legal and electoral system. Agreement was complicated by the close interest taken by the EU in the fate of Tymoshenko, whose jailing was seen as highlighting such flaws and whose release it demanded. The two sides gradually ironed out their differences, though, and on 30 March 2012 the EU Association Agreement was initialled in Brussels.
Yet Yanukovych was also being pulled towards the East. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had been trying to find a way of maintaining ties with the other former Soviet republics – a process that began with the agreement at Belavezha in December 1991, which was not only about breaking up the USSR but also replacing it with the Commonwealth of Independent States. Such attempts had foundered in large part due to a suspicion by other member states of anything that smacked of attempts by Russia to reassert its control over its neighbours. After Yeltsin’s failures, Putin had stepped up its efforts: his latest attempt, the Eurasian Customs Union, created in 2010, appeared modelled on the European Union, with Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus as its founding members.
In launching the project, Putin denied it was an attempt to re-create the Soviet Union. ‘There is no talk of re-forming the USSR in some form,’ Putin wrote in a newspaper article in October 2012. ‘It would be naive to restore or copy what has been abandoned in the past but close integration – on the basis of new values, politics, and economy – is the order of the day.’ But America was not convinced: in a speech two months later in December 2012, Hillary Clinton denounced the union as ‘a move to re-Sovietise the region’, adding: ‘We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.’ The Kremlin accused Clinton of ‘a completely wrong understanding of the situation’, stressing that the union was purely about a new type of voluntary economic integration.
Ukraine’s size, location and industrial potential made its membership vital for the success of the Eurasian Customs Union, as had been the case with all previous efforts at reintegrating the former Soviet states. Yanukovych was happy to play along with Moscow on this. Despite pursuing ties with the EU, he was also talking to Russia about ‘finding the right model’ for Ukraine’s relationship with its union. Yet he could not have it both ways. ‘One country cannot at the same time be a member of a customs union and be in a deep common free-trade area with the European Union,’ José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, told Yanukovych at their summit in February 2013. The EU was also upping pressure on Kiev over Tymoshenko and over the slow pace of reform.
Russia was not willing to let Ukraine turn towards the West, and as the country’s largest trading partner, it had considerable leverage. Medvedev, by then back as prime minister, dismissed Ukraine’s attempts to establish a semi-detached relationship with the Eurasian Customs Union, saying it had to choose between ‘all and nothing’. Russia made clear to Yanukovych that closer ties with the EU would be followed by restrictions on the import of Ukrainian goods. Companies in eastern Ukraine – Yanukovych’s power base and the site of most of the country’s heavy industry – would have been hit hardest by Russia’s escalation. Ukraine was also heavily dependent on Russian energy supplies. The EU, which had badly underestimated the ferocity of the Kremlin’s reaction, offered little by way of a sweetener – nothing like the $20 billion a year Yanukovych said he needed to adapt his country to European standards.
Yanukovych finally buckled to Kremlin pressure: on 21 November his government announced it would not go ahead with the agreement with the EU, which had been due to be signed at a summit in Vilnius beginning a week later. The Ukrainian government said it would instead ‘renew dialogue’ with the Eurasian Customs Union. The same day, the Verkhovna Rada, the parliament, voted down six resolutions that would have been required to free Tymoshenko.
Among those watching proceedings in the Ukrainian parliament was Mustafa Nayyem, a young Afghan-born journalist. At first he thought this was nothing more than a manoeuvre by Yanukovych to try to extract more money or concessions from the European Union. It soon became clear, however, that the government had radically changed course. As outrage spread on social media, Nayyem sent out a tweet: ‘Let’s meet at 22.30 next to the Independence Monument. Dress warmly, bring umbrellas, tea, coffee and friends.’
When Nayyem arrived in the Maidan there were just fifty people there. Before long there were more than a thousand. In the days leading up to the EU summit, growing numbers of people began to gather each day in the square. Yanukovych went to Vilnius to meet European leaders as planned, but rather than sign the agreement, he proposed three-way talks between Russia, Ukraine and the EU. Barroso rejected the idea of giving Moscow a say in its neighbour’s future, however, and Yanukovych returned home empty-handed.
Ukraine’s fate was sealed. Forced to choose between Russia and the EU, Yanukovych felt he had no alternative but to go with Moscow. Back in Kiev, the organisers of the protests had considered calling off their action now that the summit had ended and the door to Europe was closed. But everything changed in the early hours of the next morning, when hundreds of members of the Berkut riot police moved in, ordering the few hundred protesters still gathered there to disperse. They refused. At least three dozen were beaten and thirty-five were arrested. Far from dissuading the protesters, it only encouraged them; later that day they returned.
Yanukovych tried various tactics to calm the protesters and keep his grip on power, but he faced a losing battle. As the protests continued, fuelled by anger at the brutality of the police, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the Maidan. On 8 December, during their largest protest to date, they toppled a giant statue of Lenin and smashed it to pieces. A permanent tent city began to appear in the square. The protesters, who ranged from pro-EU liberals to thuggish far-right nationalists, lacked a single leader. But what had begun as a protest over a trade agreement was turning into a full-blown uprising aimed at ousting Yanukovych and reorientating Ukraine’s alliances.
For the West, the protesters, with their fresh faces and determination that their country should ‘join Europe’, were redolent of those involved in the Colour Revolutions of a decade earlier and in the Arab Spring. Western leaders were quick to demonstrate solidarity – prompting Russia to denounce them for ‘crude’ meddling in Ukraine’s affairs. First to make the pilgrimage to Kiev was Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, who toured the protest camp on 4 December. A few days later he was followed by Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, and Victoria Nuland, the US state department’s hawkish assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. In one of the more surreal moments of the crisis, she walked around the Maidan carrying a plastic bag stuffed with loaves of bread. ‘Good to see you!’ Nuland said, approaching a bemused elderly woman in a blue parka. ‘We’re here from America. Would you like some bread?’ The smiling woman politely declined, waving away the gift.
A few days later, Senator John McCain, a veteran of the Colour Revolutions, arrived. ‘The free world is with you, America is with you, I am with you,’ he told the cheering crowd. ‘Ukraine will make Europe better and Europe will make Ukraine better.’ In an interview with CNN the next day, he set out the issues in characteristically black-and-white terms: ‘What we’re trying to do is try to bring about a peaceful transition here,’ he said. ‘These people love the United States of America, they love freedom – and I don’t think you could view this as anything other than our traditional support for people who want free and democratic society.’ The US administration was more cautious. Although it wanted to stand up for democratic values, the Maidan was a distraction from the more pressing issues dividing Washington and Moscow, such as the civil war in Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme.
The situation on the ground, meanwhile, was deteriorating: on 16 January, Yanukovych’s backers in parliament pushed through sweeping legislation outlawing the tents that had covered the Maidan, coupled with other measures to suppress political dissent and restrict freedom of speech. More protests followed, which turned increasingly violent. Demonstrators donned ski masks and bicycle helmets, set fire to tyres and even deployed a 10ft-high catapult capable of firing bags of cobblestones at police. The police responded with stun grenades and plastic bullets. On 22 January, the conflict claimed its first three fatalities: two demonstrators were shot by police and a third fell to his death from a 43ft (13m) colonnade in front of Dynamo Stadium. Yanukovych tried to defuse the crisis by offering places in his government to the opposition leaders, but they declined.
America was also becoming involved, behind the scenes. The day before the lavish opening ceremony at the Sochi Winter Olympics, a recording of a phone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, found its way onto YouTube – apparently courtesy of the Russian intelligence services. During the conversation, believed to have taken place a few weeks earlier, the two American officials discussed which opposition figures should go into the government, perhaps as prime minister, if it were possible to do a deal with Yanukovych. ‘I don’t think “Klitsch” should go into the government,’ Nuland said of Vitali Klitschko, the former world heavyweight boxing champion turned politician. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea.’ After a long pause, Pyatt agreed: ‘Just let him stay out and do his political homework and stuff.’
They agreed instead that the former economics minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk – or ‘Yats’ to the Americans – should be the one to go in, on the grounds that he was ‘the guy who’s got the economic experience, the governing experience’. They also noted that Oleh Tyahnybok, who represented an outright fascist-nationalist party, might be a ‘problem’, but appeared to treat him as someone with whom they could work. The conversation then turned to the European Union and their frustration that it was not doing more to undercut Russia. ‘Fuck the EU!’ exclaimed Nuland.
These comments did not go down well with Angela Merkel, who was already smarting over revelations by Snowden that America’s National Security Agency had been bugging her phone. She called Nuland’s words ‘totally unacceptable’. The state department made no attempt to deny the authenticity of the recording, turning their fire instead on those who had leaked it. Nuland laughed off the incident, praising the quality of the audio and describing the episode as ‘pretty impressive tradecraft’ – implying the leak was the work of the intelligence agencies.
There was speculation that the crisis would take a turn for the worse after the Sochi Olympics ended on 23 February and Putin could stop playing the congenial host. Would Russia cut off supplies of gas to Ukraine, perhaps, or even intervene militarily? In the event, the denouement, which occurred three days earlier, proved very different: after two days of mounting casualties, radical street fighters forced their way through police lines, ushering in a day of violence that turned the centre of Kiev into a war zone and ending with a death toll of at least seventy. Many of the victims fell to snipers, thought to be working for the police. Undaunted, the demonstrators counter-attacked, reoccupying buildings they had evacuated earlier in the week.
Yanukovych was rumoured to be considering introducing a state of emergency, which would have allowed him to deploy the military. But he was swiftly losing his authority; at a joint session of parliament later that day, opposition leaders joined defectors from his own party to pass a resolution obliging interior ministry troops to return to barracks and barring the use of firearms. Parliament ruled that only it, rather than the president, could call a state of emergency.
The situation was spiralling towards crisis. The previous day, the German, French and Polish foreign ministers had arrived in Kiev in an attempt to broker a political solution. Russia was also becoming involved. That afternoon Vladimir Lukin, the former Russian ambassador to Washington and outgoing human rights commissioner, received a call from Putin. ‘He said he wanted me to go down to Kiev as soon as possible,’ Lukin recalls. ‘Negotiations were going on and the situation was very tense.’2
Lukin hurried to the Kremlin for a meeting with officials from the foreign ministry and the FSB. Arriving at Putin’s office, he found the Russian leader on the phone to Angela Merkel. He was turning to leave, but Putin gestured to him to stay.
That evening they flew down to Kiev on a private Falcon jet. By the time Lukin arrived, details were beginning to emerge of a deal between Yanukovych and the opposition, brokered by the three EU foreign ministers. Its terms included a return within forty-eight hours to the constitution of 2004, which reduced the powers of the president in favour of the prime minister; formation of a government of national unity within ten days after that; a new constitution by September and new presidential elections by December. It was also agreed there should be an investigation into the recent violence and no declaration of a state of emergency.
While copies of the documents were being printed, Lukin and Yanukovych slipped away into a side room. As they began to talk, Yanukovych, a tall man, inclined his head towards his guest. ‘Speak more quietly, Vladimir Petrovich,’ he told him. ‘They’re listening to us.’3
Lukin was struck by the Ukrainian leader’s apparent inability, even then, to grasp that his country was in the midst of a revolution. ‘He was happy with the agreement, because he thought he would benefit whatever happened,’ says Lukin of Yanukovych. ‘If he won the next election, then he would remain president. And even if he lost, his party would still have a majority in parliament, which would mean that, once the country had reverted to the 2004 constitution, he would be prime minister and in charge.
‘He did not understand that it was a revolution, which meant that the question of power would be resolved very simply. It was a situation like in China during Tiananmen Square. The difference was that Yanukovych either could not – or did not want to – do what Deng Xiaoping did. He didn’t want to because he feared it was no longer possible.’
It was agreed that they would all reconvene at midday the next day. In the meantime, Lukin went back to the embassy to telephone Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. A few hours later, Lukin received a call back from Moscow with his instructions: he was not to sign the agreement. The situation was spinning out of control so fast that Russia did not want to commit to anything.
The next day they reassembled as planned in the ornate Blue Hall of the presidential headquarters. As they went into the room, Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, was overheard telling one of the opposition leaders: ‘If you don’t support this deal, you will have martial law, the army, you’ll be dead.’ Klitschko switched seats so he did not have to sit next to the president. An unsmiling Yanukovych signed the agreement, as did Klitschko, Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok, the three key opposition figures. It was witnessed by Sikorski and the two other EU foreign ministers – but not by Lukin. After the ceremony was over, Mikhail Zurabov, the Russian ambassador, urged him to leave for the airport, where the Falcon was waiting to fly him back to Moscow.
The deal was hailed by Western leaders, among them David Cameron, the British prime minister, who said he thought it would ‘foster a lasting political solution’ that would offer a ‘real chance’ to end the bloodshed. ‘Ukraine has pulled back from the brink,’ said Tony Blinken, the White House deputy national security adviser, though he admitted that ‘we’re not out of the woods yet’. In a further sign of goodwill, the parliament voted overwhelmingly to decriminalise the count under which Tymoshenko had been imprisoned, paving the way for her release – to cheers from those who had been watching the extraordinary parliamentary session on giant screens in the Maidan.
Selling the deal to the crowd proved more difficult. Emotions in the square were running high. Funeral services had been held during the day for some of the seventy-seven people who had died there; the idea that Yanukovych, the man they blamed for the slaughter, would remain president for the rest of the year seemed intolerable. When Klitschko went to the Maidan that evening, he was met with catcalls and derisive whistling. A coffin was hauled onto the stage in memory of the dead. A protester dressed in battle fatigues won roars of approval when he jumped onto the stage, grabbed the microphone and said: ‘If it is not announced by ten tomorrow that Yanukovych is gone, we’re going to attack with weapons.’
In the parliament building, Yanukovych turned to Colonel General Sergei Beseda, head of a seven-member delegation from the Russian FSB, who had been advising him on the crisis. Beseda told him there was only one solution: unleash the army on the protesters camped in the square and ‘crush them once and for all’, according to an account in the Sunday Times, based on information from Ukrainian intelligence sources.4 If not, Yanukovych was warned, he risked suffering the fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu, the hated Romanian leader who was shot after his own people rose up against him twenty-five years earlier.
Yanukovych did not have the stomach to tough it out. He appears never to have returned to his official residence: instead, with his girlfriend, Lyubov Polezhay, twenty-four years his junior, and a little fluffy white dog at his side, he took a helicopter to eastern Ukraine, landing first in Kharkiv and then again in Donetsk. It was there he boarded a Falcon with the aim of flying to Russia. Border guards prevented the plane from taking off, however, because it lacked the proper documentation, and Yanukovych disembarked and was whisked off the tarmac in an armoured car.*
On 24 February Ukraine’s acting government declared Yanukovych a fugitive sought for mass murder. The government made an appeal through the Facebook account of Arsen Avakov, the interim interior minister, in the apparent hope that a border guard would stop him. It was too late: Yanukovych had already continued his journey by car, boat and helicopter, making it to Rostov-on-Don on the Russian side of the border.
ATTEMPTS BY RUSSIA TO PORTRAY THE events of that weekend in Kiev as the result of a coup carefully organised and stage-managed by the CIA fit uneasily with the scale and spontaneity of the protests and determination of those who took part. For the massive crowds who braved the bitter winter weather to camp out in the Maidan there was more at stake than Ukraine’s relationship with Europe; there was widespread anger with a regime perceived as inept and kleptocratic and drifting away from democracy. Such anger may have been spontaneous; it may also have been stirred up by those with an axe to grind against the government. Lukin, for one, saw the origins of the uprising in a battle for influence between Yanukovych and his allies on one side, and a rival group of oligarchs on the other.
There was no doubt, though, about the role played by Western politicians in encouraging the protesters. Or – thanks to the leaked tape of the telephone conversation between Nuland and Pyatt – of the extent of attempts by Washington to influence the political transition. As was the case with the Colour Revolutions, the pro-democracy groups also received considerable financial help from the West. One of the most generous donors was George Soros, the billionaire investor who combined support for democracy in Ukraine with considerable commercial interests in the country. Russia, too, had been heavily involved, supporting Russian-language groups and using its propaganda machine to taint the pro-European demonstrators as neo-fascists and Banderovtsi, the derogatory term given to followers of Stepan Bandera.
For all his faults, Yanukovych was the legitimately elected president of Ukraine and attempts to unseat him were undemocratic. Yet it was his own decision to abandon his capital that cost him his job. He could have stayed and insisted on implementation of the compromise brokered by the EU foreign ministers. Claims by supporters that he abandoned the capital because he was in fear of his life do not appear to be borne out by the evidence and only add to the view, taken even by his backers in Moscow, that he was a coward.
Underlying the dramatic events of those few days was a more fundamental problem faced by Ukraine. Even after more than two decades of independence, the country remained almost equally divided between those who looked to Europe and those who looked to Russia. Yet its leaders had still not learnt the art of compromise. Since 1991, power had swung backward and forward between the West and the East, and once in office, each faction sought to impose its will on the other rather than find a way of smoothing over the crack running through the centre of the country. The same thing was happening again.
The EU must bear its share of the blame for pushing Ukraine into a position where it had to choose between Europe and Russia, without taking into account that different parts of the country wanted different things. There was also a failure to appreciate the Kremlin’s sensitivities. Yanukovych was being offered few incentives, let alone the prospect of full membership of the EU. All that was on the table was a trade deal and even that had strings attached: namely the need for Ukraine to agree to painful reforms of its economy. It was no surprise that he ultimately plumped for Russia.
Some of the most withering criticism came from Henry Kissinger. In a commentary for the Washington Post, published just over a week after Yanukovych’s fall, he accused the EU of turning a ‘negotiation into a crisis’ by failing to appreciate that in Russia’s eyes Ukraine ‘could never be just a foreign country’. But at the same time, he argued, the Kremlin needed to understand that it had to give up trying to force Ukraine into accepting satellite status or risk plunging the world back into another Cold War. ‘Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West,’ Kissinger wrote.5 ‘But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other – it should function as a bridge between them.’
It was difficult to disagree with Kissinger’s words. But by the time they appeared, it was already too late. The crisis over Ukraine was about to become more acute – and bloodier.
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* When border guards arrived to check the plane’s papers they were confronted by a group of armed men who offered money in return for allowing it to take off without the necessary documentation. The border guards refused. They apparently did not realise the president was on board.