5. The Campaign

Like the British Labour Party after eighteen years out of power between 1979 and 1997, the Ukrainian opposition knew it had to reinvent itself. More exactly, its pragmatic wing was prepared to pay the price of reinvention, but its other wing preferred to remain pure in opposition. First of all, the slogan of the Orange Revolution seeded the idea that Ukraine could have its own version of ‘velvet revolution’ (as in Czechoslovakia in 1989), ‘singing revolution’ (the Baltic states, 1991) or ‘rose revolution’ (Georgia in 2003). (Kuchma's coterie labelled their takeover of parliament in January 2000 the ‘velvet revolution’, but the phrase never really stuck because it wasn't exactly revolutionary and it was mainly achieved with bribes.) Orange was chosen as the opposition's colour partly because the decisive phase of the election was expected to be the build-up to the first round of voting in October, when Kiev's main street, Khreshchatyk (the name means ‘crossroads’, and the street is the site of an ancient spring ravine) is lined with horse chestnuts and autumnal leaves. By the time the world's cameras focused on the actual revolution, however, it was mid-winter, and all the natural orange had gone.

Discussions about the group's strategy began in November 2003 and Black Pora made its first public appearance on 29 March 2004, the day the clocks changed in Ukraine, with a ticking clock, which was intended to mark out Kuchma's remaining time in office, as its symbol and a mysterious ‘What is Kuchmizm?’ sticker, inviting people to visit its irreverent website, www.kuchmizm.info. Two weeks later, their answers appeared on other stickers: ‘Kuchmizm is poverty’, ‘Kuchmizm is banditry’, ‘Kuchmizm is corruption’. ‘Yellow Pora’, whose de facto head was Vladislav Kaskiv, came up with many of the same ideas at the same time, appearing only slightly later with a yellow logo in which the letter ‘o’ appeared as a clock at fifteen minutes to midnight, and with the website www.pora.org.ua. ‘Yellow Pora’ were rather more entrepreneurial, both politically and economically, and more Kiev based. They were also more prepared to talk to the press – indeed that was part of their raison d'être. Black Pora had a strong negative message, but avoided being openly pro-Yushchenko, while Yellow Pora, on the other hand, were happier to work unofficially with the Yushchenko campaign. Yellow Pora flags began to appear at Yushchenko rallies. Roman Bezsmertnyi helped coordinate, if not control, their actions, and a useful division of labour would be established during the protests on the Maidan, with two informal ‘agreements’ on 15 October and 15 November on a division of labour. There were even suspicions that Yushchenko's headquarters had helped set up the ‘copycat’ Yellow Pora to steal the brand and steer it more in his own direction. Some of its web material did seem to be copied from the Black Pora group.

Another NGO was Znaiu (‘I know’, i.e. I know my rights), a more studiously neutral organisation set up to encourage people, especially the young, to vote (www.znayu.org.ua). According to Znaiu's leader, the twenty-eight year old Dmytro Potekhin, his group won a $650,000 grant from the US-Ukraine Foundation, with an extra $350,000 for the third round, topped up by $50,000 from Freedom House.⁷ The money went on ten million leaflets, a toll-free helpline and ads in various papers explaining voters' rights. It also paid for visits by incoming US congressmen. Twelve thousand copies of the Sharp book were published with money from his Albert Einstein Institute and distributed through www.maidan.org.ua. Znaiu avoided anything that smacked of political campaigning, but was happy for Black Pora, at least, to deliver its ‘negative message’ on the dangers of fraud.

Some have cast doubt on the effectiveness of Pora before the protest campaign proper.⁸ It activated students, but not the wider numbers who were to be outraged by the electoral fraud that provided the revolution's key spark. It overlapped with other smaller groups seeking to perform similar tasks, so that the youth movement actually became somewhat fragmented. These included Chysta Ukraïna (Clean Ukraine, www.chysto.com, with a paper, Za chystu Ukraïnu!), Student Wave, Sprotyv (Resistance) and Student Choose Freely. Nevertheless, the regime considered Pora a big enough threat to plan active measures against it.

The procurator Hennadii Vasyliev led a secret group plotting against Pora and related NGOs. The group included his deputy, Viktor Kudriavtsev, the Kiev police chief, Oleksandr Milenin, Mykhailo Manin (deputy minister) from the interior ministry, and Ihor Smeshko from the SBU. On 15 October, the police raided the Kiev office of Pora, supposedly finding a homemade explosive device, 2.4 kilograms of TNT, electric detonators, and a grenade, even though Pora members videotaped them and their sniffer dogs leaving empty-handed, forcing them to come back later when no one was around. Pora claims 150 people were detained nationally, and fifteen charged, including one ‘leader’, Yaroslav Hodunok of the Ukrainian People's Party. On 22 October, agents raided the apartment of Mykhailo Svystovych, in connection with the alleged discovery of explosives. Kudriavtsev also convened a secret meeting of the SBU and interior ministry in October, where plans were made to arrest up to 350 Pora and other student activists three days before the first round, and plant them with drugs and forged money – but the plan met with ‘silent protest and open sabotage’.⁹

The 2002 elections had caught the authorities in a pincer movement. In total contrast to 1999, when nearly all the regime's real opponents had been substituted by fakes, the authorities had faced three real opposition parties, and its efforts against them had proved divided and weak. In 2004, it was the opposition parties who were determined to be the ones playing divide-and-rule.

This all seemed to have the opposite effect to the one intended, largely because Tymoshenko decided that she would be destroyed unless the regime could be brought down. The more the authorities campaigned against her, therefore, the more she campaigned against them. Tymoshenko knew how to fight dirty, and was often a better Bolshevik than them all. She also knew when it was time to play it clean (at least in public). On 2 July 2004, she formally declared she would not run in the election and signed a deal with Yushchenko under the heading ‘Force of the People’ – not a formal coalition as such, as Tymoshenko agreed to back Yushchenko, but a declaration of unity and a division of campaigning responsibilities. Tymoshenko had won 7.3 per cent of the vote in 2002. Now that she was on board, Yushchenko's rating (23.6 per cent in 2002) moved consistently over 30 per cent. On the other hand, the agreement missed an opportunity to combine the efforts of the various campaign teams in the most effective way. Tymoshenko was supposed to campaign in the eastern oblasts, where her efforts were largely wasted. Not only did Tymoshenko remain steadfast, however, but in private she was playing the same game of divide-and-rule as the authorities, making a series of secret contacts with the Donetsk clan, including Rinat Akhmetov, with old enemies such as Viktor Pinchuk and with the SBU – in short with anyone who had their doubts about Yanukovych.¹⁰

In February 2004, a secret plan to exploit the Socialists, drawn up by the Russian ‘political technologists’ advising the regime, found its way on to the web.11 Unfortunately, this time there was more of a bite at the bait. According to the main authority on the Ukrainian left, the Socialists in 2004 were ‘not interested enough in ideology and were too often engaged in intrigue’.¹² It was certainly true that the party had shadowy business interests to protect. Its major sponsor, Mykola Rudkovskyi, had interests in an oil well in Poltava, and had also helped the fugitive Melnychenko. The party had at one time had many more sponsors, including the eventual deputy head of the Security Services, Volodymyr Satsiuk (see page 98), but most were scared off in 1999. The party also had its share of ambitious individuals, such as its campaign chief Iosyp Vinskyi, who maintained private contacts with Medvedchuk and consistently opposed cooperating too closely with Yushchenko or Tymoshenko. Both Vinskyi and Rudkovskyi argued that, as the party gradually evolved towards European-style social-democracy, this would move it closer to the fake social-democracy of the SDPU(o). However, more sensible voices, such as Yurii Lutsenko, one of the key organisers of the Ukraine Without Kuchma campaign in 2001, knew that such development should take the party closer to the real opposition instead. The party had one eye on the next parliamentary elections in 2006, for which it hoped to receive friendlier coverage on SDPU(o)-controlled TV. The Socialists were also interested in money, and took plenty from the SDPU(o) before the first round.¹³ The leaked plan actually intimated that Moroz could be levered into the presidency, gratefully to serve his masters' interests thereafter – which was never likely.¹⁴ On the other hand, in December the party would return to the game of constitutional reform favoured by Medvedchuk, though it is unclear how much of a victory for him this ultimately was (i.e. fixing the constitution in case Yushchenko came to power – see pages 80–1). After the elections, the Socialists were happy to see Medvedchuk's party collapse. In other words, they took the money and ran.

Kuchma was simply deluding himself. He may have given up on the rest of the world in the years of semi-isolation since the Gongadze scandal broke in 2000, but the people around him had not. Stealing the election too blatantly would damage their hopes of rehabilitation in the West. The preferred option of Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma's chief of staff, was therefore to change the rules so radically as to deprive any incoming president of real power. It was perhaps natural for him to think in such terms, as no one ever thought of Medvedchuk himself as having any electoral appeal. Medvedchuk had business interests to protect from the Donetsk clan, and was therefore not particularly enamoured of Yanukovych. The two men's forceful personalities also led to many a private clash.

The Rada spent much of the first half of 2004 locked in struggle over the project of constitutional ‘reform’ which was sponsored by Medvedchuk and, with sufficient prompting, the Communists. There were many overlapping proposals, but they all included different ways of reducing the power of the next president. One plan was to delay the presidential election until the following parliamentary elections due in March 2006. Another was for the Rada, not the people, to select the next president in Autumn 2004 (300 out of 450 votes would be necessary) and extend its own four-year term an extra year, until 2007. The third plan envisaged the 2004 presidential and 2006 parliamentary elections going ahead as planned, but under new terms, whereby the 2006 parliament would be elected for five years rather than for four, and would have the right to select a new president, who would serve for five years until 2011. Whoever was (popularly) elected in November 2004 would therefore have a very short term before parliament voted for a successor within three months of its election in March 2006 – although in theory the ‘2004 president’ could take part in that vote.

The opposition had something to celebrate at last. Nevertheless, even after his setback in April, Medvedchuk hoped to re-animate the issue on the eve of the vote, even, possibly, between the first and second rounds. He was stymied because the authorities' artificial ‘majority’ in the Rada fell apart in September. Three factions suspended their allegiance: the so-called Centre; the People's Agrarians; and Democratic Initiatives – the latter not because of any point of principle, but because its fancy name was a mask for the Kharkiv ‘clan’, who objected to the pooling of the state's shares in two oil companies, Halychnya and Tatnafta, to a third company, Ukranafta, a deal that basically benefited the rival Privat group from Dnipropetrovsk. The deal unravelled, and the majority reravelled. A deal on the Constitution was eventually done, in December. But its apparent failure at this time was one reason why some of Yushchenko's opponents decided to poison him.

The authorities also toyed with the idea of creating a ‘strategy of tension’, or ‘organised chaos’, either as a means of intimidating some voters and scaring others into supporting them, or as an excuse to delay or neuter the election, but they were too divided, or insufficiently ruthless, to push such a strategy to any extreme conclusion. On 20 August 2004, a bomb went off in the Troieshchyna market on the edge of Kiev, killing one person and injuring eleven. It was followed by a smaller bomb two weeks later.¹⁹ The attacks were immediately blamed on extremist supporters of Yushchenko – though what motive they would have had for such an unprovoked attack was far from clear. Troieshchyna was actually the stomping ground of the gangster Kysel and of various shadowy rackets linked to Medvedchuk, and three of those arrested were later found to work for the fake nationalist parties secretly funded by the authorities (see below).20 In December, many of the charges against those arrested would be withdrawn.²¹ Bombs were also planted on the premises of the student movement Pora. Alarms started ringing when Yevhen Marchuk, the relatively neutral minister of defence, was dismissed in October.

On 23 October, an estimated 100,000 rallied peacefully in Kiev outside the headquarters of the CEC, to demand it conduct a fair election. Ignoring such disappointing restraint, the authorities staged a double provocation: first a violent ‘assault’ by Yushchenko ‘supporters’ on the building itself, then, later that evening, an ‘attack on the militia’ that seems mainly to have been carried out by other militia in plain clothes.

This was on the whole lower-grade provocation, which mainly served as black PR, and to keep the opposition disoriented. But there was always the temptation to do more. Towards the end of the campaign, Andrii Kliuiev wanted to organise fake terrorist attacks in the Donbas, with dozens of deaths that could be blamed on Yushchenko, but the SBU refused to cooperate with this plan, and likewise the interior ministry's special forces. Even established organised crime structures refused to have anything to do with it.²² The younger Kliuiev was the acknowledged paymaster for ‘incidents’ such as the trouble outside the CEC on 23 October.²³ These types of measures were always in the background, part of the attempt to intimidate the opposition and keep its options narrow; they were essentially part of the game of bluff. It is in this light that later measures, including the miners' demonstrations, the movement of Crimean troops, and the threat of ‘separatism’, should really be seen (see pages 133–4 and 145–6). Overall, however, the opposition was not intimidated by the measures the regime took, and anything more extreme carried too high a cost for most elements in the establishment, all with one eye on their survival strategies, to consider seriously.

It seems, however, that in November 2002, the up-and-coming Donetsk clan simply informed a president much weakened by the Gongadze affair that it was their turn to nominate the prime minister. Many of the other ‘clans’ were clearly less than keen on this idea. Yanukovych scraped together only 234 votes (he needed 225 out of 450 to be approved), some of which cost up to $200,000 to obtain.²⁶ This may also have been a financial proposition as far as the president was concerned, but, more importantly, it suited Kuchma's main priority of providing a counterbalance to the power of the SDPU(o), that is, the Kiev clan, whose leader, Viktor Medvedchuk, now headed the presidential administration, and was able to count the outgoing prime minister, Anatolii Kinakh, as his informal ally. The SDPU(o) was happy to cede the premiership to forestall what they thought was the greater danger (though in the light of later events, this now seems deeply ironic) of the Donetsk group forging some kind of alliance of convenience with Yushchenko. (The Donetsk group, which actually produces things and depends on foreign trade for its profits, temporarily considered that Yushchenko might front their operations. The SDPU(o), however, prefers empire-building within the state and mass media; a semi-isolted Ukraine therefore suited these purposes.) Yanukovych's transfer to Kiev also left Rinat Akhmetov more clearly in local control of Donetsk. He was therefore happy to stop making overtures to Yushchenko and cough up the cash for the cut-price privatisation of Ukraine's biggest steel company, Kryvorizhstal, in 2004.²⁷

Most of the Russians who arrived in Kiev in 2004 described themselves as ‘political technologists’. (I have explained this strange term elsewhere.³⁰) The ‘political technologist’ is much more than a ‘spin doctor’ such as Peter Mandelson in the UK. The latter spins a story between its origin and its interpretation by the media. The political technologists who proliferate throughout the former USSR, however, like to think of themselves as political metaprogrammers, masters of the local political universe. First, the scope of their work is extremely broad. Countries such as Russia and Ukraine are often called ‘directed democracies’ (the Russian term is upravliaemaia demokratiia) and the job of the technologist is one of direction, shaping and even creating governing parties and politicians, and trying to do the same to the opposition, as well. Second, they dress up manipulation and fraud as ‘technology’, but their work is often corrosive and crude. They usually work for the authorities, and usually stop at nothing to win.

In reality, of course, some ‘technologists’ were good at their job, and some were not; but there was undoubtedly an over-supply of Russians working in Ukraine in 2004. The money was good, many were seconded by the Kremlin, and Russia had just finished its own election cycle, so a few had time on their hands. According to Andrei Riabov of the Moscow Carnegie Foundation, ‘Ukraine is a Klondike, an El Dorado … business is drying up at home’.³² (Putin's constitutional changes after the Beslan tragedy in September 2004, which abolished Duma constituencies and elected governors, meant there would be fewer elections to manipulate.) The most famous ‘technologist’ of all, Geleb Pavlovskii, of the Foundation for Effective Politics (FEP) in Moscow, was often in town, albeit claiming he was only working on a ‘Russian contract’ (i.e. for a client based in Russia). In one interview, he reeled off a long list of his colleagues: ‘Marat Gelman, Stanislav Belkovskii, Igor Mintusov, Sergei Dorenko … all became Kievites’ for the duration.³³ Some, like Gelman, who had worked in Ukraine on and off since 2002, became over-familiar faces. Working in the dark was part of the secret of their success. Other frequent flyers to Kiev were Sergei Markov, Viacheslav Nikonov and Igor Shuvalov, who had worked for Kuchma in 1999 and, despite an expenses scandal, for the SDPU(o) and ‘liberal’ projects in 2002. Shuvalov had stayed on to oversee the so-called temnyky (weekly instructions to the media on how to cover – or not cover – events).

Kuchma's chief speechwriter and the deputy head of the presidential administration, Vasyl Baziv, complained that Gelman and Russian businessman Maksim Kurochkin, aka ‘Mad Max’, the director of Pavlovskii's Russia Club, which was based in the Premier Palace Hotel, Kiev's number one house of fun for the nouveaux riches, ‘made themselves at home’ at the presidential administration on Bankivska Street.34 The Russia Club was notorious for its dodgy finances,³⁵ and the Premier Palace wasn't much better; it was widely assumed to be funded by circles close to the mayor of Moscow, Yurii Luzhkov, Russian businessman-politician Aleksandr Babakov (a friend of Gelman) and their Ukrainian associates, Hryhorii Surkis and Viktor Medvedchuk. In fact, the whole Yanukovych campaign was awash with money, and some were more interested in creaming it off. An apparent attempt on Kurochkin's life was made on 6 November, when a nearby Volkswagen exploded as he approached his car after midnight with two bodyguards. After the Orange Revolution he fled to Russia, just before the new authorities in Kiev accused him of fraudulent last-minute property deals involving the Dnipro Hotel in Kiev and three sanatoria in Crimea.

The Russians were almost all working for the Yanukovych side, although Gleb Pavlovskii was approached in September 2004 by the Our Ukraine financier, Petro ‘Poroshenko [who] made an open commercial proposition to cooperate with the Yushchenko team’.³⁶ (Pavlovskii politely declined the intellectually challenging idea of working for both sides.) One interesting exception was Aleksei Sitnikov of the Moscow firm Image-Kontakt,³⁷ who had also worked for Mikhail Saakashvili during Georgia's ‘Rose Revolution’ in 2003, allegedly advising him on the art of demonstration and virtual revolution (i.e. using the media to make it seem all ‘the people’ are on your side). Sitnikov didn't stay long, however.³⁸ Sergei Markov also claimed that another leading Russian agency, the magnificently-named Nikkolo-M (the Russian spelling of Niccolo Machiavelli), was working for the Yushchenko side,³⁹ but contacts again seem to have been only superficial. Minor roles were also played by Andrei Piontkovskii from Russia and Mirosław Czech from Poland.

Unlike some other plans, which stayed on the drawing board, much of this came to pass. Trouble was only narrowly averted in Crimea in March, after nine Crimean Tatars were stabbed by skinheads. The Tatars were the ones who were then jailed for the offence. A blatantly political provocation followed in July 2004, when Serhii Kunitsyn, head of the local administration in Crimea, changed the local criminal code to create an offence of ‘squatting’, punishable by up to two years in prison. The Crimean Tatars had been deported en masse by Stalin in 1944 and not allowed to return until the late Gorbachev era. Most of the 260,000 or so who came back therefore lived in shanty-towns or self-builds, as their property was long gone. Kunitsyn now ordered several militia raids on Tatar areas, some allegedly using chemicals. The Crimean Tatars' traditional non-violent methods held with difficulty. A big majority voted for Yushchenko, but not in the disciplined unanimity of recent years, as some stayed at home in frustration with both their leadership and the general situation. Almost every Slav voter in the Crimea, however – that is, both Russians and Ukrainians – apparently backed Yanukovych. In the final round in December, 178,755 supported Yushchenko (15.4 per cent) and 942,210 (81.3 per cent) Yanukovych. As of 2002, the Crimean Tatar electorate was 186,000 (12 per cent of the total).44 The provocations also had a wider purpose, as the opposition, now led by Yushchenko, traditionally supported the Crimean Tatars: ‘Yushchenko must be represented as an enemy of Russians in Crimea’, the report argued, and of Slav culture in general. ‘If Ukraine can't defend the interests of Slavs in Crimea, then’ Yanukovych or ‘nearby Russia is always prepared to offer support’.⁴⁵

One big problem with this overall strategy was that Yushchenko really wasn't a nationalist. Moreover, to his great credit, he refused the invitation to fight the election on such terms. The powers-that-be therefore covertly supported four virtual nationalists in his stead. All were previously obscure, but they were soon all over state TV acting out the role of the ‘nationalist threat’. All were secretly financed by the SDPU(o) and Yanukovych's party, which in public constantly used the wartime imagery of the OUN–UPA to demonise what it dubbed the nashisty (from the equation of ‘Our Ukraine’, Nasha Ukraïna, with fashisty).⁴⁶ The fake four were a sorry bunch, however. Roman Kozak of the little-known OUN in Ukraine, was not the brightest of men. Dmytro Korchynskyi, an ‘intellectual provocateur’ on SDPU(o) TV,⁴⁷ was over-exposed. The powers-that-be hoped that Andrii Chornovil, son of the veteran dissident they allegedly had murdered in 1999, would have inherited some of his father's charisma, but he hadn't. Bohdan Boiko, of the fake party ‘Rukh for Unity’, had a long record of political treachery and financial corruption in his native Ternopil, where he distinguished himself by speculating in the local sugar crop when head of the local council in the mid-1990s. Kozak, Korchynskyi and Kovalenko at the UNA were soon dubbed the Ukrainian ‘KKK’.

Still, they strove to damn Yushchenko by mock-association, demonstrating uninvited in his support and receiving plenty of coverage on official TV. Kozak's TV ads were even placed right before Yushchenko's, so that viewers could hear his call to ‘Vote for Yushchenko. Together … we will kick the Russians and Jews out of Ukraine!’ Kozak ended up spending the third highest sum on TV advertising. The four won only 0.35 per cent of the vote; but their constant over-exposure on east Ukrainian TV (Inter and 1 + 1), and their hysterically unrealistic calls to close Russian schools, ban the Russian language, and introduce a visa regime with Russia had a definite, if unquantifiable effect on building up anti-Yushchenko stereotypes in the east.

Three other ‘technical candidates’ were designed to ‘activate’ radical leftist and Russophile voters in east Ukraine, this time from their own side of the fence. Opinion polls showed that this segment of the electorate was disillusioned with the powers-that-be, but also susceptible to the black PR against both the West and west Ukraine. The technologists therefore argued it was better to use proxies to stimulate them into action. The technique was known as a ‘relay race’, with ‘technical’ (fake) candidates being paid to stir up anti-Yushchenko sentiment on the basis of crude anti-Western propaganda and then ‘pass it on’ to Yanukovych in round two, despite the risk that they would take votes from him in round one.⁵¹ Not only was the seemingly implausible Nataliia Vitrenko wheeled out to play this role (the fact that she could play it at all was testament to the degree of media control in the east, where part of the electorate had not been exposed to her exposure as a fake), she was joined by Oleksandr Yakovenko, leader of the faux-radical fake party, the Communist Party of Workers and Peasants (secretly funded by the Donetsk clan), and Oleksandr Bazyliuk of the justifiably obscure Slavic Party. The three dutifully hammered away at all the black PR themes prepared for Yanukovych, claiming that Yushchenko was an ‘ultranationalist’ and an ‘American puppet’, and that his wife was an ‘American spy’. The technologists seemed right: Vitrenko eventually won a useful 1.5 per cent and Yakovenko 0.78 per cent, though Bazyliuk flopped with 0.03 per cent.

The Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate played a similar proxy propaganda role – or, at least, one faction or ‘group of influence’ in its fairly pluralistic leadership did so. Despite wild talk that ‘the Donestkies must work on the Orthodox messianic idea if they want to strengthen their influence in Ukraine’, as the Donbas had originally been settled by frontiersmen-priests,52 most of east Ukraine was now dominated by post-Soviet agnosticism. Yanukovych's main backer, Rinat Akhmetov, was, in theory at least, a Muslim. (Most of the Russian political technologists were not exactly religious men.)⁵³ On the other hand, as the Moscow Patriarchate was still technically part of the Russian Church, it was the most easily available institutional channel for Russian influence in Ukraine. Yushchenko was backed more informally by most of the two smaller Orthodox Churches, and by the Greek Catholics.

Both the Russian Patriarch Aleksei and Volodymyr (Sabodan), leader of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine, blessed Yanukovych, the latter at Kiev's prestigious Caves Monastery. Volodymyr publically endorsed Yanukovych on UT1 TV on 10 November, stating that, ‘I view him as a true Orthodox believer, who would deserve to be the head of our state’.⁵⁴ In November a typical stash of unsigned leaflets was found in a church near the Moldovan border attacking Yushchenko as ‘a partisan of the schismatics [that is, the rival Orthodox Churches] and an enemy of Orthodoxy’ and calling his wife a ‘CIA agent’.⁵⁵ Priests politicised their sermons, and the Church's opaque finances helped channel several covert operations for Yanukovych (see page 109). The Church also helped the Yanukovych team send out flyers from no less than the Archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kiev, ‘with love’ from Yanukovych to his flock, but obviously implying divine endorsement for the prime minister (see plate 2). In return, the government handed the Patriarchate the St Volodymyr Cathedral in Crimea on the eve of the election.

Fortunately, as the Church was attacking one of its own, Patriarch Aleksei was prepared to make peace after the election, meeting Yushchenko on his visit to Moscow, and stressing that ‘we [now] respect the will of the people of Ukraine’.⁵⁶

Putin chose not to listen. He does not seem to have been thinking about economics, but about geopolitics. Once Ukraine was more firmly within Russia's orbit, then so many other things (the proposed ‘Single Economic Space’, Moldova, the South Caucasus, a more secure southern flank, an end to EU and NATO expansion, and even easier management of Belarus) would fall into place. Significantly, the end to debate in Russia coincided exactly with Yanukovych's declarations on the Russian language, dual citizenship, etc, on 27 September. Clearly, Putin, the former KGB apparatchik, had no time personally for Yanukovych, the former convict. The Ukrainian opposition, particularly its satirical wing, derived much succour and amusement from the scenes shown on Ukrainian TV during the Kiev military parade on 28 October, the eve of the first round, when Yanukovych, disrespectfully munching sweets, offered one to a clearly astonished and frankly disgusted Putin.

Much of the black PR depicting Yushchenko or his supporters as ardent nationalists was relayed to the USA, via Yanukovych's adviser Eduard Prutnik and the Odesa-born American citizen Aleksei Kiselev, who helped employ half a dozen American companies on Yanukovych's PR.⁶¹ The accusation of anti-Semitism was particularly damaging in America, particularly after an anti-Semitic diatribe, including the claim that there were 400,000 Jews in the SS, was planted in the paper Village News earlier in the campaign,⁶² which some on the Ukrainian right were stupid enough to defend. The Ukrainian authorities couldn't have it both ways, however, and the global attention given to the domestic ‘Bushchenko’ campaign in October 2004 helped pave the way for their abandonment by Washington during the Orange Revolution.

It should also be stressed that, although the traffic wasn't just one-way, the Yushchenko camp did nothing as bad as this. They focused on Yanukovych's criminal record like a dog with a bone, and exploited it to symbolise the general corruption of the regime as a whole, but both points were fair comment. One advert made in Yanukovych's style, saying, ‘If you are for Yanukovych, go and fight in Chechnia’ could be considered black PR, but the opposition didn't churn out blatant lies on an industrial scale. Instead, Yushchenko constantly talked of dignity, moral values in government and respect for the citizen in a way that Yanukovych could not.

Yushchenko could hardly not travel, however. Back in Kiev, late on 5 September after a normal evening with his aides, Yushchenko set out for what was then supposed to be a secret meeting with the heads of the SBU, Ihor Smeshko and his deputy Volodymyr Satsiuk.⁶⁴ The meeting, postponed from the previous evening, was arranged by one of Our Ukraine's businessmen, Davyd Zhvaniia, who was the only other person to attend the rendezvous at Satsiuk's dacha in the forests outside Kiev (which was not a cabbage patch, but a villa set in five hectares). Oleh Rybachuk was not present, despite being the normal contact man with the SBU. Neither was Yevhen Chervonenko, who was in charge of Yushchenko's personal security. Chervonenko claimed that he abandoned normal precautions, which included tasting all Yushchenko's food, at the SBU's request, and that Yushchenko initially kept his other colleagues in the dark about the meeting.⁶⁵ Rumours have circulated about the presence at the meeting of an unnamed ‘fifth man’, supposedly a Georgian, a presumed friend of Zhvaniia (possibly Badri Patarkatsishvili – see page 176).

According to Zhvaniia, although it later became notorious, the September dacha dinner was just one of a series of meetings and other contacts designed ‘to prevent possible “disorder” and forcible methods’, and to persuade the SBU and other organs ‘not to go over the limits, written for them in the Constitution’. The last meeting was in November, after the second round, again at Satsiuk's dacha.⁶⁶

Yushchenko left his bodyguards at home. According to Satsiuk, the meeting lasted from 10 p.m. until 2:45 a.m. The four men dined on boiled crayfish with beer, a salad of tomatoes, cucumber and sweetcorn, vodka with meats and a final round of cognac – all prepared by Satsiuk's personal chef.⁶⁷ When Yushchenko got home, his wife says she smelt ‘something metallic’ on his breath. One version of events has it that he vomited on the way home, which may have saved his life, although this remains obscure as the vomiting could be attributed to the drink, which would be difficult to admit to in Ukraine's macho culture.

The government camp also replied with an ‘attack’ on Yanukovych, when ‘several large objects’ were thrown at the prime minister when he was campaigning in west Ukraine on 24 September. Yanukovych was rushed to hospital, but found time to blame the incident on extremist supporters of Yushchenko. However, Poroshenko's Channel 5 captured the event on video, and the ‘several large objects’ were revealed to be one solitary egg. On tape, Yanukovych seemed surprised and initially failed to react, but went on to over-react with a dramatic collapse (see plate 8).⁷⁰ As often, the attempted replay was a poor copy of the original – on 10 December, Yushchenko's poisoning would be confirmed to have been both frighteningly real and nearly fatal.

The poisoning seemed to be a direct attempt on Yushchenko's life, although Rybachuk claims that his contacts had warned him ‘that the goal would not be to kill Yushchenko but to make him an “invalid”, in order to knock him out of the campaign’.⁷¹ It seems unlikely the poisoners could have been so precise. In December, TCDD dioxin poisoning was confirmed after further tests at the Rudolfinerhaus and three other laboratories in Germany and the Netherlands, although Rybachuk instead referred to the mycotoxin T-2, used in ‘Yellow Rain’, the Soviet version of Agent Orange, that was allegedly used for chemical warfare in both South-East Asia and Afghanistan. If it was fat-soluble dioxin, it could have been administered via fatty foods such as lard, fish (sushi), beer or another Ukrainian favourite, smetana (a yoghurt-like addition to soup), some, but not all, of which were on Satsiuk's reported version of the menu. As little as five milligrams would have been lethal. Dioxin collects in the fatty tissues of the sweat glands, which would explain Yushchenko's terrible acne-like appearance. It acts late, however. If Yushchenko had died in September, the later symptoms might never have appeared, and dioxin poisoning would never been diagnosed. It was also alleged that Yushchenko may have been poisoned twice, with the September dose coming second as a trigger for an earlier, more subtle dose administered on an unknown occasion; or that he was given two poisons on 5 September, with Alpha-Fetoprotein used to speed up (and disguise) the effects of the dioxin.

The Yushchenko team continued to blame the (old) regime for initiating the plot. In January, the new interior minister Yurii Lutsenko claimed: ‘We know who brought the poison through the border, which parliamentary deputy transported it, which official brought it to the place of the crime, and who mixed it with the food.’⁷⁴ It was also intimated that the dioxin could be ‘fingerprinted’ so as to establish the precise laboratory it came from, out of an extremely narrow list homing in on Russia, and that the complicated poisons used bore the hallmarks of the KGB's infamous ‘Laboratory No. 12’. Hinting so openly at Russian involvement, however, may well have been a reflection of the practical difficulties involved in taking such an investigation to a conclusion. By the spring they were backtracking.

The following conversation is not dated, but is clearly supposed to have taken place after the poisoning.

MOSCOW: All the specialists say this is totally delirious.

KIEV: I predicted this earlier…

MOSCOW: That they will use…

KIEV: They will. And they will turn [the blame] on Russia.

MOSCOW: In general, totally delirious.

KIEV: Not only that, the Americans will also turn [the blame] on Russia.

MOSCOW: I'll say. Although, as far as I understand, they too are sick of Yushchenko.

KIEV: Possibly…

MOSCOW: And more likely than not, if they did it, it was them.

KIEV: Aleksandr Ivanovich. There are several options. The moment Russia says that it had nothing to do with it, there are people with significant evidence. And that Pavlovskii will have to run pretty far.

MOSCOW: What are Pavlovskii's people associated with…

KIEV: In this matter?

MOSCOW: …with Yushchenko, could they have poisoned him?

KIEV: No, [he's the] author of the idea. The author of the idea and the organiser. The ideological inspiration, do you understand?

MOSCOW: What's with you? That wanker proposed such an idea?

KIEV: Absolutely.

MOSCOW: And there are people who can confirm this?

KIEV: Yes, who can confirm this. Not in the press, but at the prosecutor's, well, with depositions.

MOSCOW: Really?

KIEV: Absolutely, what did you think?

MOSCOW: Are you saying this seriously?

KIEV: Absolutely. Not only that, the people are abroad. Spirited away, as required. When I say there was a large-scale operation under way, I'm not making journalistic jokes.

MOSCOW: So right now you are saying serious things about that plan, because up till now all that was a joke. Nobody knows about this.

KIEV: Well, how would that be funny?

MOSCOW: But absolutely no one knows about these tricks of Pavlovskii.

KIEV: The point was to make his [Yushchenko's] face ugly, to disfigure the Messiah, and to brand him with the mark of the beast.

MOSCOW: Lord! My God! So he gave this assignment to someone?

KIEV: Yes.

MOSCOW: Mama Mia!

KIEV: As for details, I don't know whether he hired retired or active special operations operatives to prepare this.

MOSCOW: Probably retired.

KIEV: That I cannot say.

MOSCOW: It's just totally delirious!

KIEV: And so, doesn't it resemble … cynically-speaking.

MOSCOW: No, but that rascal, he is capable of anything, I have no doubt. But to come up with such a thing.

KIEV: But, excuse me, to split up the country into two parts, having provoked a civil war – is that worse, better, or what?

MOSCOW: That is even worse.

KIEV: Cynically-speaking, that's right.

MOSCOW: Well, it still fits into the framework of some sorts of political things … but in general this is already some sort of criminal act.

KIEV: Yes.

MOSCOW: Well, well.

KIEV: And violence in polling stations, that's also a criminal act.

MOSCOW: Well, yes.

KIEV: The organisation of violence – that's [his] position. To squeeze, to create fear, so that people are afraid to take a step. To breeze into town and intimidate [people] publicly and ostentatiously – that's his style.

MOSCOW: And the premier [Yanukovych] knows about this, no?

KIEV: In 99 per cent of cases, the premier didn't even guess. He just sincerely feels deceived.

MOSCOW: Simply, because I watch how he speaks [in public] and I see that he sincerely feels himself deceived.

KIEV: 99 per cent of the time he knew nothing.

MOSCOW: Then who in his headquarters coordinated these things with Pavlovskii?

KIEV: Kliuiev, Prutnik.

MOSCOW: Those two wankers?

KIEV: Yes. Well, there are also a few other people of lesser calibre.

MOSCOW: Well, understood, but they were like the executors. But they had to have coordinated with someone? With those two?

KIEV: He didn't coordinate, he came up with ideas. Glebushka [Pavlovskii] came up with ideas, and they picked up on them.

MOSCOW: And implemented them?

KIEV: Well, to the extent of their abilities. The idea of the mark of the beast, he took part directly in carrying it out, found specialists.

MOSCOW: They'd gone out of their minds! He, none other than Pavlovskii?

KIEV: Yes.

MOSCOW: Himself?

KIEV: Well, I don't know, through someone.

MOSCOW: Well, he found specialists, by himself, to complete the assignment. O My! There's a fine present for you!

KIEV: I tell you honestly, this [blame] will be turned on the Russian Special Services. And then we will have to wash ourselves here – no one will look at Pavlovskii even through a microscope. The [blame] will be turned on state politics.

MOSCOW: Lord, My God!

KIEV: That trump is still up the sleeve.

MOSCOW: And what – does Yushchenko know about all this?

KIEV: Naturally.

MOSCOW: And with evidence?

KIEV: Now that I cannot say. Informed – yes.

MOSCOW: But information can also be false. And what evidence?

KIEV: He is informed and intends at some opportunity to release this information.

MOSCOW: And who are these people that [they] say were spirited out of the country, they're who – the executors?

KIEV: People, who took part…

MOSCOW: In the discussion?

KIEV: In the process. At the executive level. It's the devil's work.

MOSCOW: Oh my! That's how it is…

KIEV: When we were spraying spit in relation to Pavlovskii, we should have foreseen, understanding what was going on, predicted the scale…

MOSCOW: Well, honestly speaking, with all my experience, I could never imagine that someone would go for this.

KIEV: It's not surprising at all. Unfortunately, this is typical of those guys. For sure, Gelman could have thought of it. This is absolutely normal for them. Such approaches. Both Gelman and Shuvalov. Markov is simply stupid, so he could never even imagine that sort of thing, but they are definitely cut from the same cloth. But, you understand, they are not poisoning people. They are poisoning natives, cannibals.

MOSCOW: Lord, My God! Fine…

KIEV: I hope, of course, that this card will not be put into play, and held up as an object of inadequate reaction by Russia.