9

The International Implications

Even if the Orange Revolution ultimately disappoints expectations at home, there can be no doubt that it has profoundly changed the international environment. It has challenged the regional slide into semi-authoritarianism, forced Russia to rethink its role in the world, and will, it is hoped, prompt Brussels to re-examine its policy on Europe's institutional expansion. It has helped to shift the balance of power within the EU, not decisively but perceptibly, from the ‘old’ Europe in favour of the new members from central and eastern Europe which were admitted in 2004, and those due for entry in 2007 (Romania and Bulgaria). The Orange Revolution also promised to change the balance of power within the post-Soviet world, with Ukraine taking up a more active leadership role, pulling several other countries in its wake, and perhaps inspiring them to their own version of Orange Revolution. Ukraine and its leaders now have an international PR profile, which in the modern era makes them players in global politics for the first time. After the poisoning, Viktor Yushchenko was a genuine hero in the eyes of the world, and Yuliia Tymoshenko had real glamour. In February 2005 it made sense for Hilary Clinton to drop in and shake hands with them, in order to bolster her image at home. Kiev hosted the fiftieth Eurovision Song Contest in May 2005. Even the football team is doing well at the time of writing (June 2005), heading the European champions, Greece, in a difficult group, to qualify, for the first time, for the World Cup finals in Germany in 2006.

Russia's Excuses

Given its lopsided intervention, Russia had most to reassess. Russia's view of the Orange Revolution was first that it should never have happened because, it claimed, there was equal fraud on both sides in the election. In Gleb Pavlovskii's words, ‘everywhere the administration acted in the interests of the “regional hero” – in the west and centre for Yushchenko, in the east for Yanukovych. There has been a great fuss about the large number of Western observers, but it was clear beforehand that they would ignore violations in the group of regions “for Yushchenko” and only fix on violations in the east.’1 More dramatically but even more implausibly, Pavlovskii claims to have suffered from ‘electoral idiotism’, from playing the game just too damn fair [sic]. ‘Opposition circles’, he alleges, ‘weren't preparing for elections. They were preparing to take power in the form of elections’. The Yanukovych side was simply unprepared for their coup d'etat. ‘If we had had the power to consult our Ukrainian partners on preventative counter-revolution, and not just elections, then this misfortune wouldn't have occurred’, continues Pavlovskii. The sub-text here seems to be that the Yanukovych side just assumed that ‘administrative resources’ would guarantee it victory. Pavlovskii doesn't spell out exactly what ‘preventative counter-revolution’ means.

Pavlovskii also refers to orange as ‘the colour of children's diarrhoea’,² and dismisses the Ukrainian Revolution as ‘a Kiev city revolution, if you like – a national-populist revolution of the middle ranks’, comparing it to Paris in 1968, which is a pretty major misreading of recent French history.³ Alternatively, and obviously contradictorily, he claims that Yushchenko was only the ‘president of the Galicians’.⁴ Pavlovskii also blames Kuchma for his inaction – and here the sub-text is much clearer: ‘If Yeltsin had conducted himself in 1999 like Kuchma here, then Moscow would have boiled over some time in October [1999] and Putin would never have become president.’⁵

As well as fraud (greater than their own) the Russians blamed manipulation from abroad (greater than their own). Some blamed spies and mountains of US money, seeing the US playing the same zero-sum ‘great geopolitical game’, and trying to create a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Russia. According to Sergei Markov, Russia was simply outspent by America and Poland (sic).⁶ More interestingly, Pavlovskii blamed the ‘new revolutionary technologies of the globalisation era’, a tacit admission that some of his methods might be old hat, and that new media technologies and Western soft power could undermine the Kremlin's normal techniques of control.

It was also an article of faith amongst some Russians that Boris Berezovskii was involved. The website www.compromat.ru alleged a direct link between Yushchenko and Berezovskii (supposedly via Oleksandr Zinchenko or Oleksandr Volkov), with Berezovskii helping with PR in the West, and pledging $20 to $30 million for fifteen seats on the Our Ukraine list for 2006.⁷ His emissary, Dmitrii Bosov of the Trans World Group, supposedly met Volkov in Kiev on 17 October 2004 to smoothe the deal.⁸ The internet businessman Demian Kudriavtsev and a number of unnamed Israelis supposedly helped with Yushchenko's PR. Davyd Zhvaniia was supposedly also linked to Berezovskii via the Georgian Badri Patarkatsishvili, another tycoon disliked by the Kremlin, who announced his intention to move to Ukraine in March 2005. One website summed up this way of thinking with an article ironically entitled ‘The Orange Revolution: Made in Russia’.9

Berezovskii had invested in Ukraine in the mid-Kuchma era, before his exile from Russia in November 2000 made this more difficult. He is supposed to have invested in businesses that dovetailed with his Russian interests, namely the Inter TV channel and the Zaporizhzhia Aluminium Combine. It was far from clear, however, how many of these interests remained active, apart from the Ukrainian edition of Kommersant. Berezovskii's ‘Civil Liberties Foundation’ was also known to be helping Mykola Melnychenko in exile and aiding the transcription of his tapes, although it was not clear that this was intended as an anti-Russian act. Nevertheless, Marat Gelman suggested that Berezovskii's alleged involvement provoked Putin to block Yushchenko, though perhaps this is simply a convenient cover story for his own failings. ‘Of course, he [Putin] couldn't allow that, in the case of a Yushchenko victory, Berezovskii would move from London to Kiev and open a TV company somewhere in Luhansk [in Yanukovych territory in the far east, but bordering Russia, broadcast-wise] and start to broadcast anti-Putin propaganda to Russia.’¹⁰ Berezovskii declared his intention to move to Ukraine in February 2005, but even Zhvaniia poured scorn on the idea. More generally, it was argued in Russia that ‘the confrontation revolved around which of the two moneybag clans could lay its hands on big money and big resources’ – an idea that also found an echo in the West.¹¹

Everyone, of course, blamed the candidate. In fact, Pavlovskii would later claim that his team had done remarkably well with such poor material: ‘From the beginning of the year, [Yanukovych's] support quadrupled. After [what we did for] Putin, this is a phenomenon. I don't see any failure from our side’.¹² But Pavlovskii also admitted that he hadn't investigated the alternatives: ‘we weren't interested in discussions amongst the Ukrainian elite, around the formula of Kuchma's successor and [who should be the] candidate of the existing powers’.¹³

Russia's Response

In essence though, Russian political technologists such as Pavlovskii ‘sold Putin a false bill of goods’.¹⁴ Their view of Ukraine was half-true, but not true enough; which is why their work for Yanukovych had often backfired (see page 89). Their view of the Orange Revolution was more radically skewed, much of it a classic projection of their own faults on to others. After Yushchenko's victory, the Kremlin had to decide whether to continue to work within the same world-view, or to mend and make do. Russia hadn't ‘lost’ Ukraine, of course. Certain options had been foreclosed, but the most likely of these – Yanukovych's Ukraine as an increasingly criminalised satrap dependent on Kremlin favour and ‘political technology’ for its survival – was no loss to anybody.

In December and January at least, before Yushchenko's inauguration, hardline Russian voices were still predominant. On the existential question, it was hard to let go of the ‘two Ukraines’ line spun so enthusiastically by the technologists, even if it was now only a partial truth.15 The nationalist intellectual Aleksandr Dugin argued that the split between the two coincided with the ‘clash of civilisations’, the struggle between the Russian world and the West, although the ‘war on the Dnipro’ as he put it, never quite got going.¹⁶ Konstantin Zatulin, the director of the CIS Institute, argued: ‘If Ukraine, even if independent, does not have special, allied relations with Russia, its fledgling statehood can easily be turned into an anti-Russian bridgehead, and it will eventually be transformed into a second Poland … a historico-cultural project, which is alien to Russia.’¹⁷ This kind of zero-sum thinking, however, and in particular the assumption that Ukraine would transform itself overnight from one of Russia's closest allies to one of its most bitter enemies, was wide of the mark. It also mistook the phantom opponent for the real. The radical west Ukrainian nationalism that Yanukovych claimed to be fighting against in 2004 was a paper tiger, and Yushchenko had been carefully steering the ‘national-democratic’ movement in a more centrist direction since 1999. Yushchenko was certainly radically Westernising, whereas Russia has historically veered between emulating the West and rejecting it, but that was insufficient to make Ukraine and Russia polar opposites.

Without Ukraine, Russia would yet be the biggest country in the world, but it might still feel psychologically cramped. Russians have never felt comfortable with an exclusively ethnic identity. Even if not explicitly imperial, Russian thinkers such as Aleksandr Dugin have argued that the ‘Russian idea is a Grand Idea … not the idea of one nationality alone – as for example the Ukrainian idea’.¹⁸ But there were many forms that a ‘Grand’ Russian identity could take, and for many Russians the ‘East Slavic’ option was becoming a more attractive alternative to a Soviet, Eurasian or seemingly empty civic identity. Without it, they would have to choose one of the other, less attractive, options. Or as another political technologist, Marat Gelman, put it: ‘now after the Ukrainian events the imperial project has just vanished’, so where would all the imperialists go?19

Russians also claimed that, without Ukraine, European Russia would be defenceless. Its access to the south, to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, and its flanking influence in the Caucasus would all be circumscribed. In April 2005, the new Ukrainian foreign minister, Borys Tarasiuk, said the 1997 agreement granting the Russian Black Sea Fleet basing rights in Sevastopil for twenty years would most likely not be renewed in 2017. The previous month, Kiev had protested when Russian special forces from Chechnia landed to ‘rest’ in the Crimea. Some even called it ‘invasion’. Without Ukraine, Russia would not have been able to stage the ‘dash to Pristina’, the brief attempt to challenge NATO's occupation of Kosovo in 1999.

The new Ukrainian leadership occasionally seemed guilty of rubbing Russia's nose in its unfortunate reversal, but in the short-term, this was probably a necessary antidote to a lingering reluctance to treat Ukraine as fully sovereign. On a visit to Germany in April 2005, Putin claimed that, ‘If Ukraine joins the Schengen zone, it will create a certain problem. As far as I know, no less than 17 per cent of Ukraine's population is Russian. This would mean splitting the nation the way Germany was divided into East Germany and West Germany’.²⁰ The statement was conditional, and it referred to ethnic Russians, but it did not help.

Russia's reversal in Ukraine was not just cultural and geopolitical. The Kremlin's biggest fear had to be that the Orange Revolution would succeed in making Ukraine's political and business culture ‘more European’. In February 2005, Yushchenko appointed the old-time Russian liberal Boris Nemtsov as adviser. He promptly invited private Russian business to invest in Ukraine, as it supposedly couldn't operate in Russia. ‘In Russia business is being squeezed to a dead stop, it can't cope with such a severe bureaucratic dictatorship’, he claimed.²¹ Economically, the main result of the Orange Revolution was the likely death of the Single Economic Space agreement, initialled in 2003 (at least in its original form), which was in any case only ever a framework ‘heads of agreement’, and never actually implemented. Ukraine was no longer interested in a common currency or tariff zone, but its alternative idea of a free-trade area was of potential benefit to all.

Pavlovskii began to talk of making good on ‘preventative counter-revolution’ at home, while building links with the ‘new opposition’ abroad. ‘During the electoral campaign in Ukraine there was an underestimation [by Russia] and low level of cooperation between Russian society and Ukrainian NGOs. We will try to avoid such an underestimation in the future … Mr Yushchenko will certainly not be regarded by us as a person with exclusive rights to interpret the position of Ukrainian society, political, and non-governmental organisations,’22 he wrote. Russia, in other words, would intervene again in 2006 and if necessary in 2009, to ‘thwart the consolidation of the two parts of Ukraine on an anti-Russian platform’.²³

The first indications were that Russia would indeed continue to use the same ‘political technology’ methods abroad, and its first test came with the Moldovan elections held in March 2005. Since 2001, Moldova has been the only European state to be ruled by a party that actually calls itself Communist, although the label is somewhat nominal. Although originally pro-Russian, the party has grown into a party of Moldovan statehood, and earned the Kremlin's wrath by rejecting the November 2003 ‘Kozak memorandum’ for federalising the country, that is, for institutionalising the breakaway ‘Dnister Republic’ in the eastern part of Moldova. (The plans for this were drawn up by Dmitrii Kozak, then deputy head of the Kremlin administration.) Attempting to force out the Communists, the Kremlin first found and funded a proxy, the ‘centrist’ Democratic bloc of Moldova (actually a very motley crew of opportunists), and then set up a fake party on the left, Patria-Rodina, to try and catch the Communists in a pincer movement. On the day, the Communists won 46 per cent, the Democratic bloc 28.5 per cent and Patria-Rodina 5 per cent. Although their majority was reduced, the Communists survived to dominate the new parliament with fifty-six seats against the Democratic bloc's thirty-four, and eleven for the only other party to gain representation, the pro-Romanian Christian-Democratic People's Party (6 per cent of the vote was necessary to win any seats). The overall result, then, was more or less a draw. The Kremlin didn't get what it wanted, but there was no local Orange Revolution either (see below).

Arguably, however, this was because the plan to oust Voronin was drawn up before the Orange Revolution began, and because the momentum that had already been established carried them through. Elsewhere in the former USSR, Russia pulled back, most notably in Kyrgyzstan (see below). More serious potential conflict looms in Belarus in 2006, when presidential elections fall due in September, and in Armenia, where the fraudulent elections held in 2003 threaten to unravel retrospectively. In both countries, Russia thinks of itself as a long-term cultural, economic and geopolitical stakeholder, and is unlikely to stand back.

The Kremlin has also continued to use the same ‘political technology’ methods at home, where its first instinct is to clone and control. With copycat versions of Pora appearing in Russia, the Kremlin's éminence grise, Vladislav Surkov, has set up a rival youth movement, dedicated to defending the established order, called Nashi (‘Ours’). Anti-Kremlin liberals immediately dubbed them the Nashisti, ironically the very same propaganda nickname the Russian political technologists had given Our Ukraine. The Kremlin's version of political competition in the 2007 Duma elections seems likely to involve spinning off three pocket parties from within the current loyalist mega-party, United Russia: a Kremlin ‘liberal’ party instead of Yabloko, a Kremlin ‘nationalist’ party capable of drawing away the safe elements from the likes of Rodina, and a Kremlin ‘state-socialist’ party to draw away the safe elements from the Communists.

How much of this is just bluster? It remains to be seen whom Russia will support at the next Ukrainian elections in 2006 and 2009 – and between times – but in the medium term, it has readjusted pragmatically enough. ‘Plan B’, maintaining links with all sides, had always been possible in any case, given the extent of Ukraine's economic linkage to Russia and Yushchenko's more than friendly attitude to Russian capital when he was prime minister from 1999 to 2001. When President Yushchenko invited leading Russian businessmen to Kiev in March 2005, the result was like a stampede in a sweet shop. There was just so much money potentially to be made, and too many opportunities in the reprivatisation process to miss out. Nevertheless, the prospect of the Russian economic elite, tamed domestically after the Yukos affair in 2003, taking part in, and even adapting to, Ukraine's ‘new business culture’ was deeply worrying to the Kremlin – just as Kiev's religious and cultural innovations in the seventeenth century had originally been anathema to Moscow. So was talk amongst liberal Russians of the possibility of the Orange Revolution helping Russia's return to Europe, with post-revolutionary Kiev reprising the role it played in the seventeenth century of the ‘window on Europe’ for the whole east Slavic world.24 Some also talked of Ukraine filling the missing role of a ‘bridge’ between institutional Europe and Russia, though it was doubtful that either party was interested in such a role.

Orange for Export?

The new Ukraine also sold the idea of revolution to the surrounding region. A first effect was arguably to tip the scales in the Romanian election on 12 December 2004. Despite its promise of EU entry in 2007, Romania under Ion Iliescu was in many ways similar to Ukraine under Kuchma, with ex-Communists in power, and serious problems of crony capitalism and corruption (though Iliescu had briefly ceded power to the unsuccessful liberal Emil Constantinescu from 1996 to 2000). As had happened in Ukraine, and arguably helped by Ukraine's example, the new model centrist Traian Băsescu edged out Adrian Năstase, the candidate of ancien régime continuity by 51.2 per cent to 48.7.

There was no regime change in neighbouring Moldova in March 2005, because there were no real opposition forces. All sides, including the ruling Communists, tried to depict themselves as somehow ‘orange’. Iurie Roşca of the Christian-Democratic People's Party was the first to shift his party's campaign colours and parade under photos of himself shaking hands with Yushchenko, although he was not the most natural partner for Our Ukraine, as he represented the pan-Romanian rather than the patriotic wing of Moldovan politics. Ukraine's everpresent Eurovision star, Ruslana, sang for the Communists. The fact that the Democratic bloc managed to convince both Russia and America of its credentials as a viable opposition party is only testament to the skill of its leaders' opportunism.

In Belarus, Lukashenka dismissively ruled out any idea of popular revolution, whether it was ‘rose, orange or banana … or pink’ (gay).25 ‘All these “flower revolutions”’, he stated in his 2005 state of the nation address, ‘are in reality no kind of revolution at all. Just plain banditry in the guise of democracy.’²⁶ Lukashenka could thank his lucky stars that he had organised rigged elections to his puppet parliament and a referendum on changing the constitution to expand his term just before the Orange Revolution, on 17 October 2004. Just to make sure, he appointed Viktar Sheiman, who was allegedly responsible, as chair of the Security Council, for the ‘disappearances’ of several key opposition figures in 1999, as his chief of staff in December 2004.

President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan was also initially determined to prevent any franchise revolution, dubbed locally the ‘lemon’ (traffic light) or ‘tulip’ revolution, by the would-be Pora clone KelKel (‘New Epoch’). His ouster in March 2005 bore some superficial similarities to the Orange Revolution, most notably in the boomerang effect of ineffective election fraud on mobilising the opposition. Nevertheless, there were serious differences. It was far from clear that the opposition had really won; neither was the extent of fraud clear. Different estimates gave the opposition five or six, but no more than ten, out of seventy-five seats. As in Ukraine, the Eurasia Foundation financed an exit poll for the first time (www.kyrgyzpoll.org), but, with few mass parties, it only covered individual constituencies, and only questioned the announced results in a few of these. There was no united opposition, which was more regional and clan-based than in Ukraine, and the opposition had few financial resources – in Kyrgyzstan, most of these were controlled by Akaev's son Aydar and son-in-law Adil Toygonbaev. Most importantly, the amount of popular violence and simple looting in the capital, Bishkek, made it more doubtful that the new regime would stick (and if the violence was orchestrated by provocateurs, this was another fate Ukraine had managed to avoid). In 2004, the US spent $50.8 million in Kyrgyzstan, including $12.2 million on democracy assistance.27 The undoubtedly powerful American ambassador, Stephen Young, tipped to move on to Taiwan, was reported to have given a private speech in which he urged the destabilisation of the outgoing regime, and the use of Kyrgyzstan ‘as a base for advancing the process of democratisation in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and limiting Chinese and Russian influence in the region’.²⁸ Unfortunately, the document outlining his ‘speech’ seemed to be a forgery. One obvious consequence of the Ukrainian precedent, however, was that this time Moscow stayed out of events. Ukraine offered to mediate instead.

Nevertheless, the contagion effect could still be felt in Kazakhstan and Belarus, where elections were due in 2006, and retrospectively in Armenia, where a potentially strong but still disunited opposition was still smarting from an election fraud similar to Ukraine's in 2003. They hoped for US support to oust local strongman Robert Kocharian, but precisely because this would be retrospective (Kocharian would be able to stay in office until 2008), there was concern that this might look manufactured. One opposition leader, Victor Dallakian, actually said, ‘We will choose the right moment for carrying out regime change as a result of a popular movement.’²⁹ In Belarus and Kazakhstan, the opposition parties were potentially stronger than they seemed, given the authorities' constant game of divide-and-rule but, of course, they would have to overcome such tactics in order to grow in strength. In none of the three countries did the regime yet seem on its last legs. All had relatively strong security apparatuses that still seemed loyal.

The other central Asian states and Azerbaijan were much more autocratic. Unless the benign international environment (stemming from the war on terror in central Asia, and oil in Azerbaijan), that had so far limited foreign interference in these countries were to change, they would either survive, implode or organise elite successions. Significantly, however, after the Orange Revolution (and after Iraq and the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon) American rhetoric was now more consistent in backing democracy in Azerbaijan. Russia was not an autocracy, but ‘directed democracy’ was much more firmly entrenched there than it was in Ukraine. The liberal opposition groups who hoped to appropriate the Ukrainian brand were neglecting the need to improve their own image and to compensate for their past unpopularity first. After the Orange Revolution, however, Russia was much less likely to organise an uncontested succession or extension of Putin's power in 2008.

Yushchenko caused a considerable stir in April 2005 by declaring in Washington that he would work with America ‘to support the advance of freedom in countries such as Belarus and Cuba’.30 In Belarus, this could be a joint action, as the US Congress passed the Belarus Democracy Act in October 2004. Joint action in Cuba was not particularly likely, but the fact that Washington valued Ukraine's endorsement was testament to how much had changed. The world's press was now full of reports on countries as diverse as Lebanon, Ecuador, Nepal and Iran that mentioned the Ukrainian example either to confirm or deny the potential for change. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, published an article on ‘Why Zimbabwe is Not Ukraine’.³¹

Even if it did not deliberately export revolution, post-Orange Ukraine was set to assert itself in the post-Soviet world, pulling others in its wake by force of example and even serving as an alternative pole of attraction to Russia. Ukraine was particularly likely to ally with the old states of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth – Poland, Lithuania, and, it is hoped, one day, Belarus and Moldova – which historically had close relations, and with Turkey, with whom relations were historically all too close. The new geopolitics of oil and the burgeoning relationship with Georgia under Mikhail Saakashvili also meant a new emphasis on the so-called GUAM group (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova – Uzbekistan left in 2002), which was first launched in 1997 but was largely moribund as a result of Russian pressure in the later Kuchma era. It was formally revived at a summit in Chiʂinău, Moldova, in April 2005, with the presidents of Lithuania and Romania in additional attendance, despite Russia now attacking it as an ‘orange belt’ along its vulnerable south-western flank.

The West's Role in the Revolution

Russia's accusations of illegitimate or excessive Western interference found an echo in certain circles in the West, some of whom argued that the entire Revolution was ‘made in the USA’, as some sarcastic banners on the Maidan had it. It was alleged that ‘Yushchenko got the Western nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him’.³² The critics' attempt to draw ‘attention to the degree of funding by the US and other western governments for the campaign’,³³ normally centred in on a figure of $65 million over two years to back the Ukrainian opposition.³⁴ Some saw any spending as illegitimate or inherently partial. On 7 December, US Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, a libertarian Republican and critic of the Iraq war, speaking before the House International Relations Committee quoted President Bush saying ‘that “Any election (in Ukraine), if there is one, ought to be free from any foreign influence.” I agree with the president wholeheartedly,’ he continued. ‘Unfortunately, it seems that several US government agencies saw things differently and sent US taxpayer dollars into Ukraine in an attempt to influence the outcome.’35 It was also often alleged that monies were ‘funnelled through’ US organisations such as Freedom House and the Carnegie Foundation,³⁶ as if these were extra monies. This is normally how the process works.

American spending was indeed substantial, albeit actually on a declining trend. A lot of detailed figures follow, as an antidote to the vague assertions of America's critics, as well as numerous websites, so readers can check information for themselves. The official figures are that all US government agencies spent $280.48 million in aid to Ukraine in the fiscal year 2002, including $157.92 million under the 1992 Freedom Support Act. The latter included $74 million through USAID, and $25 million for the US State Department Public Diplomacy programme.³⁷ In 2003, funding for democracy support was cut substantially, by about a third, because of US anger over the Kolchuha affair (Washington believed President Kuchma was guilty of illicitly supplying a hi-tech radar system to Saddam Hussein on the eve of the invasion of Iraq). Overall funding was now $227.48 million, with $55.11 million for democratic reform programmes.³⁸ The figure for the fiscal year 2004 was $143.47 million, including $34.11 million for democracy assistance.³⁹ The equivalent figures for the United Kingdom Department for International Development's overall annual budget in Ukraine was £6.5 million, only a small proportion of which went on democracy assistance.⁴⁰ George Soros's Renaissance Foundation spent $1.65 million between autumn 2003 and December 2004, supporting the ‘New Choice 2004’ and ‘Freedom of Choice’ coalitions of NGOs, and providing very detailed accounts.⁴¹ Considerable sums were also raised privately by the Ukrainian diaspora and by supporters of the Orange Revolution; it is harder to give an accurate sense of how much was raised in this way, but it is possible that it was several million dollars. In Chicago, for example, home to one of North America's largest Ukrainian communities and the original home of Ukraine's new first lady, Katherine Chumachenko, $363,000 were raised.⁴²

The critics also listed various reprobates who were guilty of receiving the money. Freedom House administers the Polish-American-Ukrainian Cooperation Institute (PAUCI), which is funded by USAID (www.usaid.kiev.ua), and, through PAUCI, a variety of Ukrainian NGOs. PAUCI's grants are all listed publicly at www.pauci.org/en/grants/grant. One argument was that the Ukranian recipients were inappropriately political. One Ukrainian NGO criticised by Ron Paul and others was the International Centre for Policy Studies (ICPS, www.icps.kiev.ua), set up in 1994, because Yushchenko was a member of the board. However, the whole point of the ICPS is elite dialogue, which is why regime stalwarts such as Serhii Tihipko were also on the board. ICPS itself claimed that ‘the only ICPS–PAUCI project [in this period], worth US $4,500, was aimed at researching and developing methodology for designing regional small business development programs and had nothing to do with any election campaigns’.⁴³ Another NGO on the list was the Centre for Political and Legal Reforms (www.pravo.org.ua), run by two Rada deputies, Serhii Holovatyi and Ihor Koliushko, and which was set up in November 1996 with the not particularly sinister aim of promoting constitutionalism, i.e. promoting the better working and actual observance of Ukraine's own constitution after it was passed in June of that year. The National Democratic Institute funded similar works, running legal seminars and supporting the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, which has also received help from the Eurasia Foundation. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) supported the Laboratory of Legislative Initiatives and its excellent publication of academic reference, Parlament (Ukrainian spelling, but www.parliament.org.ua), and the website first set up by Hryhorii Gongadze, www.pravda.com.ua. The NED and the US Embassy Public Affairs Section helped fund www.telekritika.kiev.ua, a site devoted to media analysis and media bias monitoring, which was hugely popular amongst Ukrainian journalists. The Institute for Sustainable Communities, based in Vermont, had a $11 million federal contract to help bring about a ‘fundamental cultural shift’ in Ukraine, as the organisation puts it, ‘from a passive citizenry under an authoritarian regime to a thriving democracy with active citizen participation’. Leslie J. McCuaig, Ukraine project director, accepted that ‘It has become particularly tricky to walk a very thin line.’⁴⁴ In May 2004, the Virginia-based private management consultancy, Development Associates, Inc., was awarded $100 million by the US government ‘for strengthening national legislatures and other deliberative bodies worldwide’. According to the organisation's website (www.devassoc.com/devassoc/index.html), several million dollars from this went to Ukraine in advance of the elections.

In late December 2004, the Ukrainian ministry of the economy released details of two contracts, pointing out that the CEC and USAID had signed a Memorandum on Mutual Understanding in March 2004. As a result, two non-partisan projects, ‘Citizens' Role in the Elections in Ukraine’ (budget $3.674 million) and ‘Promoting Election Organisation in Ukraine’ (budget $4.481 million) heavily benefited the CEC, the Rada and all the main political parties, including many of the fake ones.45 In other words, a large proportion of foreign funding went to the government side – as it should.

In election year, Freedom House, along with the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (IRI) helped to fund election monitoring by the European Network of Election Monitoring (ENEMO), which was strongly critical of the 21 November poll.⁴⁶ Eight Western embassies (the US, the UK, Canada, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark) and four NGOs (the NED, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Eurasia and George Soros's Renaissance Foundation) helped fund the exit polls conducted by KIIS, the Razumkov Centre, SOCIS, and the Social Monitoring Centre (though only the first two remained in the consortium after the first round). Dick Morris, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, admitted to a clandestine meeting in an unnamed East European capital with members of Yushchenko's team, at which he advised them that a big exit poll would not only be useful in helping to minimise fraud, but that it might also help to bring protesters out on to the streets if it indicated an obvious steal.⁴⁷ Despite the assertion by some that this meant that a manufactured projection would replace a ‘real’ count, the opposite was the case. The official results were fixed and the rival exit polls were fixed, but the exit poll by KIIS–Razumkov was the only fair game in town. It cost $24,700 in round one and $31,000 in round two – which, frankly, was money extremely well spent.⁴⁸

Finally, the Open Society Initiative, and the Citizen Participation in Elections in Ukraine programme, run by Freedom House, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), along with the German Marshall Fund and the Canadian International Development Agency, provided support for the youth organisation Pora. However, Pora's own accounts claim this only amounted to $130,000 in total – as against €5 million in small donations ‘in kind’ – from local sources.⁴⁹ Similar support for Znaiu has already been mentioned (see pages 75–6). More general seminars for youth activists had been run in 2002–3, supported by the Alfred Moser Foundation (Netherlands), the Westminster Foundation (UK) and the Fund for European Education (Poland).⁵⁰ Many of those trained later ended up in Pora. Freedom House also helped train election monitors in Crimea in August 2004. Contacts began in March 2003, and in April 2004 eighteen Ukrainian activists went to a seminar in the Yugoslav town of Novi Sad. Otpor's Aleksandar Maric was a frequent visitor to Ukraine until he was eventually denied re-entry on 12 October. According to Maric, ‘We trained them [Pora] in how to set up an organisation, how to open local chapters, how to create a “brand”, how to create a logo, symbols, and key messages. We trained them in how to identify the key weaknesses in society and what people's most pressing problems were — what might be a motivating factor for people, and above all young people, to go to the ballot box and in this way shape their own destiny.’51 However, unlike the more direct support for Otpor in 2000 (where the US spent $41 million on the ‘operation’),⁵² possibly for Zubr in Belarus in 2001, when much money went missing,⁵³ but not for Georgia's Kmara in 2003,⁵⁴ there is not yet any evidence of extra covert payments to Pora. It would be interesting if there were, but the ball is in the critics' court.

USAID also funded Znaiu. The Washington PR firm Rock Creek Creative helped set up a ‘Friends of Ukraine’ network on behalf of the Global Fairness Initiative linked to Bill Clinton; a conference on ‘Ukraine in Europe and the World’ in Kiev in February 2004, which was attended by Yanukovych, Yushchenko and the likes of Václav Havel and Madeleine Albright; and the corresponding website www.ukraineineurope.com.⁵⁵ In Germany, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (www.fesukraine.kiev.ua) and Centre for Applied Politics have funded many of the same causes.

So what? None of this is especially problematic. On the whole the West was doing exactly what it should have been doing in Ukraine, though arguably not doing enough. ‘Our money doesn't go to candidates; it goes to the process, the institutions that it takes to run a free and fair election,’ as the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said.⁵⁶ The West was promoting its own values. It may not always live up to them itself, but that does not mean it is wrong to try to help other countries live up to these values. The West has nothing to apologise for. America decided to provide more money after the Orange Revolution, an extra $60 million in the fiscal year 2005 (though this was later cut to $33.7 million). It would be wrong to claim that the line between supporting fair process and supporting a particular candidate can always be drawn, however. Several websites, such as www.pravo.org.ua, had prominent links or endorsements (‘We recommend’) to Yushchenko's site at www.razom.org.ua, which was certainly inadvisable, however much he was closer to their aims, but this is a million miles from the instant insinuation that $65 million directly funded Yushchenko's campaign. At least the West is aware that a line should be drawn somewhere. Normally, the left (and many of the critics were on the left) is proud of the West's spending on international aid, and constantly urging it to spend more although, quite rightly, Britain, for example, does not have a department for ‘aid’ any more, but one for ‘international development’, instead. Supporting good government helps ensure that the money is well spent.

Moreover, the idea that Pora was the revolution and that the revolution followed some kind of US script is wide of the mark. It is true that the demonstrators were highly organised, but they were organised by Ukrainians, who were mindful of what had happened in Ukraine in 2001, when the ‘Ukraine without Kuchma’ protests had failed because the organisers couldn't build a wide enough coalition and put sufficient numbers on the streets. The protesters' ranks had included too many questionable ‘nationalists’, with too many agents provocateurs in their ranks. Staged confrontation with the local police gave the authorities the excuse they needed for a crackdown. In 2004, therefore, Pora was kept off the main stage. There is evidence that Pora was helped directly by similar organisations in Serbia, Georgia and Slovakia, and by thousands of small donations. It was also funded by Davyd Zhvaniia,57 and by another local businessman, Valerii Borovyk. But it seems grossly naïve to criticise the opposition for taking money from both local businesses⁵⁸ and from the West.⁵⁹ They needed money from somewhere; without it, they would have lost. Left-wing critics seem to imply that parties that might improve the lot of the poor should remain mired in poverty themselves. Moreover, the first source made the Ukrainian opposition less dependent on the second. The West helped more with method than with money, and there was never the slightest chance of the opposition outspending the regime and its Russian backers. In any case, as one third of the €540 million loan provided by Deutsche Bank in 2004 for building the new Dnipro railway bridge was apparently unaccounted for, the West may have inadvertently financed either Heorhii Kirpa's Italian bank accounts or Yanukovych's campaign to a much greater extent than they helped Yushchenko.⁶⁰

To put it another way, one could imagine something like the critics' fantasy scenario happening in Belarus in September 2006, when President Aliaksandr Lukashenka comes up for re-election. In April 2005, Condoleezza Rice stated fairly directly that America wanted him out of office.⁶¹ However, for a decade Lukashenka's domestic poll rating has been remarkably stable, between 40 and 50 per cent – way ahead of any rival, but, of course, not enough for a guaranteed majority. Lukashenka therefore frequently resorted to ballot-stuffing when necessary. Over the same period, the traditional opposition polled only 10 to 15 per cent, but was strongest in Minsk. Did the US really want to call the 2006 result before the actual election, which could well see Lukashenka winning a clear plurality and faking a majority? Would the US then support protest by a minority in the capital, possibly in front of the world's cameras, against what Rice dubbed ‘the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe’ (so-called because there was no doubt that Lukashenka's methods were often brutal)? The point here is to make the enormous contrast with Ukraine. In Ukraine, the authorities could not win a majority, but the opposition did. There was a genuine mass movement to overturn the fraud that attempted to conceal this fact. The West criticised the fraud only after it was perpetrated. The two scenarios look very different to me.

That said, as even Pavlovskii tentatively recognised, the West's role in Ukraine was both direct and indirect. ‘Soft power’, the pulling power of perceived prosperity and the general ambience of life à la européenne, also played a role in the Ukrainian Revolution. The efforts of local NGOs were free-riding to an extent on general globalisation processes and the pulling power of Western capital and political institutions, providing them with a multiplier effect to offset the crude cash spending advantages of the incumbent regime. ‘Joining the club’ of the EU, NATO and WTO can be a very powerful implicit promise, and one which only ‘anointed’ candidates can claim to deliver. On the other hand, the West has no reason to be ashamed of the pulling power of democratic ideals and liberal culture, and it was not caught doing anything more heavy-handed. As far back as November 2001, Yushchenko was reportedly wined and dined in Washington by the Bush administration, paid for by the NED. But nothing more substantial has yet been proven, and it is up to the critics to provide evidence.

As they turned out to be so wide of the mark, it seems wrong to spend too much time on the failings of sections of the Western press, except to say that their constant desire to change the story was impatient, imprudent and wrong. It was morally unacceptable to say that there was equal fraud on both sides, or that the Orange Revolution was just a battle of élites rather than of political cultures. These were precisely the myths propagated by the Ukrainian authorities' highly paid ‘technologists’ in their attempt to keep the old regime in power. The Western media all too often echoed the myth of an inevitably and fatally divided Ukraine62 that the same Russian technologists had laboured so carefully to construct. Finally, and possibly worst of all, there was far too much gainsaying on the critics' side, and far too little evidence and considered argument. The ‘real story’ does not suddenly appear just because some journalist decides to write it. Many of the Western harpies had the dubious honour of leading the news on the most partisan local channels, and of being reprinted in the press and on websites such as www.zadonbass.org.⁶³

The EU

There were others in the West who did not exactly welcome the Orange Revolution with open arms. Having been bounced by Poland into its dramatic intervention, a large part of the EU now seemed determined to insist that nothing had changed. The Poles were talking up the prospects of Ukraine's eventual full membership, but the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell Fontelles, a Spanish Socialist, in private attacked Polish and Lithuanian interference, which, he said, was ‘acting under the influence of the United States’.64 Even the mainstream EU position, which argued that the time was not right for symbolic declarations,⁶⁵ was a brush-off. Yushchenko, however, quite rightly realised that just after the Orange Revolution was exactly the time for symbolic declarations. Ukraine had a limited window of opportunity to make its newly prestigious presence felt, and it pursued a twin-track policy, signing up for an amended three-year Action Plan in February 2005, while focusing on what might then happen in 2008, in order to keep the process moving forward, even though the Action Plan again put the ball back in Ukraine's court. It was again up to Ukraine to deliver.

Yushchenko explicitly rejected the old tongue-twister term for Ukrainian foreign policy, ‘multi-vector-ness’. ‘I don't like this word,’ he said: ‘It's associated with the politics of President Kuchma, which caused problems in the East and an unintelligible position in the West.’⁶⁶ Ukraine still had plenty of friendships to maintain, but its foreign policy was now uni-directional, in so far as integration with the West was now its overriding priority. Ukrainian diplomats, especially Borys Tarasiuk and Oleh Rybachuk, began telling the West what it had long professed to want to hear: that Ukraine would now be predictable and credible, would deliver on its promises, and would maintain a ten-year programme to become ‘EU-compatible’, without, as often under Kuchma, periodically threatening to run to Russia instead. In the past, it was suspected that even the old opposition were playing lip-service to ‘European values’ as a means of joining the club. Now they had demonstrated European values in action: above all, those of civil society, peaceful demonstration and institutional continuity amidst peaceful change. Yushchenko explicitly stated that the new Ukraine's overriding recommitment to democratic values and the rule of law made the EU a more important target for it than NATO, and quite sensibly sought to play the ‘procedural’ game. In other words, he would aim to downplay high-flown rhetoric about Ukraine's crucial contribution to European history, and quietly get on with the job of reform. The 1999 EU ‘Common Strategy’ on Ukraine had stressed that all doors were open. Any European country which fulfilled the criteria (the so-called ‘Copenhagen Criteria’ drawn up in 1993) was a potential member. In return, Ukraine wanted the EU to drop the term ‘neighbourhood’ from its vocabulary, and to drop any idea of a ‘Russian veto’ on Ukraine's European Choice.

A rather different position was taken by the European parliament, which, on 13 January 2005, passed a resolution by 467 to 19 that called on ‘the Council, the Commission and the Member States’ ‘to meet the expectations and hopes raised by the European Union's close involvement in the peaceful Orange Revolution’, and ‘to consider, besides the measures of the Action Plan within the framework of the European Neighbourhood Policy, other forms of association with Ukraine, giving a clear European perspective for the country and responding to the demonstrated aspirations of the vast majority of the Ukrainian people, possibly leading ultimately to the country's accession to the EU’.67 This may have been a high-water mark of sorts. Apart from Poland and Lithuania, most EU states have no well-defined historical attitude to Ukraine – which means they are more likely to be swayed by changes in Ukraine itself. Northern and New Europe, plus often Portugal, which has a large community of new Ukranian migrant workers, form a loose group of eleven in favour of a broader relationship, while Mediterranean countries naturally tend to look to the south. France is the most hostile to eventual Ukranian membership, Germany a key swing state.

Ukraine thought it had missed the EU boat after the ten new members, Poland, Lithuania et al., were admitted in May 2004. It thought the Orange Revolution had put its ambitions back on track. The resounding rejection of the EU constitution in France and the Netherlands in May and June 2005 seemed to derail them again. No one could pretend this was good news for Ukraine.

Ukraine's path to NATO seemed more straightforward, given its previous history of successful cooperation under the Partnership for Peace scheme and the ‘Charter on a Distinctive Partnership’, signed between NATO and Ukraine in 1997. Admittedly, this had been taken as far as it could in the late Kuchma era, and Ukraine's NATO partners were now keen to move beyond joint exercises to a new era of in-service reform and technical upgrade to ease military compatibility. This would cost money, but Ukraine was confident that talks about membership might start as early as 2008. During the campaign, Yushchenko had already promised to lower military service to twelve months (nine months for graduates) as a first step towards creating a fully professional army by 2010. At the April 2005 NATO summit in Vilnius, Ukraine was offered an ‘Intensified Dialogue’ on Ukraine's aspirations to membership, if not yet on membership itself, and it was assumed the dialogue would get more intense once the March 2006 elections were out of the way (NATO still has a bad image in east Ukraine). Ukraine has a lot to offer NATO, heavy military transport planes in particular, but NATO basing in Ukraine might be a different story – provocative to Russia at the least.

Poland and ‘New Europe’

Poland's leading role in the EU mission to Kiev confirmed its vital importance to Ukrainian foreign policy. Despite an often troubled past, mutually warm relations now extend across the political spectrum in both countries. The right wing had buried several hatchets in the 1980s, when Solidarity and Rukh activists exchanged influence and ideas. At the time of the Orange Revolution, Poland was still governed by the main ex-Communist party, the SLD (the Union of the Democratic Left, which was in office from 1993 to 1997 and from 2001 to 2005), but this helped former Communists such as President Aleksander Kwásniewski (1995–2005) and Marek Siwiec, head of the National Security Bureau from 1997, to cosy up with the likes of Kuchma, and to point the way ahead. When he headed the EU mission to Ukraine, Kwásniewski brought a symbolic message about how the old guard can survive a round table process and ultimately prosper. Business relations were good.

The pro-Ukrainian position in Poland was therefore unlikely to be disturbed by the change of government that was likely in 2005. Some of the right-wing parties, such as the League of Polish Families and the populist Samoobrona (‘Self-Defence’), harboured elements that dwelt on the Polish–Ukrainian confrontations of the past (the sixtieth anniversary of the 1943 Volyn massacres, for instance, touched many raw nerves), but the mainstream alternative, the anti-corruption Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwóśc, usually referred to as PiS) and the neo-liberal Civic Platform, were, if anything, more romantically pro-Ukrainian, largely because the new Ukraine fitted the Polish world-view. According to one Polish commentator:

Ukraine, central Europe and the US share a common interest in the Ukrainian revolution's success: first, because all three share the same fundamental belief that liberal democracy is better than authoritarianism, including in its capacity to ensure stability; second, because they recognise that a liberal, independent, western-oriented Ukraine is the only long-term guarantee that Russia too will slowly start to shift in the same direction. The victory of this political fellowship and strategic perspective will mark the final defeat of the classic Franco–German, ‘old European’ view that the only way to deal with Russia is to flatter its leadership while ignoring or finessing its authoritarianism at home and imperial reflexes abroad. Even before Ukraine, it had been clear that this strategy was a failure: now, Russia needs from the west the language of liberal Anglo–Saxon democracy, not of continental raison d'etat.'68

Somewhat more bluntly, in the words Kwaśniewski is supposed to have used, ‘for every great power Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine’.⁶⁹

The Russian version of this view, propagated by the likes of Sergei Markov, is to imagine a Polish plot ‘to become the patrons of the whole of Central and Eastern Europe’,⁷⁰ and to regret the failure to play the ‘Polish card’ more vigorously before the second round: ‘I told them [the Yanukovych team] to use anti-Polish rhetoric.’⁷¹ (Lukashenka in Belarus was preparing a rabidly anti-Polish campaign for 2006.) In a historical perspective, anti-Polish propaganda played a big role in cementing east and central Ukrainians' loyalties to both imperial Russia and to the new Soviet state in the 1920s. On 2 December Mikhail Leontev of Russia's Channel One (formerly ORT, Civic Russia TV) cast doubt on the suspicious ‘enthusiasm of Ukraine's Polish and Lithuanian brothers to act as mediators in the post-election conflict’. ‘The motives of the Poles to [act as mediators in] Ukraine is transparent from Ukrainian history. The Poles have always been very active in Ukraine and today especially so … They want to appear as the Great Poland, and to do so is possible only on the bones of Ukraine.’ Russia was therefore simply reprising its seventeenth-century role of defending Ukraine, and President Kuchma, like the seventeenth-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, was ‘the great balancer between Russia and the West’.⁷² Russia, in other words, was again guilty of putting hard geopolitics before the politics of political culture.

Poland had also shown a good understanding of how the EU actually works. Before becoming a member in May 2004, Warsaw had to endure Jacques Chirac's patronising comments about the New Europeans being

‘infantile’ and ‘missing a good opportunity to stay quiet’ or keep their counsel (de se taire) over the Iraq war. Once inside, they could behave like the French and lead policy by the nose. Ironically, Ukraine could never afford to be as categorically anti-Russian as some of the New Europeans, but its basic instincts were clearly more in tune with its Western neighbours. Having dreaded the possibility of a hard border descending in the West after May 2004, there was now an obviously symbiotic relationship: Ukraine needed the east European lobby in Brussels and the east Europeans now found their foreign policy voice given extra weight. The new Ukraine naturally tends to have similar concerns to other east European countries. These include: a post-imperial emphasis on sovereignty; a post-communist suspicion that Russia is parleying economic power in the region for political power, a historical mistrust of great-power pragmatism, a tendency towards idealism as an antidote to historical marginalisation, which America is currently seen as embodying and Brussels abandoning for a narrowly technocratic method; and the corollary view that membership of the EU is a cultural achievement and not just a question of GDP per capita. With a much more recent experience of occupation and empire than most of Old Europe, most of New Europe is more prone to compromise rather than coercion; but there is also the experience of Munich and Yalta, an instinctive dislike of authoritarian states, such as Iraq under Saddam, and the argument that the threat of force still plays a role in international affairs. New Europeans, in Robert Kagan's formula, are more like the Americans from Mars than the Eurocrats from Venus,73 although given some of the paradoxical effects of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, there is much more instinctive respect for international law. Given the burgeoning relationship between Yushchenko and Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, Kiev could also usefully help clear up New Europe's backyard by reviving the part historical, part geopolitical idea of its central position in a Baltic–Black Sea alliance of like-minded states, including Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Georgia, it is hoped Moldova and also it is hoped one day Belarus.

Ukraine and America

That said, the distinction between Old and New Europe is often overdone, as is New Europe's often simplistically strident anti-Russianism. West Ukrainian nationalism is more anti-Russian than most, but the west Ukrainians are not the new masters in Kiev. Nevertheless, Ukraine shares the empathy for Washington that is currently much greater in Warsaw or Budapest than it is in Paris or Berlin. The ease with which Washington shrugged off Ukraine's gradual troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2005 showed that it could welcome the Orange Revolution from a broader perspective. According to one neo-conservative, Radek Sikorski, ‘The Iraq contingent is a small price to pay for [Yushchenko keeping his promise to withdraw]. Ukraine can be helpful elsewhere.’⁷⁴ The American reaction was partly to do with the power of media and personality politics in the US, but the Orange Revolution was also brilliantly timed to take advantage of fashionable democracy domino theory. More narrowly, some Cold War veterans and neo-conservatives welcomed anything that weakened Russia.

Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute greeted Yushchenko's final victory as a ‘happy day … for those of us who have long preached the power of democratic revolution’ and, conversely, had condemned America's past folly of ‘alliances with “friendly tyrants”’.75 These comments were difficult to fault, as were those of Ledeen's colleague, Radek Sikorski, who heads the AEI's New Atlantic Initiative, which is ‘dedicated to revitalising and expanding the Atlantic community of democracies’, and was set up in 1996:

Europe came close in 2004 to seeing a new curtain dividing it from north to south. Had the fraudulent result of the Ukrainian elections stood, the continent's geopolitical division would have gelled and the window of liberty in the former USSR would have closed. The line from the Barents Sea in the North, to the Black Sea in the South, along the eastern borders of Norway, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, and Romania, would have marked a division between democracies to its west, and post-Soviet ‘managed democracies’, that is to say kleptocratic dictatorships, to its east.⁷⁶

In his 2005 inauguration speech, President Bush declared that: ‘The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world … So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.’⁷⁷

Bush was also fond of the catchphrase, ‘democracy is not America's gift to the world, but God's gift to humanity’. As a self-proclaimed ‘values-based’ politician, Yushchenko was comfortable mimicking the same rhetoric, and that of some of Bush's predecessors, in a masterful speech to Congress, during which he echoed Ronald Reagan's famous Berlin speech in 1987 to say:

‘We do not want any more walls dividing Europe, and I'm certain that neither do you … Please make this step toward Ukraine. Please tear down this wall.’⁷⁸ Ukraine was well-placed to exploit the sometime contradiction between the universal principle of democracy for all and the realpolitik with which it is sometimes applied. There was no storm of protest after the blatant fixing of the 2003 Azerbaijani election. America has downplayed its democratisation policy in ‘frontline’ states such as the ‘Stans’ of central Asia. But Ukraine's new leader provided a perfect PR opportunity to advertise the success of the democracy export drive: he was articulate, brave and European. Not only was he granted a joint address to both houses of Congress in April 2005, with elderly senators chanting his name, but the vice-president, Dick Cheney, wore an orange tie in support.

More pragmatically, others welcomed Ukraine to the American-led ‘Supra-national Mega-coalition’ of the civilised world against its opponents.79 At one time, Ukraine had threatened to fall on the wrong side of this divide, as the Kuchma coterie grew notorious for selling arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as well as to China and Iran, and, supposedly, even to the Taliban. My Ukrainian friends wondered aloud if Ukraine might be the next to be included in Bush's ‘axis of evil’ list after his 2002 State of the Union address. Ukraine is also close to many areas of current American concern, such as the New Europe, central Asia and Georgia, and the potential ‘new democracies’ of the Middle East and the Levant. It could also help clean up some local ‘rogue states’ or quasi-states, most obviously the separatist ‘Dnister Republic’ in neighbouring eastern Moldova, a neo-Soviet wonderland and cesspit of corruption, which Kuchma and successive interior and customs ministers had helped prop up by participating in that corruption. Ukraine also has a role to play in local energy geopolitics, although hardly one important enough to support assertions that the Orange Revolution was all about oil.⁸⁰ Kiev hopes to find partners to reverse the recently constructed Odesa–Brody line, so that it would flow from south to north, as originally intended, to carry Caspian oil to Poland via Płock and Gdańsk and beyond. (In 2004 Kuchma had authorised ‘reverse use’, allowing Russian companies to supply a trickle of oil to Mediterranean countries.) Russia might also benefit from the new arrangement, via the proposed €2 billion German-Ukrainian-Russian energy consortium (Oil and Gas of Ukraine, Gazprom, and Ruhrgas). Long-term, it is hoped to extend the link eastwards to Central Asia or even Iran.

At the time of writing, the Orange Revolution is less often situated in reflex anti-Russianism and schadenfreude,⁸¹ though it has certainly emboldened many critics of Russia's less than perfect democracy. Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state under Clinton, argued for a rapid invitation for Ukraine to join NATO (within two years), but added a rather celebratory reference to 2004 as Putin's ‘annus horribilis’.⁸² Voices such as Pat Buchanan's, who asked ‘What are we up to in Ukraine?’, have also been somewhat isolated.⁸³

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Ukraine's annus mirabilis continued into 2005. Although progress was uneven at home, Ukrainians took immense pride in Yushchenko's every visit to Brussels, Washington or Davos. There was much hope of a new virtuous circle. Under Kuchma, Ukraine had grown diplomatically semi-isolated, and its domestic habits got worse. Brussels and Washington were reluctant to open the door until Ukraine internalised Western values in politics and business, and Ukraine was unwilling to reform until some kind of opening was made. The Orange Revolution in itself won Ukraine a higher regional profile; the more it lived up to its promise, the more effective a regional player it would be. And real international partnership with the West could reinforce the reform impulse at home. Balancing the relationships with Washington and Brussels might prove difficult, however. As a ‘new democracy’, Ukraine looked more towards America, as ‘new Europe’ it looked to the EU.

Ukraine is not a natural great power, or even a slumbering giant. Even Leonid Kuchma liked to repeat the myth that the Ukrainians, ‘in contrast to the Russians, are a benign and absolutely non-imperial nation’.84 Ukrainian leaders have always cut their cloth with more skill. But under Kuchma, the foreign policy élite acted all too often as though the world owed them a living. Under Yushchenko, Ukraine promised to raise its game. Russia destroyed the illusion of its local veto power by its ham-fisted intervention in 2004, and it is open to speculation what the New, New Europe might look like in ten years' time.