The Contest for Ukraine's Soul

November 19-21, 2004
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
by VLADIMIR SOCOR

Ukraine's presidential election runoff on Nov. 21 is the prologue to an approaching East-West contest -- not "over" Ukraine as is often said (as if this 48-million nation were a disputed object), but for this nation's European and indeed Euro-Atlantic future. For all its enormous geostrategic significance, the East-West contest in Ukraine is ultimately one within this nation's soul. To turn the contest in Russia's favor, Kremlin political operatives and Ukrainian government apparatchiks have organized the ugliest, most brutal and corrupt electoral campaign seen anywhere in the post-communist world since 1991.

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, an exponent of eastern Ukrainian industrial interests linked with the Russian market, is the Kremlin-preferred candidate to succeed Leonid Kuchma for a five-year term as president of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin is personally involved in this project. It is an alliance of convenience between Russian geopolitical interests and Ukrainian clan interests. The scenario, dubbed "Operation Successor" by Moscow political planners, is mainly designed to stop Ukraine's most popular politician, former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko, from winning the election, as he undoubtedly would in a free and fair campaign and balloting.

Mr. Yushchenko owes that popularity to successful economic reforms and anti-corruption measures he undertook while prime minister (1991-2001), to his vision of a Ukraine integrated with Europe, and to his appeal to Ukraine 's growing middle class and younger generations. The political bloc he leads, Our Ukraine, placed first in the 2002 parliamentary elections, though well short of a majority in parliament.

Opinion surveys, as well as exit polls during the October 31 first round of the presidential election, consistently showed Mr. Yushchenko as front-runner. He won the first round, probably by a 5% to 10% margin, according to exit polls and parallel vote-counts. However, official returns -- released by government-controlled election authorities after ten days, and widely suspected to have been tampered with -- credited him with a lead of less than one percent over Mr. Yanukovich.

Denied fair access to television channels (most of which are oligarch- and government-controlled); relentlessly assailed by those channels as well as by Russian television; prevented by the authorities (sometimes through deliberately staged incidents) from campaigning in populous eastern cities; and ultimately targeted by an apparent chemical attack that disfigured his photogenic face almost beyond recognition -- Mr. Yushchenko can still win an honest runoff.

Evidence of official fraud could trigger mass protests in Kiev and the western regions, where Mr. Yushchenko's and Our Ukraine's support is concentrated. Mr. Yanukovich's strongholds are in Russocentric eastern regions of Ukraine, where voter behavior is still substantially influenced by the administrative authorities, factory bosses, and signals from the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin has involved himself in the Ukrainian election campaign with a particularly heavy hand. He has collected, and rechanneled into the Yanukovich campaign via Russian operatives, hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from Russian energy companies. Top political consulting firms, which normally work for the Kremlin, descended on Ukraine to work for "Operation Successor."

Their directors made no secret of the geopolitical agenda that inspired their efforts. They declared publicly that Russia could not permit Ukraine ever to join NATO, or to outpace Russia in developing relations with the European Union, or to join the World Trade Organization instead of entering Russian-led economic unions. Moscow expects Mr. Yushchenko to pursue all these goals if he becomes president, and is counting on Mr. Yanukovich to do the opposite: freeze Ukraine's NATO aspirations, focus on integration in the "Single Economic Space" with Russia, and coordinate with Moscow in negotiating for joint accession to the WTO.

To maximize support for his candidacy in populous eastern Ukraine, Mr. Yanukovich has pledged to ask parliament to confer official status on the Russian language (on a par with the Ukrainian) and to introduce dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship, if he is elected. Such moves would weaken Ukrainian national identity, which is why the parliament is unlikely to approve them. Even Mr. Kuchma has tried to distance himself from these pledges (which he himself had made when first elected president in 1994, only to reverse his stance afterward).

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Putin held effusive meetings with Messrs. Kuchma and Yanukovich every few weeks, including visits to Ukraine a few days before the first round and midway between the first round and the runoff. Amply televised, those meetings were designed to mobilize Russia-oriented, Soviet-nostalgic voters in eastern Ukraine for Mr. Yanukovich by demonstrating that he is Moscow's favorite. Meanwhile, Russia' s Kremlin-controlled television channels (which are received throughout Ukraine) lacerated Mr. Yushchenko in pure Soviet style -- as an American agent, fascist-nationalist, and dangerous market reformer intent on taking away jobs and closing Ukrainian industries to serve Western interests.

Having suppressed democratization in Russia, Mr. Putin is now campaigning against it in one of Europe's largest countries, Ukraine. While international election monitors have severely criticized the Ukrainian authorities' conduct of the campaign, Russian election monitors have staunchly defended it as "democratic" (as they did the recent elections and referendum staged by dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko in neighboring Belarus).

At the end of such an unfair campaign, Mr. Yanukovich can win by a narrow margin even if the vote count is honest. But the authorities may be tempted to conclude that they still need to rob Mr. Yushchenko of a few percentage points in order to defeat him, however narrowly. This would be a worst-case outcome. It would trigger a storm of internal and international protests, isolate a fraudulently elected Mr. Yanukovich from the West, and leave him no choice but to rely on the Kremlin more heavily than he would ever have wished.

Mr. Socor is a senior fellow of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation, publishers of the Eurasia Daily Monitor.