Yushchenko's Formidable Challenge

Ukraine's Opposition Leader Needs to Win Converts In Russian-Speaking Regions
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
Wall Street Journal, 20 December 2004

YALTA, Ukraine -- Pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko has a comfortable lead in the opinion polls ahead of Ukraine's presidential election. But he still faces a formidable task even if he wins on Dec. 26: reassuring the country's Russian speakers that he isn't as bad as they fear.

Confronting fervent anti-Yushchenko sentiment in Ukraine's Russian-speaking eastern and southern regions -- the base of support of his opponent, Moscow-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych -- has emerged as a central goal of the Yushchenko campaign now that election-law changes have substantially reduced the chance of fraud that marred the Nov. 21 vote, since annulled by the nation's supreme court. If he fails to win at least some support here, Mr. Yushchenko may face big obstacles governing a bitterly divided country, including the prospect of a renewed separatist movement.

Knowing that the key to success lies in the east, Mr. Yushchenko Friday relaunched the campaign by visiting Harkiv, the biggest city of eastern Ukraine -- the same day Mr. Yanukovych also arrived in town. Mr. Yushchenko used the occasion to pledge during a visit to a Harkiv tank factory that he won't make any moves to restrict the use of Russian language in Ukraine and that he will seek good relations with Moscow.

Mr. Yanukovych had been crisscrossing eastern and southern Ukraine all last week, painting himself as the leader of the real opposition and the only true patriot determined to defend Ukraine from a specter of American domination.

The difficulty of winning converts to Mr. Yushchenko's so-called orange revolution is apparent in the Crimea peninsula city of Yalta, a balmy resort long synonymous with Europe's Cold War divide, sealed at a 1945 conference when U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin agreed to Soviet domination of eastern Europe. Crimea, which Soviet rulers transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, is the only Ukrainian region where ethnic Russians make up a majority of the population -- and where many view a likely Yushchenko victory as a sellout to the still-hated U.S.

At a recent rally on Yalta's beachfront promenade, pro-Yanukovych protester Alla Danchenko shouted, "We want to live in friendship with Russia , and America is paying Yushchenko to break us apart."

While Mr. Yanukovych was said to have beaten Mr. Yushchenko by three percentage points nationwide last month, according to now-overturned results, he carried Crimea with 82% of the vote, an edge that even local opposition leaders say was only marginally inflated by falsification.

Mr. Yushchenko's supporters have reasons to be optimistic about the new election. Opinion polls predict he is likely to beat Mr. Yanukovych by a margin of between five and 10 percentage points. The opposition leader has said that he aims to win at least 60% of the nationwide vote -- a landslide that would render irrelevant the precinct-by-precinct legal challenges that Mr. Yanukovych's campaign is preparing.

Ukraine's Parliament has severely curtailed the two most widespread methods of fraud: the use of absentee ballots and the voting at home, rather than at a precinct. Local election commissions were revamped to provide equal representation for both candidates, and the Central Election Commission member who publicly opposed falsification in the Nov. 21 vote now supervises the body. Also, national TV stations no longer slant their news coverage against Mr. Yushchenko.

Still, in Mr. Yanukovych's strongholds, residents have been subjected for months to a barrage of negative propaganda that distorted Mr. Yushchenko's views. Just a few weeks ago, official newspapers in Crimea published what they described as Mr. Yushchenko's electoral program -- topped by a pledge to turn the country into an American military base. And almost every household in Crimea has received a forged electoral leaflet in which Mr. Yushchenko purportedly promised to expel all ethnic Russians from the peninsula. "I will never get Russian votes, and Russians have no place in our country," the leaflet says. Mr. Yanukovych, by contrast, pledged to make Russian the second official language and to allow dual citizenship with Russia .

To counter the anti-Yushchenko feeling, last week his campaign launched a motor rally by pop stars and TV personalities who plan to travel across eastern and southern Ukraine, and who reached Crimea during the weekend, after an hours-long standoff with Mr. Yanukovych's supporters who blocked the highway into the peninsula. Mr. Yushchenko recorded some of his latest campaign commercials in Russian.

And in Yalta, Mr. Yushchenko's local campaign chief, Oleg Zubkov, is trying an unorthodox approach. He has turned the local zoo that he owns into a center of the outreach effort, bedecking the cages with orange ribbons, allowing free entry and distributing campaign literature between stunts with lions and tigers.

Seeing a group of visitors to the zoo on a recent morning, he lost no chance to proselytize: "About this election...you are being lied to. Don't believe all these rumors about Yushchenko."

Too polite to argue, the visitors smiled silently. Later, one of them, a retiree named Appolinaria Yakovleva, confided that the free trip to the zoo hasn't quite swayed her views. "I am still for Yanukovych," she said. "I have seen so many nice things about him in newspapers and on TV."

As Mr. Zubkov organized a Yushchenko demonstration under a huge Lenin monument that still dominates Yalta's main square, a counter-demonstration of similar size immediately coalesced nearby, mostly by elderly women outraged that a Yushchenko event could occur in this city at all.

"Americans have a toxic-waste problem," said one of the counter-demonstrators, Vladimir Kostenko. "If Yushchenko wins, they will shut down all our mines, making our people jobless, and will use the mines to store the American toxic waste instead."

Protected by a row of police, Mr. Zubkov concluded the rally after a half-hour of speeches and led his supporters on a march through Yalta's main street, where hostile glares greatly outnumbered welcoming waves. Back under the Lenin monument, local teenagers lined up to pick up Mr. Yushchenko's campaign newsletters at the orange tent -- only to burn them a few feet away.

Mr. Zubkov, himself an ethnic Russian who immigrated to Ukraine only in the 1980s, concedes that efforts to portray Mr. Yushchenko as an enemy of Russian-speaking Ukraine have been effective. "For the government, it was easy to shape people's opinions with all this outlandish lunacy," he says. "And once an opinion is formed, we need 10 times the effort to change it."