“Let’em fight it out in Kiev”
From an e-mail to me ….
My relatives in Ukraine are absolutely sick of politics and have the attitude of “let’em fight it out in Kiev as long as it doesn’t affect us”.
My whole take would be rather pro-Russian, so I am very much opposed to Yuschenko and/or Timoshenko. But I don’t believe Yanukovich is pro-Russian, he is merely Kuchma #2. The whole “West vs. Russia” framework got forced on Ukrainian events by western media, which allowed the minority of Ukrainian nationalists to hijack the legitimate protest of the majority against Kuchma’s corruption (and Yanukovich was believed to be a Kuchma follower, with more of the same) and turn it into another attempt to tear Ukraine away from the Russian influence.
That is the basic reason for the ultimate failure of the “Orange revolution”. Once normal Ukrainians realized that they are being led down the nationalist path as part of the package, the support for the orangists collapsed and Yanukovich’s party easily won parliamentary elections.
But that doesn’t remove from Yanukovich the stigma of Kuchma’s corruption or his own questionable character.
It must be pointed out that the oligarchs from the Yanukovich camp are probably the paragon of honesty compared to the greedy and unprincipled sons of bitches in the Timoshenko camp. Mostly because the former have already looted enough, and the latter are just getting started.
I am of two minds about the events. On the one hand, Kuchma #2 would’ve been better for the country economically. On the other, the defeat that the East and South of Ukrainian suffered from the nationalist orangists served as a wakeup call to a large degree.
Eastern Ukrainians are basically coming to a realization that they’ve been raped by the nationalist West ever since independence. While being the industrialized part of the country and providing most of the national GDP, thus subsidizing the economically backward West, in exchange they are undergoing forced Ukrainization and are being fed chauvinist fairy tales designed to develop a national inferiority and permanent victimhood complex, just like that in Poland.
So the East is giving up on the central government and is taken things in its own hands, most especially by instituting Russian as an official language at the regional level, in defiance of threats from Kiev. I think it’s all for the better in the long term.
As for current events, it’s nothing but a desperate gamble of Yuschenko to save the power that was slipping away from his grasp. He has failed already. If Yanukovich doesn’t win in the standoff, Timoshenko will. Yuschenko has practically no supporters of his own left.
