Konstantin Zatulin, a deputy of the Russian State Duma, is Director of the Institute of CIS Studies.

Ukraine changed forever following its 2004 presidential election, as did relations between Moscow and Kiev. The bitter feelings that this situation produces are not related to Russia’s defeat in this battle, but to the helplessness of its political warriors. The mercenary fighters have dispersed, leaving the wounded Supreme Commander behind on the battlefield. The engineers of Russia’s political technologies are offering endless assurances that they were not responsible for losing Ukraine. Several politicians are rushing to Kiev in order to become associated with the “great victory on Maidan,” while the most ardent proponents of democracy are demanding that the Russian government provide material backing to the new Ukrainian authorities.
Does all of this equate to capitulation?

THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE

To understand what really happened, let us rewind a few years back and stop in the fall of 1999, the most heated period of Russia’s parliamentary election race. At that time, high stakes were involved in the battle for majority seats in the State Duma, not to mention the race for the presidency. A life and death struggle was underway in Russia. Obviously, the internal affairs of Russia’s neighbor seemed trivial at that time.

Meanwhile, on November 14 of the same year, the Ukrainians held the second round of their presidential election; President Leonid Kuchma received approximately 60 percent of the votes to emerge victorious against Petro Simonenko, the Communist Party leader. In other words, one month before the Russian elections, Kuchma had already secured for himself a second term of office.

Those elections in Ukraine were practically a full remake of the 1996 elections in Russia. Businessman Boris Berezovsky had propelled Russia’s political technologies to the celestial heights of Ukrainian politics. All the fine details of the plot had been replicated. In the 1999 election race, Yevgeny Marchuk, Ukraine’s equivalent of the late Russian General Alexander Lebed, had destroyed the coalition of non-Communist oppositionists. In the second round, Kuchma ran against Simonenko, Ukraine’s equivalent of Russia’s Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Eventually, the forces of progress triumphed over the ghosts from the past.
I do not want to sound too much like a Cassandra, but here is what I wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on the eve of the second round of the Ukrainian election 1999: “The main outcome of this election is the discrediting of democratic procedures taken per se, and its impact will be long lasting. Independent Ukraine has not yet seen such a scale of intimidation, threats and misuse of power. Whatever the finale of the second round may be, it holds no promise of ending the current crisis. On the contrary, it is fraught with increasing destabilization.”

This did not seem to worry President Kuchma in the least, however. After all, he did achieve the impossible. In 1994, he won the presidential race against a rival from western Ukraine much the same way his predecessor, Leonid Kravchuk, did in 1991. Kuchma came to power as a representative of the country’s Russian-speaking yet multi-ethnic eastern regions. Much like Kravchuk, he did not fulfill a single pre-election promise, but unlike his predecessor, he was re-elected.

All was quiet on the foreign policy front as well. On May 31, 1997, the Ukrainian and Russian presidents signed a bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership. This did not stop Kuchma, however, from signing a Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between Ukraine and NATO on July 9 of the same year. Those Russians who expressed their doubts over the sincerity of Kiev’s intentions were silenced by the ratification – on the eve of the 1999 election – of the Russia-Ukraine agreement in both houses of the Russian parliament.

Kuchma did not realize one thing, though: as soon as this document went into effect, at least one of the parties involved – the West, with the U.S. at the head – would not have a pretext any longer for closing its eyes to the corrupt practices of his administration. For Western strategy planners, Ukraine was more significant as a means for curbing Russia’s ambitions. Kuchma was tolerated for the simple reason that he – the winner of the Lenin Prize for missile construction – was the only man with whom Yeltsin’s Russia was ready to sign a document that would finally fix Ukraine’s independence despite its litigious state borders; the document also failed to outline any guarantees of friendship, parameters of cooperation, or terms of partnership. Once Kuchma finished his chores, he would be free to go. His task was to give way to a new, more advanced individual who would be more transparent for the West. This new politician was supposed to lead Ukraine into the next stage of divorce from Russia.

Soon, events began to look like a political blockbuster. First, there was the disappearance of the provocative journalist Georgy Gongadze, whose decapitated body was discovered in a beech forest outside Kiev. Next, a noble major of the security service, Mykola Melnichenko, recorded the president’s allegedly incriminating conversations and turned the tapes over to the ‘saintly’ oppositionist Alexander Moroz, who publicly accused the president of involvement in the murder of Gongadze. The major was then granted political asylum in the U.S. Pavlo Lazarenko, a former Ukrainian premier and also Moroz’s sponsor and employer of another prominent oppositionist, Yulia Timoshenko, was imprisoned in the U.S. at this time and disclosing the developments in Ukraine to U.S. investigators.

A campaign entitled “Ukraine Minus Kuchma” had begun. Condoleezza Rice called Kuchma “a Slavic Mobutu” [Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire from 1965 to 1997, became synonymous with corruption – Ed.] and, following in the footsteps of George Soros, revealed the name of a new Ukrainian Redeemer – Victor Yushchenko, still a prime minister and one of Kuchma’s disciples. Note that all of this occurred within less than a year after Kuchma had handed presidential powers to himself upon re-election.

THE PATHS WE CHOOSE

May the Lord save us from believing that all of these events were the product of some witty Jewish or Masonic or Polish-American plot. Throughout Ukraine’s independence, its authorities had been gathering brushwood for the fire with their own hands. The Americans simply grasped at the situation in order to implement replacement of yet another thieving Roh Tae Woo by a standard Kim Yong Sam – a regular martyr in the name of truth [the administration of the South Korean President Ro Tae Woo was engaged in financial machinations and President Kim Yong Sam came to power in 1992 – Ed.]. Both candidates sought friendship with the world’s only superpower (What else did they have to do?), but the superpower found the democrat more instrumental than the dictator who was mired in corruption. No personal affections – as another presidential term comes to an end, the situation will be replayed, although with different names in the cast.

It may be supposed that Russia could benefit from the experience of another nation like Ukraine, since both countries make up an inseparable part of each other’s past and present. The Russian-Ukrainian bond goes back centuries, and Ukraine was the last decisive factor in the disintegration of the unified Soviet state in 1991. Ukraine’s independence put Russia to a harsh test, as it had to abandon the most promising territory that was becoming oriented toward Europe. This caused contemporary Russia to draw back its borders to its present size. If independent Ukraine lacks a special union with Russia, its independence will unavoidably be placed on an anti-Russian foundation. Ukraine may then turn into a second Poland – an alien cultural and historical project that Russia will have to learn to deal with, or else Ukraine set about Russia itself.

There was nothing wrong about Putin taking up the glove that had been thrown to him. Nor was it wrong that Russia – which had been made a prey under Yeltsin and had ceded one position after another – decided to engage in the struggle. Staying away from the fight for Ukraine at a time when everyone else was flexing their muscles would have been foolish for Russia. But how should it have fought?

First of all, Russia owed nothing to Kravchuk or Kuchma. On the contrary, by fully supporting the democratization process in Ukraine, Moscow could have brought into the limelight the broad ranks of pro-Russian forces which Kiev had fervently black-painted for years and forced them into a semi-legal status. However, Moscow was unfamiliar with such an approach and thus chose a different genre of actions. (The Russian authorities are trying hard now to justify themselves by saying they “did not work with opposition forces anywhere in the CIS.” This argument does not stand up to criticism. History taught us such lessons: the slogan “Our Dignity Is in Fidelity,” Czar Nicholas I, the Holy Union, and the Crimean War as the final verdict.) The Kremlin assured itself that Kuchma was a guarantor of Russian-Ukrainian relations and rushed to rescue him at a time when he was being intimidated by boycotts, an investigation, possible imprisonment and general misery.

The Russian authorities made a correct decision to engage in struggle at a time when staying aloof was impossible; however, they staked their bets on the wrong horse – partly owing to the elite Putin had inherited. Over the previous years, it had made nice profits on questionable transactions with Ukrainian counteragents – in co-embezzling of natural gas and exports/imports of electoral technologies. On this point, I must quote another one of my own prophesies: “No doubt, any scenario poses certain risks for Russia, but they grow manifold if stakes are made on Kuchma, whose power is waning, as an option without an alternative. Sooner or later the West will force Kuchma to surrender to the mercy of Victor Yushchenko – that is, to the part of the opposition that is looking strictly westward. Russia’s present policy toward Ukraine is again making Putin’s strong Russia a hostage to Kuchma’s weak Ukraine” [Novaya Gazeta, November 11, 2002].

Thus, both of the main actors, the U.S. and Russia, made open stakes that ruled out any compromise. The Americans have poorer knowledge of Ukraine than the Russians do and it appears they wrote Kuchma off too early. But Washington had a durability resource from the very start – the Americans knew perfectly well what they had to do to reach their goals. Against this background, Russia’s inflexible policy still lacks an understanding of what can provide reliable guarantees of a “special relationship” with Ukraine.

That kind of relationship cannot be maintained through one-sided political or economic concessions. Nor can it be maintained through self-imposed moratoriums which are primarily concerned with defending Russia’s own interests in exchange for Ukraine’s gratitude. No agreement at the top, including support of the incumbent president or a friendly candidate for the post, will provide any definite guarantees. Nor will the successful advance of Russian finances on the Ukrainian market provide a guarantee of a special bilateral relationship; unlike Western businesses, the Russian business community has not yet learned how to secure national interests. Actually, there are only three guarantees of, and/or conditions for, genuine Russian-Ukrainian friendship, cooperation, and partnership: the democratization of Ukraine through decentralization and its transformation into a federation; acceptance of the Russian language as Ukraine’s second state language (to prevent a further assimilation of the Russian-speaking population); and the preservation of the Moscow Patriarchate’s influence amongst the numerous followers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, that is, maintaining the unity of the two countries in the religious sphere.

By securing a pro-Russian politician in the person of the incumbent president (Kuchma), Russia was not obliged to adopt his vision of things. Moscow should have used the extra time for securing guarantees in the post-Kuchma period. But Russia’s efforts were not evenly distributed in different directions. The Kremlin failed to work properly with Ukrainian political parties, public associations, political experts, journalists, regional elites and the population. Generally speaking, the executive is unable to address such complicated tasks without the support of parliament, political and expert communities and society in general. Russia’s lack of credible institutions within civil society, together with the lack of state support for their activities, resulted in Russia’s defeat against Western institutions, foundations, centers and grants in the battle to win over public opinion in Kiev. Political technologists tried to make up for the glaring inadequacy of Russia’s instruments of influence by using Putin’s popular ratings, as well as his active participation. The final result produced the unsettling image of an isolated warrior stranded on the battlefield. Apart from Putin’s efforts, individual officials from both countries maintained their contacts – or rather the pretences of contacts. But Russia’s numerous hands meddling in Ukrainian politics only served to spoil the soup. Instead of bureaucratic mobilization, discipline and accountability, the Russian authorities demonstrated chaos and departmental deviations from the general course. The damage was finally done, it seems, by the activities of the Russian embassy in Kiev where Victor Chernomyrdin is ambassador. He seemed to care for anything – especially the interests of his friends and clients, including Kuchma – except for ensuring Russia’s guarantees.
Ukrainian voters were regarded as target objects of more or less intricate political technologies that had replaced a clear strategy and understanding of the goals. Besides, the technologists were busy with self-promotion, which created an overblown impression of their importance and eventually did ill service to their clients. The bureaucrats were busy entertaining themselves at informal meetings, engaging in elaborate festivities, such as “The Year of Russia in Ukraine” and “The Year of Ukraine in Russia,” and indoctrinating ethnic Ukrainians living in this country. Eventually, they developed a feeling that genuine progress was being made in the Ukrainian direction.

The truth is, however, that all of the participants failed to perform properly.

IS UKRAINE NOT RUSSIA?

Although it is true that the U.S. and Europe competed against Russia for Ukraine, this does not mean that the main Ukrainian candidates simply performed as puppets. The eastern and western regions of Ukraine had their say in the story, as well.

Long before the end of the political drama, I commented that the people who were claiming that the 2004 election would predestine the future of Ukrainian democracy were either mistaken or simply lying. It predestined – inconclusively, as it appears – the future of Ukraine as an integral state, be it democratic or authoritarian. In the first round, Victor Yushchenko received popular support from a total of 16 western and central regions, in addition to the capital of Kiev. Victor Yanukovich emerged victorious in 9 regions of eastern and southern Ukraine, as well as in Sevastopol. The result was the same in the abortive runoff round and the repeat runoff, despite the betrayal of people responsible for the administrative resource and Kuchma’s flight from the Yanukovich camp.

Ukrainians voted for a friend versus a foe, not for a rightist candidate versus a leftist candidate. Yanukovich was considered to be a foe in the western regions, while Yushchenko had that reputation in the east. This split disrupted the candidates’ electoral strategies. Contrary to Yushchenko’s expectations, he did not succeed in uniting all of Kuchma’s adversaries in the eastern regions, while Yanukovich – despite being the Prime Minister – failed to represent the all-nation power for the voters in the western regions.

Once again, Ukraine split into two camps and painted itself different colors. Neither the U.S., nor Russia, nor the two candidates, nor the mythically omnipotent Russian political technologists, ever planned for such an event. As it turned out, no one proved able to draw conclusions from the genuine Ukrainian election of 1991 and 1994 (as I said above, the 1999 election was a total sham).

To understand why Ukraine’s political geography has not changed a bit over more than a decade of independence (the east and west, excluding rebellious Kiev, remain as staunch as ever), let us go back to the year 1991 when independence suddenly descended upon the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. At that moment, Ukraine became truly independent for the first time in its history, unless you count as “full-fledged statehood” the endless hetmans, military chiefs or directories during the years of the Russian Civil War [1918 to 1922 – Ed.]. (Strictly speaking, then, the Volga region, Siberia and the Far-Eastern Republic would have had equal reasons to claim state sovereignty.) No one but a handful of Ukrainian dissidents had ever dreamt of an independent Ukraine before, to say nothing of fighting for it with arms. Simply, the Ukrainian nomenklatura that stood at the helm at that time used the situation to fence itself off from the unpredictable restructuring and central government in Moscow.

The politicians of that time did not have any plan or program for building an independent state; they simply could not grasp the full idea of what was happening. Therefore, they borrowed an ideological base from their recent enemies, the secessionists of western Ukraine, who were historically alien to the concept of Russian-Ukrainian unity. Many people believed that the essential part of the new Ukrainian state was building a nation that would be independent of Russia.

This unwritten plan was clear to everyone in the West and was implemented with great persistence. Ukraine was supposed to reorient all of its relations from the East to the West, except for the inescapable economic ties. It was to renounce its plans of integration with Russia and replace them by integration with the West, including the most fantastic projects – with Poland or Turkey.  Ukraine was to compete with Russia for military and political influence in the post-Soviet space and bid for accession to NATO and the European Union, even though the latter organizations might not desire Ukrainian participation. An inalienable part of the plan called for the swift assimilation of Russians and other Russian-speaking residents. Due to this policy, between the 1989 and 2002 censuses, a quarter of the Russian population dissolved into a “unified Ukrainian nation.” To this end, the authorities slashed the number of Russian schools and the airtime of Russian radio and television programs. Moreover, the attempts of the eastern regions and the Crimea to claim original cultural or language identity were crushed.

Kravchuk and Kuchma, both candidates of the east-Ukrainian regions, were victorious against candidates from the west at the presidential elections. At the same time, both men squandered their chances, although at different periods of time and in different ways.

TWO UKRAINES

Ukrainian self-determination victimized the eastern regions. ‘Ukrainizers’ felt apprehension toward those territories, as well as the Crimea and some southern regions adjoining the Black Sea. They denied their population the right to read and think in their native tongue, forcing their children to read books, for example, by Ukrainian-born, Russian-language writer, Nikolai Gogol, in Ukrainian translations. People in the east and south who were accustomed to living in a single political and cultural space with Russia for centuries, now saw that the newly built state was put on a completely hostile foundation. On the face of it, they had to pay for the adventures ordered by others. Suffice it to say that two eastern regions, Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk, account for more than a quarter of Ukraine’s budget revenues. The east was to become restive sooner or later: naturally, it would desire to command the adventures it was supposed to pay for.

The east rebelled during the recent election campaign. While filling out the blank of a presidential candidate’s application in Ukrainian, Prime Minister Yanukovich made two mistakes in his job title, producing chuckles in the mass media supporting Victor Yushchenko. They chuckled in vain – the Russian-speaking east, where people write in Ukrainska Mova [the Ukrainian language] with mistakes, realized Yanukovich was their man.

During the first phase of the campaign, Yanukovich, who had a dubious blessing from Kuchma and engaged in ritual chat about the need for stability and the European choice, looked a mere figurant in Yushchenko’s triumphant march. Yet Yanukovich derived benefits from attacks by his opponents. Furthermore, when he dropped mentions of Europe and NATO, stressed his links with Russia, advocated an official status for the Russian language and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship, the election race went down a completely different road. Yanukovich acquired a political image of his own and won the votes in the eastern regions, the Crimea and southern territories, securing a solid place in the second round of elections.

The eastern regions are more heavily populated than the western ones, and Yanukovich’s victory in the second round was natural and predictable, whatever his opponents would say of it. The fact that victory was eventually stolen from him is explicable, too.

First of all, Kuchma played a significant role in it. He had chosen Yanukovich, a man with a questionable history, in the hopes it would complicate the situation and help him eventually regain the reins of power (the fact that Yanukovich finally rejected the role of a stuntman is a different story). How Kuchma could have hoped to unite his country after all that had befallen Ukraine during his presidency, and in the face of a battle for his country between a former superpower and the surviving superpower, is a great question. His lethargy, duplicity, vain reveries and under-the-table dealings dealt an irreparable blow to Yanukovich and made Kuchma himself a loser.
Secondly, the population of the eastern regions – their economic and political elite and Victor Yanukovich himself as a candidate – did not have the experience and stamina of western Ukraine. Yanukovich retained the bulk of his electorate even after the national parliament, Supreme Court, and a cohort of international mediators had driven it home to the population that their candidate’s victory could not be recognized and that the voters would have to return to the polls again. However, the results of the repeat runoff vote showed a 3-percent increase in the already improbable voters’ turnout in western Ukraine, while in the eastern regions it fell by an average of 5 percent. (In Donetsk, a city trying on the role of a leader of the eastern and southern regions, the number fell a whole 13 percent, while in the Crimea, which is used to making a stand against Kiev, it fell by 3 percent.) This percentage is not very high, yet it was enough to make Yushchenko the winner – at least according to the terms of the Electoral Commission counting.

NEW HORIZONS OF RUSSIAN POLITICS

To sum up, Yushchenko and the West won, while Russia and Yanukovich were disgraced and suffered considerable losses. What is next? Should we deliver public apologies and send Ambassador Victor Chernomyrdin to Kiev, the “mother of all Russian cities,” with gifts such as sable furs and loans? I am not at all sure. The most important result of the 2004 presidential election is Ukraine’s split, and it shows that the country will unavoidably turn into a federation.

The guarantee that Ukraine will maintain a special relationship with Russia lies in its federalization rather than in the ascendancy of one or another candidate. At the very least, federalization would prevent Ukraine’s consolidation around anti-Russian forces or its rise to a position where it would offer competition to Russia and obstruct the reemergence of its influence. Such a role is already being planned for Ukraine by those who applaud Yushchenko from across the borders. The new president happily signs Carpathian declarations with Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili, declaring “the third stage of liberation in Eastern Europe.”

What the Ukrainian government needs is a timeout, a transitional period. Yulia Timoshenko has never made a secret of her wish to cast out the political reform that had paved the way to a package agreement on the eve of the decisive battle. If she succeeds – and there is plenty of time before the reform takes effect September 1, 2005 – the Orange will not have to worry much about a revenge of the Blue-and-White in the March 2006 parliamentary election. More important for the Orange is to secure their freedom of action to mop up the political space in the eastern and southern districts. That is, “implant civil society in the east” in the terms of Yushchenko’s political technologists. This is no wonder, considering that Yushchenko is president of only one-half of his country.

This is exactly why Moscow was Yushchenko’s first official state visit as president. Of course, he had to be received here. But let us not believe all he said. Instead, let us consider what he kept silent about. Now Russia has a unique opportunity to make an official pause – for the first time since Ukraine received its independence – and allow its new president to demonstrate his interest in it. Had Yanukovich emerged victorious, Moscow would have had to redouble its assistance in solving Ukraine’s economic problems, while at the same time putting up with the inevitable presidential overtures toward the West. For the first time ever, Russia can afford a pragmatic approach.

We need that pause to formulate an agenda for the new Russian-Ukrainian dialog. The agenda, however, must not affect the efforts of political forces inside and outside parliament, nor of Russian society’s abilities to maintain brotherly ties with Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions and the Crimea. A consolidation of the south and east of Ukraine, together with the promotion of the ideas of autonomy and federation, will help disrupt any attempts to unite both parts of the country around an anti-Russian program. As for the southern and eastern regions, they will have the right to veto in determining their future.

A broad support of those efforts constitutes the new horizons of Russian policy in Ukraine. Its implementation should involve the entire Russian state and society.