The Dirtiest Trick

Sunday, Dec. 12, 2004 By YURI ZARAKHOVICH | KIEV
FACE OF VICTORY: Yushchenko is thought likely to win the runoff this month, but the poisoning has taken its toll on his health. He is seen here, left, in July 2004 and earlier this month.
GLEB GARANICH/REUTERS; YURI KOZYREV FOR TIME
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The struggle isn't over — and Yushchenko knows his life expectancy may be diminished — but he has reason for optimism. He is feeling better, and the electoral reforms met his key demand: reducing the number of absentee ballots from 4% to 0.5% of the electorate, overhauling the Central Electoral Commission, and firing its disgraced chair. The opposition agreed that the President would no longer have the power to appoint his Cabinet, though he retains the right to nominate such key posts as Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defense Minister.

Few doubt that Yushchenko will have the votes to prevail, but he still needs to get people to the polls. So he urged the activists in Independence Square to begin working on the campaign, and the crowd thinned out last week. But a hardy band remains, and they say they're staying put until Yushchenko becomes President. Some of the makeshift shelters that popped up in late November have been replaced by large, army-issue tents, and Independence Square even has its own daily newspaper, the Revolution, a leaflet of resistance news.

Yanukovych, the beneficiary of the vote-rigging, broke with his patron Kuchma and denounced the reform package; even some Yushchenko allies were against it. Yulia Timoshenko, a radical opposition leader, refused to vote on it. "This reform strips the President of powers he needs to deliver on his promises to the people," she fumed.
But Mikhailo Svistovich, an activist with the opposition group Pora, has a more positive view. The electoral reforms are incorporated into the law, he says, while the constitutional changes must be reviewed by the next Parliament — and could be modified. "The point is, we've been fighting for honest elections — and it's honest elections we're getting now," says Svistovich.

In Donetsk in the industrial heartland of the east, some 700 km from Kiev, anger about the election's annulment is still rife. Most people here voted for Yanukovych, and for nine nights running, demonstrators gathered in Lenin Square to denounce "the vile Americans who hired their vile agent Yushchenko to split Ukraine and grab it piecemeal," as one recent speaker put it. Leading eastern politicians are threatening to secede and join Russia if Yushchenko wins. Says Alexander Zats, a member of the Donetsk regional legislature: "Should our legitimate concerns be ignored, the people may take matters into their own hands."

In western Ukraine, Yushchenko's ascendancy has ended the region's traditional separatism. For the first time in the history of Ukraine, says Ihor Derzhko, deputy chair of the regional legislature in Lviv, "the orange revolution has fused us with the rest of the country." Derzhko believes the east's succession threats are a political ploy to wrench concessions from the new government.

Those threats are a powerful weapon for the Kremlin, though for now Russian President Vladimir Putin is talking sweet. On Friday, he told visiting Spanish PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero that he "could only be pleased" if Ukraine were to be welcomed into the E.U. "Ukraine's turned out to be Putin's worst failure," says one official in Moscow. If Putin fails to install Yanukovych and thus "loses" Ukraine, the official says, his domestic position will be undercut. "Putin will strike back," he says. "But except for encouraging eastern separatism, he does not have a lever to work."

For now, Putin must wait like everyone else for the outcome of the election. The future will depend on how quickly and thoroughly Yushchenko can flush the toxins out of his system — and whether Ukraine's body politic can do the same.