Strongman

by Roxburgh, Angus

  It should be said that this assessment is precisely the opposite of what the opposition themselves (and most Western observers) believed: that the media were totally controlled by the government, and served a consistent diet of pro-Russian views.

  Markov gave this outlandish assessment of the opposition candidate. ‘We were firmly of the opinion that Yushchenko was completely controlled by his wife, and she belonged to a circle of radical Ukrainian nationalists connected with the Nazi movement and with, not so much the American special services, rather with circles of various East European diasporas, especially the Poles, who hate Russia as only Polish nationalists can. I was certain that Yushchenko, as a weak person, would totally carry out the programmes of these radical nationalists, whose aim was to create the maximum conflict between Ukraine and Russia – even a small war. In order to cause a quarrel between these fraternal nations, the Russians and Ukrainians, blood had to be spilt. I am convinced that these people were determined that Ukrainians and Russians should start killing each other – and I mean killing each other.’

  These are quite astonishing claims, but they are important, for it is highly likely that Markov’s apocalyptic view was shared by his masters in the Kremlin.

  At the same time, the Russians were fully aware that Yushchenko had a big chance of winning, and made strange undercover overtures to his team. Oleh Rybachuk was Yushchenko’s campaign chief, and future chief of staff. He says he received a call out of the blue from an old student friend whom he had not seen for 24 years. ‘When he called me I knew he was in the KGB. He suggested that I come to Moscow to meet people who were close to Vladimir Putin.’5

  Over the next month and a half Yushchenko’s adviser made weekly visits to Moscow, meeting ‘in dimly lit restaurants and speaking in whispers’. The Russians wanted to know what Yushchenko would do if elected. Rybachuk told them: ‘Our policies are simple. We want to be a democratic country, a European country. We want to be a NATO member for European security. When we come to power we won’t be a problem because you’ll know what to expect from us.’ It was hardly the reassurance the Kremlin was hoping for.

  On 5 September, just two months before election day, Yushchenko fell seriously ill after a dinner with the head of the Ukrainian security service. He took painkillers when he got home, but in the morning was feeling worse. Rybachuk recalls: ‘It was around ten in the morning and he said, “Let’s have this meeting fast because I feel really bad. Something’s not right.” ’ The cause of the pain could not be found and after three days Yushchenko was flown to a private clinic in Vienna where he was diagnosed with dioxin poisoning. The poison caused stomach ulcers, problems with his spleen and considerable disfigurement to his face.

  ‘I remember waking up in the clinic at 5.30 in the morning,’ Yushchenko recalled, ‘and half of my face was paralysed, and within three hours I could barely make a sound. I was losing my speech. Every morning I looked in the mirror and my face was getting bigger and bigger.’6

  For two weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko stepped into the breach, addressing rallies and blaming Yushchenko’s enemies for ‘cynically poisoning him’. When he finally returned to the campaign trail he was more popular than ever, the scars on his once handsome face visible proof of his enemies’ desperation. Thanks to Channel 5 – a television station owned by a wealthy businessman in Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party – his words were broadcast live to public squares across the country: ‘The last two weeks, dear friends, have been the most tragic in my life.’

  Moscow had to step up a gear now to promote its candidate, who was trailing in the opinion polls. On 9 October Putin invited Kuchma and Yanukovych to Moscow at short notice – to celebrate his recent birthday. The television coverage was designed to demonstrate how chummy they all were, in the hope that some of Putin’s stardust would land on Yanukovych’s dowdy shoulders.

  ‘Thank you for responding to my invitation to come at such short notice,’ Putin gushed. ‘It’s a good pretext.’

  ‘It’s a wonderful pretext,’ the Ukrainians gushed back. With the cameras still on him, Kuchma took the chance to sound presidentially ‘neutral’ while warning his countrymen back home that, as Eduard Shevardnadze might have said, the sun rises in the north: ‘When I am asked about our two main presidential candidates, I reply that for me it’s not so much a question of who but of what will be after the election. Which path will Ukraine take? The tried and tested one we have today, which has given results – even if our countrymen perhaps do not fully feel those results – or the path that will scupper everything that’s been done these past ten years, and put everything in doubt? I think our meeting [with Putin] will help to push things in the right direction.’

  Lest anyone was in any doubt, Putin then travelled to Ukraine for a three-day visit at the end of October – an unprecedented intervention right on the eve of the first round of the election. He did not need to do anything so crude as to publicly praise Yanukovych or disparage Yushchenko. His very presence was a reminder of what was most at stake in this election, and everyone knew who the pro-Russia candidate was. Putin began with a live interview simultaneously broadcast on three Ukrainian state television channels, to which viewers could phone in or email their questions. Over the next two days he held talks with the leadership and stood beside Yanukovych at ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of Ukraine’s liberation (by the Russians) from Nazi occupation. The spin doctors were doing a pretty good job. And at this stage the Russians were firmly convinced that Yushchenko stood no chance of being elected.

  But polling on 31 October proved them wrong. Yushchenko emerged fractionally ahead of Yanukovych, with both taking just under 40 per cent. A run-off between the two leading candidates was required, and this was set for Sunday 21 November.

  In that second round, an exit poll paid for by Western embassies put Yushchenko 11 percentage points ahead of his rival. But official results put the prime minister three points ahead. The result was denounced by Western election observers who said they had witnessed abuse of state resources in favour of Yanukovych. Yushchenko’s campaign chief, Oleh Rybachuk, recalls: ‘I was voting in a small polling station in the centre of Kiev. There were always very few people voting there, but on the day of that election there was a sudden queue of people with additional voting slips, who had arrived from the Donetsk region [Yanukovych’s heartland]. There were more of them than there were Kiev people who came to vote at their own polling station!’

  The fraud was so evident that Yushchenko supporters began to pour into Independence Square (known as Maidan) in central Kiev, setting up a tent city where they planned to sit it out until the result was changed. Orange became the colour of the revolution – chosen rather than the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag in order to avoid nationalist overtones. Over the next week or so, a million people joined in, besieging government buildings.

  Vladimir Putin, however, immediately rang Yanukovych to offer his congratulations. ‘It was a sharp fight,’ he said, ‘but an open and honest one, and your victory was convincing.’ Apart from ‘sharp’, every adjective could scarcely have been further off the mark. Being charitable, one might point out that he was in Brazil at the time, and maybe out of the loop. But what were his intelligence services telling him? His adviser Gleb Pavlovsky says it was no mistake, but a deliberate attempt by Putin to challenge the West in what he describes as an ‘international fight’ over the election result. ‘The congratulations served as a political signal. The fight for recognition of the results had started, and Putin took part in that fight. In the end, Russia lost, but if it had not, the result would have been different.’

  President Kuchma was paralysed. His capital city was witnessing the biggest display of people power Europe had seen since the fall of communism. He toyed with the idea of using force to remove the protestors, hoping all the while that the sub-zero temperatures would drive them away. They did not, and the demonstrators themselves remained entirely peaceful to avoid provoking violence. In t
he early hours of 23 November Kuchma called President Kwaśniewski of Poland for advice. ‘He was incredibly nervous,’ Kwaśniewski recalls, ‘and kept repeating, “I will not allow blood to be spilt here” – two or three times. He asked me to go to Kiev. I said, “It’s the middle of the night, I’ll see what I can do by morning.” ’7

  In the morning Kwaśniewski called Tony Blair. Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, recalls: ‘He was urging Tony to go with him to Kiev. But Tony was reluctant to do that because the Russians had this obsession that we were trying to surround them, that the West was moving into their sphere of influence. Tony decided not to do it.’

  The Polish president pulled together a European Union mission to mediate between the two candidates and President Kuchma. They would travel to Kiev by the end of the week. But events were moving fast.

  On Tuesday 23 November Yushchenko declared himself the winner and symbolically took the presidential oath. His running-mate Yulia Tymoshenko impetuously announced she would lead a march on the presidential administration, declaring, ‘Either they will give up power or we will take it.’ Her call provoked a row within the team. Rybachuk told her: ‘You shouldn’t be provoking the crowds like that. What if somebody gets killed?’

  ‘Then they’ll die as heroes,’ she replied, according to Rybachuk.

  The next day the Central Election Commission officially declared that Yanukovych had won. The United States, which had invested so much in trying to ensure a fair election, had to decide what to do in the face of such apparently blatant manipulation. The secretary of state, Colin Powell, recalled in an interview: ‘I came into the office while all this was unfolding and called in my team, and I said, “Look, this is too big. We cannot simply stand by and say nothing and put out mealy-mouthed statements.” ’ He went down to the press room and made a statement that set Washington at odds with Moscow: ‘We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse.’

  On his way back from his Latin American trip, President Putin stopped in at The Hague for a summit with EU leaders, where he picked up the gauntlet. ‘We have no moral right to push a big European state into any kind of mass disorder,’ he said. ‘We should not allow the resolution of such conflicts through mob rule to become part of international practice.’

  Behind the scenes, it seems that Putin was advising Kuchma to get a grip and clear the crowds from the streets. Asked about it in an interview, Kuchma admitted: ‘Putin is a hard man. It wasn’t like he was saying directly, “Put tanks on the street.” He was tactful in his comments. But there were some hints made, that’s no secret.’ The hints were evidently rather heavy, and Kuchma had to insist: ‘I will not use force to clear demonstrators from the Maidan. Because I know there are children there, and it’s obvious how it would end.’8

  On the Friday, five days after the election, the EU mission arrived in Kiev, led by Kwaśniewski and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. But as a million Yushchenko supporters waited patiently in the streets, some 40,000 miners from Yanukovych’s heartland, Donetsk, were marching on Kiev. Kwaśniewski told Kuchma: ‘What are you saying? This means a massacre! I am telling you that if this happens I go straight to the airport with Solana, and we will hold a huge press conference in Brussels where we will accuse you of starting a civil war in Ukraine.’

  Kuchma took the necessary measures to prevent disaster. ‘I have leverage with influential people,’ he recalled later. ‘We just managed to stop them.’

  Before the mediation talks began Kuchma put through a call to President Putin in Moscow to stress that the Round Table must have a Russian representative present. Putin proposed sending Boris Yeltsin, which sounded like a joke to Kwaśniewski. He told Kuchma: ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but I can’t treat this seriously, because much as I appreciate Yeltsin and I enjoyed working with him, we want to have serious talks, not a show.’9

  Putin sent a trusted functionary instead – Boris Gryzlov, a former interior minister and chairman of the State Duma, whom Putin had just made head of his party, United Russia. Gryzlov’s contribution to the talks was scarcely more productive than Yeltsin’s might have been. Yushchenko says the tension was overpowering. ‘I knew I was the last person Russia wanted as president. These falsifications, the way the Russians were taking an interest, their slanted position during the election, this interference in Ukrainian internal affairs ... it was obvious to all.’

  Gryzlov’s starting point, according to Kwaśniewski, was that Yanukovych was president, and that all the stories about irregularities were a waste of time, stirred up by foreign forces. There was nothing to talk about and the Round Table made no sense.

  Yushchenko and Yanukovych each accused the other of rigging the vote in different constituencies. Someone suggested that overall the vote wasn’t forged by more than 10 per cent. Kwaśniewski says he looked at him and said: ‘Okay, put that in your constitution, then – that if an election is not forged by more than 10 per cent, it’s valid!’ Gryzlov then referred to the US presidential election of 2000, when the final outcome depended on hanging chads and a recount in Florida, and suggested that, like the Americans, they should just accept an apparently flawed result and agree to it. ‘Let’s stick with the constitution.’

  There was stalemate in the talks. Kwaśniewski knew that only one man could break the deadlock. He asked the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to talk to Putin. ‘I said: “You know Putin. Tell him – if you persist in claiming that this is some artificial movement, financed by Western forces, which has no legitimacy, and that the elections were not rigged, then you’re getting it wrong; it means you don’t understand the seriousness of this situation.” ’

  Schröder called Putin – but got an earful. Putin believed he understood the situation perfectly well, much better than Kwaśniewski and his EU mission. Schröder reported back to Kwaśniewski that it was one of the hardest calls he had ever had with Putin.

  It is not clear what effect Schröder’s call had, or what Putin may have subsequently said to Kuchma. But on Sunday evening, one week after the election, the US embassy received news that the worst was about to happen: heavily armed police units were being sent in to disperse the demonstrators. Ambassador Herbst called Washington and told them, ‘I think Secretary Powell needs to call President Kuchma.’

  Powell was told that interior ministry troops were massing on the outskirts of the city. ‘I tried to call the president, but he suddenly wasn’t available.’ Kuchma explained in an interview that the reason he refused the call was because it was 3am and he had no interpreter available for the conversation. In the meantime the ambassador got through to Kuchma’s son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, and told him: if any repression happens tonight, we will consider Kuchma personally responsible.

  The troops were called off. When Powell finally got through to the president in the morning Kuchma told him nothing would happen: it was a ‘false panic’. But he added, ‘Mr Secretary of State, if the White House was surrounded as our presidency and government offices are at this moment, what would you do?’ Powell, according to Kuchma, had no answer.

  Kuchma was becoming ever more desperate and was now prepared to ditch his own man as well as Yushchenko and hold a fresh election with new candidates. He says: ‘If Yanukovych had become president then, Ukraine would have become a pariah state. There was all that pressure from the street. Plus the diplomatic blockade from the West, especially the USA.’

  But nothing could be done without Moscow’s blessing. On Thursday 2 December Kuchma flew to Moscow for consultations with Putin at Vnukovo airport. Putin seemed to give his backing to the idea. ‘Re-running the second round [with Yanukovych and Yushchenko] might also achieve nothing,’ he told Kuchma. ‘You’ll end up doing it a third, a fourth, and a twenty-fifth time, until one side gets the result it needs.’

  Putin spoke of his fears that Ukraine could
split into two parts – the western, more nationalistic part that overwhelmingly supported Yushchenko, and the eastern, heavily industrialised part bordering Russia, where Yanukovych drew much of his support. ‘I have to tell you straight,’ he told Kuchma. ‘We are very worried about the trend towards a split. We are not indifferent to what is happening. According to the census, 17 per cent of Ukraine’s population are Russians – ethnic Russians. In fact I think there are far more of them. It’s a Russian-speaking country, in both the east and the west. It’s no exaggeration to say that every second family in Ukraine, if not more, has relatives and personal ties to Russia. That’s why we are so worried by what is happening.’

  It was clear from this that Putin regarded Ukraine (as he later revealed to George W. Bush) as almost a province of Russia – certainly what would later be termed a ‘sphere of privileged interest’. His adviser, Sergei Markov, says he had prepared briefing papers for Putin earlier in his presidency that suggested ‘public opinion in Ukraine wanted there to be no borders between Ukraine and Russia, that all the citizens should have the same rights, the same currency, the same education and information policy. But at the same time Ukraine would keep its sovereignty – separate flag, anthem, president, citizenship and so on.’

  This was what the Kremlin leadership believed. Just as strongly, the American administration believed Ukraine was ripe to align itself with the West, and that the majority of its citizens aspired to membership of NATO and the EU.

  In fact, both the Russians and the Americans underplayed the most important thing – that Ukraine is a finely balanced entity, divided and pulled in many directions. There is a linguistic split between Russian and Ukrainian speakers, a religious divide between Orthodox and Catholic Christians; there are those who pine for the old days (more security, less tension, less corruption, little ethnic strife) and those who want to move on (openness, democracy, free enterprise); there are Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians – distributed across an imprecise geographical ‘east–west’ divide. Opinion polls did not show an overwhelming desire across the country for NATO membership, although joining the EU was more popular. The family ties of which Putin spoke were real. But at the same time this was not the same Ukraine that was once part of the Soviet ‘family’; it had developed for 13 years already as a separate entity, and a new identity was growing. The use of the Ukrainian language was far more widespread than it was in Soviet days when I once embarrassed the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, by asking him what language was used at Ukrainian central committee meetings. There was a new pride in the nation, and an awareness that economically, at least, they would be far better to tie their future to the West than to the semi-reformed and corrupt economy of Russia.