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Elections that ‘Shook the World’ – Yushchenko’s Election in Ukraine 2004
26 Plays1 month ago
Taras Kuzio is a British Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Kyiv, Ukraine). His area of study is Russian and Ukrainian political, economic and security affairs.
Matt Davis interviews Dr. Kuzio, an internationally respected expert in Ukrainian and Russian politics. In this episode Matt discusses the 2004 Ukrainian Election around the Orange Revolution that saw the contest between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. Dr. Kuzio explains which Viktor was the victor.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Observations Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Observations podcast. I'm Matt Davis, the international elections correspondent. Today we have another episode in our series on elections that shook the world.
00:00:20
Speaker
This episode will take us into the 21st century and take us to Eastern Europe.
The 2004 Ukrainian Election and Orange Revolution
00:00:26
Speaker
In 2004, Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine, announced that he would not seek re-election in the wake of his increasing unpopularity.
00:00:34
Speaker
This led to a political vacuum and a highly contested election between two frontrunners, Viktor Yashchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. After this election, there were a series of protests and eventually political upheaval known as the Orange Revolution.
00:00:50
Speaker
At its height, there are a million protesters on the streets in response to the initial electoral result.
Interview with Professor Teres Kuzio
00:00:56
Speaker
To talk through this election in more detail, I'm joined by Professor Teres Kuzio, who has written extensively on Russia, Russian nationalism, post-communist states and Ukraine.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thanks for joining us today. Thank you for inviting me. Going down memory lane, should we say. Yes, I know you've written quite a lot of stuff from quite close to the time of all of this.
00:01:22
Speaker
So to get an an idea of the background, what do you think the main the main background to this election people will need in order to be able to understand it Well, there's probably a number of different things. um I mean, when this was taking place, I was then living in Toronto, but working in Toronto, Canada, but working in Washington, D.C. in the United States. And so it was fascinating to be in Washington when such enough people was taking place.
00:01:50
Speaker
and That's one thing like kind of gives me a certain colouring, as it were. and But it was also at a time when um there was this kind of new, trendy, fashionable idea that you could challenge governments using nonviolent protest.
Nonviolent Protests in Eastern Europe
00:02:09
Speaker
That was the key. um Of course, this kind of changed later in this Euromaidan revolution, a decade after this. But at the time, there were a number of protests that seemed to follow this pattern.
00:02:23
Speaker
The first was in Yugoslavia with the Serbian so-called bulldozer revolution, it was nicknamed. and in the year 2000, which was of course brought about by NATO's bombardment of of Serbia and of Kosovo.
00:02:38
Speaker
So that was sort of late 90s, 2000. That was the first one that toppled this war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. And then three years later, you had the Rose Revolution in Georgia, again peaceful, again non-violent,
00:02:52
Speaker
that threw out Edward Shrevanadze, a relic from the Soviet era. He had ah he'd actually been Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister. And then Ukraine in 2004.
00:03:04
Speaker
And I suppose Ukraine got the most attention at the time and because it was the biggest well it was the biggest country of the three and it was the biggest protest therefore on the streets.
00:03:17
Speaker
um And it was also because of the geopolitical
Geopolitical Tensions with Russia
00:03:21
Speaker
ramifications. I mean, Russia always, um since 1991, when the USSR disintegrated, Russia always had problems dealing with whether Ukraine should be fully independent of Russia and be allowed to sort of break away from Russia's sphere of influence and go westwards.
00:03:40
Speaker
This was four years, at that stage, four years into what we now have, a quarter of a century of Putin, Vladimir Putin's rule of Russia. So then it was only four years into that Putin's rule. So he wasn't as nationalistic in 2004 as he became later, which um I think also impacted on, shall we say, not um on the degree to which Russia intervened.
EU's Role and Internet Influence in 2004 Ukraine Election
00:04:10
Speaker
And um I think the other the other impacts were that um the European Union ah for the first time really became involved.
00:04:22
Speaker
And the European Union at that stage had had already changed because it it's in 2002, 2004, it had begun...
00:04:30
Speaker
it had begun bringing in to the European Union former communist countries like in Central Eastern Europe, three Baltic states, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia.
00:04:41
Speaker
So those Central East European and Baltic countries had a you know a direct interest in what was taking place in Ukraine. It wasn't that which wasn't true, say, of, I don't know, Spain, Portugal or France um at the time.
00:04:57
Speaker
So that that that meant that Lithuanians and Poles in particular ah were were heavily involved in the negotiations that led to um because of the public protests, the negotiations brokered by the EU um allowed for a rerun of the second round, which and which no wasn't recognized by anybody in the West.
00:05:21
Speaker
I think a final important point was that the Orange Revolution was always called the first internet revolution. of I think if you are a young person today, the idea that there was a time when mobile phones were not very good, ah with without email, without all of all the facilities you have now on a mobile phone,
00:05:47
Speaker
and there was no Facebook, no Twitter or anything. i mean, this was all beginning at that time in 2004. The only the mobile phone I remember I had in Washington at that time was a BlackBerry, a handheld BlackBerry, um which had very basic email. um And you know that all didn't change till Android and iPhones began about four or five years later So um it was though classed as the first internet revolution. The internet had begun. I'd taken off, shall we say, a few years prior to the Orange Revolution.
00:06:25
Speaker
So the internet was big, um ah relatively big at that time. um and And I think Facebook um was already just beginning.
00:06:38
Speaker
um So all of that had an impact in the sense that um you the Ukrainian opposition and and young people, particularly who are doing working through civil society and NGOs,
00:06:53
Speaker
They um were of course always the the biggest you know professionals when it comes to mobilizing the internet and social media. They were very good at ah pushing an alternative message across um in in on the internet and elsewhere, which the old guys, as it were, from the Soviet Union, the old Soviet generation,
00:07:19
Speaker
the Kuchmers, the Yanukovychs, and those kinds of people, and the Sheva Nazi in Georgia, the for them, the internet was something they'd never heard of. you know I mean, they just couldn't relate to it.
00:07:33
Speaker
They were just used to very old-fashioned media. So this was the first time, I think, in history where um where the internet and and and related ah communications played a role in mass mobilization.
00:07:52
Speaker
And of course, since then, we've it's the developments in that field have gone know massive and go become massive. But in 2004, they were very still very basic, but nevertheless crucial in in mobile in getting the message out, shall we say.
00:08:09
Speaker
um that That was key. um and and And that was, I think, important.
US Support for Ukraine's Democratic Movements
00:08:16
Speaker
um Who was in power at the time was important.
00:08:20
Speaker
Putin, I've mentioned. um He was in his fourth year um because he first came to power in 2000. um He took over from Boris Yeltsin. um He was moving to a more nationalist position, but in 2004 it wasn't as bad as it became, especially after 2012.
00:08:42
Speaker
In the US you had George Bush. Again, a different type of American leader, because since 2009, you've had quite American leaders who have not been that interested in international affairs, like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump.
00:09:01
Speaker
um Whereas Bush was probably the last US president, and he was around from 2000, 2008, who was what they call neocon. So very much interested in this idea of promoting democracy abroad, supporting countries like Ukraine and Georgia,
00:09:19
Speaker
um and and And so the the american it means the Bush administration was heavily supportive of the Orange Revolution at that time. and And that was probably that and the year before when the US invaded Iraq were the two things that basically pushed the US and Russia apart. um there So again, it was a very different era to what we have now, but but certainly something to bring back to memory.
00:09:50
Speaker
ah Okay, thank you. I think that gives quite a good um overview of kind of the global situation at this time. ah Is it broadly best to understand this election between Yashenko as a pro-European Western candidate and kind combining that with more pro-democracy and economic liberalism and then Yanukovych as kind of a pro-Russia candidate and then kind of potential more pro-authoritarianism and oligarchy?
00:10:17
Speaker
Is that too simple? Well, it it it is to some degree, but it is basically right. um in In all of these what were called colour revolutions or democratic revolutions, whether Serbia, Georgia or Ukraine, the alliance um of those political forces is very broad, inevitably.
00:10:39
Speaker
um And many of those political forces um are more astute at saying what they're against than what they're in favour of.
00:10:51
Speaker
So that inevitably leads to quite a lot of populism on the side of of those political forces that come to power. um So that's certainly true. You did have a wide range of people in the Orange Coalition, um ranging from, as you say, kind of center-right, typical pro-market economy um politicians like Viktor Yushchenko, who had been head of the Central Bank,
00:11:20
Speaker
And then you had, shall we say, more centre-left in Britain, New Labour style, um politicians like Yulia Tymoshenko, who many accused of being a populist.
00:11:34
Speaker
And one of the tragedies of the Orange Revolution and subsequent protests orange governments was that Timoshenko and Yushchenko could never get on. I mean this was this personal quarreling plagued the next five years of Yushchenko's presidency.
00:11:51
Speaker
So there was that coal there was that coalition and there was even um a quite relatively moderate socialist party also supported the orange revolution. um led by Alexander Moroz, but then he, a few years later, kind of aligned with Yanukovych.
00:12:07
Speaker
Yanukovych, Viktor Yanukovych, came from ah a um ah very specific background. um and And in that sense, he wasn't a typical kind of just centrist or or kind of authoritarian a politician. Because he came...
00:12:30
Speaker
from a criminal background, I would argue. um i mean, in that Wild West transition you had in the 1990s in that region of the world, Russia, Ukraine, elsewhere,
00:12:45
Speaker
um you basically had, I think, people made money in, you can divide them into two groups. One you could call white collar criminals, which we have in the West. I mean, you know, people...
00:12:59
Speaker
bending the rules in the City of London and Wall Street ah through or through personal connections, ah but they don't have blood on their hands. And then you have others who were out-and-out gangsters, and they they did have blood on their hands and they made their fortunes by killing.
00:13:17
Speaker
and And I think that those two groups of people um existed in that part of the world. And the Yanukovychs who came from Donetsk in the East, which became famous after 2014 as a kind of a place where Russia stirred up separatism.
00:13:35
Speaker
um They had grown out of organized crime and or criminal activities, shall we say, which merged with the with a ah with a growing market economy in the 1990s.
00:13:49
Speaker
And Donetsk and Crimea, I think not coincidentally also pro-Russian, were the bastions of that criminality in the nineteen ninety s in inside Ukraine.
00:14:02
Speaker
And what they did um was ah by the late 1990s, those who would come out on top in the kind of um the gangster fights of the 90s were Yanukovych and particularly his oligarchic ally, Rinat Akhmetov, until a few years ago, the wealthiest oligarch in Ukraine.
00:14:30
Speaker
Those two came together in the late 90s and formed a formidable political force called the Party of Regions. and and and that kind of forcibly united these warring clans under one roof.
00:14:44
Speaker
it The purpose of these political formations was to to obtain political protection for for former criminals or acting criminals, as it were. In Russian and this is called a krisha, a kind of a roof, a protective roof, as it were, um because by going into government and politics you can control the prosecutor's office, the judiciary, and this kind of thing.
00:15:10
Speaker
um And Yanukovych came from that background. they though They were very wealthy. They were probably in Ukraine the only political machine, this terminology from the United States, that could mobilize people, particularly in the East and South. So they focused on Russian speakers and their basis of two strongholds were Crimea and but and the Donbass.
00:15:35
Speaker
Donbass being this region of East Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk. And so, yes, he would have been by when we talk about this phrase pro-Russian, it's a very broad phrase. I mean, you know, it can mean many different things.
00:15:53
Speaker
It can mean also it can mean that you're just a Russian speaker and you like Russian culture. But it also can mean that you want to be part of the Russian sphere of influence geopolitically. You don't want anything to do with Europe.
00:16:05
Speaker
So that it's it's a very broad umbrella for a very wide ranging group of people. For example, The current Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was a Russian speaker when he was elected president in 2019. He comes from, not from Donetsk, he comes from Dnipropetrovsk, which is the region to the west of Donetsk.
00:16:28
Speaker
But he's relatively young. um And you could call him post-Soviet. I mean, he you know he was he grew up in and where after the USSR disintegrated and Ukraine is an independent state.
00:16:42
Speaker
So he wasn't nostalgic for the past. um And I think, to me... um What was fascinating comparing, ah shall we say, Britain, where I grew up in, and and this and this kind of region, is that the voters that Yanukovych managed to mobilize are similar to the voters who backed Brexit.
00:17:07
Speaker
These are the what would what many would call the disenfranchised, the marginalised. In Britain, this would have been...
Yanukovych's Marginalized Supporters
00:17:16
Speaker
um I grew up in West Yorkshire, where you had a lot of industry until the 1980s and 90s.
00:17:21
Speaker
Those industries closed. And surprise, surprise, that was a region that voted heavily for Brexit. um Even though, you know, these it was a formerly working class area. um Because these formerly...
00:17:36
Speaker
These people who previously had good very good jobs ah felt that they'd been um screwed by the system. They felt that they'd been marginalized, ignored, um and they wanted to put two fingers up to the establishment with Brexit.
00:17:51
Speaker
And the kind of voters that Yanukovych mobilized were a was similar, in that they felt they had suffered in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, factories closing, coal mining is closing, and that they weren't getting what they weren't having the same standard of living they had in the Soviet Union. They were nostalgic.
00:18:11
Speaker
Brexit voters were nostalgic for some mythical British past, and these guys were nostalgic for the Soviet Union. So very similar kind of voters. In Ukrainian, they would be called marginalized or transition losers, that kind of situation.
00:18:27
Speaker
people. um And and those um they had previously a voted for the communists in the 1990s and then in the 2000s voted for Yanukovych's party regents.
00:18:38
Speaker
um So certainly there were two world views here clashing. um And mean that was the way the 2004 elections and the Orange Revolution was portrayed as a clash between, shall we say,
00:18:53
Speaker
One group looking to the past, nostalgic for the past, nostalgic for Russia, nostalgic for the Soviet Union. This would have been Yanukovych and his voters.
00:19:03
Speaker
And then another group, a lot of young people, um a lot of people born in the late 80s or nineteen ninety s um middle class people, particularly young, the new business sector, the new middle class, emerging middle class, those would have been looking to the West, to Europe.
00:19:24
Speaker
um They weren't nostalgic for the past. They they want they were glad the past was gone. So in that sense it was a clash between two very different outlooks um which was replicated in in the way the country was split on those questions. um So yes, I think it is in a very broad sense ah a way to say yes there were two different competing visions at that time and certainly nobody could accuse Yushchenko having you know made loads of money during this Wild West transition
00:20:00
Speaker
He wasn't corrupt. He was certainly pro-Western. His wife was American, Ukrainian, um whereas Yanukovych was yeah the exemplar of that Wild West gangster gangster transition of the 1990s.
00:20:18
Speaker
Yeah, so you see those those two sides in that kind of gangster tradition there. ah now Now, my understanding is that the previous president, Kuchma, was really quite unpopular by the time of the election.
Kuchma's Scandal and Its Electoral Impact
00:20:30
Speaker
and had in the previous few years been implicated in the murder of a journalist known Kuchmagate. So whilst he himself was not running in these elections, do you think it impacted the sort of influence he might have wanted to have over them?
00:20:44
Speaker
Or you think he kind of managed to hold that influence anyway? Well, in many ways, um you know, we have to compare and contrast. In 2004, Kuchma did not send goons and and military to the streets to shoot protesters.
00:21:02
Speaker
There was no bloodshed. In 2014, a decade later, when Yanukovych was president, he did. Because he was a gangster. um And 100 protesters were murdered in 2014.
00:21:16
Speaker
So I think Kuchma, for all his faults, um can have to his credit that he doesn't have blood on his hands from from from the from that from the Orange Revolution.
00:21:27
Speaker
um In 2004, Kuchma couldn't stand again because he ah by the Ukrainian constitution, like most presidential constitutions, you can only stand twice. You can only have two presidential terms and he'd had one in the 90s and then one from 1999 to 2004.
00:21:43
Speaker
um So um he was ah looking to Yanukovych as as his successor, but I mean, he wasn't trying to block Yushchenko either. I mean, he brought in the EU...
00:21:55
Speaker
to to negotiate a compromise, um which they did, and the second round was rerun, and Yushchenko won that. So Kuchma facilitated, um shall we say, a democratic rerun of those elections.
00:22:14
Speaker
um At the same time, on this question of Kuchma's colored past, yes, there was a scandal in Kuchma, called the Kuchmageet scandal in in late 2000, whereby um ah a bodyguard from his office um claimed to have tapes that he'd made illicitly in his office um where Kuchmageet was talking about sending goons out to beat up journalists.
00:22:45
Speaker
I mean, this is fascinating in itself because I asked when I was working in Washington, I asked, you know, would this ever happen in the United States? For example, in the White House, if a member of the Secret Service, the same, the same job, bodyguards, would a member of the Secret Service also do something if they heard a president doing something illegal?
00:23:09
Speaker
And they said, no, they would turn a blind eye. they would They wouldn't regard that as being part of their duty to do that. so you do you know So that's one question.
00:23:21
Speaker
this um This bodyguard was called Menichenko. He unveiled tapes. ah pointing the finger at Kuchma in November 2000.
00:23:33
Speaker
This led to massive public protests called ah Ukraine without Kuchma um leading up to the 2001 and then 2002 elections, parliamentary elections.
00:23:46
Speaker
A journalist was found murdered um um in fact, beheaded, murdered and beheaded outside Kiev. The whole um saga of this, nevertheless, um still smells very strange.
00:24:02
Speaker
Why do I say that? um Because on the actual tape that was released, and these tapes have been analyzed by countless people, on the actual tape, Kuchma says ah to the police chief,
00:24:19
Speaker
I want to hit this this asshole, this journalist taken out to the outskirts of Kiev and given good hiding and then just left there. He never says on the tape, I want him killed.
00:24:32
Speaker
So there is a strong suspicion that there was something else happening at the time, that somebody was trying to blackmail Kuchma by taking this evidence and then killing the journalist and pinning that on on him.
00:24:47
Speaker
Because there's no there's no record, there's no evidence of Kuchma actually ordering his murder. Yes, he's obviously what he did was illegal, ordering a journalist to be beaten up.
00:25:00
Speaker
But that's very different to having him murdered. So it's very strange. And we still to this day don't know who was behind this, what seems to be a conspiracy. um If you're If you're pro-Russian, or if you were, sorry, pro-Russian in Ukraine, you would say this is an American cons conspiracy to unseat kuchma. If you're anti-Russian, you were you said this was a Russian conspiracy.
00:25:27
Speaker
So, because they love conspiracies in that part of the world. um But we still to this day don't know um who was really behind this. um Some police officers were eventually imprisoned um under Yushchenko for the actual murder.
00:25:44
Speaker
um But who was the person who gave the actual order to do this? we We don't know. We don't know. But nevertheless, yes, this from late 2000 all the way through to 2023 on the eve of the presidential elections and the Orange Revolution.
00:26:02
Speaker
you had mass protests around Ukraine, um you had mobilization. So the Orange Revolution didn't happen in a vacuum. There'd already been three years of um of of of of street actions, protests, and also training.
00:26:20
Speaker
um um What happened with these revolutions is that you had roving groups of instructors going from Serbia to Georgia, Georgia to Ukraine and elsewhere,
00:26:32
Speaker
who were basically ah guns for hire, they were being probably paid by um British or American democratic promotion foundations like in Britain the Westminster Foundation for Democracy or National Endowment for Democracy in America and they were then training young Ukrainians.
00:26:54
Speaker
um I think one final thing I'll say about about about about the um these revolutions, which I think was i think quite revolutionary and new,
00:27:06
Speaker
was the use of humor, um which you don't really see in protests in the West as much. um And I think that it was it was a ah very good way of of of tackling authoritarian regimes that you you know, of course, you ridiculed them, but you laughed at them.
00:27:26
Speaker
You made jokes about them. um And I'll give you one example I remember seeing on the main, like the Oxford Street of Kiev, the Khrushchatyk, one weekend when the when the traffic was no not not allowed to drive down there.
00:27:43
Speaker
So it's full of pedestrians. I saw a long line of of young men walking wearing prison uniforms.
00:27:52
Speaker
And I thought, this is really weird. You know, you you don't normally see that. um But they were they were just students dressed up as prisoners. And they were saying they were going off to vote for Yanukovych.
00:28:05
Speaker
So they were pretending to be his voters and and pretending to back Yanukovych because Yanukovych had been twice in prison. So this was like and you know making making fun of Yanukovych is ah as an ex-prisoner, um saying, yeah, yeah, all the people who are in prison going to vote for him.
00:28:27
Speaker
It is, um and I mean, this kind of, I think, humor, think, was very good as well at breaking down fear amongst some people about going out on the streets.
00:28:41
Speaker
Because the protests became just like a big carnival. It was a big rock show. It was a carnival. It was a good time. It was like Glastonbury in Kiev. I mean, this is what it what it where it felt like. it wasn't Nobody felt kind of you know felt as though they were under threat, as it were.
00:29:01
Speaker
like yeah I mean, that's quite the image there with these, with all of these prisoners, hey all these big prison uniforms. Big prisoners, yes. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. All right. but yeah but But it's what's amusing about it now, if we put it into context with Donald Trump, is that...
00:29:17
Speaker
um I remember in 2004, I was working, I think I was doing election monitoring for the National Democratic Institute, which is linked to the Democratic Party in the US.
00:29:28
Speaker
and And they were out looking at me and telling me, how can and how can Ukrainians vote for an ex-prisoner, you know Yanukovych? How can they vote for somebody who was twice in jail? Isn't that ironic today when they've got a president in the U.S. who's been convicted 33 times and he's the president of the U.S.?
00:29:48
Speaker
So it's very ironic how history can come and bite you um after you've kind of ridiculed the Ukrainians and and the Americans have got the president they deserve.
00:30:00
Speaker
Well, there we go. So we'll stop for a quick break and then I've got just a few more questions for you later on. you.
00:30:12
Speaker
It begins, as it always does, with a vision. In the quiet streets of Brody Ferry, one man rose above the hundrum of politics of the day.
00:30:27
Speaker
His name was Bob Servant. Businessman. Dreamer. cheeseburger magnet the only candidate bold enough to pay local dog owners not to walk their dogs in Dawson Park so the grass could reach its full majesty.
00:30:50
Speaker
He promised free wellies for every man, woman, and child. The color, council issue, the size, you'll grow into them.
Humorous Take on Bob Servant's Campaign
00:31:00
Speaker
He vowed to put the ferry back on the map, preferably larger than Dundee, and in one unforgettable hustings to tell the best bus story ever told.
00:31:13
Speaker
ah story involving why Lulu wasn't given the blind date job. and how Scotland will always choose Sean Connery over Roger Moore. Like Richard Haney rousing a packed hall, speaking of honor and destiny.
00:31:29
Speaker
But Bob's destiny was different. His speeches could leap from that bust story. retold in ever greater detail to the sovereignty of the South at Atlantic.
00:31:42
Speaker
And in his BBC debate, with the wind whipping in from the Tay, he delivered the words that would echo through the ages. Give us back the Falklands!
00:31:55
Speaker
From Dunny on the walled single vote to Brodie Ferry's greatest son, we revisit the fictional elections that shaped our screens and the truths they whisper to us all.
00:32:08
Speaker
Brodie Ferry, independent spirit, eternal legend.
00:32:22
Speaker
And welcome back. So... In an article fairly close to the time, ah believe you claimed that this was the dirtiest election in Ukraine's history. Now, this was written as a kind of fairly close to when the election took place.
Corruption and Yushchenko's Poisoning
00:32:36
Speaker
I'm just wondering if you could perhaps go into that a bit more. Well, the. um i mean, in Ukraine history, by what they meant by that was since 1991. I mean, we're not talking about a huge period of history because the USSR disintegrated in 1991, then you had various presidential and parliamentary elections since then.
00:32:59
Speaker
But they had all been um free and fair until 2004. And I think this is um in a book that's coming out with a colleague of mine this year,
00:33:11
Speaker
ah one you know one of the One or two of the chapters there, we talk about the divergence between Ukraine and Russia, which had already begun in the 1990s. I mean, i mean um Russia has hasn't had free elections for the last 25 years, basically.
00:33:28
Speaker
um Whereas Ukraine's had pretty much free elections for most of the time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. I mean, 2004 in that sense was an aberration. It wasn't wasn't usual because six years after that, Yanukovych won a free election.
00:33:47
Speaker
It wasn't by a big margin, only 4%, but he won the 2010 presidential election. 2004... presidential election two thousand and four I think that Yanukovych and his gang mistakenly ah believed that um the passivity of people in their neighborhood of Donetsk and eastern Ukraine um which which was the case was true throughout the country. And of course, it wasn't like it like every country.
00:34:20
Speaker
um Every region is different. And um they found to their mistake that Ukraine is not the Donbas. Ukraine is not Donetsk.
00:34:32
Speaker
um And ah by the way, Donetsk is twin with Sheffield. um It was twinned in the 1970s because of coal. Well, Donetsk was founded in the late 19th century by a Welshman.
00:34:46
Speaker
um um And in the 1970s, Sheffield, which was then the center of coal mining in Britain, um was twinned with Donetsk. So it was a cold coal producing region, quite politically passive, very strongly controlled by the party regions.
00:35:06
Speaker
A lot of not really much civil society activity and certainly no opposition political parties. And they just assumed that they could use their tough gangster methods in elections and and and faking and you know fraud fraudent elections there and apply it to the rest of the country and they were wrong um because um the rest of the country is quite different.
00:35:30
Speaker
I think what what we noticed about that region of Ukraine and Crimea compared to the rest of the country was also a very ah very Sovietized mentality, kind of passivity and so and Sovietized identities.
00:35:46
Speaker
And that certainly wasn't true in the rest of Ukraine, particularly in Kiev. And Kiev is a large city. um It's the largest in the country with about three to four million people.
00:36:00
Speaker
And they could never get the the protests or the people on the streets without paying them, really, without actually forcing them to go on the streets, either by telling um state officials, today you've got a day off, you have to go and protest, or by giving them money.
00:36:19
Speaker
Whereas the Orange Revolutionary protests protesters were never paid, and they all came volunt voluntarily. So that was one one aspect of it. um The kind of fraud they did was um very different to anything before because you had elections in ninety ninety one ninety four ninety ninety eight in 1991, 1994, 1998, 1999, 2002.
00:36:43
Speaker
two thousand and two All of these had taken place free and fair. And then 2004 came along and you had a really terrible second round of the elections.
00:36:54
Speaker
but pray But prior to that there was something else which to this day has also not really been resolved, was Viktor Yushchenko being poisoned, attempted assassination attempt.
00:37:08
Speaker
I mean, the elections were to be held in late October, November, and he was ah poisoned in in September. Now, um ah what was used against him, dioxin, well would have let him led to him being killed. His face was all disfigured.
00:37:29
Speaker
And if he had not been emergency evacuated to Austria, he would have died. So that that We don't know to this day who did that. Obviously, it was had to be some form of intelligence service.
00:37:44
Speaker
The suspicion, of course, is Russia. um But that was the dirtiest thing that happened in the election campaign. Why do we suspect suspect it's Russia? Because two years after that, in London,
00:37:57
Speaker
A Russian emigre, Litvinenko, was murdered by Russia in a relatively similar way. didn't use the same um biological or chemical materials, but similar to those.
00:38:11
Speaker
And those biological chemical materials were from former Soviet laboratories. in Russia, which are controlled by the intelligence services. You can't buy this stuff on Amazon.
00:38:23
Speaker
um um And then a few years after that, in 2018, we had another ah an attack, biological attack in Salisbury in England. um against and another defector, Skripal.
00:38:37
Speaker
So Yushchenko's poisoning with dioxin in September 2004 was the first of this kind. He survived, Litvinenko didn't, sadly he died. He had a horrible death over two weeks.
00:38:53
Speaker
And Skripal also survived, although a British lady um was killed in Salisbury from that. So there's probably a Russian hand there. um So even though Putin wasn't maybe as nationalistic in 2004 as later years, certainly I think Russia's intelligence services were active.
00:39:14
Speaker
um rush ah Putin had loaned loaned ah what were called political technologists. i mean these It's impossible to translate this into English. They were election consultants, but but but completely biased towards the black arts, you know the the dirty tactics.
00:39:35
Speaker
They weren't just advisers for an election. And these were working They were from the Kremlin and these were working for Yanukovych, um producing like leaflets, posters, um a lot of TV ads attacking Yushchenko, accusing him of being a CIA agent because his wife is American, that kind of stuff. So a lot of dirty propaganda.
00:40:02
Speaker
um Putin himself twice visited Ukraine during the first and second round to support Yanukovych. um And so, I mean, besides that, I think there's a lot of violence as well by goons our or vigilantes hired by Yanukovych, these kind of, shall we say, low-level hitmen.
00:40:25
Speaker
So there was various types of of of election fraud. And all of this was quite shocking because it never had happened before. um And it reinforced a stereotype of the people from that region of Ukraine.
00:40:41
Speaker
a negative stereotype. um But it didn't lead to... i think what they expected was was that Ukrainians would act like they act in Donetsk and just say, OK, we're off home.
00:40:53
Speaker
And it did the opposite. It actually made people angry and more people came on the streets. um And ah because of the mass protests, because ah Kuchma wasn't so bad in that sense, he didn't he refused to use violence to quash the protesters.
00:41:15
Speaker
and he brought in the European Union to broker a compromise. So there was a way through that crisis um and Ukraine held, ret redid the second round after the after that round was annulled by the Supreme Court and not recognized by the Ukrainian parliament.
00:41:35
Speaker
um and and And so Yushchenko eventually won.
EU's Changing View on Ukraine
00:41:40
Speaker
I think one thing we have to take into account is that this kind of democratic pushback, shall we say, um is only possible if the country has not yet become a fully authoritarian system.
00:41:56
Speaker
So Ukraine in 2004 was not. No matter how much we dislike Kuchma and his corrupt oligarchs and so, it was still a relatively pluralistic country with free media, opposition parties and and and so on, and and and Ukrainian ah politicians active in parliament.
00:42:17
Speaker
ah free elections. This kind of democratic pushback is impossible in countries like Belarus and Russia. It's impossible because they're fully they're dictatorships.
00:42:29
Speaker
and And they will bring out people on the streets and shoot them. um and In the year 2020, mass protests broke out in Belarus against election fraud, blatant election fraud.
00:42:45
Speaker
um And you know they just brought in Belarusian goons and Russian goons. They brought in Russian goons and just mass protests. And they've put about 2,000 people in jail.
00:42:57
Speaker
um So in Ukraine, it wasn't yet an authoritarian system. But of course, the fear was that if Yanukovych is allowed to get away with this, he's going to impose, he's going to take Ukraine along the Russian path.
00:43:13
Speaker
and And that was another reason why why people came out on the streets. I think the negative side to this is that um the European Union, um yes, they played a positive role in and negotiating a compromise that allowed for A rerun of the second round and Yushchenko to win.
00:43:35
Speaker
But at the same time, Ukraine was not considered as a European country. um So um if you think about this from a longer term perspective, it took the took Brussels decades to actually perceive Ukraine and Ukrainians as Europeans.
00:43:55
Speaker
In 2004 that was not the case. There was a massive enlargement of the EU at that time, which brought in Central European countries, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, e etc., Baltic states.
00:44:08
Speaker
um But the EU had nothing to give Ukraine at that time. The EU only offered Ukraine integration, not membership, just integration, in 2014, the so-called Association Agreement, um and then only offered Ukraine membership after the full-scale invasion of 2022.
00:44:30
Speaker
So the EU only you began to regard Ukraine as European practically 20 years after the Orange Revolution. Yes, yes. That's pretty incredible, if you think about it.
00:44:43
Speaker
that Yeah, that's really quite a long time span there. um In terms of the lasting impact of this, this election and then kind of subsequent revolution, is it largely that it managed to just maintain a free democratic order?
Legacy of the Orange Revolution
00:45:01
Speaker
Well, it's a if if you I think Ukrainians look at this as in a broader perspective because they and they compare themselves to their neighbors. ukrainians Ukraine was often lumped together with Russia and Belarus um by, shall we say, Brussels and the West. And certainly, Ukrainians were always very unhappy that they were lumped together with Russia and not seen as different.
00:45:27
Speaker
um In the case of ukrainian Ukraine, Ukraine was was different because it had three of these revolutions. The first one was in 1990, just on the eve of the USSR disintegrating.
00:45:42
Speaker
um And it was a a lot of students on a hunger strike in the center of Kiev, which forced the authorities to to do some changes at that time.
00:45:56
Speaker
Then you have the Orange Revolution um in 2004. And then a decade after that, you had the Euromaidan Revolution or the Revolution of Dignity. um The joke is that Ukrainians need a revolution every 10 years or so.
00:46:11
Speaker
Belarus and Russia never had that. um And um they were far more passive and they never really stood up for their rights. And so the legacy of that is that in Belarus and Russia, you have full dictatorships.
00:46:24
Speaker
Ukraine, you never came close to that at all. um There you have humiliated subjects. In Ukraine you have citizens. you have to Anybody who is in power in Ukraine has to recognize that Ukrainians won't put up with um you know misappropriation or or authoritarianism or or mass corruption.
00:46:50
Speaker
Just in the last month Zelensky did made a mistake on in a parliamentary vote. He stripped two ah government institutions fighting corruption, stripped them of their independence.
00:47:03
Speaker
This led to mass protests in Ukraine. And many of these people are protesting were in their late teens, early 20s. So they would have been kids in the Orange Revolution or not even born.
00:47:15
Speaker
um So all of this has a legacy, of course, because, you know, parents pass fast to their kids. Oh, Jim, I had a great time on the Orange Revolution. Yes, people got married in the Orange Revolution.
00:47:29
Speaker
I'm not kidding. People got together. um I mean, there was it was a fun time. Euro My Damn revolution was europe myam Revolution was a bit different because it was bloodier.
00:47:40
Speaker
um But so so those kinds of memories get passed on. Books get published, films, there's stuff on the Internet. So, of course, yes, I mean, the legacy is is one of many legacies, but an important one.
00:47:56
Speaker
um that Ukrainians will stand up and fight. They won't kneel to dictators, whether they are domestic like Yanukovych or foreign like Putin.
00:48:11
Speaker
um I think that's always a good reminder there that history is more often a um the process than one big event. um I think it was also good to hear about the, yeah again, the kind of carnivalesque, the kind of fun atmosphere that there was in the orange revolution. You don't always hear about revolutions as being fun, but as I said, there's ah there is that element there.
00:48:37
Speaker
Yes. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining me today. i really appreciate it. I think you've given some quite fascinating insight on this. Thanks very much for inviting me.
00:48:47
Speaker
Thank you. And to the next revolution.
00:49:01
Speaker
The Observations podcast is being brought to you by Democracy Volunteers, the UK's leading election observation group. Democracy Volunteers is non-partisan and does not necessarily share the opinions of participants in the podcast.
00:49:14
Speaker
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