Some nasty, Soviet-era habits are tough to shake, and in Ukraine, stealing elections seems to be one of them.
Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych has claimed victory over opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko in Sunday’s presidential runoff election. Tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of Kiev, crying fraud. The United States and practically every Western European country have denounced the results. Ripples of the protests have reached Chicago’s Ukrainian community.
Dispensing with diplomatic niceties, U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the White House’s special envoy to Ukraine, said, “It is now apparent that there was a concerted and forceful program of election day fraud and abuse, enacted with the leadership or cooperation of authorities.” Some European observers have compared the contest to “elections” in North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
President Bush, in a letter delivered by Lugar, warned Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma the U.S. would review relations between the two countries if there was evidence of vote fraud.
The outrage was almost universal, except at the Kremlin. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who backed Yanukovych’s candidacy, promptly congratulated him on his victory.
This is an all-too-real sign the Cold War may be over but not forgotten. Putin was jolted by the election victory last year in the ex-Soviet republic Georgia of a pro-Western reformer he didn’t like. In Ukraine–a country the size of France with a population of 48 million and vast economic potential–the stakes are far higher. Putin seems determined to avoid a reprise of the Georgian results. That would leave Russia flanked by two independent, Western-oriented neighbors–tiny Georgia to the south and the much larger Ukraine to the west.
As if to underline his preferences, Putin visited Ukraine before the first round of the elections, posing with Kuchma and Yanukovych in American-style photo ops. The Kremlin viewed reformist Yushchenko as a loose cannon who might back Ukraine’s entry into the European Union and even NATO. The Kremlin’s man, by comparison, proposed Russian as the second language and allowing dual citizenship.
Western countries were not so subtly betting on the independent Yushchenko, hoping to create a democratic buffer between Western Europe and the increasingly authoritarian Russia.
In addition to the protests in Kiev, local leaders in several Ukrainian cities have disavowed the election results. This could grow into a dangerous political situation capable of destabilizing the country.
The deadline to announce the final vote count is Dec. 6. Putin and his Ukrainian compadres have less than two weeks to resolve this. They have to start with a recount and an internationally supported investigation of vote tampering.
The U.S. and Western Europe cannot allow Russia to erode the hard-won democratic gains in the countries of the former Soviet empire, especially one as important as Ukraine.
