Strongman (20 page)

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
the early hours of 23 November Kuchma called President Kwa
ś
niewski of Poland for advice. ‘He was incredibly nervous,’ Kwa
ś
niewski 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 Kwa
ś
niewski 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 Kwa
ś
niewski 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. Kwa
ś
niewski 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 Kwa
ś
niewski. 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 Kwa
ś
niewski, 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.
Kwa
ś
niewski 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. Kwa
ś
niewski 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 Kwa
ś
niewski and his EU mission.
Schröder reported back to Kwa
ś
niewski 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.

It was these sentiments that prevailed when the 2004 election was finally re-run, following a Supreme Court decision, on 26 December, under new rules to tighten up procedures and reduce fraud.
Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner with 52 per cent of the vote, to Yanukovych’s 44 per cent. International observers declared the ballot had been run fairly.

The result was a humiliation for Putin, who had staked everything on preventing what he saw as the ‘loss’ of Ukraine to a Western conspiracy.

The Orange Revolution was like a door slamming on Russia’s and the West’s efforts to understand one another. It is hard to think of any event that could be interpreted in such
diametrically opposed ways. The West saw it as a triumph of democracy. Here is what the
Washington Post
wrote, looking back a few years later: ‘Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
erupted in 2004 because of an attempt by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his proxies to impose on Ukraine a version of Russia’s corrupt authoritarianism – beginning with a fraudulent
presidential election.’
¹⁰

In Russia, it was seen as essentially the work of US special operations. Gleb Pavlovsky described the Orange protestors as ‘Red Guards’, trained and funded by American consultants.
‘But this isn’t rocket science. There are plenty of local specialists who’ve been working on the “Destroy Russia” project since 1990–91, ever since the Chechen
project.’
¹¹

Sergei Markov said it was a coup aimed at breaking Ukraine away from Russia, and that Yushchenko triumphed only through falsification. ‘The Orange never came to power as the result of free
elections. They came to power as the result of an anti-constitutional coup, being supported, of course, by the American administration and the Western observers. No matter how many American
senators say that it was legal, it was anti-constitutional.’

Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s main operator during the revolution, had to sneak away in disguise. ‘My departure from Kiev was quite funny. I was living in a hotel right in the centre of
the city, in the middle of the orange crowd which was blocking the presidential administration. I was forced to change clothes – like Kerensky [Russian prime minister overthrown in the 1917
revolution], who our Soviet textbooks say escaped dressed as a female nurse. I went out through the crowd wearing an orange scarf and hat.’