The New Tsar (48 page)

However transparently staged, Putin’s appearances resonated with some Ukrainians, those who envied Russia’s rising standard of living or harbored the same nostalgia that many Russians did for the Soviet era. Ukraine, however, was more pluralistic than Russia, and its democracy less “managed.” State television served the power and assailed Yushchenko on a daily basis, insinuating that his illness was caused by
sushi or syphilis, but Kuchma’s control of the media was not absolute. Channel 5, owned by a chocolate tycoon, Petro Poroshenko, threw itself unabashedly behind Yushchenko. It became the voice of the opposition’s campaign, prompting the government to try unsuccessfully to suspend its broadcasting license. Putin’s unprecedented intervention in another country’s election also played into the opposition’s main argument: that a vote for Yanukovych would simply return the country to the empire from which it had gained independence. That anyone would ask Putin in earnest to become the leader of Ukraine was too much. The Kremlin’s political apparatchiks never appreciated that, because Putin did not. Putin’s strategists also miscalculated the degree to which the crude anti-Americanism that worked in Russia’s politics would resonate in Ukraine.

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W
hen the first round of the election was held on October 31, Yushchenko collected 39.87 percent of the votes, edging out Yanukovych’s 39.32 percent, with twenty minor candidates dividing the rest. Exit polls paid for by the Western
agentura
had Yushchenko ahead by an even larger margin, and with widespread reports of ballot stuffing and other irregularities, some in the opposition, including Yulia Tymoshenko, wanted to protest in the streets, as they had been preparing to do all summer. Yushchenko, though, was content to celebrate his unexpectedly strong showing and vowed that he would prevail in the runoff scheduled for three weeks later, on November 21.

After Yanukovych’s lackluster showing, Putin redoubled his efforts. With both candidates courting the also-rans from the first round, Putin pressed Russia’s Communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov, to use his influence with Petro Symonenko, the Ukrainian Communist candidate who had received 5 percent of the vote. Zyuganov agreed, but he had a price: the Kremlin had to provide financing to the Communist Party of Russia and end the relentlessly negative coverage of it on state television. The Kremlin did, for a while, but the tactic failed since Symonenko too was furious over the voting, believing that more than fifty thousand Communist votes had been stripped from him in the first round. Instead, he called on his party members to vote against both candidates in the runoff.
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Putin then traveled to Ukraine for yet another working visit, meeting Kuchma and Yanukovych in Crimea once again to inaugurate regular ferry service between the peninsula and the Russian mainland, and
together they traveled down the Crimean coast to the Artek International Children’s Center, a famous Soviet-era resort that was then hosting hundreds of schoolchildren who had survived the terror attack in Beslan. The Kremlin’s political operatives, including Medvedev, remained confident of Yanukovych’s victory, in part because Kuchma and Yankuvoych were. Still, Putin pressed Yanukovych to do more with the government resources at hand to boost turnout, a practice that had worked well in Russia.
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To prepare for the runoff, election officials padded voter lists with “dead souls,” suspiciously inflating the turnout in the eastern areas that supported Yanukovych. In Donetsk, the turnout for the second round jumped nearly 20 percent to an incredible 96.7 percent. On the day of the runoff, voters were bused to Kyiv to vote after voting in their home districts; hundreds of them were caught in the act.
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Yushchenko’s campaign had anticipated fraud, but the flagrancy of it provoked outrage. By the time polls closed that night, his supporters, wearing orange and waving orange flags, poured into the streets around Kyiv’s central public space, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square. The crowds had grown to tens of thousands by the next morning, when the election commission announced preliminary results that showed Yanukovych winning with 49 percent to Yushchenko’s 46 percent, even though the exit polls paid for by NGOs from the United States and Europe showed the latter winning by 11 points. International election observers immediately raised questions about the conduct of the vote and the tally, but Putin, who had spent the previous three days in Latin America for a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation nations, promptly telephoned from Brazil to congratulate Yanukovych.

Yushchenko’s supporters erected a tent city in the Maidan, vowing to remain until the election result was overturned. For all the outrage over the fraud, the mood of the crowd was festive. Pop musicians performed between the speeches of Yushchenko and his supporters. Kuchma’s advisers were in disarray, divided over what to do. Journalists began revolting at the state television networks, including an interpreter for the deaf, who disregarded the official script of the anchor on the main state channel and began signing the truth. “The results announced by the Central Electoral Commission are rigged,” she signed. “Do not believe them.” When Kuchma’s government made no immediate move to remove the protesters, more people poured into the square—not just political activists, but ordinary people, even parents who took their children to witness
what they felt was a historic moment in Ukraine’s young history. It was suddenly more than an outpouring of support for Yushchenko. For all the country’s problems, its crippling Soviet legacies, Ukrainians, unlike Russians, were willing to take to the streets to demand fairness and accountability from their leaders. On November 23, Yushchenko took a symbolic oath of office, proclaiming himself the winner in a quorumless session of parliament, only to have the election commission declare Yanukovych the official winner after the final tally the next day. Putin extended congratulations again, this time in a letter to Yanukovych, saying the Ukrainians had made “a choice for stability,” but the crowds grew even larger, laying siege to the parliament and presidential building in a sea of orange. It was Putin’s worst nightmare.

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P
utin flew from South America to Brussels for a meeting with the leaders of the European Union, most of whom had refused to recognize the election results in Ukraine and instead called for a investigation into the fraud. The chummy partnership that Putin hoped to develop with the Europeans—promising to expand cooperation on energy, security, trade, and travel—had grown increasingly strained, and Ukraine all but broke it. “I am convinced that we have no more right to incite mass disturbances in a major European state,” Putin said after a tense private meeting with the leaders. He was accusing them of encouraging the people massed in the streets of Kyiv. “We must not make it an international practice to resolve disputes of this kind through street riots.”

Putin’s insistence that the outcome was “absolutely clear” left Russia with no alternative strategy, and the Kremlin struggled to keep up with the pace of events. Ukraine’s parliament, sensing the political tide turning toward Yushchenko, voted to declare the election results invalid. Members of Ukraine’s security forces, including the secretive successor to the KGB, began to break ranks and side with the protesters. Ihor Smeshko, the general who had attended the late-night dinner before Yushchenko’s disfiguring illness two months before, now also swung against the Yanukovych camp, warning that the country’s interior troops would resist any order to crack down. Putin had pressed Kuchma to resist the momentum toward a compromise, hinting strongly that he should deal firmly with the mass protest. “Putin is a hard man,” Kuchma said later. “It wasn’t like he was saying directly ‘Put tanks on the streets.’ He was tactful in his comments, but there were some hints made.”
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Yanukovych retreated to Donetsk, his hometown, to attend a congress
of political leaders from the eastern regions that remained deeply loyal to him and to Russia: Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv. Meeting in a skating rink in Severodonetsk, the congress voted unanimously to declare their regions autonomous if the chaos in Kyiv persisted. The regional assembly then moved up a vote on autonomy to the following week. Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow, attended and seemed to lend the Kremlin’s endorsement to the calls for separatism. He denounced the opposition leaders as a “sabbath of witches” pretending to “represent the whole of the nation.” The Donbas, as Ukraine’s industrial heartland was known, would split before agreeing to any compromise that would install Yushchenko.

On the night of December 2, Putin summoned Kuchma to Moscow; they met in the VIP lounge of Vnukovo Airport as Putin prepared to depart on a state visit to India. In Ukraine, the parliament continued to debate the mechanics of holding new elections, while the country’s highest court heard Yushchenko’s arguments for nullifying the results of the last one. Putin now embraced Kuchma’s call for an entirely new vote as the best chance to head off Yushchenko’s victory. “A rerun of the second round may also produce nothing,” Putin declared. “What happens then? Will there have to be a third, a fourth, a twenty-fifth round until one of the sides obtains the necessary result?”
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The next day, after a week of hearings that were broadcast around the country, Ukraine’s highest court intervened to order a new runoff, saying the second round had been so “marred by systematic and massive violations” that it was impossible to determine who had genuinely won. It was an unmitigated victory for Yushchenko, and the center of Kyiv erupted in celebration. For Putin, it was an unmitigated defeat.

Three weeks later a repeat of the runoff election was held. Between the court’s ruling and the voting, Yushchenko’s doctors in Austria had finally determined that he had been poisoned by dioxin. The accusations that Yushchenko’s illness had been a stunt, exploiting some other illness to win voters’ sympathy, now seemed a cynical cover-up of some dark conspiracy by a deeply corrupt system willing to stoop to poisoning to derail a candidate. When the second runoff was held, under even greater international scrutiny, Yushchenko won with almost 52 percent of the vote; Yanukovych trailed with 44 percent. Despite an investigation, the question of who poisoned him was never answered. Yushchenko himself showed an odd lack of zeal for the investigation despite the horrible disfigurement it caused.
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He would later say that he suspected his host,
Volodymyr Satsyuk. Once Yushchenko was in office, Satsyuk was questioned by investigators and his dacha tested for traces of dioxin, but he was never declared a suspect.
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In June 2005, Satsyuk left Ukraine for Russia, where he received citizenship. Yushchenko came to believe that Putin was harboring his would-be killer.

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T
he Orange Revolution, as it became known, was treated in Russia as a humiliating defeat and in the Kremlin as an ominous warning. Putin the tactician had been outmaneuvered in a geopolitical struggle, and he nursed the experience like a grudge. The Kremlin responded by intensifying pressure on Russia’s NGOs, by redoubling its hunt for foreign spies, and by creating its own youth movement to contain any manifestation of youthful dissent. It was called Nashi, and its ideology and practices bore more than a passing resemblance to those of the Soviet Union’s Komsomol, or even, to critics, the Hitler Youth. Putin acted increasingly defensive and increasingly suspicious of international rebukes about Russia’s record on basic democratic rights. He found them hypocritical, especially coming from the United States, which under President Bush was pursuing a hyperaggressive foreign policy that had overthrown governments in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now, he believed, Ukraine. His initially warm relations with Bush had cooled, and were about to get colder.

Shortly after Bush’s inauguration for a second term in January 2005, the two met in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Bush had delivered a speech that morning in the city’s Hviezdoslav Square, only hours before Putin flew into the city. He had made the advancement of democracy—the “freedom agenda,” he called it—a central theme of his second term, and now he cheered the popular uprisings in Georgia and Ukraine. The recent elections in Iraq, he said, were part of the inevitable march of democracy that had begun with the Velvet Revolution in the then-unified Czechoslovakia in 1989. He did not mention Russia, but he declared that “eventually, the call of liberty comes to every mind and every soul. And one day, freedom’s promise will reach every people and every nation.”

In Slovakia the two presidents were accompanied by their wives, who appeared with them for an official photograph in falling snow at the entrance to Bratislava Castle. After tea, Lyudmila, whose public activities had perceptibly diminished after Putin’s reelection the year before, joined Laura Bush on a tour of the tapestries at the Primacial Palace in the heart of the city’s old center; together they listened to a boys’ choir
sing in Russian and English.
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When the two men met inside the castle, however, Putin dropped any pretense of good-natured friendship. When Bush raised his concerns about the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the strangulation of the media, the “lack of progress” on democracy, Putin counterattacked. He compared his decision to end the elections of regional governors, announced after Beslan, to the use of the Electoral College in American presidential elections. The prosecution of Khodorkovsky was no different than the prosecution of Enron the Texas-based energy company that went bankrupt in 2001. It went on for nearly two hours. Putin’s tone was mocking and sarcastic, irritating Bush to the point that he imagined reaching over to “slap the hell” out of the interpreter.
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“Don’t lecture me about the free press,” Putin sneered at Bush at one point, “not after you fired that reporter.” Bush was momentarily puzzled. Then he realized that Putin meant a scandal that had erupted over reporting by Dan Rather for CBS on Bush’s service in the Air National Guard, which was based on documents that could not be authenticated. Rather had had to apologize and was forced to retire, and now Putin was citing it to accuse Bush of suppressing freedom of the press. “I strongly suggest you not say that in public,” Bush told him. “The American people will think you don’t understand our system.”
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Later, their joint press conference revealed how their differences could no longer be papered over for the sake of diplomacy. Putin repeated his assertion that the Electoral College was a fundamentally undemocratic practice. A Russian journalist chosen by the Kremlin then raised the issue that Putin had just discussed with Bush privately, asking Putin why he had not raised publicly the violation of rights in the United States. (“What a coincidence,” Bush said he thought.) The partnership Bush had imagined when he looked into Putin’s eyes four years before never really recovered. “Perhaps we should have seen it coming,” Condoleezza Rice, now Bush’s secretary of state, later wrote, “but this Putin was different than the man who we had first met in Slovenia.”
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