In Kiev, the Orange Revolution is present on request at least. Ask young people on the street, "How was it last winter?" and Ukraine's winter temperatures and raw political climate are momentarily forgotten. People warm themselves on the memories and talk about the atmosphere of a year ago. About an intense sense of being alive, in which the moral superiority assured by the election fraud and the euphoria of mass solidarity were combined with the fear of an opponent who, though defeated, remained a threat. Rumours had gone around the Maidan (Independence Square) that Russian special forces or gangs of thugs from east Ukraine had been called in. This made people feel they were doing something brave, even if most of the police in Kiev were already on their side.

The uplifting memory of the revolution has since given way to cold sobriety. Political magazines are now asking whether it is even possible to talk about a revolution. Perhaps the whole thing was only a slight shift? The striking political continuity supports the latter interpretation. Yes, the rightful winner of the rigged elections, Viktor Yushchenko, was elected president at the end of 2004; yes, the government did receive a face-lift with the beautiful Yulia Timoshenko, and with a turnover of personnel at the level of regional government. But in the judiciary, in education, and in public offices – places people have to deal with in their daily lives – little has changed.

This continuity has for the time being spared Ukraine the economic shock that the GDR and Czechoslovakia had to go through after 1989. The hyperinflation that impoverished millions of Poles has also stayed away from Ukraine. So far there have been no mass redundancies, and unemployment is markedly lower than in most EU countries, not to mention Poland. The hryvna was valued up, rather than down, on the euro and the dollar. The new government has also raised salaries and pensions. Public servants earn on average over fifty per cent more than what they earned one year ago.

But this upturn has also raised inflation to over fifteen per cent. What's more, it is partly on loan. The state's contribution to the gross domestic product has risen from just under forty per cent to over forty-four per cent within the last year. Compared to western Europe that may not be particularly high, but it is at the expense of private business, which, with a growth rate of between five and twelve per cent, has underwritten the upturn since 2001. On top of that, the regime has plugged taxation loopholes for small and medium-sized businesses. That may be the right thing for the long term, because the state needs an income, and paying public servants well is the best way to fight corruption. But the bankruptcies are piling up.

The economist Anders Åslund, expert on CIS countries, has criticized Ukrainian economic policy for being too socialist and populist.^[1] By that he means high state expenditure and attempts by the government, led by Yulia Timoshenko, to regulate energy and meat prices. Early in 2005, the prime minister wanted to force a number of Russian and Ukrainian refineries to sell oil and petroleum under the global market price. When the companies simply closed the throttle on production, leading to a brief energy crisis and long queues at filling stations, Timoshenko threatened to set up a competing chain of state-owned filling stations. There were similar problems with meat production. In April 2005, prices rose sharply as a result of drastically increased import tax. When Timoshenko instructed the regional governors to allow the direct marketing of meat (recalling the Kolkhoz markets of the Soviet Union), the result was administrative chaos. Finally, Yushchenko intervened and ordered the liberalization of both the energy sector and the meat sector.

Since then, the break between the two protagonists of the Orange Revolution has proved to be final. In 2005, after renewed quarrelling, Yushchenko sacked the heroine of the demonstrators of the previous winter. Whereupon the reform movement split into two wings: the radicals, who strongly oppose the oligarchs and Russia, and the centrists around Yushchenko, who would rather reach a compromise with both powers. However, Timoshenko's dismissal means a fatal compromise with the old guard. In order to appoint the bureaucrat Yury Yekhanurov as new prime minister, Yushchenko required the parliamentary votes of his former opponents. In return, he had to guarantee his old rival, Viktor Yanukovich, legal impunity for rigging the presidential elections. For many of the revolution's activists, above all among the younger generation, Yushchenko's handshake with the usurper compromised him irrevocably.

The congenital defects of the reformist government

How can one explain the paradox that Yushchenko, who has always stood for liberal reforms and who during his brief spell as prime minister in 1999-2000 created the basis for the upturn in Ukraine, adopted a dirigiste economic policy? One of the congenital defects of the new government goes back to a compromise made during the Orange Revolution. While the old guard of the Kuchma era, under pressure from the mass demonstrations, handed over the presidency to Yushchenko, they managed in return to ensure that the parliamentary elections would take place only early in 2006, over one year after the upheavals. Before then, the new government has wanted to avoid painful reforms and above all increase the public's spending power. In doing so, the impulsive prime minister, with her populist policies, overshot the mark. Only rarely are successful revolutionaries good administrators.

However, the lengthy period before the parliamentary elections also made room for all kinds of disturbances from outside. Moscow has still not got over the fact that its candidate was defeated in Kiev. Vladimir Putin had intervened directly in the presidential election campaign and congratulated Yanukovich on his illegal election victory. For Moscow, the Orange Revolution meant not only a massive loss of prestige in the post-Soviet space, but also the end of plans to establish, together with Belarus and the Ukraine, a new economic space as a replacement for the Soviet Union. Putin still does not fully regard Ukraine as another country. And the Kremlin security doctrine has lately begun defining energy resources as an important instrument of foreign policy.

The halt on deliveries of cheap natural gas to Ukraine in December 2005 was a clear attempt to weaken Yushchenko in the run up to the Ukrainian elections in March and to strengthen pro-Russian forces. Instead of US$ 50 per 1000 cubic metres, the Kremlin-controlled company Gazprom charged the global market price for gas of US$ 230. Ukraine demanded a transitional period and drew attention to the exceedingly low transit charges for Russian natural gas towards western Europe. When a compromise failed to materialize, Gazprom closed the gas tap on Ukraine. Ukraine reacted as it did in similar crises at the beginning of the 1990s: it simply reduced supplies to western Europe. Set to forfeit its reputation as a reliable gas supplier, Russia was forced to concede. Eventually a price of US$ 95 per 1000 cubic metres of gas was agreed on, albeit based on a mixture of gas from Turkmenistan, which Russia continues to obtain under special conditions.

The gas crisis casts light on Putin's entire foreign policy. Whoever bows to the Kremlin's will, like the Belarusian president Aleksandyr Lukashenko, can continue to obtain gas at a price of as little as US$ 50. Whoever opposes Russia must pay the global market price. As in the Soviet Union, which after the two oil crises of 1974 and 1979 supplied cheap energy to its satellite states in eastern central Europe, it is the Russian people who ultimately pick up the tab when their income from the country's raw materials is lost.

The system of political gas prices is only possible because Putin has de facto re-nationalized the country's energy companies. This also explains the campaign against the former Yukos director Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who wanted to create a market-governed energy sector controlled by the stock market, one whose profits would partly have been pumped into Wall Street. In fine Soviet tradition, Putin banished his political opponent to a Siberian prison and made Gazprom into a central pillar of neo-imperialist foreign policy. In the West, the Khodorkovsky case was seen as a domestic matter for Russia. However, the Putin regime's domestic policy and foreign policy are one and the same thing. This has also been demonstrated in the curbs on NGOs, by means of which the Kremlin intends to decisively limit the West's influence on Russia's internal development.

All the more must the EU be committed to support Ukraine's democratic development and independence. Because the country has always played a key strategic role in the history of eastern Europe.^[2] Only when Russia took over a large part of the Ukraine in the course of the division of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century could it enter the scene as an eastern European hegemonic power. And accordingly, when the independence of Ukraine was decided by plebiscite in 1991, the fate of the Soviet Union was sealed.

If a one-sided pro-Russian policy prevails in Ukraine after the elections on 26 March, Russia might once again develop superpower ambitions. Among its geopolitical projects – which have been the trend in Moscow for a number of years – counts the planned Baltic Sea pipeline from Russia to Germany. It secures Russian gas for Germany, but exposes the Ukraine and Poland to future exhortion attempts from Russia, since they can no longer use the transportation of Russian gas as a bargaining tool.^[3]

Ukraine received at least moral support from the West during the December gas crisis. However, contrary to hopes, the country has hardly moved closer to the West since December 2004. This is in part due to the shifts in internal politics. The gas crisis has damaged the new prime minister, Yury Yekhanurov. In a parliamentary session in January, the opposition accused him of betraying national interests in having agreed to pay a price for gas that is almost double what Ukraine had formally been paying. With Yulia Timoshenko's help, the parliament voted for the resignation of Yekhanurov, who was nevertheless kept in office by Yushchenko.

The outcome of the parliamentary election at the end of March is still completely open; however, the fractious reformers must reckon with losses. It would not be the first time in central eastern Europe that the revolutionaries of 1989 and the reform parties suffered a massive drop in popularity a year or two after upheavals. In Ukraine, it again looks like Viktor Yanukovich's pro-Russian party, Regions of Ukraine, could become the strongest party.

In the meantime, several obstacles to Western rapprochement have arisen. The first is that the reforms expected of the Ukraine have yet to happen. Acceptance in the WTO, for example, is not possible as long as corruption is not dealt with decisively and as long as there continues to be a lack of transparency in politicians' and businesses' accumulation of positions of authority.

No light from the West

A rapprochement is also being hampered by the attitude of the West. For example, the Ukraine enabled visa-free entry for EU citizens as a gesture of goodwill. But the EU action plan decided in 2005 only loosely promised a "constructive dialogue" about future visa relaxations on the part of the EU.^[4] If the reformers in the Ukraine want to show the population a concrete foreign policy success by the elections, concrete agreements must be reached post-haste. Politically, however, these are almost impossible to achieve: for example, in Germany since the exaggerated Visa affair.^[5] And since the failed referendum on the EU constitution, France also blocks all further opening of the EU to the East.

Even if the political causes of the Orange Revolution were primarily domestic, millions were demonstrating for a Western orientation for their country, one directed outwards as well as inwards. If the EU were to turn its back on the Ukrainians or fail to send out a positive signal, they would be likely to once more orient themselves more strongly towards Russia. Because of the chaos in domestic politics and economic problems, the mood in Kiev is already on the point of turning. While the myth and the experience of the revolution lives on in the mind, a new era will begin with the elections at the end of March – for the EU as well.

• ^[1] Anders Åslund, "The Economic Policy of Ukraine after the Orange Revolution", Eurasian Geography and Economics, no. 5 vol. 46 2005, 327-353.
• ^[2] There has been a recent crop of new books on Ukrainian history. Particularly convincing in its method and content is Andreas Kapler's "Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine", 2nd edition, Munich 2000.
• ^[3] This explains Poland's vehement opposition, which could probably only be assuaged by a branch of the Baltic pipeline to Poland.
• ^[4] See the analysis of the Walther Bathory Institute, "Will the Orange Revolution Bear Fruit? EU-Ukraine elections in 2005 and the beginning of 2006", Warsaw 2005, 19.
• ^[5] In early 2005, changes to the procedure for issuing German visas for eastern European and non-EU citizens were found to discard provisions against trafficking and illegal immigration in favour of a swift processing time.

Published 2006-03-08

Original in German
Translation by Simon Garnett
First published in Le Monde diplomatique (Berlin) 2/2006 (German version)

Contributed by Le Monde diplomatique (Berlin)
© Philipp Ther/Le Monde diplomatique (Berlin)
© Eurozine