The freedom of speech and assembly enjoyed in Ukraine is the envy of human rights activists in Russia. The Ukrainian media is the freest in the ex-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States. Others say that despite his political naivety he must be given credit for establishing the beginnings of a bottom-up democratic culture in his ex-Soviet country. “Yushchenko has never had a strategy for reaching out to the south and the east of Ukraine after the division that emerged in 2004,” said Wilson. He has failed to broaden his appeal beyond his western Ukraine power base and reach into highly-populated, Russian-speaking areas, the bedrock of Yanukovich’s support. The result has been political paralysis with the presidency, the prime minister’s office and a fractious parliament hopelessly out of tune with one another. His powers for handling these problems only diminished with constitutional reform to which he had unwisely signed up. He has, overall, seemed to be focussing on the wrong priorities as Ukraine has slid into economic hardship. There is also a record of poor time-keeping and bad administration. Insiders say he is not a sound judge of people and he has changed his team of advisers four times in five years. “When he tried to fight tough (with Tymoshenko), he often came off worse,” British historian Andrew Wilson, author of “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution”, told Reuters in an interview. He has often been on the wrong side of the argument in clashes with the PR-savvy Tymoshenko, now one of his main challengers for the presidency. He once said he would be ready to take a “second dose of dioxin” to defend the memory of lost generations of Ukrainians.Įqually the United States, his patron in the “Orange revolution”, has left him high and dry, possibly unimpressed by his lack of strong leadership at home.įor good reasons or bad, he broke early on with Yulia Tymoshenko, twice his prime minister but his main ally on the streets in the heady days of 2004. Many criticise him for throwing himself obsessively into restoring Ukrainian national identity, and righting, as he sees it, the wrongs of history that deprived Ukraine of statehood in the 20th century. Instead, though he himself is seen as a clean pair of hands, bribery and cronyism have only ballooned in his five years in office. He declared he would root out the corruption that plagued Ukrainian business and official life. Tens of thousands turned out in the winter of 2004-5 to back Yushchenko, his face disfigured by a mysterious poisoning from dioxin, against a sleazy post-Soviet establishment.īut the story of Yushchenko’s reign, analysts say, is that of a man who, once in power, hopelessly lost touch with the faithful who put him there. He risks becoming a historical footnote as the adversary whom he humiliated in 2004, Viktor Yanukovich, appears set for a comeback.
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