Translated material
Ukraine without Yushchenko
Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko will compete for the presidency
Already by yesterday evening, when the first round of presidential elections in Ukraine, the fifth in the entire post-Soviet history of the country, was ending, their most predictable outcome began to emerge: none of the 18 candidates received half the votes to count on victory in the first round. Another forecast was also confirmed - about the leadership of the head of the Party of Regions, ex-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. The first exit polls, conducted by a consortium of Ukrainian sociological services, showed: Viktor Yanukovych received 31.5% of the votes, the current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko - 27.2%. Businessman Sergei Tigipko was noticeably behind them with 13.5%. In fourth place is former Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Arseniy Yatsenyuk - 7.8%. Only the fifth result was shown by President Viktor Yushchenko, who was fighting for his re-election - 6.0%.Thus, in the second round on February 7, Viktor Yanukovych and Yulia Tymoshenko will meet, as most analysts expected.
Two other public opinion polls taken at the exit from the polling stations did not change the order of the leading names, but gave a significantly larger gap between Yanukovych and Tymoshenko - 11.5 and 12.2%. In any case, Viktor Yushchenko ceases to be the head of state after these elections.
To assert that voters are showing great interest in the current Ukrainian elections means to sin against the truth. The turnout was not the highest. According to the CEC, 65.65%. However, this was also predicted: people have lost their illusions, and few of the candidates arouse their interest. Kyiv taxi drivers, who, as always, know everything about everyone, without choosing expressions, shoot everyone down like hell... Yulia Tymoshenko especially gets it. But for some reason they favor Sergei Tigipko. He himself, having come to vote yesterday, carefully noted that he was expecting a surprise this morning. It’s clear what kind of exit it will take to the second round...
Already in the morning yesterday, the main scandal of election day continued to flare up - around the landing in Donetsk of several charter flights from Georgia with several hundred athletic young men. It turned out that they were going to work as observers at polling stations in the Donetsk region, but they did not have any accreditation from the Central Election Commission. In the Donbass (Viktor Yanukovych’s patrimony), this action was perceived as a provocation on the part of Georgia and its President Mikheil Saakashvili, who reached an agreement with Yanukovych’s main opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. This story seemed incomprehensible to many, and most importantly, it was unclear in whose interests all this was being done.
Premises for polling stations in Ukraine must be spacious. If only for one reason: we need to place 18 posters with photographs, biographies and election programs of 18 presidential candidates somewhere and provide free access to them. In a large school in Obolon, one of the residential areas of Kyiv, there is enough space, but it is difficult to say that people are crowding around these posters. One married couple of retirement age had already voted, had lunch in the school canteen (the first and second with a snack and compote for the third cost no more than 15-20 hryvnia, which is 60-80 rubles) and after that began to study some of the candidates’ programs.
Another elderly woman approaches. They begin to discuss something near the poster of the young leader of Ukrainian nationalists Oleg Tyagnibok. The point about the need to return Ukraine to nuclear status caused controversy. Women are against: “Why is this, are we missing more sickness, is Chernobyl not enough for us?” The husband of one of the women intervenes. He himself does not strongly support this thesis, but he understands the motives of the leader of the Svoboda party. “This is politics,” he says. - Ukraine needs to be taken into account. Look, France or Germany don’t really want to let us into the European Union, they consider us almost barbarians, and if we want to become a nuclear power again, they will start treating us differently. Why are we worse than India or Pakistan?
To the accompaniment of controversy surrounding the nuclear status of Ukraine, I remembered a conversation with an old acquaintance of mine, a young guy who, in the wake of perestroika, moved from the United States to Ukraine. His parents were born there, and he set off to restore independence in his historical homeland. In the 1990s, my interlocutor was close to the founder of the People's Movement of Ukraine, the legendary Soviet political prisoner Vyacheslav Chornovil (tragically died in a car accident in 1999). He said that Chornovil also “played” with the “nuclear” idea, disappointed that the West did not give Ukraine anything in return after the last Soviet nuclear warhead was removed from Ukrainian territory in 1994.
The return of Kyiv's nuclear status was indicated as a separate item in the election program of another presidential candidate from Western Ukraine - 49-year-old mayor of Uzhgorod Sergei Ratushnyak. It is clear that neither Ratushnyak nor Lviv resident Tyagnibok initially had a chance of getting more than 2% of the votes. But the current presidential elections for many candidates are a kind of primaries before the upcoming parliamentary elections in the next year or two. At them, the position they have indicated may already be represented by a political party vying for seats in the Verkhovna Rada. For example, the same Oleg Tyagnibok proposes introducing a visa regime with Russia, which he accuses of “occupying” Ukraine in 1918-1991.
The deputy chairman of the precinct election commission in Obolon, who was not averse to talking with the journalist, calls these positions marginal, with no chance of serious support. He himself voted for Viktor Yushchenko in the last elections, but now he is completely disappointed in him. “A political corpse” is how my interlocutor describes the current president. “Who did you vote for today?” - I asked him. The interlocutor hesitated a little: “For Lyudmila Suprun.” The head of the Ukrainian Agency for Investment and Innovation, like most of the 18 contenders for the presidency, is a so-called technical candidate and is not one of the “Big Five” (Yanukovych, Tymoshenko, Tihipko, Yatsenyuk, Yushchenko, whom Communist leader Pyotr Symonenko and Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Vladimir Lytvyn). The deputy chairman of the precinct election commission does not trust any of them and, as he now thinks, will not vote at all in the second round.
My “American” friend will most likely do the same. In the first round, he votes “out of love” for former Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko: “Unlike most others, he is a decent person.” Gritsenko is also a “technical” candidate, and he has no chance of reaching the second round. He hasn’t decided yet who my friend will vote for in the second round, it will depend on who gets there.
But for the Ukrainian communists voting for Peter Symonenko, the question of voting in the second round will be decided by a special plenum of the bloc of leftist parties. An elderly veteran of the Soviet army, who was present as an observer at the polling station, told a Vremya Novostei observer about this. The former officer himself does not trust any of the “current” ones in power: “They will deceive you anyway.” He cannot forgive Yanukovych for his weakness during the previous elections in 2004: “He turned out to be a coward.” The veteran doesn’t like Yushchenko either: “He’s not behaving like a man.”
“And Julia?” "Julia?" - the old warrior asks and smiles. “She, of course, never tells the truth,” he says with masochistic pleasure. “But how he fights, what his character is!” And after a pause, he adds, somehow doomedly: “I’ll probably vote for her in the second round.”
Such sentiments are very accurately noted in one of the articles of the Kyiv newspaper “Zerkalo Nedeli”: “The most active voters today will be those who are accustomed to the fact that nothing much is changing in the country, and who do not see anything bad in this, they believe that everything will be the same.” Always. They form the core of sympathizers of both Yanukovych and Tymoshenko.” The newspaper adds: “This misconception could lead to shocks, perhaps in a year or two, when the subcutaneous reserves of rapidly impoverished voters are depleted.” As for the winner of the elections, according to the author, he “will get an ideologically disoriented, politically divided, energy-dependent, financially helpless country.”