Even though most people and polls have written off President Victor Yuschenko's chances to get re-elected, Russian leaders are still mounting attacks on him. Why do they bother? Will their meddling backfire, as it did during the 2004 Orange Revolution?
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev inserted Russia into the Ukrainian presidential election campaign this week, decrying President Victor Yushchenko’s “anti-Russian” stance and expressing hope that Kyiv’s new leader would build closer ties with his country.
In a letter and video blog addressed to Yushchenko published on his web site on Aug. 11, Medvedev accused the Ukrainian president of pursuing policies that have plunged bilateral relations to “unprecedented lows.” He said that he would postpone sending Russia’s new ambassador to Kyiv until relations improved.
Yushchenko gave his response two days later. “I cannot disagree that there are serious problems in the relations between our countries, but it’s strange that the Russian president completely denies Russia’s responsibility for it,” he said.
Medvedev’s attack came as Ukrainian politicians gear up for the upcoming presidential contest on Jan. 17. His remarks are widely interpreted as escalation of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s domestic politics. In 2004, Russian leaders openly supported Victor Yanukovych. Their efforts backfired then.
The Russian president’s letter read like a balance sheet of all the complaints made in recent years by the Kremlin about Yushchenko’s pro-Western integration drive and attempts to break Kyiv free of Moscow’s grip. Since Yushchenko defeated Yanukovych and rose to the presidency, he has been a thorn in the side of Russian leaders. The Kremlin has frequently blasted his attempts to build Ukrainian national consciousness.
In the letter, Medvedev criticized Yushchenko’s support for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili during the Russia-Georgia war in South Ossetia last year, attempts to bring Ukraine into NATO, the recent expulsion of a Russian diplomat and attempts “to complicate the activity of the Black Sea Fleet” in the Crimea.
Medvedev also laid into Yushchenko’s attempts to forge a new approach to Ukrainian history through the promotion of leaders who fought for Ukraine’s independence and the recognition of Holodomor as a Josef Stalin-inspired genocide. He appealed to the countries’ “common history” that makes them “not just neighbors, but brother nations.”
In his address to the Ukrainian nation, Yushchenko refuted each one of Medvedev’s accusations as “baseless” and said he was ready for “a constructive dialogue” with his counterpart.
“I am confident in the good future of Ukrainian-Russian relations, based on deep traditions of friendship and neighborliness between the people of our two countries, which are evidently stronger than the interests of individual political circles, and do not depend on the fleeting political situation,” Yushchenko said.
Observers said Medvedev’s letter and its tone were unexpected. The decision to delay the sending of an ambassador was almost without diplomatic precedent. “There were no direct motives for such a sharp message and diplomatic demarche,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research.
Medveded appeared to backtrack on his decision and on Aug. 13 signed a decree appointing Mikhail Zurabov Russia’s new ambassador to Ukraine.
Coming shortly after the anniversary of Russia’s war against Georgia, Medvedev’s comments were seen as highly symbolic. “It’s a message to the West that Russia is prepared to follow a tough foreign policy line in the post-Soviet space. It’s a delayed reaction to the visit of [U.S. Vice President Joe] Biden,” Fesenko added.
If Medvedev was sending a message to the West, the final sentence of the missive also brought Russia crashing into the Ukrainian presidential election campaign. “Russia hopes that the new political leadership of Ukraine will be prepared to build relations between our countries that will in practice correspond to the genuine hopes of our nations, and the interests of European security,” Medvedev wrote.
In his letter, Yushchenko retorted that he has sought dialogue with the Russian president by sending him letters at least three times this year, only to get invitations to horse racing and other public events in response. “I am hoping that the reaction of the head of the Russian state to my call for dialogue will be constructive,” he said.
But it’s not Yushchenko with whom the Kremlin had sought dialogue in the past. In 2004, Russia gave consistent and vocal support to Victor Yanukovych and suspicions persist about the Kremlin’s involvement in the near-fatal dioxin poisoning of candidate Yushchenko. Their attempts failed spectacularly when thousands of Ukrainians hit the streets to protest a rigged vote, and Yushchenko won in the Dec. 26, 2004, rerun.
“It’s a return to 2004,” said Oleksiy Haran, founding director of the School for Policy Analysis at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. “Medvedev and Putin still suffer from a loser’s complex. It’s a signal that Russia intends to take part in the election campaign.”
Some analysts said that Russia appears not to have learned its lesson from the 2004 defeat that Ukrainians react negatively to outside interference. “It will play a mobilizing role like in 2004, where their actions put off even those voters who were sympathetic toward Russia. It will have the opposite effect [to Medvedev’s intentions], and will actually bring more votes to Yushchenko,” Haran said.
Yanukovych leads the way in a June poll by the Research & Branding Group on 26.8 percent, with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on 15.8 percent and former parliamentary speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk on 12.3 percent. Yushchenko languishes on 2.1 percent.
While the letter will chime with the Yanukovych electorate, observers said it was a message and a test for the candidates. “It’s as if Medvedev gave them some homework on how to improve relations with Russia,” said Fesenko from the Penta Center. “He is saying they must pay heed to Russian interests on concrete problems.”
Yanukovych said in a statement that he would “restore normal, neighborly, equal and mutually beneficial relations.” Yushchenko’s former Orange Revolution ally, Tymoshenko, who has fostered closer ties with the Kremlin, gave no response, while Yatseniuk told a Moscow radio station that both sides were to blame for the poor state of relations, but that any attempts by Moscow to interfere in the elections “would end badly.”
