With highly questionable parliamentary elections and continuous persecution of the opposition, the authoritarian regime of President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions looked indestructible in 2012.
Parliamentary elections
Much of the year was dominated by the October parliamentary elections.
Yanukovych’s Party of Regions needed to preserve control of the parliament amid dropping approval ratings. To achieve it, they passed new electoral legislation the year before, introducing single-mandate districts and banning parties from running united as blocs. It reduced the chances of opposition parties, who formed a union known as the Dictatorship Resistance Committee, and opened possibilities for cheating.
It also helped that in February, Yuriy Lutsenko, then one of the leaders of the opposition, was sentenced to four years in prison for abuse of office. He became the second opposition leader to be jailed in an apparently political case, after Yulia Tymoshenko in 2011.
As a result, the Party of Regions won 152 out of 450 seats, but preserved control over the parliament with the help of the 66-member faction of the Communist Party, and some independent lawmakers.
International and Ukrainian observers deemed the election “not competitive enough” and reported numerous violations of the voting process and the vote count.
The new parliament was short-lived. Less than two years later, President Petro Poroshenko, the nation’s fifth president, dissolved the legislature and initiated a snap election.
Euro 2012
Ukraine co-hosting the UEFA Euro 2012 soccer championship with Poland was one of the brightest moments of the decade for Ukrainians. For the first time, a major event took place in Ukraine, giving Ukrainians a feeling of being included in the European family.
In the run-up to the championship, the nation has renovated or built from scratch key sports arenas, airports, roads, and hotels. Speedy Hyundai trains were imported to connect the biggest cities. The preparations had cost the country about $5 billion over four years. There were many allegations of embezzlement of state funds, but no one was prosecuted.
Ukraine’s national soccer team, however, failed to qualify for the championship’s final stage, as it took the third place in Group D after losses against France and England. The Ukrainian fans enjoyed a single victory against Sweden, though.
Big crime year
The 2012 was also a year of shocking crimes.
The most publicized one was the tragic story of Oksana Makar, an 18-year-old woman from the southern city of Mykolaiv, which shook up Ukraine that year.
Three young men raped Makar on March 9, 2012, in Mykolaiv. To cover up their crime, they tried to burn the woman alive in a trash pit at the abandoned construction site. Makar survived and was found the next morning. Despite intense medical care, Makar died in hospital 20 days after the attack.
The crime immediately grabbed public attention in Ukraine. It was partly due to the cruelty of the attack, but also because many anticipated that the suspects may evade responsibility, as one of them was related to local officials through his parents. This feeling was fueled by the fact that the then-governor of Mykolaiv Oblast made unfavorable comments about Makar, blaming her parents for “not controlling their daughter.”
Amid this expectation of impunity, thousands of people in Mykolaiv and other cities took to the streets, demanding justice for the victim.
The case was known beyond Ukraine. The Kyiv Post got emails from readers abroad, expressing support for Makar’s family and trying to send money to them.
In the end, the attackers didn’t evade justice: two were sentenced to 14 and 15 years in prison, while one got a life sentence.
The case caused one of the first protest movements during the Yanukovych presidency. Later in 2013, there were protests in support of another gang-rape victim in Vradiyivka, a city in Mykolaiv Oblast. The Vradiyivka protests, in their turn, are widely seen as a precursor of the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Shortly after Makar was murdered, another unusual crime grabbed the headlines. On April 27, 2012, a series of explosions took place in the industrial city of Dnipro, then known as Dnipropetrovsk, located some 500 kilometers south of Kyiv and home to 1 million people. It was something unusual for Ukraine: terror attacks. Four explosive devices were hidden in concrete trash bins. They detonated within hours. No one was killed, but 27 people were injured.
The police soon arrested a local university professor for organizing the explosions. Seven years later, the case is still being heard in court, with the professor claiming he was set up by Security Service of Ukraine agents.
But this wasn’t it for 2012. In September, a man shot dead three guards at the supermarket in the Karavan shopping mall. It was one of the rare mass shootings in Ukraine’s history. The man was identified as a Kyivan named Yaroslav Mazurok. He was found dead in Kyiv weeks later.
Although the police said it appeared to be a suicide, speculation went on regarding whether it was true and whether Mazurok was really “the Karavan shooter.” Mazurok’s motives were never clear.
Language law
The new language law, adopted in July 2012, caused controversy in Ukraine. It expanded the use of the Russian language and languages of other national minorities, and was widely believed to be detrimental to the Ukrainian language.
The language law polarized parliamentary parties and the public, causing clashes in the parliament and in the streets. As the pro-Russian Communist Party and Party of Regions pushed for adoption of the law, the law was deemed to represent the interests of Russia. It was also criticized by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.
The controversial law ended up causing even more damage than anticipated. In February 2014, it was the parliament’s attempt to cancel it that was used by separatists as a pretext to start pro-Russian rallies in eastern Ukraine.
The Constitutional Court ended up canceling the law in 2018.
Anti-tobacco move
In 2012, Ukraine made considerable progress in fighting tobacco smoking.
In March, the parliament banned tobacco advertising. The state also increased taxation of the tobacco industry and made tax enforcement more stringent. This worked towards making cigarettes less affordable to buyers and replenishing state coffers.
In December, the country banned indoor smoking in public places. This move protected millions of Ukrainians from secondhand smoke, which used to be omnipresent in Ukrainians eateries.
