How was a peaceful resolution reached in the winter of2004-2005?
Disunity among the key figures in the governing clique was a major factor favoring a peaceful resolution. Outgoing President Kuchma, who still controlled the police and the military, refused to stand by Yanukovych, the troublesome successor that the Donetsk clan had imposed on him.
Kuchma appeared more interested in securing from whoever was going to be the next president a promise that the new administration would not seek to prosecute him or his family. The West also applied pressure at a critical moment, forcing all sides to accept high-level international mediators: the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, the EU foreign policy commissioner, and the speaker of the Russian parliament. The mediators arrived on November 26, just four days after the start of mass protests. It was now too late to attempt a violent dispersal of protesters, something Putin had reportedly advised behind the scenes.4In this atmosphere of uncertainty, members of the political and economic elite started defecting to the Orange side. On November 27 the parliament passed a resolution condemning the fraudulent elections. Sensing defeat, Yanukovych's advisors from the Party of Regions played their last card, the threat of separatism. A conference of provincial governors from eastern Ukraine demanded a referendum on the country's federalization, while the authorities in Donetsk province actually scheduled a referendum on autonomy, which then had to be called off. The separatist movement did not have enough time to build momentum. At the time, there seemed to be little popular support in the east for such steps, which would have had no binding legal consequences in any case.
On December 2, 2004, the Supreme Court declared the results of the runoff election invalid and scheduled a repeat runoff for December 26. In order to make such a rerun constitutional, Ukrainian parliamentarians scrambled to put together a package satisfying all sides, at least in part.
In addition to promulgating a new elections law that contained a clause on repeat elections and mandated personnel changes at the discredited Central Electoral Commission, the deal included constitutional reform transferring some powers from the president to the parliament. The repeat runoff on December 26 became the most monitored election in Ukrainian history, with 12,000 foreign observers and 300,000 Ukrainian ones. Yushchenko won, with 51.99 percent against Yanukovych's 44.19 percent, and was inaugurated as president in late January 2005.The elections of 2004 demonstrated a change in Ukraine's electoral geography. Yushchenko won by carrying the central region in addition to the west, which at the time seemed to indicate an emerging civic national identity based on Ukrainian culture and democratic values, rather than the historical tradition of Ukrainian nationalism.5 However, the southeast still voted for Yanukovych in the fair election, signaling the growth of a separate Ukrainian political identity based on cultural identification with Russia and the rejection of "Western" values, sentiments that the Party of Regions both inculcated and exploited.
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- CONTENTS
- Yekelchyk S.. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know. 2nd ed. — Oxford: Oxford University Press,2020. — 234 p., 2020