Why did mass protests against President Kuchma develop in the early2000s, and who led them?
Kuchma narrowly won his second term as president in 1999, largely thanks to his control of the media and his willingness to engage in every kind of political manipulation, up to and including ballot stuffing.
In order to accomplish this ignoble feat, he had to rely even more heavily on the support of the oligarchs. The following year, his administration employed electoral fraud freely in a constitutional referendum aimed at weakening the parliament, although any constitutional changes required approval by two-thirds of the parliament, so the regime's fraudulent victory at the polls was ultimately in vain. However, it took a much more shocking revelation to propel the Kuchma regime on its downward spiral.In September 2000 the investigative journalist Georgii Gongadze, who specialized in documenting government abuses, suddenly disappeared; his headless body was eventually discovered in fields near Kyiv. In November, the leader of the Socialist Party, Oleksandr Moroz, made a stunning accusation against Kuchma in parliament, claiming that the president himself had ordered the journalist's disappearance, as confirmed by recordings made secretly in the presidential office. As it turned out, a member of Kuchma's security detail, Major Mykola Melnychenko, provided Moroz with some 300 hours of conversations that he claimed to have recorded with a simple digital recorder left under a couch. Some people heard speaking on the “Melnychenko tapes” confirmed their authenticity, while others claimed that the content had been doctored. The blow to Kuchma's reputation was nonetheless enormous.
The tapes revealed the president repeatedly asking his minister for internal affairs and security service chief to “take care" of Gongadze, even suggesting a possible scenario for the journalist's disappearance; other revelations were no less shocking.2 The recordings seemed to indicate the highest Ukrainian leadership's direct involvement in large-scale electoral fraud, money laundering, insider privatization, and the illegal arms trade.
On top of that, Kuchma's speech on the tapes was full of obscenities and replete with anti-Semitic and misogynistic slurs.Early in 2001 a broad opposition movement sprang up in Ukraine and, for the first time since independence, the Communist and Socialist parties did not lead the way. Adopting the name “Ukraine without Kuchma,” this large democratic coalition focused on the removal of the rotten political regime. The new Ukrainian middle class resented the rampant corruption and the lack of equal opportunity, but the opposition slogans resonated even further, especially their populist message of reining in the oligarchs. The leaders of the opposition also seemed to represent a new breed of politician, as exemplified by Viktor Yushchenko, a patriotic Ukrainian banker who had served as prime minister without acquiring a reputation for being corrupt—a nearly impossible feat under Kuchma. His dynamic political partner, the charismatic Yulia Tymoshenko, was a master of fiery, populist rhetoric and was also well informed about government corruption in the energy sector by virtue of her own business background in that area.
In preparation for the 2002 parliamentary elections, the new center-right opposition reconstituted itself as the electoral bloc “Our Ukraine," led by Yushchenko. His skillfully run campaign focused on economic reform and clean government. Kuchma's coalition of small, oligarch-backed parties managed to win the elections by employing the usual fraudulent tactics, but Our Ukraine formed the second-largest faction in the parliament. It also acquired its own oligarch supporters, most notably the “chocolate king," Petro Poroshenko. The opposition and the West protested the stolen elections, but the Kuchma administration was able to carry on business as usual, at least temporarily.
In fact, by then Kuchma had become a pariah on the international scene. Shunned by Western leaders after the Gongadze scandal and the many instances of electoral fraud, he also incurred the ire of the United States after revelations of illicit arms deals with Saddam Hussein's Iraq emerged. Washington was particularly outraged in
2003, when it became known that the Ukrainian authorities had either sold or planned to sell to Iraq the Soviet-made Kolchuga radar system, capable of detecting stealth bombers. Kuchma was unable to salvage his reputation by sending 1,650 Ukrainian troops to Iraq as part of the US-led multinational contingent. Trapped in semiisolation from the West, the Kuchma regime was drifting against its better judgment closer to Putin's Russia, which wanted to swallow Ukraine economically and politically.