5 - Ukraine

Summary

It was very frightening. For two days we thought the police or army might fire. We talked to the army men with helmets and said “don't fire on us,” and slowly, one by one, they took off their helmets.

Marisa Shukost, citizen, Ivano-Frankivsk

“Razom nas bahato, Nas ne podolaty.” Together we are many, We cannot be defeated.

Song on the Maidan, 2004, modeled after the Chilean song “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”

As we have seen in the last chapter, in contrast to the orderly turnovers of power that took place in Slovakia and Croatia from 1996 to 2000, the defeat of Milošević in Serbia required not just an electoral victory, but also large-scale popular protests following the election. As we will discover in this chapter and the two that follow, the Serbian precedent proved to be quite influential. Thus, from 2003 to 2008, popular protests also took place following electoral confrontations between opposition parties and incumbent authoritarian regimes in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. While the protests failed to dislodge the incumbent in the first three cases, they succeeded in doing so in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

This chapter analyzes the 2004 presidential election that pitted Viktor Yushchenko and his Orange Coalition against the anointed successor of Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yanukovych. The dramatic events that followed the effort by Kuchma and his supporters to steal the 2004 elections unfolded over a period of more than a month and came to involve hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians in addition to political and NGO leaders.