Strongman (19 page)

Putin would not make the mistake of sending his foreign minister to Ukraine to ‘sort things out’ and risk letting it slip away like Georgia. In Ukraine, Putin would do whatever it
took to stop the rot. He put his new chief of staff, the future president, Dmitry Medvedev, in charge of working out a strategy.

The danger had been clear to Putin since the Ukrainian election campaign started back in July. The Western-oriented opposition was led by a charismatic duo: Yushchenko, who had already served as
the country’s central bank chairman and prime minister, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a fiery politician renowned for the trademark blond plait wound like a pie-crust around her head and for her
controversial career in the gas business which had made her one of Ukraine’s richest people. The two formed an electoral coalition, Force of the People, and struck a deal under which, if
Yushchenko was elected president, he would nominate Tymoshenko to be his prime minister. Both wanted to assert Ukraine’s independence from Russia and, in particular, its right to join the
European Union and NATO if it wished.

The establishment candidate was the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a man with an unprepossessing past – he had two criminal convictions as a youth for robbery and assault – that
made even Vladimir Putin wary of him, though he was clearly preferable to Yushchenko. Several well-placed Russians have indicated to me that Putin did not think Yanukovych was the best candidate,
but acquiesced because he had the full support of the incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, who threw all the government’s resources behind his campaign. State television gave Yanukovych wide
and positive coverage, while disparaging Yushchenko as an extreme nationalist, damningly married to an American of Ukrainian extraction who may even have been a CIA agent, plotting her
husband’s seizure of power.

In an interview, Kuchma confirmed that he and Putin had discussed who the preferred candidate should be. ‘It was not a secret. Didn’t the West discuss who should be president of
Ukraine? The whole Western community did that, but on the other side just Russia, just Putin. Putin knew Mr Yushchenko’s statements and opinions. And he did not have a great desire that he
come to power.’
¹
Once Kuchma had chosen Yanukovych as his ‘successor’, Putin threw the Kremlin’s support behind him. Ukraine now
became a battleground for influence, with the United States and Russia both openly supporting opposing candidates.

Just as in Georgia the previous year, Western NGOs were heavily involved in the campaign, advising Yushchenko and the home-grown groups that supported him. The biggest youth group was called
Pora (‘It’s Time’), which borrowed the electioneering and civil disobedience techniques of the Serbian group Otpor and the Georgian Kmara. The Russians for their part sent
so-called ‘political technologists’, including the well-known Gleb Pavlovsky (a one-time Soviet dissident and now an adviser to Putin) and the political consultant Sergei Markov, to
work as spin doctors with the Yanukovych team and act as a channel between them and the Kremlin.

The American ambassador to Kiev, John E. Herbst, recalled in an interview that Western embassies ‘developed tools’ to make sure the elections would be free and fair. ‘I
remember the Canadian ambassador took the lead on this to develop a working group of interested embassies keeping an eye on things relating to the election. I also then organised a regular meeting,
first on a monthly basis but then it happened maybe every couple of weeks, with all interested international and Ukrainian NGOs, to find out what they were doing to encourage free and fair
elections, and to brainstorm on how we might better coordinate to get the outcome we want. And the outcome was a free and fair election, not any particular winner.’ As in Georgia, the USAID
contributed millions of dollars to promote civil society, free media and democracy awareness. Herbst says all parties, including even the Communist Party, were free to avail themselves of these
funds and programmes.
²

At one point during the campaign Herbst reached out to the Russian spin doctors to try to gauge what they were up to. ‘I invited Pavlovsky and Marat Gelman, who was his partner in this
enterprise, to lunch. We had a pleasant lunch ... but a very restrained conversation. They really did not want to talk too much about what they were doing.’ Herbst says he made no bones about
what the Americans were doing in Ukraine: ‘In a sense I had an advantage because everything we were doing was pretty much right out in the open. We wanted to encourage a free and fair
election, and we said what we were doing publicly. I had no problem telling them that NGOs in Ukraine, and for that matter internationally, were trying to encourage this result too. They were more
reticent to describe to me what they were up to, and I can understand why.’

What Herbst described as merely supporting free and fair elections, Pavlovsky saw differently: ‘I could see consultants and a large number of NGO activists who were completely pro-American
or pro-Atlantic.’ Pavlovsky was also reticent when asked what he had been trying to achieve. He acted as a ‘channel of communication’, he said, but found it hard to influence
Kuchma, who insisted on running his candidate’s campaign on his own. ‘We never understood why Kuchma selected him. There were other governors much more acceptable to the electorate. As
I understood it, Kuchma was expecting a conflict, and Yanukovych seemed like a tough man who could handle it. It was his mistake. Yanukovych’s rudeness, his coarseness, irritated voters. And
of course Putin noticed that, and was unhappy about it.’ By the end of the campaign, Pavlovsky says he was reduced to writing sad reports back to Moscow about how the campaign headquarters
had ‘lost command’.
³

In an interview, Sergei Markov was more forthcoming about the advice Russian consultants gave to the Kuchma/Yanukovych team – and made some startling claims about the role the Russians
believed Western NGOs were playing. Markov openly acknowledged – indeed stressed – that he and his colleagues were commissioned to do this work (to influence the election of a sovereign
state)
by the Russian presidential administration
. Part of their work, according to Markov, consisted in providing Kuchma and Yanukovych with daily expert analyses of the developing
situation, to enable them to respond better. Secondly, he said, ‘We saw that experts who were appearing in the mass media were by and large firmly under the influence of Western foundations.
And basically these Western foundations forbade them to say anything good about Russia. If they did they were thrown out of the projects they were working on, lost their grants and ended up
penniless. So we came and started organising seminars, conferences, joint media projects with them, to try to get around this “ban”.’
⁴

It should be said that this assessment is precisely the opposite of what the opposition themselves (and most Western observers) believed: that the media were totally controlled by the
government, and served a consistent diet of pro-Russian views.

Markov gave this outlandish assessment of the opposition candidate. ‘We were firmly of the opinion that Yushchenko was completely controlled by his wife, and she belonged to a circle of
radical Ukrainian nationalists connected with the Nazi movement and with, not so much the American special services, rather with circles of various East European diasporas, especially the Poles,
who hate Russia as only Polish nationalists can. I was certain that Yushchenko, as a weak person, would totally carry out the programmes of these radical nationalists, whose aim was to create the
maximum conflict between Ukraine and Russia – even a small war. In order to cause a quarrel between these fraternal nations, the Russians and Ukrainians, blood had to be spilt. I am convinced
that these people were determined that Ukrainians and Russians should start killing each other – and I mean
killing each other
.’

These are quite astonishing claims, but they are important, for it is highly likely that Markov’s apocalyptic view was shared by his masters in the Kremlin.

At the same time, the Russians were fully aware that Yushchenko had a big chance of winning, and made strange undercover overtures to his team. Oleh Rybachuk was Yushchenko’s campaign
chief, and future chief of staff. He says he received a call out of the blue from an old student friend whom he had not seen for 24 years. ‘When he called me I knew he was in the KGB. He
suggested that I come to Moscow to meet people who were close to Vladimir Putin.’
⁵

Over the next month and a half Yushchenko’s adviser made weekly visits to Moscow, meeting ‘in dimly lit restaurants and speaking in whispers’. The Russians wanted to know what
Yushchenko would do if elected. Rybachuk told them: ‘Our policies are simple. We want to be a democratic country, a European country. We want to be a NATO member for European security. When
we come to power we won’t be a problem because you’ll know what to expect from us.’ It was hardly the reassurance the Kremlin was hoping for.

On 5 September, just two months before election day, Yushchenko fell seriously ill after a dinner with the head of the Ukrainian security service. He took painkillers when he got home, but in
the morning was feeling worse. Rybachuk recalls: ‘It was around ten in the morning and he said, “Let’s have this meeting fast because I feel really bad. Something’s not
right.” ’ The cause of the pain could not be found and after three days Yushchenko was flown to a private clinic in Vienna where he was diagnosed with dioxin poisoning. The poison
caused stomach ulcers, problems with his spleen and considerable disfigurement to his face.

‘I remember waking up in the clinic at 5.30 in the morning,’ Yushchenko recalled, ‘and half of my face was paralysed, and within three hours I could barely make a sound. I was
losing my speech. Every morning I looked in the mirror and my face was getting bigger and bigger.’
⁶

For two weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko stepped into the breach, addressing rallies and blaming Yushchenko’s enemies for ‘cynically poisoning him’. When he finally returned to the
campaign trail he was more popular than ever, the scars on his once handsome face visible proof of his enemies’ desperation. Thanks to Channel 5 – a television station owned by a
wealthy businessman in Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party – his words were broadcast live to public squares across the country: ‘The last two weeks, dear friends, have been the most
tragic in my life.’

Moscow had to step up a gear now to promote its candidate, who was trailing in the opinion polls. On 9 October Putin invited Kuchma and Yanukovych to Moscow at short notice – to celebrate
his recent birthday. The television coverage was designed to demonstrate how chummy they all were, in the hope that some of Putin’s stardust would land on Yanukovych’s dowdy
shoulders.

‘Thank you for responding to my invitation to come at such short notice,’ Putin gushed. ‘It’s a good pretext.’

‘It’s a wonderful pretext,’ the Ukrainians gushed back. With the cameras still on him, Kuchma took the chance to sound presidentially ‘neutral’ while warning his
countrymen back home that, as Eduard Shevardnadze might have said, the sun rises in the north: ‘When I am asked about our two main presidential candidates, I reply that for me it’s not
so much a question of who but of what will be after the election. Which path will Ukraine take? The tried and tested one we have today, which has given results – even if our countrymen
perhaps do not fully feel those results – or the path that will scupper everything that’s been done these past ten years, and put everything in doubt? I think our meeting [with Putin]
will help to push things in the right direction.’

Lest anyone was in any doubt, Putin then travelled to Ukraine for a three-day visit at the end of October – an unprecedented intervention right on the eve of the first round of the
election. He did not need to do anything so crude as to publicly praise Yanukovych or disparage Yushchenko. His very presence was a reminder of what was most at stake in this election, and everyone
knew who the pro-Russia candidate was. Putin began with a live interview simultaneously broadcast on three Ukrainian state television channels, to which viewers could phone in or email their
questions. Over the next two days he held talks with the leadership and stood beside Yanukovych at ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of Ukraine’s liberation (by the Russians) from Nazi
occupation. The spin doctors were doing a pretty good job. And at this stage the Russians were firmly convinced that Yushchenko stood no chance of being elected.

But polling on 31 October proved them wrong. Yushchenko emerged fractionally ahead of Yanukovych, with both taking just under 40 per cent. A run-off between the two leading candidates was
required, and this was set for Sunday 21 November.

In that second round, an exit poll paid for by Western embassies put Yushchenko 11 percentage points ahead of his rival. But official results put the prime minister three points ahead. The
result was denounced by Western election observers who said they had witnessed abuse of state resources in favour of Yanukovych. Yushchenko’s campaign chief, Oleh Rybachuk, recalls: ‘I
was voting in a small polling station in the centre of Kiev. There were always very few people voting there, but on the day of that election there was a sudden queue of people with additional
voting slips, who had arrived from the Donetsk region [Yanukovych’s heartland]. There were more of them than there were Kiev people who came to vote at their own polling station!’

The fraud was so evident that Yushchenko supporters began to pour into Independence Square (known as Maidan) in central Kiev, setting up a tent city where they planned to sit it out until the
result was changed. Orange became the colour of the revolution – chosen rather than the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag in order to avoid nationalist overtones. Over the next week or
so, a million people joined in, besieging government buildings.

Vladimir Putin, however, immediately rang Yanukovych to offer his congratulations. ‘It was a sharp fight,’ he said, ‘but an open and honest one, and your victory was
convincing.’ Apart from ‘sharp’, every adjective could scarcely have been further off the mark. Being charitable, one might point out that he was in Brazil at the time, and maybe
out of the loop. But what were his intelligence services telling him? His adviser Gleb Pavlovsky says it was no mistake, but a deliberate attempt by Putin to challenge the West in what he describes
as an ‘international fight’ over the election result. ‘The congratulations served as a political signal. The fight for recognition of the results had started, and Putin took part
in that fight. In the end, Russia lost, but if it had not, the result would have been different.’