The tussle in Ukraine

Viktor Yushchenko with wife Kateryna at a rally in Kiev. - ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AP

The Opposition candidate, Viktor Yuschenko, emerges on top in the presidential re-election in Ukraine, but the country's political troubles appear to be far from over.

THE apparent victory of Viktor Yuschenko in the presidential repoll in Ukraine on December 26 is welcome news for the West. Yuschenko was the candidate openly backed by the United States and most of Western Europe. Russia too had not hidden its sympathies: after Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was declared the winner by the Election Commission in the disputed presidential election, held in November, Russian President Vladimir Putin was among the first to congratulate Yanukovich. Most heads of state kept a diplomatic silence.

Moscow will now have to deal with the new political realities in Ukraine. The pro-Western Yuschenko will be President for the next four years. One of his stated priorities is to take Ukraine closer to the West. Putin, on the other hand, had stated after taking office in 2000 that his goal was to restore Russia's "zones of traditional influence". This in effect meant re-establishing Moscow's political primacy in all the regions that constituted the former Soviet Union.

Yuschenko has, however, moved quickly to calm Moscow's fears. He said that Moscow would be the first capital he would visit as President. It will be difficult for Ukraine to distance itself immediately from Russia as it is heavily dependent on the oil and gas supply from that country. The two countries also have close defence ties, especially in the production of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), planes and tanks.

Ukraine's neighbour Poland has started serious lobbying to facilitate Ukraine's speedy entry into the European Union (E.U.) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Russia has reason to fear that the new government will be quick to raise the issue of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and Russian military bases in Ukraine. Historically, Poland and Russia have vied for influence in Ukraine. The election results have shown that the country is virtually polarised between the Russian-speaking population in the more prosperous south and the east of the country and people in the rest of the country.

Before the latest presidential poll, Yanukovich had threatened to detach the mineral-rich and industrialised east from the rest of the country if he was denied the presidency, which he claimed he had won fair and square in the November election. He is no longer threatening secession but the latest round of polls has shown that Ukraine remains deeply divided. The Crimean region on the Black Sea coast was ceded to Ukraine only in the 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev was the Premier of the Soviet Union. The Crimea voted solidly for Viktor Yanukovich this time round too.

Yanukovich has so far refused to accept the results of the December 26 election and has filed an appeal to the country's Supreme Court to invalidate the results. The Opposition, however, has threatened to take to the streets again. Yanukovich resigned as Prime Minster but has said that he will exhaust all legal avenues to overturn the results. Preliminary results have shown that Yuschenko has won by more than 8 percentage points of the vote. Yuschenko can be declared the winner officially only after his rival exhausts all legal possibilities to challenge the validity of the results.

Yanukovich has alleged massive rigging by the supporters of the "orange revolution". Besides, a lot of Western money flowed into the coffers of the Yuschenko campaign, he says. Even private organisations such as the "Soros Foundation" contributed handsomely to the Opposition's high-decibel campaign.

Since the 1980s, the West has been selectively intervening in the electoral affairs of countries. It started with the Philippines in the mid-1980s. Right now most of the focus is on East Europe and a few countries in Africa and West Asia. Critics of the West have called it "electoral interventionism" in the style of "humanitarian intervention", which has been used effectively to bring about many a "regime change" in recent times.

A lot of unsubstantiated allegations have also been bandied about, the most glaring one being that Yanukovich was involved in an attempt to eliminate his opponent physically by using the government's secret services to poison him. Reports appearing in the Western media now imply that the sudden eruptions on Yuschenko's face were due to a bad case of herpes outbreak triggered by heavy drinking and not dioxin poisoning, as alleged earlier. As many commentators have said, it would be the height of political naivete for any presidential candidate to have his main rival eliminated a few weeks before the election. Despite the odds being stacked against him, Yanukovich managed to win more than 44 per cent of the votes cast.

According to knowledgeable observers of the Ukrainian political scene, there was very little ideologically to differentiate between the two candidates. Their political platforms were similar in many respects. Both the candidates had called for Russian to be made the second official language of the country. Both their campaigns were managed by Russian advertising agencies. Yushchenko and Yanukovich are both known to be indebted to different sets of oligarchs, who have fattened themselves on the privatisation of the state's assets. The presidential election was crucial for the shadowy business groups, as more public sector companies are to be put up for privatisation. In recent years, the Ukrainian economy had shown signs of a turnaround.

Yuschenko has promised to provide a healing touch, after the three rounds of bruising elections in 2004. He has said that he will constitute a Cabinet with representation for all important political parties and regions. One of his election pledges was to clean up the country's economy. Significant sections - perhaps up to 55 per cent - of the economy are under the control of criminal elements. There are demands that the allegations of corruption and criminal activity by the incumbent President, Leonid Kuchma, be investigated. It is feared that such a move may open a can of worms. At one point of time, Yuschenko himself was a close associate of Kuchma.