Strongman, The

state. What is Ukraine? Part of its territory is Eastern Europe, but the greater part is a gift from us.’ One part – the Crimean peninsula – really was a gift, transferred by decree from Russia to Ukraine by the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Crimea was strategically vital to Russia, as the Black Sea Fleet was based there – and indeed the whole country stood like a great boulder across many of the strategic links between Russia and Europe – the oil and gas pipelines, the electricity grid, the military highways – the last buffer between Russia and the ever-expanding NATO. And yet the man who would be president there, Viktor Yushchenko, with his American wife, was talking of joining NATO!
    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