Ukraine’s Soul Search

Exactly eleven months ago yesterday I sat on a bus rattling its way through countryside on my way to L’viv, an artistic, cobblestone city in the western half of Ukraine. As I gazed out the window, I watched as petite houses dotted the rural landscape where old babcias tended their gardens and teenagers waited for the bus under graffitied cement overhangs.
At the border my lone American passport held up the bus for an additional three hours, bringing our total wait to six hours. We spent the night at the checkpoint, a place which I recall as dark, modestly sketchy, and where drug-sniffing dogs barked constantly. Later, we stopped again, first for wandering cows and a team of horse-drawn wagons in the road and, second, for police, who according to my fellow passengers, are usually just looking for bribes.
Welcome to Ukraine, a place not quite like Europe and yet not really like Russia either. A place which, one might say, is currently on a soul search.
As we drove along I conversed with a Polish banker who had worked in Ukraine. He told me how he felt that support for democracy there was waning. To the poor, rural Ukrainians who had experienced communism and were now struggling under capitalism and the recession, the old days of relative economic security under strong leadership seem tempting. For them, things weren’t ever good in the old days, but then again, things weren’t ever so bad.
Flash-forward to this week’s news of the Ukrainian Constitutional Court’s reversal of an amendment passed in 2004 which markedly decreased the power of the executive. Passed following the Orange Revolution, the 2004 amendment was a check on the original 1996 constitution, which gave the president power to appoint the prime minister and cabinet officials and to fire ministers without parliamentary approval. Under the reversal, parliamentary terms will be decreased from five to four years, and pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovych will now be able to cancel any government resolution.
According to the former Prime Minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, in a September 30th Kyiv Post article, “October 1st [will] go down in Ukrainian history as the day democracy was murdered and a dictatorship installed.”
Since elected in a cloud of fraud in February, President Yanukovych has continually courted the Kremlin. With his increased powers, Yanukoyvch can be expected to further strengthen his ties with Russia as he continues on his agenda of ending Ukraine’s bid to join NATO, increasing Russia’s control over an important southeastern gas line, and possibly even installing Russian as the official language.
Perhaps the man on the bus was right, democracy for sure is waning in Ukraine. However, I for one tend to disagree—because, this is Ukraine’s great chance. If Ukrainians take a stance and rise up in protest behind Tymoshenko, they will decide their allegiance and their commitment to democracy, once and for all, on their own terms. In doing so they will build a stronger Ukraine, independent in its views and collaborative in its means, to thrive in the twenty-first century.
Otherwise if they don’t, there are few reasons to believe why Ukrainians, half of whom already speak Russian, won’t simply sway to Russian influence under a President who already has.
Photo Credit: Ria Novosti