KIEV -- It's a familiar sight: Ukrainians gathered under an orange flag in the centre of Kiev, demanding change. But a year after the euphoria of the Orange Revolution, the last such banner still flying in the centre of Kiev has a black ribbon of mourning tied to it.

The 10 tired-looking men and women gathered under it aren't celebrating the events of last fall that brought President Viktor Yushchenko to power. They're protesting the betrayal of the ideals that brought so many Ukrainians into the streets to support him.

“This is the funeral of Yushchenko's politics,” said Andrei, who gave only one name. The 38-year-old farm-equipment dealer has been sleeping for weeks in a pup tent in front of the Agriculture Ministry, a miniature version of last year's sprawling tent city that occupied Kiev's central Khreshchatyk Street.

The protesters, who say they were among the crowds supporting the Orange Revolution, initially set up the encampment to demand the resignation of the Agriculture Minister over rising prices in the industry.

Now they have an additional demand: that Yulia Tymoshenko be reinstated. The populist blond firebrand who stood beside Mr. Yushchenko throughout the uprising was recently fired as prime minister after a very public spat with the President over corruption.

“The two of them led the revolution together, and they should be in power together,” Andrei said.
In last year's revolt, tens of thousands of orange-clad Ukrainians swarmed the centre of Kiev for weeks to demand that a fraudulent election result be overturned and that Mr. Yushchenko be installed as president. It was supposed to have marked a clear departure from the corrupt, incestuous politics of the country's recent past.
But Ukraine's mood since the Orange Revolution has slid from initial euphoria at the performance of the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team in office, to deep disillusionment at how the two heroes of the revolt split after an ugly power struggle.
Independence Square, where demonstrators gathered daily last November and December, is today a place where Ukrainians can go to display their dismay at what's happened since then.
Supporters of Viktor Yanukovich, the pro-Russian candidate who vainly resisted defeat at Mr. Yushchenko's hands, have erected a garbage bin on the square where people — about 70 of them a day — throw out the orange flags and scarves of a year ago. Orange was the colour of Mr. Yushchenko's election campaign.

One of the clearest signs that the Orange Revolution has gone sour has been the re-emergence of Mr. Yanukovich as a political power broker in the country.

Mr. Yushchenko struck a pact with Mr. Yanukovich's party in exchange for the parliamentary approval of Yuriy Yekhanurov as Ms. Tymoshenko's replacement. The wording of the deal provides immunity to many who participated in the vote fraud that set off the Orange Revolution.
The deal has been most disconcerting for those who thought the uprising had finally pulled Ukraine out of the Kremlin's orbit after centuries of Russian domination. Mr. Yanukovich was backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the defeated presidential candidate brings his Russian allies back to the Ukrainian political scene.

“This alliance of Yanukovich and Yushchenko will dismay their supporters,” read a recent editorial in the Ukraine Moloda newspaper, which is normally pro-Yushchenko. “This means that once more, east and west, business and politics, will be mixed up. Many of those who stood on Independence Square will view this as a betrayal.”

“It's exactly what we expected,'' said Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-affiliated political analyst who was in Kiev this week hosting a seminar on Ukraine's political crisis. “The program of the Orange Revolution was unrealistic. . . . They prepared for a revolution, but had no strategy for running the country after they won.”

To complicate matters further, Russian prosecutors suddenly cancelled a long-standing arrest warrant for Ms. Tymoshenko last weekend, a signal that she may now ally herself with the Kremlin in a bid to trump Mr. Yushchenko's party in parliamentary elections scheduled for next spring. (Ms. Tymoshenko had been accused of illegally siphoning off gas that was transiting Russia.)

Most opinion polls now put her popularity ahead of the President's. “Yushchenko has always been afraid of her,” said Sergei Ossipenko, an aide to Ms. Tymoshenko.

It's not just the political infighting that has people disillusioned. The leaders of the Orange Revolution have failed to deliver on almost every key issue dear to their supporters.

The country is no closer to joining the European Union — a key, if unrealistic, promise often made by both Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko during the uprising — than it was a year ago.
They did not bring the country out of isolation; in fact, foreign investment fell under their leadership, and economic growth slid to 6 per cent in the first half of this year from 12 per cent in 2004. The percentage of Ukrainians who believe the country is headed in the right direction has fallen from 43 per cent in April to 23 per cent in a recent poll.
An investigation into the death of opposition journalist Giorgiy Gongadze, which many Ukrainians believe was carried out by senior figures in the hated regime of former president Leonid Kuchma, has gone nowhere, leading the dead man's mother to charge that the new authorities were no better than the old ones and that she would not shake Mr. Yushchenko's hand if she saw him.

Amidst all the disappointment, the allegations of corruption have stood out as particularly repulsive to Ukrainians who supported the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team hoping they would put an end to the post-Soviet kleptocracy under Mr. Kuchma. Disappointed insiders, however, say members of the new government behaved little differently than those who preceded them.

Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko fell out after Oleksander Zinchenko, the president's chief-of-staff, quit his post in disgust earlier this month, saying “corruption is now even worse than before.”
Mr. Zinchenko specifically accused Petro Porashenko, a key financial backer of the Orange Revolution who later became head of the National Defence and Security Council, and Olexandr Tretyakov, an adviser to the president, of nepotism and influence peddling.

“People who come to power still see the state as a huge trough. They gorge themselves as quickly as possible because they don't know how long they're going to be there before the next group comes along. It's been that way since independence,” Dan Bilak said. Mr. Bilak, a Canadian lawyer who has been advising the government on legal reforms, was speaking in general terms and not about recent allegations.

The implosion of the Orange Revolution was months in the making. Mr. Porashenko, a millionaire confectionary tycoon, and Ms. Tymoshenko, herself a millionaire, were privately at loggerheads even as they stood together in front of the crowds on Independence Square.

By most accounts, Mr. Porashenko, who was granted extensive powers by the President, never reconciled himself to Ms. Tymoshenko's having got the top job. He ran the Security Council as something close to an alternative government and frequently clashed with Ms. Tymoshenko and her cabinet on economic policy.

Mr. Porashenko favoured market-oriented policies; Ms. Tymoshenko had a leftist, populist approach. Neither was able to push through the economic reforms they wanted.

“They were very good at striking and leading protests, but due to their personal characteristics, they were not good at administering,” said Yuriy Orobiets, an influential parliamentary deputy. “They only ever had one thing in common: opposition to Kuchma.”

As the personality clash threatened to run his presidency into the ground, Mr. Yushchenko eventually decided he had no option but to fire the entire government and start anew. “He lost both his biggest political supporter, Tymoshenko, and his biggest financial supporter, Porashenko, at once,” said a Western diplomat based in Kiev. “The winner seems to be Yanukovich, and Russia seems quite happy as well.”

Those inside the corridors of power say they know the people on the streets feel let down. Many Ukrainians believed the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko team was going to put the country on a path to greater affluence and integration into Europe. What they saw instead was the new leaders behaving just like the old ones, squabbling for influence and trading accusations of corruption.

“It was not just a surprise, it was a shock,” said Kseniya Lyapina, a member of Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party. “There was this irrational, romantic idea that Yushchenko and Tymoshenko would always remain together [politically], and now this romantic idea has been disproved.”

But despite the spectacular setbacks, politicians and ordinary Ukrainians alike are also quick to point out that the country has nonetheless made some strides from a year ago.

The once-dreaded security services have lost much of their influence, and society is more open. Once the media were afraid to criticize those in power, and today the press is as vibrant and diverse as almost anywhere in Europe. Once Ukrainians felt they had no choice but to endure decades of bad government; now they know that if the authorities misstep, they can throw them out of office, either via the ballot box or otherwise.

“Before, everyone worried only about himself or herself, but in the time of the Orange Revolution, people saw what they can accomplish if they gather together,” said Masha Boronina. The 20-year-old student from Eastern Ukraine was helping this week to set up another small tent camp, this one in front of the country's Oil Ministry in a protest against alleged corruption there.

Speaking of her own small protest, she said she expected it would succeed in bringing about change. “They know the power of the people,” she said.

The Globe and Mail; 1 October 2005