Backing the bad guy
If Yushchenko’s technocratic, free-market reforms are carried
through, globally uncompetitive heavy industries, including mines,
will suffer. Most of these are in the east. Western Ukraine, by
contrast, is much better placed to receive foreign direct investment
in areas such as car production as labour in new EU entrants like
Hungary and Poland becomes more expensive. Ukraine would not be the
first east European country to swallow the bitter pill of the
market, but the suspicion of regional bias carries added bitterness.
Yanukovich’s support is not confined to workers. Among the
outstandingly leggy, fur-clad devuchkas of the Donetsk university
language department (here, as the world over, languages are a girly
subject), the lecturers and professors are as stoutly pro-Yanukovich
as the miners are. Natalia Pyrlic, the deputy dean, said, ‘The EU
has closed the door to us, the answer is no. Even Romania and Turkey
are more welcome than we are. So we will make our own destiny
instead. A partner must make steps towards us as well; it is not
only we who must work for the relationship.’
Mr Putin sees his opportunity, and is undoubtedly pulling strings
in eastern Ukraine. At a meeting of 16 eastern regions to discuss
autonomy on Sunday both the Russian ambassador, Viktor Chernomyrdin,
and Putin’s close ally Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, were present.
Moscow is far from a disinterested observer, and may prefer to see
Ukraine split than the whole country go West.
So the people of Donetsk face a choice. They can continue for
some time in a corrupt but protected economic bubble, lacking
political freedoms and looking to Moscow as a political godfather.
Or they can expose their economy to global competition and
‘restructuring’ in return for the apparently hopeless process of EU
accession and eventual Western foreign investment. The political
crisis now engulfing Ukraine calls for an urgent decision. Right or
wrong, the people in this freezing and grim industrial region seem
to have made up their minds — if Yushchenko prevails, their future
lies to the east. As Mr Mikhailovich at the mine said, ‘Yushchenko
doesn’t listen to us, so we would rather have autonomy, and we will
vote for it.’
Neil Barnett is an independent foreign correspondent
(www.neil-barnett.com).
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