But polling on 31 October proved them wrong. Yushchenko emerged fractionally ahead of Yanukovych, with both taking just under 40 per cent. A run-off between the two leading candidates was required, and this was set for Sunday 21 November.
In that second round, an exit poll paid for by Western embassies put Yushchenko 11 percentage points ahead of his rival. But official results put the prime minister three points ahead. The result was denounced by Western election observers who said they had witnessed abuse of state resources in favour of Yanukovych. Yushchenko’s campaign chief, Oleh Rybachuk, recalls: ‘I was voting in a small polling station in the centre of Kiev. There were always very few people voting there, but on the day of that election there was a sudden queue of people with additional voting slips, who had arrived from the Donetsk region [Yanukovych’s heartland]. There were more of them than there were Kiev people who came to vote at their own polling station!’
The fraud was so evident that Yushchenko supporters began to pour into Independence Square (known as Maidan) in central Kiev, setting up a tent city where they planned to sit it out until the result was changed. Orange became the colour of the revolution – chosen rather than the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag in order to avoid nationalist overtones. Over the next week or so, a million people joined in, besieging government buildings.
Vladimir Putin, however, immediately rang Yanukovych to offer his congratulations. ‘It was a sharp fight,’ he said, ‘but an open and honest one, and your victory was convincing.’ Apart from ‘sharp’, every adjective could scarcely have been further off the mark. Being charitable, one might point out that he was in Brazil at the time, and maybe out of the loop. But what were his intelligence services telling him? His adviser Gleb Pavlovsky says it was no mistake, but a deliberate attempt by Putin to challenge the West in what he describes as an ‘international fight’ over the election result. ‘The congratulations served as a political signal. The fight for recognition of the results had started, and Putin took part in that fight. In the end, Russia lost, but if it had not, the result would have been different.’
President Kuchma was paralysed. His capital city was witnessing the biggest display of people power Europe had seen since the fall of communism. He toyed with the idea of using force to remove the protestors, hoping all the while that the sub-zero temperatures would drive them away. They did not, and the demonstrators themselves remained entirely peaceful to avoid provoking violence. In the early hours of 23 November Kuchma called President Kwaśniewski of Poland for advice. ‘He was incredibly nervous,’ Kwaśniewski recalls, ‘and kept repeating, “I will not allow blood to be spilt here” – two or three times. He asked me to go to Kiev. I said, “It’s the middle of the night, I’ll see what I can do by morning.”’7
In the morning Kwaśniewski called Tony Blair. Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, recalls: ‘He was urging Tony to go with him to Kiev. But Tony was reluctant to do that because the Russians had this obsession that we were trying to surround them, that the West was moving into their sphere of influence. Tony decided not to do it.’
The Polish president pulled together a European Union mission to mediate between the two candidates and President Kuchma. They would travel to Kiev by the end of the week. But events were moving fast.
On Tuesday 23 November Yushchenko declared himself the winner and symbolically took the presidential oath. His running-mate Yulia Tymoshenko impetuously announced she would lead a march on the presidential administration, declaring, ‘Either they will give up power or we will take it.’ Her call provoked a row within the team. Rybachuk told her: ‘You shouldn’t be provoking the crowds like that. What if somebody gets killed?’
‘Then they’ll die as heroes,’ she replied, according to Rybachuk.
The next day the Central Election Commission officially declared that Yanukovych had won. The United States, which had invested so much in trying to ensure a fair election, had to decide what to do in the face of such apparently blatant manipulation. The secretary of state, Colin Powell, recalled in an interview: ‘I came into the office while all this was unfolding and called in my team, and I said, “Look, this is too big. We cannot simply stand by and say nothing and put out mealy-mouthed statements.”’ He went down to the press room and made a statement that set Washington at odds with Moscow: ‘We cannot accept this result as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse.’
On his way back from his Latin American trip, President Putin stopped in at The Hague for a summit with EU leaders, where he picked up the gauntlet. ‘We have no moral right to push a big European state into any kind of mass disorder,’ he said. ‘We should not allow the resolution of such conflicts through mob rule to become part of international practice.’
Behind the scenes, it seems that Putin was advising Kuchma to get a grip and clear the crowds from the streets. Asked about it in an interview, Kuchma admitted: ‘Putin is a hard man. It wasn’t like he was saying directly, “Put tanks on the street.” He was tactful in his comments. But there were some hints made, that’s no secret.’ The hints were evidently rather heavy, and Kuchma had to insist: ‘I will not use force to clear demonstrators from the Maidan. Because I know there are children there, and it’s obvious how it would end.’8
On the Friday, five days after the election, the EU mission arrived in Kiev, led by Kwaśniewski and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. But as a million Yushchenko supporters waited patiently in the streets, some 40,000 miners from Yanukovych’s heartland, Donetsk, were marching on Kiev. Kwaśniewski told Kuchma: ‘What are you saying? This means a massacre! I am telling you that if this happens I go straight to the airport with Solana, and we will hold a huge press conference in Brussels where we will accuse you of starting a civil war in Ukraine.’
Kuchma took the necessary measures to prevent disaster. ‘I have leverage with influential people,’ he recalled later. ‘We just managed to stop them.’
Before the mediation talks began Kuchma put through a call to President Putin in Moscow to stress that the Round Table must have a Russian representative present. Putin proposed sending Boris Yeltsin, which sounded like a joke to Kwaśniewski. He told Kuchma: ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but I can’t treat this seriously, because much as I appreciate Yeltsin and I enjoyed working with him, we want to have serious talks, not a show.’9
Putin sent a trusted functionary instead – Boris Gryzlov, a former interior minister and chairman of the State Duma, whom Putin had just made head of his party, United Russia. Gryzlov’s contribution to the talks was scarcely more productive than Yeltsin’s might have been. Yushchenko says the tension was overpowering. ‘I knew I was the last person Russia wanted as president. These falsifications, the way the Russians were taking an interest, their slanted position during the election, this interference in Ukrainian internal affairs… it was obvious to all.’