Gryzlov’s starting point, according to Kwaśniewski, was that Yanukovych was president, and that all the stories about irregularities were a waste of time, stirred up by foreign forces. There was nothing to talk about and the Round Table made no sense.
Yushchenko and Yanukovych each accused the other of rigging the vote in different constituencies. Someone suggested that overall the vote wasn’t forged by more than 10 per cent. Kwaśniewski says he looked at him and said: ‘Okay, put that in your constitution, then – that if an election is not forged by more than 10 per cent, it’s valid!’ Gryzlov then referred to the US presidential election of 2000, when the final outcome depended on hanging chads and a recount in Florida, and suggested that, like the Americans, they should just accept an apparently flawed result and agree to it. ‘Let’s stick with the constitution.’
There was stalemate in the talks. Kwaśniewski knew that only one man could break the deadlock. He asked the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, to talk to Putin. ‘I said: “You know Putin. Tell him – if you persist in claiming that this is some artificial movement, financed by Western forces, which has no legitimacy, and that the elections were not rigged, then you’re getting it wrong; it means you don’t understand the seriousness of this situation.”’
Schröder called Putin – but got an earful. Putin believed he understood the situation perfectly well, much better than Kwaśniewski and his EU mission. Schröder reported back to Kwaśniewski that it was one of the hardest calls he had ever had with Putin.
It is not clear what effect Schröder’s call had, or what Putin may have subsequently said to Kuchma. But on Sunday evening, one week after the election, the US embassy received news that the worst was about to happen: heavily armed police units were being sent in to disperse the demonstrators. Ambassador Herbst called Washington and told them, ‘I think Secretary Powell needs to call President Kuchma.’
Powell was told that interior ministry troops were massing on the outskirts of the city. ‘I tried to call the president, but he suddenly wasn’t available.’ Kuchma explained in an interview that the reason he refused the call was because it was 3am and he had no interpreter available for the conversation. In the meantime the ambassador got through to Kuchma’s son-in-law, Viktor Pinchuk, and told him: if any repression happens tonight, we will consider Kuchma personally responsible.
The troops were called off. When Powell finally got through to the president in the morning Kuchma told him nothing would happen: it was a ‘false panic’. But he added, ‘Mr Secretary of State, if the White House was surrounded as our presidency and government offices are at this moment, what would you do?’ Powell, according to Kuchma, had no answer.
Kuchma was becoming ever more desperate and was now prepared to ditch his own man as well as Yushchenko and hold a fresh election with new candidates. He says: ‘If Yanukovych had become president then, Ukraine would have become a pariah state. There was all that pressure from the street. Plus the diplomatic blockade from the West, especially the USA.’
But nothing could be done without Moscow’s blessing. On Thursday 2 December Kuchma flew to Moscow for consultations with Putin at Vnukovo airport. Putin seemed to give his backing to the idea. ‘Re-running the second round [with Yanukovych and Yushchenko] might also achieve nothing,’ he told Kuchma. ‘You’ll end up doing it a third, a fourth, and a twenty-fifth time, until one side gets the result it needs.’
Putin spoke of his fears that Ukraine could split into two parts – the western, more nationalistic part that overwhelmingly supported Yushchenko, and the eastern, heavily industrialised part bordering Russia, where Yanukovych drew much of his support. ‘I have to tell you straight,’ he told Kuchma. ‘We are very worried about the trend towards a split. We are not indifferent to what is happening. According to the census, 17 per cent of Ukraine’s population are Russians – ethnic Russians. In fact I think there are far more of them. It’s a Russian-speaking country, in both the east and the west. It’s no exaggeration to say that every second family in Ukraine, if not more, has relatives and personal ties to Russia. That’s why we are so worried by what is happening.’
It was clear from this that Putin regarded Ukraine (as he later revealed to George W. Bush) as almost a province of Russia – certainly what would later be termed a ‘sphere of privileged interest’. His adviser, Sergei Markov, says he had prepared briefing papers for Putin earlier in his presidency that suggested ‘public opinion in Ukraine wanted there to be no borders between Ukraine and Russia, that all the citizens should have the same rights, the same currency, the same education and information policy. But at the same time Ukraine would keep its sovereignty – separate flag, anthem, president, citizenship and so on.’
This was what the Kremlin leadership believed. Just as strongly, the American administration believed Ukraine was ripe to align itself with the West, and that the majority of its citizens aspired to membership of NATO and the EU.
In fact, both the Russians and the Americans underplayed the most important thing – that Ukraine is a finely balanced entity, divided and pulled in many directions. There is a linguistic split between Russian and Ukrainian speakers, a religious divide between Orthodox and Catholic Christians; there are those who pine for the old days (more security, less tension, less corruption, little ethnic strife) and those who want to move on (openness, democracy, free enterprise); there are Ukrainian nationalists and ethnic Russians – distributed across an imprecise geographical ‘east–west’ divide. Opinion polls did not show an overwhelming desire across the country for NATO membership, although joining the EU was more popular. The family ties of which Putin spoke were real. But at the same time this was not the same Ukraine that was once part of the Soviet ‘family’; it had developed for 13 years already as a separate entity, and a new identity was growing. The use of the Ukrainian language was far more widespread than it was in Soviet days when I once embarrassed the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, by asking him what language was used at Ukrainian central committee meetings. There was a new pride in the nation, and an awareness that economically, at least, they would be far better to tie their future to the West than to the semi-reformed and corrupt economy of Russia.
It was these sentiments that prevailed when the 2004 election was finally re-run, following a Supreme Court decision, on 26 December, under new rules to tighten up procedures and reduce fraud. Viktor Yushchenko was declared the winner with 52 per cent of the vote, to Yanukovych’s 44 per cent. International observers declared the ballot had been run fairly.
The result was a humiliation for Putin, who had staked everything on preventing what he saw as the ‘loss’ of Ukraine to a Western conspiracy.
The Orange Revolution was like a door slamming on Russia’s and the West’s efforts to understand one another. It is hard to think of any event that could be interpreted in such diametrically opposed ways. The West saw it as a triumph of democracy. Here is what the Washington Post wrote, looking back a few years later: ‘Ukraine’s Orange Revolution erupted in 2004 because of an attempt by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his proxies to impose on Ukraine a version of Russia’s corrupt authoritarianism – beginning with a fraudulent presidential election.’10
In Russia, it was seen as essentially the work of US special operations. Gleb Pavlovsky described the Orange protestors as ‘Red Guards’, trained and funded by American consultants. ‘But this isn’t rocket science. There are plenty of local specialists who’ve been working on the “Destroy Russia” project since 1990–91, ever since the Chechen project.’11