| The political crisis in Ukraine, where
opposition protesters are burning campfires and setting up tents in the center
of Kiev, is presenting a test for Russia, which gambled heavily on its
neighbor's presidential election. A defeat of the pro-Moscow candidate, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, would humiliate the Kremlin one year after another former Soviet Republic, Georgia, slipped from its influence, according to observers and political analysts. The Ukrainian upheaval echoes what happened in Georgia, where protests over vote rigging led to the resignation of a Moscow-linked President and a landslide victory of a young, Western-educated and Western-oriented leader. {{U}}For Moscow, the stakes are even higher in Ukraine.{{/U}} Unlike Georgia, Ukraine shares close ethnic and linguistic ties with Russia; Kiev, Ukraine's capital, is the cradle of the Russian culture and the ancient capital of the first Russian state. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to forge a closer union between three Slavic nations Russia, Ukraine, and tiny, authoritarian Belarns and Ukraine is key to the plan, Russian businesses have major interests in Ukraine, which borders Russia to the west. The Russian military also wants to have Ukraine as an ally over which it can hold sway, not as a potential NATO participant, the analysts said. As other former republics turned away from Russia, Moscow "gets the feeling that Ukraine is its closest ally, with a symbolic significance," said Marsha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "Russia has given itself a goal of getting a controllable Ukraine. I'm afraid it won't happen." Putin quickly congratulated Yanukovych following Sunday's vote, which pitted the prime minister against opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. But Western observers reported voting fraud, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians rallied in protest. "If the crisis lasts, .it will become a potential source of problems for Russia's relations with the West," said Alexander Pikayev, an independent politica! analyst in Moscow "Russia will have to share responsibility for the acute political crisis." The Kremlin had come out early and strongly for Yanukovych before the election. Putin traveled twice to Ukraine, ahead of each round of voting. To support the official purpose of his first visit, attending anniversary celebrations of Ukraine's liberation from the Nazis in World War Ⅱ, the festivities were rescheduled for 10 days earlier than the actual date. Since the vote, {{U}}the Kremlin's propaganda machine has been in full swing.{{/U}} Russia's Channel One television, controlled by the Kremlin like all other major networks accused the Ukrainian opposition of breaking the law by declaring Yushehenko the rightfully elected President. In his prime-time show, television commentator Mikhail Leontyev compared the Ukrainian opposition to Middle Eastern militants. "But this is not the Gaza Strip, and the chaos cannot go on indefinitely," he said, warning that protest strikes would only hurt ordinary people. Russian television also aired reports on the anniversary of Georgia's "Rose Revolution" on Tuesday, saying the country was steeped in misery and poverty a year after the fall of the old government. Russian independent newspapers, however, which reach only a fraction of the TV audience, wrote about a different Georgia the same day telling how happy Georgians had decorated shop windows and restaurants with roses to celebrate. Many Russians view Ukraine's powerful opposition as a kind of force that has disappeared in Russia under the increasingly authoritarian Putin administration. Russia has not had a seriously contested presidential election since 1996, when Boris Yeltsin narrowly defeated a Communist challenger. The political opposition here is fractured and marginalized, ousted from parliament in last year's balloting closely directed by the Kremlin. Russian optimists hope a defeat of Yanukovyeh would force the Kremlin to reconsider its attempts to control political life in other former Soviet republics. Pessimists fear that his loss would only prompt the Kremlin to tighten its rule. "The stakes are high," Lipman said. "It's a question of whether Russia's neighbor will be a Ukraine ruled not through democratic institutes but through administrative means, or a Ukraine that will embrace democracy." |