You're reading: Eight years after the Orange Revolution, a look back at English-language media

On Nov. 22, the eighth anniversary of the Orange Revolution that overturned a rigged presidential election, the Kyiv Post revisits some of the English-language reporting and analysis from those historic days when Viktor Yushchenko ultimately triumphed over Viktor Yanukovych – only to see their fortunes reversed again in 2010.

Going back to the winter 2004-2005…

Kyiv
Post:
Weather to impact elections?

By Roman Olearchyk

“The probability of
Yanukovych winning would be higher in better weather,” read
the report.

 

Washington Post:
Yushchenko was poisoned, doctors Say

By Feter Finn

“’The criminal investigation
does not fit within our purview but . . . there is suspicion
of third-party
involvement,” said Michael Zimpfer, director of Vienna’s
private
Rudolfinerhaus Clinic, where the candidate went for treatment
in September
after falling ill while campaigning.”

 

New York Times: Let my people go

By Nicholas D. Kristof

“Young people enveloped in
orange scarves, hats and ribbons alternately chant slogans for
freedom, boogie
to rock music, eat oranges, warm up and flirt at McDonald’s,
and disappear into
their downtown ‘tent city’ to make love, not war.”

 

BBC: Ukraine on brink
of ‘civil war’

“The new head of the
European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, earlier warned
Ukraine there could be
“consequences” for its relations with the European Union
unless there
was a serious and independent review [of the vote].”

 

New York Review of
Books: The Orange Revolution

By Timothy Garton Ash and
Timothy Snyder

“Observers have placed
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in a sequence of peaceful
democratic revolutions
stretching from the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 in Central
Europe, through the
“rose revolution” in Georgia in 2003, to what some are already
calling the
“cedar revolution” in Lebanon. Many Ukrainians are
understandably delighted by
this attractive labeling, so different from the largely
negative or nonexistent
image they have had in the past.”

 

BBC: Kyiv goes ‘orange’ for Eurovision

“ ‘No to falsifications!…
No to lies! Yushchenko – yes! Yushchenko – yes! This is our
president – yes,
yes!’ their song says. […] However, some local music experts
have criticized
the viewers’ choice, saying the Eurovision is not a contest
for political
songs.”

Watch Green
Jolly sing “Razom nas bahato”, Eurovision 2005 (VIDEO)

 

Kyiv Post staff writer Annabelle Chapman
can be reached at
[email protected].