Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

The United States has done its share of nasty things in the world. Support Ukrainian democracy isn't one of them

them.

It has become fashionable in the media to examine the so-called “American sources” of the money behind the “Orange Revolution.” This trend was initiated by left-wingers of the anti-globalist stripe, for whom any U.S. involvement in anything is “neo-liberalism” or something else demonic. It was picked up by right-wingers like U.S. troglodyte Pat Buchanan, and by some in Ukrainian ruling circles.

Finally it was adopted by the mainstream media. For example, The Associated Press ran a thorough story on Dec. 11 detailing how U.S. government money helped create the conditions for the Orange Revolution. The American government did this by funneling money into Ukraine under the auspices of such organizations as USAID, the Carnegie Foundation and the National Democratic Institute.

A couple things need to be said about this. First of all, aid from the Great Satan is the most obvious choice for enemies of Ukrainian democracy to single out: pro-Yanukovych, pro-authoritarian demagogues will drive no one into the streets of Donetsk by complaining about Danish meddling in Ukraine. Yet many other countries have also supported democracy programs here. Besides Denmark, Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, Norway and the European Union as a body have done so. It’s hardly a U.S. plot.

Second, the money wasn’t slated for opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. It was spent in non-partisan fashion, mostly on programs meant to promote democratic culture in Ukraine. We consider some of these programs to be useless, but anyone opposed to them in principle must justify to us their opposition to concepts like a free press, an informed citizenry, clean elections and one-person-one-vote. In doing so, however, they will have to excuse us if we refuse to take them seriously.

Third, these programs were approved by the government of which Viktor Yanukovych – who’s taken the lead in complaining about them – is prime minister. If they were so harmful, why didn’t the government ban them?

The fact is, there’s good democracy promotion, and there’s bad democracy promotion. A reasonable person could argue, for instance, that the Iraq war represents the latter type. But no person worth listening to could argue that the explosion of Ukrainian democracy has been negative, and no one should believe that the United States, and the West in general, have to apologize for what they’ve done in Ukraine. Let the carping be restricted to the political extremists in their Western enclaves, the Donetsk strongmen, the Kremlin siloviki and their like.