Will he? Won't he?
Ex-Soviet Ukraine stands at a fork in the road as President Viktor Yanukovich weighs a decision on the fate of his arch-rival Yulia Tymoshenko.
The question of whether he will spare the former prime minister and opposition leader from jail will weigh heavily on the speed with which Ukraine joins Europe’s mainstream.
The Kiev court judging her is now in recess, ostensibly considering the prosecution’s call for her to be jailed for seven years on a charge of abuse of office.
But in reality it is waiting for a pointer from Yanukovich, whom everyone recognises as the only real arbiter in the affair. The court will re-convene on Oct. 11 — or perhaps later — for
a verdict to be announced.
But there’s still no indication of which way Yanukovich will jump. Usually easy to read, he is hiding his hand this time in a game of very high stakes.
The pundits are divided.
Some say pressure from the European Union and the United States will carry the day. They say the trial is politically driven and casts doubts on Yanukovich’s commitment to democracy. They want Tymoshenko released.
Others say Yanukovich, a big-built, macho figure from a tough mining region of eastern Ukraine, can not afford to lose face with his constituency.
Nor can he break faith, they say, with the industrial barons who put him in office. Most of them would like Tymoshenko — a self-styled scourge of the ‘oligarchs’ — extinguished as a political force.
The EU has brushed aside Yanukovich’s arguments that he is allowing the courts to do their job. They have warned him a key association agreement will be in jeopardy if she goes to jail. But EU officials add they are not sure he has “got the message”.
Even Russia’s leaders who have an interest in the outcome because the charge against her relates to the price Tymoshenko negotiated for Russian gas in 2009, seem to be in the dark.
“The answers … are in Yanukovich’s head,” Yulia Mostovaya, chief editor of the influential weekly Dzerkalo Tyzhnya wrote.
OPTIONS, ANIMOSITY
It is hard to exaggerate the animosity between Yanukovich and Tymoshenko whose political paths fatefully crossed in the 2004-5 “Orange Revolution” street protests.
A slight figure who wears a peasant-style hair-braid as her trademark, Tymoshenko’s PR savvy and rhetoric galvanised thousands on the streets and doomed Yanukovich’s first bid for the presidency.
Though Ukraine’s highest court quashed his election, he contends to this day that Tymoshenko and her cohorts robbed him of his right to the presidency.
Their later face-off for the presidency in February 2010 was a brutal affair in which Tymoshenko heaped invective on her opponent. For weeks, she refused to recognise his victory.
The bitterness between them rules out charity: Tymoshenko has been held in a prison cell overnight since Aug. 5 for contempt of court and the authorities have passed up several chances for relenting.
With the popularity of Yanukovich’s Regions Party dipping as the run-up starts to a parliamentary election next year, there is every reason politically for him to keep the populist Tymoshenko out of action.
Equally, though, EU pressure can not be underestimated.
Despite being tagged pro-Russian early in his presidency, Yanukovich has refused Moscow’s entreaties to join a Russia-led customs union.
He seems firmly committed to taking Ukraine into mainstream Europe and strengthening ties with the 27-member bloc in an association agreement due to be signed at the end of the year.
A proposed free trade zone with the EU holds out huge promise for the business interests of Yanukovich’s powerful backers like steel billionaire Rinat Akhmetov.
EU leaders have warned Yanukovich that if Tymoshenko is jailed there is no chance of any agreement being ratified by EU member parliaments.
“I strongly believe that there will be no chance of this (if Tymoshenko is jailed),” Oleg Rybachuk, a chief-of-staff under former President Viktor Yushchenko, told Reuters.
The EU has handed Yanukovich what they see as a way-out. They want him to push through legislation to “decriminalise” the abuse-of-office charge under which Tymoshenko is being tried, allowing her to go free.
Yanukovich, sensing this would represent a dangerous loss of face, told EU officials in Warsaw last week that she would first have to ask him for a pardon.
Secondly, he said, she would have to pay out $200 million to compensate the Ukrainian energy firm Naftogaz for estimated financial losses from the 2009 gas deal with Russia’s Gazprom.
The fiery Tymoshenko, who has denounced the court hearing as a “lynching” trial, has herself ruled out asking her nemesis for a pardon. “That would be like recognising a dictatorship in our country,” she told the court.
To date, while some parts of the criminal code are being re-classified, there is no move to dilute the Tymoshenko clause. Indeed, one Yanukovich adviser has ruled this out.
“Articles 365 and 364 do not qualify for ‘decriminalisation'”, Andrei Portnov told Channel 5 television on Monday.
But most commentators feel the potential harm to Ukraine’s international image means Yanukovich will go some of the way to meeting the EU’s demands.
Imprisoning Tymoshenko would rebound on him, for instance, ahead of next year’s Euro-2012 soccer tournament when, as co-host, Yanukovich will seek to showcase Ukraine as a bridge of democracy between east and West
“If he (Yanukovich) puts her in jail she will become at a stroke the most famous dissident in Europe, and who needs that?,” analyst Viktor Nebozhenko said last week.
He can take heart too from opinion polls that suggest he might not have much to lose by releasing her. They show that political martyrdom has not bolstered her ratings — though the trial is causing some re-alignment in opposition ranks.
Nor does there seem to be a real risk of mass protests. Hundreds of her supporters have campaigned from a tent encampment in Kiev centre through summer in solidarity with her. But there is no sign their cause could ignite mass unrest.
“The authorities at the highest level must free Tymoshenko. It is common sense. They have to find a way of freeing her because with every day that she is in prison the more problems multiply for them,” said analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky.
Rybachuk said: “I am convinced there is a lot of negotiating going on. I am not sure that things will be resolved in the court next week.”
