When the protests started on Nov. 21, Yanukovych’s formerly faithful clans of oligarchs distanced themselves from him by having their TV stations report the pro-European protests with a degree of objectivity. In the last days of 2013, however, censorship has returned. The first victim was the prominent TV talk host Savik Shuster, whose popular Friday evening show was axed after he attempted to discuss the Dec. 25 violent attack on the political journalist Tetyana Chornovol.
Yanukovych hopes to ride out the waves of protests calling for his resignation, and survive until the presidential elections in 2015. If he does so, he will almost certainly win, as he and his immediate circle are past masters at rigging elections. Moreover, thanks to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s $15 billion loan — the main reason he signed an agreement with Russia rather than the EU — he has additional resources with which to buy votes.
The question remains whether the diverse opposition, which ranges across the political spectrum, will be able to hold together to push him out of office before the elections.
So far, the protesters have failed to force Yanukovych to meet their demands, the most important being the signing of the EU association agreement, the resignation of the government led by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov, and a return to the 2004 constitution, in which the prime minister is selected by parliament rather than by the president. He has not met even the more straightforward demands, such as that for legal action against those who ordered the Nov. 30 attack on the student camp, and the Dec. 1 provocation in front of the president’s office, in which the paramilitary police beat people savagely and indiscriminately.
On Dec. 30, one of the coalition partners in the protest movement gave Yanukovych a lifeline. The opposition nationalist Svoboda Party announced that, on the evening of Jan. 1, it would hold a torchlight parade in central Kyiv in honor of the 105th birthday of Stefan Bandera, the founder of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. A military-style torchlight parade, which will remind many of the Nazis, will almost certainly split the opposition and weaken its position nationwide. Yanukovych might have dreamed this up himself.
For many people, Bandera was a hero, but for many others he was a war criminal. Fanatical supporters and their equally fanatical opponents have made up contrasting myths. The historical truth was that he was neither. During most of the war, the Nazis held him and his brothers in concentration camps. His claim to fame was that he organized the assassination of the Polish interior minister in 1934, and split the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1940, creating a rival group that eventually, during his imprisonment, formed an armed resistance movement – the UPA, which stands for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
The provocative torchlight parade on the first day of the New Year will be the perfect opportunity for Yanukovych’s and Putin’s propaganda experts to identify the pro-European protests with the extreme right, not only in Ukraine and Russia but also throughout the EU.
Jaroslav V. Koshiw is an academic scholar and former Kyiv Post editor who wrote “Abuse of Power: Corruption in the Office of the President,” which was published this year by Artemia Press.
