Russia Annexes Crimea, 2014

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 118-119:

On March 18, 2014, Vladimir Putin delivered one of the most consequential speeches of his career. Addressing a joint session of the lower and upper houses of the Russian parliament—the deputies of the State Duma and the members of the Federation Council, joined by regional leaders and representatives of Kremlin-controlled civic organizations—Putin asked the deputies to approve a law annexing the Ukrainian Crimea and the city of Sevastopol to the Russian Federation. Two days after the referendum, Putin was ending the Crimea’s short-lived independence by annexing the peninsula—the first annexation of a sovereign nation’s territory in Europe by a foreign state since World War II.

In his speech, Putin declared that the Crimean self-defense units had taken the initiative to bring about reunification, and the people of the Crimea had decided their fate, preventing Sevastopol from being turned into a NATO military base. He took advantage of the opportunity to remind NATO and the West of all the injustices allegedly committed against international law and Russia, from the bombing of Serbia to the recognition of Kosovo’s independence, as putative justification for Russia’s actions in the Crimea, and denounced the “color revolutions” as coups engineered by the West.

Putin made an unprecedented appeal to Russian nationalism. This was a marked departure from his earlier statements and pronouncements, in which his main addressee and point of reference was the multiethnic Russian political nation embodied by the citizens of the Russian Federation, referred to as rossiiane rather than ethnic russkie. Now he claimed that Russia and the Russians were the greatest divided nation in the world. After the fall of the USSR, said Putin, when “Crimea ended up as part of a different country . . . Russia realized that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” “All these years,” he declared, “citizens and many public figures have come back to this issue, saying that Crimea is historically Russian land and Sevastopol is a Russian city.”

There were also elements of the speech that appealed to Russo-Ukrainian unity, despite Putin’s attack on Ukraine and annexation of part of its territory. “Orthodoxy,” claimed Putin, “predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.” He even declared that Russia was taking the Crimea on behalf of both Russians and Ukrainians to prevent its loss to a third party. “Crimea is our common historical legacy and a very important factor in regional stability,” Putin went on. “And this strategic territory should be part of a strong and stable sovereignty, which today can only be Russian. Otherwise, dear friends (I am addressing both Ukraine and Russia), you and we—Russians and Ukrainians—could lose Crimea completely, and that could happen in the near historical perspective.”

Putin made a hybrid argument for the annexation: appealing to Russian history, territory, and identity, he invoked the legacy of empire to claim the Crimea under the banner of Russian ethnic nationalism, while also maintaining that Russians and Ukrainians were Slavic brethren. The latter was meant to exploit the sense of Russo-Ukrainian unity to which many citizens of Russia and Ukraine subscribed. Putin assured Ukrainians that Crimea was a unique case—a part of Ukraine historically, culturally, and ethnically belonging to Russia. The rest of Ukraine was safe. “Do not believe those who want you to fear Russia, shouting that other regions will follow Crimea,” declared Putin. “We do not want to divide Ukraine; we do not need that.” In fact, the division of Ukraine was exactly what Putin undertook in the weeks and months following his Crimean speech.

In conclusion, Putin asked the Russian parliamentarians to ratify the treaty and create two new constituent entities within the Russian Federation, one for the Crimea, another for the city of Sevastopol. The parliament complied, and on March 21 Putin signed the law integrating the Crimea and the city of Sevastopol into the Russian Federation. The annexation of the Crimea was now a fait accompli, carried out in accordance with the Russian constitution but in blatant violation of international law and treaties signed by Russia, including the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russo-Ukrainian Friendship Agreement of 1997.

Reviving Russian Slavic Eurasianism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Putin adopted many elements of traditional and revived Eurasianism as parts of his world view. In his official pronouncements he spoke repeatedly of Russia as a unique multiethnic civilization not only different from the West but opposed to it in history, culture, and values. But he also embraced with equal if not greater enthusiasm the ideas of a different group of Russian thinkers who juxtaposed Russia to the West predominantly as a Eurasian Slavic or Russian civilization. That trend of thought, represented by such figures as Aleksei Khomiakov, Ivan Kirievsky, and Konstantin Aksakov, predated Eurasianism, going back to the first decades of the nineteenth century, which produced one of the most consequential schisms in Russian intellectual history, that between Westernizers and Slavophiles. The former insisted that Russia’s destiny lay with the West, while the latter emphasized Russian uniqueness, rooted in history, language, culture, and nationality.

The nationality that the Slavophiles called Russian was in fact East Slavic. In imperial Russian terminology, it consisted of Great Russians, or Russians per se, Little Russians or Ukrainians, and White Russians or Belarusians. The model of a tripartite Russian nation, which the Russian historian Alexei Miller calls a “big Russian nation,” was adopted by the imperial elites in the second half of the nineteenth century and became part of the ideological credo and personal belief, as well as identity, of many of the country’s political, religious, and military leaders. The Russian Revolution put an end to the dominance of the tripartite nation in Russian political and ethnonational thought. In 1922, Lenin resisted Joseph Stalin’s attempts to incorporate non-Russian republics into the Russian Federation and insisted on the creation of a Union state in which those republics would be distinct polities with rights equal to those of Russia.

The idea of a big Russian nation went into the Russian emigration along with the White Guard generals defeated by the Bolshevik Red Army and the intellectuals who supported their vision of Russia, one and indivisible. Among the émigrés was General Anton Denikin, whose memoirs would make a strong impression on Vladimir Putin, and the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, an admirer of fascism, whose article, “What the Dismemberment of Russia Promises the World,” would become a frequently quoted source in the speeches and pronouncements of Putin and other Russian officials. Ilyin argued that one day Russia would gather its lands back under its tutelage.

The key figure who linked the imperial thinking of the past with a plan for dealing with post-Soviet Russian challenges and realities was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his essay of 1990, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals, Solzhenitsyn called for the separation of the eastern Slavs from the non-Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and the formation of a “Russian Union” consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. If one followed Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism as the establishment of congruence between political and ethnonational borders, then Solzhenitsyn’s “reconstructed” Russia was to become quadripartite. But his plan never materialized, and several years later Solzhenitsyn went on to question the legitimacy of the Ukrainian borders. In his essay Russia in Collapse (1998), Solzhenitsyn argued for the annexation of eastern and southern Ukraine, denouncing its “inordinate expansion onto territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets provinces, and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melitopol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea.”

Putin was an admirer of all these writers and shared many of their ideas. In May 2009, less than a year after the invasion of Georgia, he made a public show of his admiration for imperial Russian thinkers. Despite rainy weather, he showed up in the company of numerous reporters at the cemetery of the Donskoi Monastery in Moscow to lay flowers on the graves of General Denikin and his wife, along with the grave of Ivan Ilyin and that of Ivan Shmelev, another Russian émigré writer whose remains had been returned to Russia. Putin also laid flowers on the grave of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had died in Moscow the previous year.

Referring to General Denikin, whose grave he honored first, Putin encouraged one of the reporters accompanying him at the ceremony to read Denikin’s memoirs. “Denikin discusses Great and Little Russia, Ukraine,” said Putin. “He writes that no one may meddle in relations between us; that has always been the business of Russia itself.” Denikin was in fact following Aleksandr Pushkin, who had attacked the West for criticizing Russia’s assault on Poland after it rebelled against the empire in 1830. If Pushkin referred to Russo-Polish relations, Denikin referred to those between Russia and Ukraine. In Putin’s view, it was up to Russia to decide how to conduct its relations with a weaker neighbor. The Slavic roots of the two peoples became his excuse to condemn any Western support for Ukraine.

NATO's Bucharest Summit, 2008

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 87-89:

As NATO leaders arrived for the Bucharest summit on April 2, 2008, Russia’s vocal protests against membership for Ukraine and Georgia were on their minds. Putin came to the Romanian capital in person to take part in the meeting of the Russia-NATO summit and warn the members of the alliance against extending invitations to the two post-Soviet republics. “The emergence of a powerful military bloc at our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security,” Putin told President Bush. Bush was not particularly impressed. Before going to Bucharest he made a stopover in Kyiv, where he told the Ukrainians: “Your nation has made a bold decision, and the United States strongly supports your request.”

But key European members of NATO, France and Germany in particular, blocked the decision advocated by the United States and supported by the new East European members of the alliance to grant Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” read the declaration before making it clear that no accession would take place any time soon. The MAP was promised but not given on the basis that the two potential applicants still had to meet some specific criteria in order to qualify. “[W]e will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications.”

The matter was postponed and would not return to the NATO agenda at the next summit or the one after that. Everyone knew that the decision to deny MAP to the two post-Soviet republics was a concession to their former master, Russia. Otherwise it was impossible to explain why the Bucharest summit invited Croatia and Albania to join NATO. For the two countries now perceived as threats by Russia, NATO’s non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed indefinitely, leaving them with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so.

On August 8, 2008, a few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia launched a war on Georgia, ostensibly in defense of the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia in the early 1990s. The Russian attack allegedly came as a response to the actions of the Georgian army, which had been ordered into South Ossetia, but there was no doubt that the war was directly linked to the outcome of the Bucharest summit. Russia had established official relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces that it was now “defending,” almost immediately after Putin’s return from the Bucharest summit. The Georgians fought back under the leadership of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been educated in Ukraine and the United States, but the Russian army, larger and superior to Georgia’s, moved deep into the country and threatened to occupy its capital, Tbilisi.

On August 12, Yushchenko, together with the leaders of Poland and the three Baltic states, flew to Tbilisi to show support for Saakashvili and his country. That day the Russian advance was stopped by means of a ceasefire negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Russian troops eventually left a good part of the occupied territory but stayed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ostensibly protecting the independence of the two provinces from Georgia and perpetuating its territorial division. That undermined Georgia’s chances of ever joining NATO, as the alliance was reluctant to accept any state with unresolved territorial issues. The Russian war on Georgia became the first instance of its initiating a major war beyond its borders. It sent a clear signal to the West that Russia was prepared to use military force to stop any expansion of the alliance. It also demonstrated to other post-Soviet republics that NATO would not come to their rescue in case of Russian attack.

The decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, coupled with the outcome of the Russo-Georgian War, dealt a devastating blow to Ukrainian aspirations to join the alliance. The changing of the guard in Washington and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009 led to a thorough revision of all elements of US foreign policy and an attempted “reset” of US-Russia relations. In January 2010 Viktor Yushchenko, defeated in the first round of that year’s presidential elections, left office to make way for Putin’s old favorite, Viktor Yanukovych. The new president promptly dropped NATO membership from the Ukrainian foreign-policy agenda and signed a deal that was devastating for Ukrainian security because it extended the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042.

The Bucharest summit put Ukraine in the most vulnerable position that it had experienced since declaring independence. Without nuclear weapons and NATO membership, Ukraine found itself at the mercy of Russia, which saw the ambiguous offer of membership extended to Ukraine by the Bucharest summit as a threat to its own security. Ukraine was a lone warrior on open ground pursued by hostile forces, running to take shelter in a secure fortress, only to find its gates closing because of disagreements among its defenders.

Post-Soviet Nations and NATO

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 82-84:

As far as Russia was concerned, the victory of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a major blow to the Kremlin’s interests at home and abroad. “It was our 9/11,” declared the Russian political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, who was close to the Kremlin. A native of Ukraine, he went to Kyiv to advise Prime Minister Yanukovych and his campaign. The Orange Revolution was also a personal defeat for Putin because it was supported by Boris Berezovsky, his onetime sponsor, later nemesis, and ultimately refugee from his regime. The Kremlin was concerned that under the Western-leaning President Yushchenko, Ukraine might leave the Russian orbit forever and join the Western camp.

With the fall of communism, democratic rule became a prerequisite for post-communist and post-Soviet states aspiring to join Western institutions, both political, like the European Union, and military, NATO in particular. Ukraine, with its chaotic but viable democracy, could be a candidate for both, while Russia, failing one democracy test after another and eventually setting on the path of authoritarian rule, could not. The success and durability of Ukrainian democracy was a threat to the Putin regime, since it encouraged whatever remained of the pro-democratic forces in Russia and, in geopolitical terms, brought democratic institutions closer to Russia’s borders. In Putin’s eyes, this was not just undesirable but unacceptable.

By 2004, Putin was well on the way to laying the foundations for a future autocratic regime. He took control of the Russian Duma in the December 2003 elections, which saw his party, United Russia, obtain three times as many votes as the communists to become the largest party in parliament. He then exploited a hostage crisis produced by Chechen radicals who attacked a school in Beslan in September 2004. It was mishandled by the Russian security services, whose personnel stormed the school, contributing to the death of 314 hostages, including 186 schoolchildren. This gave Putin an opportunity to intervene and curtail whatever remained of Russian democracy: elections of regional governors were abolished, and new laws were introduced curtailing the activities of political parties and NGOs.

Putin was eager to see a similar political system installed in Ukraine, openly campaigning for Yanukovych and secretly pushing Kuchma toward the use of force. He failed on both counts. In early 2005, mass protests also shook a number of other post-Soviet countries, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the “Tulip Revolution” unseated the local ruler, Askar Akayev, who had been in power since the late Soviet period. A year before the Orange Revolution, the “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia had brought to power a young, charismatic, pro-Western reformer named Mikheil Saakashvili. In Russia, all these protest movements were labeled “Orange.” Finding itself on the defensive, Moscow began to mimic the tactics used by the opposition during the Orange Revolution, creating and funding numerous pro-government youth organizations, the most notorious of which was “Nashi,” or “Ours.” “Ours” were there to defend the president against revolutionary upheaval, allegedly promoted by foreign powers. Ukraine was singled out in that regard, but behind Ukraine Moscow ideologues saw the threatening shadow of the West.

Indeed, as expected in Moscow, the Orange Revolution produced a major geopolitical shift in Kyiv. President Yushchenko returned to the pro-European policies launched by Kuchma before the Melnychenko tapes scandal of 2001. Those included gradual integration into European structures, from the European Union to NATO. Yushchenko wanted an invitation to join the alliance in the form of a Membership Action Plan, or MAP. His requests did not fall on deaf ears in Brussels, as NATO officials invited Ukraine to begin an Intensified Dialogue on possible membership. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbors who had not wanted their efforts to join NATO to be compromised by association with Ukraine in the 1990s, now all supported Ukraine’s aspirations to membership. They were only too happy to yield their position on NATO’s eastern flank, vulnerable to possible Russian attack, to Ukraine.

In February 2022, a few weeks after his inauguration, Yushchenko attended a meeting of heads of state of NATO member nations in Brussels, where he publicly declared that he wanted his colleagues to regard Ukraine as a future member of the alliance. He did so in the name of the Orange Revolution that he had led and the people who had elected him to the presidency. “I’m pretty much sure, dear friends,” began Yushchenko, “that the people who went onto Kyiv’s squares and streets were motivated because they wanted to see Ukraine in Europe, not as a neighbor of Europe, because we are a country located in the center of Europe. And we would like to see Ukraine integrated into the European Union and into the North Atlantic Alliance.” Before leaving the podium, Yushchenko went out of his way to reassure Russia that his NATO aspirations and those of his country were not directed against Russia. “Russia is our strategic partner,” declared Yushchenko, “and Ukraine’s policy toward NATO will by no means be against the interests of other countries, including Russia.”

Ukraine was trying to solve its security dilemma as best it could. Since NATO had established a strategic partnership with Russia, the idea of Ukraine’s acceding to NATO without antagonizing Russia was theoretically feasible in the 1990s. But in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv faced a difficult choice: either to accommodate Moscow, which had long-standing territorial claims on Ukraine and had intervened directly in that country’s presidential elections, or to seek protection in a military alliance that could guarantee its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The threat from Russia was real and immediate, while membership in NATO was hypothetical and removed in time. After long vacillation, Kyiv opted decisively for NATO.

Post-USSR Territorial Disputes

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle p. 65:

Territorial disputes are a hallmark of imperial disintegration, and the fall of the USSR was no exception. The Russian government had been challenging Ukraine’s territorial integrity even before it became legally independent and left the Soviet Union. The first challenge to the Ukrainian borders came from the democratic government of Russia almost immediately after the Ukrainian parliament declared the country’s independence on August 24, 1991. Two days later the Russian president’s spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, made a statement on behalf of his superior.

“In the most recent days, state sovereignty has been declared and withdrawal from the USSR announced in a series of Union republics,” read the statement. “In that regard, I have been empowered by the President of the RSFSR to make the following declaration. The Russian Federation casts no doubt on the constitutional right of every state and people to self-determination. But there is the problem of borders, which may prove to be unregulated, a condition admissible only if provision is made for Union relations secured by an appropriate treaty. Should they be abrogated, the RSFSR reserves the right to pose the question of revision of borders.”

The statement was addressed to every Soviet republic that might declare its independence of the Soviet Union. But when Voshchanov was asked by journalists to be more specific, he singled out Ukraine and Kazakhstan. “If those republics enter into a union with Russia, then there is no problem,” he explained. “But if they withdraw, then we must be concerned about the population living there and not forget that those lands were colonized by Russians. Russia will hardly agree to give them away so easily.” Both Ukraine and Kazakhstan had large ethnic Russian minorities, and both republics, Ukraine in its entirety, and Kazakhstan in its northern lands, were eyed as parts of a future Russian state by no less a figure than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose article advocating the creation of such a state had been published by the major Soviet newspapers the previous year.

Kyiv and Almaty protested, obliging Yeltsin to dissociate himself from Voshchanov’s remarks. The spokesman was portrayed as someone who had got out of control and presented his personal views rather than the policy of Yeltsin’s administration. But Voshchanov had in fact formulated the new policy of the Russian Federation for years to come. Treaties recognizing the borders of Union republics like the one signed between Russia and Ukraine in 1990 applied only if the republics, Ukraine in particular, remained in union with Russia. The understanding of what such union meant would change over time, from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Commonwealth of Independent States and, eventually, a number of Eurasian projects advanced by Putin. Models and rulers changed, but the basic principle remained the same: Russia’s recognition of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the post-Soviet states would be conditional on alliance with Moscow.

Ukraine's Dirty Election of 2004

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 60-61:

The Ukrainian constitution did not allow the president to serve in office more than two terms, and after some hesitation Leonid Kuchma decided to abide by it, rejecting the idea of running for a third term on the grounds that his first election predated the adoption of the constitution and thus should not be counted. Once again Kuchma reached out for the Russian or, more specifically, Yeltsin’s precedent, looking for a successor who would guarantee his personal safety and the integrity of his assets.

The choice fell on the leader of Ukraine’s largest regional clan, the governor of Donetsk oblast, Viktor Yanukovych, who had led the largest grouping in the pro-presidential faction of parliament. Yanukovych had been appointed prime minister and approved by parliament in November 2002. The presidential campaign of 2004, which pitched Yanukovych, supported by Kuchma, against the former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, who led the largest faction in parliament, was the dirtiest in Ukrainian history. The Yanukovych camp used government media, administrative pressure, government handouts to the most vulnerable social groups, as well as the financial power of the Donetsk clan to prevail in the elections. It also resorted to an act of terrorism against Yushchenko.

In September 2004, the fifty-year-old Yushchenko fell violently ill and was soon diagnosed with dioxin poisoning. The individuals suspected of arranging it had fled to Russia and were given safe haven there. Yushchenko miraculously survived the attack and managed to return to the electoral campaign defaced but alive. Instead of knocking Yushchenko out, the attack on the opposition candidate increased his popularity. When Ukrainians went to the polling stations on October 31, most of them voted for Yushchenko, not Yanukovych.

That was the result of the exit polls conducted by numerous Ukrainian institutions on election day, but the Central Electoral Commission, controlled by Kuchma and Yanukovych, announced a different outcome. According to the commission’s report, it was Yanukovych who had won the race with 49 percent of the vote over Yushchenko’s 47 percent. Yushchenko’s supporters, refusing to accept the forged result, flooded Kyiv’s main square, the Maidan, and set up a tent city there. Kyivans were soon joined by supporters from the provinces. The Orange Revolution, which took its name from the colors of Yushchenko’s electoral campaign, had begun.

Numerous factors contributed to the outbreak of the Orange Revolution. Among them were the protracted and unresolved conflict between the presidential and legislative branches of government; the split within the political elite, including the oligarchs with their media resources, who supported opposite sides; and, last but not least, Kuchma’s halfhearted support for Yanukovych, who was not his preferred choice for successor but was forced on him by circumstances. Ultimately it was Ukrainian regionalism, rooted in political and cultural differences, that came to the rescue of Ukrainian democracy. The supporters of the Orange Revolution, many of them residents of Ukraine’s west and center, associated themselves with Ukrainian identity, language, and culture, as well as an orientation toward the liberal West.

Faced with continuing mass protests and the split within the elite, Kuchma decided to put Yeltsin’s precedent aside. Despite demands from Yanukovych, he refused to use the army against the protesters and open fire, as had been the case in Moscow in 1993. Instead, he opted for a compromise. The Yanukovych camp agreed to a new round of elections in exchange for Yushchenko’s promise to amend the constitution to limit presidential prerogatives. On December 26, in the third round of the presidential elections, Yushchenko was elected with 52 percent of the vote against Yanukovych’s 44 percent.

The crisis that had begun in April 2000 with Kuchma’s attempt to increase the power of the presidency by means of a referendum came to an end in December 2004 with the weakening of presidential powers. Some presidential prerogatives were transferred to the prime minister, whose appointment and political fortunes depended on the disposition of political forces in parliament. Ukraine was entering the new century as a presidential-parliamentary republic with divided governing power. It was anything but an ideal outcome, for under the new system neither the president nor the prime minister had sufficient power to implement policy independently. But it was the outcome that saved Ukrainian democracy.

During his last year in office, Kuchma had published his memoirs under the telling title, Ukraine Is Not Russia. After trying the Russian model more than once and inevitably failing to achieve the desired result, he knew exactly what he was talking about. The book was published in Moscow and launched there before its Ukrainian translation became available to readers in Kyiv. It sent a message that very few in Russia took seriously and no one in the Kremlin was prepared to accept.

Ukraine's Economic Turnaround c. 2000

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-57:

In the fall of 1999, as Yeltsin was getting ready to step down and promote Putin as his successor, the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, was preparing to run for a second term. During his first term he had managed to stabilize the Ukrainian economy by launching large-scale privatization and working closely with Western donors, especially the International Monetary Fund. Kuchma had also brought Ukrainian politics into temporary equilibrium by adopting a new constitution that introduced a power-sharing agreement between president and parliament. Yet the system was anything but stable, as the two political actors did not agree on the political and economic direction of the country. The global financial crisis of 1997 and the Russian default of 1998 hurt the Ukrainian economy, enhancing the position of the communists as the most powerful parliamentary faction. In the parliamentary elections of 1998 they gained 25 percent of the popular vote. The national democrats, organized in Rukh and led by the former dissident Viacheslav Chornovil, came second with 10 percent of the vote, while the Kuchma-backed People’s Democratic Party garnered a mere 5 percent.

In 1999 Kuchma was pretty much in the same place as Yeltsin on the eve of his reelection in 1996. He decided to take a page from Yeltsin’s electoral campaign, presenting himself as the only force capable of stopping a communist return to power. This stance appealed to the new industrial bosses in eastern Ukraine, who had managed to privatize former state-owned enterprises on Kuchma’s watch and with his assistance. Electors in the western regions, who cherished Ukrainian independence, oriented themselves toward Europe and against a return to the USSR.

Using his control of state-run media and obtaining support from media controlled by the regional bosses and oligarchs who had emerged during his first term, Kuchma managed to carry both eastern and western Ukraine, losing only in the center, where the countryside was still controlled by holdovers of the collective farm system. He gained 58 percent of the popular vote versus 39 percent for his opponent, the Ukrainian communist leader Petro Symonenko. Like Yeltsin, Kuchma decided to use his victory over the communists to push market reforms forward. He was luckier than his Russian counterpart, as there was no Asian financial crisis to interfere with his plans.

Upon his reelection, Kuchma initiated a new course toward integrating Ukraine into European political and economic structures. He appointed Viktor Yushchenko, the young head of Ukraine’s national bank who was strongly supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the new prime minister. In slightly more than a year, Yushchenko and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko, who became deputy prime minister in the new government, managed to stop the economic decline, increase revenues by closing loopholes for big business and the newly emergent oligarchic clans, and repay unpaid wages, salaries, and pensions. The economy began a rapid recovery led by the metallurgical and mining industries, which doubled their exports. Economic growth would continue well into the first decade of the new millennium.