Ukraine faces milestone election

KIEV, Ukraine — It was a carefully scripted moment when Russian President Vladimir Putin began quoting Taras Shevchenko, this country’s 19th-century bard, during a live television interview broadcast on three national stations here last Tuesday.

Reciting in surprisingly good Ukrainian, the Russian leader recalled the verse of a poem he said he still remembers from his student days. That Mr. Putin, who by his own admission has no Ukrainian roots and was educated during the Soviet era, was unlikely to learn a poem in Ukrainian seemed irrelevant.

Mr. Putin’s presence in Kiev on the eve of Ukraine’s third presidential election, scheduled for today, underscores the importance of the race. Depending on whom they choose, Ukrainians, in their 13th year of independence, will determine the course their country takes for many years to come.

The two main contenders — opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych — offer two very different visions for Ukraine.

Mr. Yushchenko favors Ukraine’s integration into international organizations, including NATO and the European Union. Mr. Yanukovych sees Russia as Ukraine’s principal ally; he favors dual citizenship and making Russian an official language of Ukraine.

The two do agree that Ukraine must eventually pull out its troops from Iraq, a move supported by most Ukrainians.

With 24 candidates on the ballot, neither man is likely to win 50 percent of the vote. The latest polls, published two weeks ago before a pre-election ban took effect, showed the two running neck-and-neck, each with 30 percent to 35 percent of the vote. A run-off is expected on Nov. 21.

Mr. Putin spent three days in Kiev, ostensibly to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Kiev’s liberation from Nazi occupation. Along with his television appearance, the Russian president observed a Soviet-style military parade on Thursday, when he stood next to Mr. Yanukovych, who towered over him.

Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, also viewed the parade. Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who was in Kiev on Wednesday, did not.

The opposition charged that the government pushed the commemorative ceremony up a week to bolster support for Mr. Yanukovych and to intimidate citizens before today’s election. Commemorations of the 50th and 55th anniversaries, which also came in presidential-election years, were relatively muted.

The West continued to call for an honest race. Early this month, the Bush administration warned Kiev it risked derailing its Euro-Atlantic aspirations and its relationship with the United States if the race were fraudulent.

“We are prepared to work closely with any candidate who wins in a free and fair contest,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington.

“We are also prepared to move forward quickly on many issues of importance to Ukraine. At the same time, if the election does fail to meet democratic standards, it would be unrealistic for Ukraine to expect realization of these aspirations.

“We would also need to re-examine our relationship with those who engaged in election fraud and manipulation.”

Mr. Boucher said the race thus far has “fallen short of international standards,” and “the disruption of opposition rallies, muzzling of independent media, misuse of ’administrative resources,’ and other serious violations cast doubt on the Ukrainian government’s commitment to its democratic obligations.”

As if to underscore its seriousness, Washington denied Grigory Surkis, a key lawmaker who is considered an oligarch and also heads Ukraine’s soccer federation, a visa to the United States, using a new and seldom-used ban against reputedly corrupt officials.

The European Union also warned last week that the election could fall short of international standards.

Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, who visited Ukraine with a bipartisan group of senators in August, told a Washington conference last month both the United States and Europe “have not been fully cognizant of the critical role Ukraine plays, and as a result, the aspiration of Ukrainians to see their nation firmly ensconced in the West has drifted.”

“It would be a terrible blunder if, because of our inattention and mistakes, we allow Ukraine to slip back into the Russian orbit,” Mr. McCain said. Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry also accused President Bush last month of turning a blind eye toward Kiev.

“While Ukraine has generously contributed troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has ignored democratic reversal in that country. We could have been working with Europe over the past several months to formulate a common approach to support democracy in Ukraine,” Mr. Kerry said.

Mr. Putin, who has voiced his support for Mr. Bush in the election, did not directly endorse Mr. Yanukovych in the Ukraine race, although he praised the prime minister’s economic record of growth, saying the government managed to “concentrate financial resources on solving the main social tasks, such as increasing pensions.”

It is rumored that Mr. Putin, a former KGB chief, is not particularly fond of Mr. Yanukovych, who was twice imprisoned, but believes he is Russia’s best hope for more integrated relations between the two countries.

Answering questions submitted by phone and via the Internet, Mr. Putin told television viewers he supports joint citizenship for Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, three countries that share a special relationship, when the time is right. He also promised that Ukrainians would not have to obtain special passports to enter the Russian Federation, a move that had been expected to take effect on Jan. 1, 2005.

Mr. Putin’s appearance on three Ukrainian TV channels was an unprecedented event. Even outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, in office since 1994, never got that much television exposure. All the channels that broadcast the interview are believed to be controlled by Viktor Medvedchuk, Mr. Kuchma’s chief of staff.

Mr. Yushchenko, the opposition leader, told Ukrainians not to put too much stock in Mr. Putin’s visit and a spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry said that even the leader of Russia couldn’t affect the outcome of the elections.

In a televised address Friday, Mr. Kuchma called for calm and urged electors to vote their conscience. He reiterated police were not to interfere in the elections, but were to protect “the safety of citizens.”

“That even now we can’t say who will be the next president, that speaks of real democracy in this country,” Mr. Kuchma said.

Some 157,000 police and citizens’ groups are expected to keep the peace.

Many Ukrainian observers said they are concerned the campaign has been marked with so many legal violations that the results could be nullified by Mr. Kuchma, a move that would allow him to stay in power for a while longer.

Mr. Kuchma, who is in his second five-year term as president, was barred from running for a third time under Ukraine’s Constitution.

State television has aggressively sought to discredit Mr. Yushchenko. Government media played up a report by the prosecutor general’s office that a recent reputed poisoning of Mr. Yushchenko was just a viral infection caused by his lifestyle.

Mr. Yushchenko claimed the government had tried to kill him after he fell ill following a meeting with Internal Affairs Ministry officials.

The illness was first thought to be food poisoning, but turned out to have been caused by chemical substances not normally found in food products, according to Austrian doctors who treated the opposition leader in Vienna, Austria.

Mr. Yushchenko was off the campaign trail for nearly a month while recuperating and the illness has left his face temporarily disfigured. Tests to determine the cause of the illness continue, sources said.

The opposition leader said Friday in an interview with the ERA television station that family members, including a daughter who is pregnant, have received multiple kidnapping threats.

Mr. Yushchenko’s son has temporarily stopped attending university, while his wife and three small children have moved to an undisclosed location outside Kiev.

Ukrainian news media, meanwhile, have reported that the government plans to pull the plug on ERA — the company also broadcasts the British Broadcasting Corp. and Ukraine’s public radio on its radio station — replacing it with state controlled media on election eve.

The station airs nights and mornings and has resisted government control.

Journalists from Channel 5, one of the nation’s few independent broadcast stations, went on a hunger strike last Monday to protest threats their station would be taken off the air. Although Mr. Kuchma said he was against shutting down Channel 5, its operating license remains in jeopardy. The station’s bank accounts were unfrozen late Wednesday.

In a surprise development, journalists from the country’s leading television stations last Thursday signed a letter of protest against pressure they said was being put on them.

Seven journalists from Studio 1+1, which is broadcast nationally and believed to be under Mr. Medvedchuk’s influence, quit their jobs to protest censorship. “We recognize that under today’s conditions, we can’t fulfill our professional responsibilities … to give society true information,” they said in an open letter.

“Our television craft has definitively been turned into serving the interests of those to whom 1+1 was given by its owners for political use. … At such a stormy time for Ukraine, the standards of honesty for Ukrainian journalism have all the chances to prevail or to be lost forever.”

Mr. Yushchenko warned that election night could turn violent, saying that his camp had information that thousands of coal miners from the Donetsk region, where Mr. Yanukovych enjoys widespread support, were prepared to march.

“We understand that the government will use the falsification variant maximally,” and if that doesn’t work, “they will use force” to ensure the elections don’t happen, he told supporters while campaigning last Thursday, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

More than 100,000 people appeared at a rally in Kiev last weekend to support the opposition leader and honest elections.