The jeep swerved when an egg hit its passenger window. A man dressed in black leant into the driver’s window and screamed: ‘Go home!’. Terrified, the driver sped on, into a road strewn with nails.
It was the moment that opposition supporters, driving round Ukraine as part of a ‘Friendship Tour’, hoped would never happen. As they crossed the country for 10 days, trying to promote the ‘Orange Revolution’ that enveloped Kiev during 16 days of electoral crisis, they had received a warm welcome even in Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk, cities renowned for supporting Viktor Yanukovich, some of whose supporters have been accused of trying to steal the presidential election. On Sunday, that election will be run again.
But a mile from the eastern industrial stronghold of Donetsk, Yanukovich’s home town, their peaceful protest was met with violence. Two hundred cars bearing the blue-and-white flags of the Yanukovich campaign blocked the turning to the city centre. Three students in a Lada car said they had come on their own initiative. One said: ‘I’ve been to Kiev. I know Viktor Yuschenko [Ukraine’s opposition leader] paid students to protest for him.’ He said a Yuschenko presidency would set the economy back four years.
Donetsk, where Russian is the dominant language, has never been shy about its support for Prime Minister Yanukovich. His backing for heavy industry and reputation as a man of order who pays salaries and pensions on time eclipses allegations of his criminal past and government. The region has repeatedly threatened to secede from Ukraine if Yuschenko becomes President.
On a popular level, there may be doubts about Yanukovich, but there is a greater suspicion about Yuschenko and the effect his free market policies would have on their heavy industry.
Artiom Kos (24) who with four colleagues parked their taxis across the turning to the centre, blocking the convoy, said: ‘I did it out of a desire to protect my choice. I didn’t like where the country was headed when Yuschenko was the Prime Minister and I like what Yanukovich did.
‘I really like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. He’s a guy who can bring order. Russia and Ukraine have a lot of cultural and social things in common. People just want to live normally here.’
Despite allegations in the local media that Yuschenko would fill the mines with US nuclear waste if he wins, many Donetsk residents showed their choice was more informed than the level of debate in the state-run local media.
‘Yanukovich is the best of two evils’, said Vika (20) a waitress. ‘I like his masculine character. He says things and then does them. But Yuschenko, who I dislike more, only talks in the abstract.’ Her colleague, Inga (23) said she would vote for Yuschenko. ‘Yanukovich’s talk of Ukraine splitting up is not presidential and only serves the interests of his family and the clan that backs him.’
In the city centre that afternoon, up to 5 000 people demonstrated outside the Palace of Youth, chanting: ‘We are for Yanukovich’. Their hatred of the ‘Orange pest’ was in evidence when they burnt effigies of Yuschenko and his billionaire backers, Yulia Tymoshenko and Petro Poroshenko. Despite a promise from the mayor of a police escort, so that the convoy could stop in the city centre for two hours, the crowd was in no mood for political debate or tolerance. Donetsk, it appears, is not yet for turning.
The end game to one of the most brutally fought election campaigns in the former Soviet Union still brims with anxiety. On Saturday the country’s constitutional court added to that by dramatically annuling a ruling that would have denied disabled and housebound Ukrainians the right to vote from home. Protests and political crisis have changed the electoral landscape. Nationwide, the media are now less under state control; election laws and officials have been changed in a bid to ensure a fairer vote; the Prime Minister, perhaps seeing the inevitability of a Yuschenko presidency, is bizarrely presenting himself as the new anti-government candidate, trying to capitalise on the loathing for outgoing President Leonid Kuchma — his original sponsor — which fuelled the original protests.
Opinion polls suggest a win for Yuschenko by as much as 14%, perhaps enough to render pointless the court challenges Yanukovich is expected to bring if he is defeated. But have the newly liberated media and electoral system changed voters’ minds? Will it be neck-and-neck again for the third vote in a row? Will Yanukovich supporters, as the opposition alleges, sabotage the vote with violence? Can Yuschenko, widely expected to be the next President, keep the country together?
Even Yuschenko, as a key architect of the new, transparent election rules, remains unsure the vote can be completely fair. On Friday he warned again of possible disruption: ‘I think it will be a colossal mistake on the part of the current regime if even one drop of blood is shed in the coming days.’
His campaign, perhaps in a bid to ensure that their voters turn out, has raised similar fears. Oleg Ribachuk, Yuschenko’s chief of staff, told The Observer that armed men — ‘organised crime troops’ — were being moved into Kiev. He said there were fears that Donetsk would refuse to recognise the result or to send its ballot papers to the central elections committee, plunging the vote into chaos. ‘But that can be settled by legal procedures and the courts.’
A senior official in the Yuschenko camp said he had intercepted money and arms sent from Donetsk to Kiev’s Zhulhany airport. One opposition MP even claimed that people in pro-Russian Crimea have been given arms.
Igor Smeshko, head of the security service, now thought to be loyal to Yuschenko, said: ‘State security will do everything to prevent attempts by certain groups to violate law, order and people’s constitutional rights.’
Yanukovich has said Yuschenko is buying votes and has amassed several thousand supporters in the capital. Nestor Shufrich, Yanukovich’s representative in the commission, said ‘inaction’ over procedural problems was threatening a ‘manipulation and dirty falsification’ of the vote.
While Moscow, once Yanukovich’s supporter, is tempering its rhetoric, his domestic supporters, like the east’s industrial barons, appear to be placing their hopes in staging an anti-revolution, a bid to protest at the re-run of an election they claim they won first time around. Several thousand of his supporters massed in Gratitude Square in Kiev to attend a rally ahead of the vote. Wilder rumours speak of thousands of angry pro-Yanukovich miners flooding the capital.
Instead, painstaking legal challenges are expected. Pro-opposition analyst Marian Bylinskyj said: ‘Yanukovich has a whole campaign to question the process through the constitutional and supreme court.’
The Yuschenko team is preparing to form an administration, with his inner circle rife with debate as to how he will satisfy his powerful backers with posts. On Friday, Yuschenko even said he would not use the current presidential administration as his offices, but move elsewhere and rename the street after the opposition journalist Giorgi Gongadze, whom the opposition accuse the government of having murdered.
The final days of campaigning have been remarkably subdued, the opposition acting as if any further agitation could only dent its big lead. In Kiev, only symbolic acts of protest continued, the revolutionary spirit ebbing in the hope that elections may bring a more legitimate change.
While there is hope there will be no need for more protests after polling, only one outcome will suffice for many. As Vitali Bogari (23) an academic, said: ‘Many forces were awoken by the events that followed the second round. People began to feel a little bit of freedom — and won’t stop until the end.’ – Guardian Unlimited Â