Yanukovych and Nixon

Like generals fighting the last war, much of the western press reported the recent Ukrainian election as a battle between the ‘pro-western' Yuliya Tymoshenko and the ‘pro-Russian' Viktor Yanukovych. But this election was not the great existential drama produced by the last vote in 2004

Then everything - foreign policy direction, internal regional tensions, even the very existence of Ukrainian democracy - seemed at stake, and the fixing of the vote by Yanukovych's supporters provoked the ‘Orange Revolution' that swept Viktor Yushchenko to power.

Events have moved on. All revolutions disappoint, and the Orange Revolution disappointed more than most. Its leaders have preferred fighting each other to getting things done. Tymoshenko served twice as prime minister in 2005 and 2007-10, but by the time of the great gas crisis in January 2009 had clearly made her peace with Russia. She and Putin got along just fine, making jokes in public at Yushchenko's expense. To use Mrs Thatcher's famous phrase about Gorbachev, Putin clearly thought Tymoshenko was someone he could ‘do business with'; and the Ukrainian media constantly speculated about what exactly that business might be. A deal on gas? This or that privatisation deal? Meanwhile, the Kremlin and Gazprom had a very public falling out with several of the business ‘oligarchs' who backed Yanukovych. Having got their fingers so badly burned in 2004, Putin's people still thought of the charisma-free Yanukovych as a serial loser, until very late in the election campaign.

But the other lesson that Russia drew from 2004, when its attempt to back Yanukovych with overwhelming force had back-fired, was not to put all its eggs in one basket. Medvedev's notorious open letter to Yushchenko in the summer of 2009 was designed to isolate his type of ‘anti-Russian' politics and define the rules of the game for a ‘primary' for Russian favour amongst the other candidates in the race. Tymoshenko and Yanukovych were not the only ones to play along: several of the minor candidates went further and took Russian money and airtime.

Both Tymoshenko and Yanukovych talked of ‘resetting' a more pragmatic relationship between Ukraine and Russia. But both had also learnt the key Ukrainian lesson from 2004, that there is little electoral mileage in being seen to be a Russian puppet - Ukrainian national interests should come first. They were further apart on some specific issues: Tymoshenko talked of resurrecting the EU gas deal signed in 2009, Yanukovych favoured solving the problem at the Russian end by asking for a lower supply price; Yanukovych was more willing to renew the lease on Russia's Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol after its expiry in 2017. But both played the game of balance between Russia and the West - albeit with Tymoshenko a little closer to the West and Yanukovych a little closer to Russia.

So what does this mean now that Yanukovych has won? During the election he played identity politics, seeking votes in east Ukraine by attacking NATO and promoting the Russian language. But his first foreign trips were first to Brussels and then to Moscow in the same week. In fact, in Moscow he got a version of Marlon Brando's wedding day speech from The Godfather - ‘why did you not come to us first?' - while Putin tried to bounce him into rash commitments on joining the customs union between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Yanukovych played a straight bat, though he surprised many on his return to Kiev by proposing a law preventing Ukraine from joining ‘military alliances' - though, depending how it was drafted, that could exclude the Russia-dominated CSTO as well as NATO.

Ukraine is more likely to balance between east and west than rush back to Moscow. There are even some in Ukraine who think that Yanukovych could be a ‘Ukrainian Nixon'. Like Nixon in China, because he is more reassuring to Russia and to Ukraine's Russian-speaking population, he could actually take Ukraine further towards Europe in the long run than Yushchenko ever managed.

A different east European analogy could be Aleksander Kwasniewski, who was similarly distrusted by the Solidarity right when he became President of Poland in 1995, but who took Poland into NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004 (though none would suggest things might happen in Ukraine that fast). Yanukovych's supporters also claim that he has a good record of no-nonsense delivery on bread and butter issues.

Unfortunately, Yanukovych, like Kwasniewski, is surrounded by too many representatives of the old guard, men who held power under President Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) or were prominent during Yanukovych's brief return as prime minister in 2006-07. New prime minister Mykola Azarov was then notorious for abusing the VAT system to reward friends and punish enemies: there was even a word coined in Ukrainian to describe the process - Azarovshchina . The same people are back in charge of the energy sector, which has been Ukraine's main source of corruption in recent years. Yanukovych has also trampled on the constitution to fast-forward the creation of his new government.

So maybe the analogy with Nixon is too close for comfort. But if the right incentives are in place, the West may have someone it can also do business with.

This article originally appeared in Progress

Andrew Wilson's new policy brief, 'Dealing with Yanukovych's Ukraine', has been published by ECFR 

Click here for a podcast interview with Andrew Wilson on the prospects for Ukraine under Yanukovych