Ukraine’s East and West Are Miles Apart on Issues

DONETSK, Ukraine — The campaign spokesman in eastern Ukraine for presidential hopeful Viktor Yushchenko sits alone in a small office, barricaded behind double locks and closed blinds.

Far off to the west in Kiev, the capital, Yushchenko has drawn hundreds of thousands of supporters into the streets to contest the results of the Nov. 21 presidential runoff, which gave a slim lead to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich.

But here in the nation’s industrial belt, Yushchenko spokesman Igor Nezhurko feels compelled to wear a semiautomatic pistol on his hip and a smaller one in a holster under his left arm.

When the doorbell rings, he peers through the peephole, and when he sees an unfamiliar face, his hand hovers over his gun as he opens the door.

“This is our life,” Nezhurko said with a sigh Thursday. “The last campaign rally we had — we were trying to show the world that Yushchenko supporters are also human beings, and we have the right to gather, to express our opinion under orange banners — they tried to turn into a blood bath. They called it the ‘orange plague.’ The very idea enraged them.”

In Kiev, where jubilant Yushchenko supporters have filled the streets for nearly two weeks and forced a review of the election he officially lost to Yanukovich, it is easy to assume that Yushchenko rides an overwhelming wave of popular support. Here in eastern Ukraine, though, the popular wave washes up on a different beach.

In this gray landscape of dirty snow, steel factory smokestacks and towering coal slag heaps that are the engine of Ukraine’s booming economy, there is barely a Yushchenko poster to be seen. A thousand or more supporters of Yanukovich turn out each day wearing signature blue scarves for their own rallies, and billboards feature photos of the prime minister with the words, “Yanukovich: President of Ukraine.”

The vehement support for the Russian-backed politician among millions of Ukrainians in the east is a reminder that Ukraine’s political crisis is far from a simple contest between democracy and entrenched power.

And any court decision to annul the allegedly fraudulent results that led to Yanukovich’s victory at the polls will surely leave large numbers of citizens in the east feeling angry, disenfranchised and perilously alienated.

“This is a hard-working region. In the past, it used to take care of the needs of not only Ukraine but the entire Soviet Union,” Donetsk Gov. Anatoly Bliznyuk said Thursday. “Here, 96% of the people said, ‘Yanukovich is our president.’ The people have made a decision…. Who gave anyone the right to deny them their rights?”

Yanukovich, a former metalworker, was Donetsk’s governor from 1997 to 2002. The region is also his home turf. But his popularity extends to a large swath of the countryside, geographically closer to Russia than Kiev. The rough, blue-collar workers here speak better Russian than Ukrainian, and many feel more at home with a Russian-style government, generous both with its authority and its dispensation of social benefits, than with European-style democracy.

On Sunday, when about 200 Yushchenko supporters tried to rally in downtown Donetsk, they were surrounded by a hostile crowd of about 4,000 that grabbed their orange scarves — the symbol of the “Orange Revolution” street rallies in Kiev — and wrestled a banner carrier to the ground, kicking and punching him in the ribs and face.

“It was like a quiet scalp hunt. These people were running and ripping off people’s orange scarves and pins,” Nezhurko said. “Every time a scarf would go down, they would explode in a shout of joy. They were saying, ‘There is only one law in this land, and Yanukovich is the law.’ And while all of this was happening, the police were just standing by and watching.

“It has become dangerous to even appear in the street with a Yushchenko sign,” he added.

Large numbers of east Ukrainians credit Yanukovich with kick-starting one of the highest economic growth rates in Europe and funneling millions of dollars in federal aid to Ukraine’s crumbling industrial infrastructure and paying hundreds of millions of dollars in pension and salary arrears.

Nowhere is that more important than in eastern Ukraine, which produces 43% of the nation’s metal products and half the coal that runs the steel mills and power plants. Now, industrial workers who voted to keep the factories running fear that their voice will go unheard.

“We should have dropped our tools and run to Kiev and started our own rally. It was a mistake. It made it look like the entire country was with Yushchenko,” said Mikhail Timoshenko, director of a coal mine in Uglidar, a town 30 miles southwest of Donetsk.

In a region often described as bleak, Uglidar seems especially forlorn under the low leaden clouds of December. Piles of mine tailing cones stand on the horizon like a low range of mountains. Coal dust turns the snow into black slush, and workers fight their way through a bitterly cold wind to climb into the rickety cage that carries them on a 40-minute ride into the shaft.

There, they work six-hour shifts hunched over in a chamber as tall as a desk. They earn an average of $160 a month. Still, there are few complaints.

“I would like to point out that 15 million people voted for Yanukovich. But they consider us nonhuman beings. Riff-raff,” said Sergei Gudz, a supervisor at the mine. “When Yushchenko was prime minister, he basically told us, ‘I don’t need your people. It’s easier to shut down your mines and buy coal from abroad.’ ”

“I had to take some Valium drops while I watched what was happening in Kiev on television. Because what I saw happening was a cynical seizure of power,” added Alexander Khovyaev, a foreman. “When Yushchenko was prime minister, I hadn’t been paid my salary for a year. There were interruptions in the electricity supply; we would sit for days without power here. And when Yanukovich became prime minister in this country, it became much easier to live.”

The prospect of Yushchenko snatching victory from defeat has raised such alarm that several regional leaders in the east have launched a referendum campaign seeking to turn Ukraine into a federation with an autonomous republic in the east. Under their plan, endorsed by the regional parliament in Donetsk on Thursday, the east would retain 70% of the $1.5 billion a year in revenue generated in the region.

Most here seem to discount the allegations of vote fraud that center heavily on eastern Ukraine. Their fear is that the courts will set aside votes in areas subject to fraud complaints, in effect disenfranchising those, like them, who cast their ballots in good faith.

“In what other country can it be possible to call white black? To go out into the main square, shout your own name four times and declare yourself president?” steel plant manager Igor Podunovsky told a rally Wednesday night in Donetsk. “They claim the real people are all out in Independence Square in Kiev. We turn out not to be people at all. Shame on them.”