Ukrainian protests show the European Union still offers hope to some

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/01/ukrainian-protests-european-union-hope

Version 0 of 1.

It is not very often that the European Union starts a riot. Even rarer that people take to the barricades to support Brussels. The tired, squabbling old union may be dragging down the world economy, mired in austerity, plagued by self-doubt, producing a lost generation of young people. But for the hundreds of thousands of mainly young people on the streets of Kiev on Sunday, the EU is definitely worth fighting for.

And however unlikely it may seem, an EU summit of national leaders provided the spark for the biggest outpouring of national frustration seen in Ukraine since the heady days of the 2004 Orange Revolution. Kiev was bathed in blue and yellow, the colours of both the Ukrainian flag and the often-derided EU one.

How come? Because Ukraine, according to those on the streets, missed its date with destiny at the Vilnius summit on Friday. After five years of negotiating political association and a free trade deal with the EU, the president, Viktor Yanukovych, balked at finalising the pact and blinked in front of the Kremlin.

Ten days earlier, Yanukovych stunned EU leaders and shocked many in his country by freezing the European deal. He pleaded he was under irresistible pressure from Vladimir Putin in Moscow. He tried to play one side off against the other, to see who was the better at bribery. Within 12 hours of the summit ending he sent his riot police in at dawn, deploying needless force to clear a few hundred protesters camping out in Kiev's main square.

His calculations about money and power, seldom so ruthlessly and transparently applied, appear to have backfired. The police violence catalysed national anger, putting up to half a million on the cold streets of the capital. Yanukovych's chief of staff and a couple of MPs went over to the opposition. The courts pre-emptively tried and failed to ban street protests in a display of the "selective justice" that the EU has made the central condition for concluding the agreements with Ukraine.

Until last week it appeared that Ukraine was having to choose whether to head west into a more rules- and law-based region of Euro-Atlantic integration or stay in the east, held tight in the Russian bear-hug, joining Putin's attempt to construct a Moscow-dominated alternative in the space between Russia and the EU.

By Sunday it appeared the issue had shifted to Yanukovych himself. His main aim is simply to retain and shore up power, perhaps through declaring a state of emergency. The protesters' main goal was the signing of the EU agreements; it has shifted to the removal of the president and early elections.

Ukraine has been spectacularly ill-served by its governing elite since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The misrule and rampant corruption of the post-Soviet president Leonid Kuchma ignited the Orange Revolution almost a decade ago. The winner, Viktor Yushchenko, proved a major disappointment. Yanukovych's main rival, the jailed opposition leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, was also no angel as prime minister.

Yanukovych has led the country to the brink of financial collapse as his coterie and his oligarchic backers grow insanely and obscenely wealthy.

His main aim is to retain power at the next presidential election in 2015. He appears to calculate that Putin rather than Angela Merkel and other European leaders is his better bet for achieving that aim.

It is not clear whether the energy on the streets can be maintained and whether it can be channelled into more meaningful political form. Yanukovych's most formidable opponent is in jail. He fears Tymoshenko. Putin may help him out in the short term, but the price will be high and wreck the aspirations of the protesters.

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.