Crisis And Deadlock: How Ukraine’s Political Class Is Unravelling

Mark MacKinnon

KIEV, UKRAINE The Globe and Mail Last updated: Friday, Mar. 18, 2016 2:44PM EDT

The pattern, by now, is all too familiar to Ukrainians. There’s a revolution. The people celebrate. Then a new batch of politicians takes power and spoils it all.

The second anniversary of Ukraine’s latest revolution passed last month in a familiar atmosphere of political crisis. President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk – two leaders of the 2014 ouster of a pro-Russian government headed by Viktor Yanukovych – are at loggerheads, with Mr. Yatsenyuk fighting to hold onto his job and Mr. Poroshenko determined to replace him.

To Ukrainians who remember the Orange Revolution of 2004, it feels like a rerun. That revolt unravelled when its leaders, president Viktor Yushchenko and prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, wasted their political capital fighting each other rather than reforming the country. That led to the rise of Mr. Yanukovych and a new era of Kiev’s subordination to Moscow.

Also still remembered is how popular protests in Kiev helped to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, only to see corrupt oligarchs take the place of the commissars.

The 2014 revolution was supposed to be different. This time, people died fighting to change their country. Russia’s annexation of Crimea – and its support for separatists in the southeast of the country – made it clearer than ever how high the stakes were.

But the parliamentary coalition headed by the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Mr. Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front has collapsed, with three smaller parties leaving the alliance last month after a failed attempt to oust Mr. Yatsenyuk. Meanwhile, the reforms they were elected to introduce remain largely unattended to.

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