Five years after the “Orange Revolution: Ukrainian economy suffers sharp fall in 2009

Five years after the “Orange Revolution,” which brought Ukrainian politician Viktor Yushchenko to power in January 2005, the Ukrainian economy is in the deepest crisis since the post-Soviet economic and social implosion of the 1990s.

Yushchenko’s bid for office, and his subsequent campaign to overturn the declared electoral victory of the more pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovich, were financed and politically supported by the United States. Washington saw Yushchenko as a means of weakening Russian influence in the country and opening up its markets to transnational companies and global finance capital.

Yushchenko had earned his support from Washington during his tenure as the head of the central bank of Ukraine, where he oversaw the privatisation of Ukrainian state assets in the 1990s... Following his ascendancy to the presidency, Yushchenko was universally praised in the Western corporate media as a reformer who could usher in a new era of prosperity and democracy in the former Soviet republic.

Washington’s man in Kiev is today a despised figure whose pursuit of unpopular “free-market” economic policies and a pro-NATO foreign policy has left him with polling figures in the single digits. Having campaigned in 2004 as an anti-corruption candidate, Yushchenko has presided over a regime every bit as corrupt and in thrall to oligarchic business interests as that of Kuchma.

Economic and social conditions for Ukrainian workers are worse now than when Yushchenko came to office, and remain lower than what they were under the Soviet Union...The country’s economy was badly hit by the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing global recession. Ukrainian industrial exports plummeted as global demand fell, while the country’s financial system faced default. The state was saved from bankruptcy by an emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) of US $16.5 billion, which has come with demands from the fund that Kiev restructure its economy to cut public spending and further enforce the demands of global capital...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/ukra-o29.shtml