Student Protests in Ukraine

The dramatic events in Ukraine in recent weeks have again brought the country into the headlines. The mainly student protests in Kiev are about reneged promises over further integration with the EU. Before we come to the table with our personal prejudices and biases over the EU (and both UKIP and the idiotic liberal reaction to UKIP suggest we have many) we need to remember Edward Said’s warning that very few political principles survive translation, inserted, as they are, into a new set of power relations. The first directly relevant point here is that Ukraine is the world’s third largest exporter of grain. Certainly the EU protects its farmers (and as a leftist I should like to point out the cost to third world farmers that this protectionist policy has) and Ukraine has much to gain from joining the EU. However, as the continuing economic crises in Greece, Spain etc. show, the integration of a notoriously fragile economy into the EU may well be tantamount to handing the keys over to Germany.

EU aside, there is the ever perennial Big Brother to the East. Putin clearly doesn’t want Ukraine to integrate more with the EU, and the oil debacles in 2006 and 2009 show Putin isn’t scared of punishing sheep that stray too far from the flock. The criminal actions in Chechnya are perhaps a more sinister example. This brings us nicely to internal politics: President Yanukovych was widely seen as the ‘Russian’ candidate in the 2004 ‘election’, and indeed the base of his support is in the predominantly ethnically Russian east. Ukraine is infamous for its East/West divide, with the country more pro-Soviet as you head east, and these protests have once again thrown this factor into relief.

Yanukovych is without doubt a dubious character, with very serious allegations of corruption levelled at him, despite the highfalutin rhetoric. Then there was the blatant electoral fraud in 2004 which led to the Orange Revolution. The revolution was perhaps more of the type we physicists are used to dealing with as Yanukovych soon saw himself back in power in 2010, elected in perhaps the cleanest election in the post-Soviet bloc to date.

Mind you, Yulia Tymoshenko is not perhaps as much the fairy-tale candidate that Guardian readers would like to believe. Perhaps this is just prejudice, but I am not sure that becoming one of the richest people in the country during a period where GDP shrunk to 40% of its Soviet era economy is quite justified by business sense and initiative. Despite the personal difficulties she has no doubt faced since her arrest in 2001, it was the incompetence and infighting of the Orange revolutionaries that brought Yanukovych back to power. Finally, Tymoshenko is all too cosy with the wrong sorts of people: note her meetings with Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice in 2007, or her transformation into Russia’s preferred candidate in 2010. One final word: democratic uprisings have a life of their own. Slavoj Žižek once made a wonderful point about how best to rewrite Antigone. Forget the fights between Creon and Antigone, the chorus should send both to the prison camps and start life in a new commune. My call to the people of Ukraine is analogous; forget the Mafioso politicians and gas baronesses. Unite and protest!