Ukraine has made a decision to create Common Economic Space together with Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia and simultaneously rejected the proposal of another EU plan (within the European Neighborhood Policy), which particularly concerned the introduction of amendments to the Ukrainian military doctrine from the perspective of European integration. Viktor Yanukovych said that Brussels humiliated Ukraine with not accepting its aspirations for membership in the European Union and therefore he refuses to seek the possibility of joining the EU in the future. The President of Russia Vladimir Putin decided to get personally engaged in Ukrainian affairs and supported one of the candidates in the presidential elections. It all took place in 2003 and 2004 and Yanukovych was at that time the prime minister under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. The further destiny of the dominant political order had to be defined in the presidential election in the fall of 2004 that was approaching. However, the Orange Revolution broke out unexpectedly and the final decision about who had to govern Ukraine in the next couple of years was to be made on Maidan. You can complain about the actions of the Orange elite, but without the change that took place at the turning point between 2004 and 2005, without this pulling at the reins on the way of the official Kyiv towards the EU Ukraine would be in a much worse situation than it is today. The political elites that surrounded Kuchma at that time lost the opportunity of political settlement of the situation in which they got stuck.
After nearly eight years since the revolution on Maidan near the Dnipro lots has changed. The united opposition today is different, it is richer with the experience of the past years. The elites of the Party of Regions are also different: they are much more pro-European and even internally divided on this issue – it does not look quite good to be against Europe. You can be a member of the Party of Regions and reproach other members for too little engagement in European integration. But there are also phenomena reminiscent of the days before the Orange Revolution. Although, now the times are very different but the political situation on the domestic scene is, like it was in 2004, ambiguous. The doubts and uncertainty about the future fate of the state can be seen not only in politicians, but also in the intellectuals. It turned out so that today’s melody sounds somehow similar – the same personalities in somewhat different, even though similar, roles: Yulia Tymoshenko is again in prison, Viktor Yanukovych, then the head of the government, became the president as a result of free elections, Vladimir Putin continues to rule in the neighboring Russia, this time on the post of the prime minister. The course of time is not only seen because Kuchma grew old and Viktor Yushchenko decided to completely devote himself to producing honey at the family apiary. The disappointment in Brussels seems the same, but the present EU in a certain perspective is different, more closed, even more than at the time back then, they don’t want to speak about expansion and this reluctance is now deeper and is largely caused by the economic and political crisis within the European community.
Anyways, Ukraine is again now sure of its path, just like it was at the end of Kuchma’s rule. The Europe, in its turn, is again not confident in Ukraine. Could we have already seen this somewhere, we rub our eyes in surprise and ask whether Ukrainians will escape from their deja vu. But enough of comparisons, analogies, and associations. We were told at school that history does not repeat itself, maybe only as a farce. But who needs this farce? Why would Ukrainians need farce, why would Poles need farce in Ukraine, why would Germans need farce in Ukraine? That is why we need to make use of the experience of the past years, after all we are all wiser for those few gray hairs. President Yanukovych has to consider the factor that did not play an important role in the Kuchma era. Perhaps, the opposition is not stronger than the Orange politicians from that time, but the bunch of people who want Ukraine to be a part of Europe is much stronger than it was back then. Who are they? Each year the next generations of Ukrainians educated in Ukrainian and Western universities enter the adult world as people conscious of their nationality and weight in Europe. Among the young professionals there are those born in 1988 and 1989. They are silent, alike the whole generation of their peers in
Europe, they reluctantly go to political rallies, and carry their activity on the Internet.
They consider themselves to be the owners of their freedom no less than the Polish or French youth in 1968. This freedom today is the possibility to travel, listen to Western music, but most of all it is the freedom of relations in the network. It is the freedom of planning your own life and hopes that this individual plan will be to some extent consistent with the development of the country. This generation is capable of making surprises: they surprised not only Zine Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak, or Vladimir Putin. They even surprised the Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk in the recent weeks. The element of the freedom of the post-Soviet generation – digital generation in Ukraine – is free elections. They simply cannot already imagine any other life. Even if they do not use this right, they will not let anyone take it from them easily. That is why this year’s elections will be the most important event in Ukraine. And this is because the political situation in Ukraine is in such a dead-end, both in domestic and European dimensions, that even if the Association Agreement is initialized, the new trend will be, in fact, brought by the Ukrainians who will come to the election polls in a few months, and not by those who were elected to the parliament a few years ago. The current political figures won’t have bright success any more. If the winner will be the Party of Regions, it won’t be a dismal victory and its leaders will have to suggest how to finish the Tymoshenko case, how to begin cooperation with the opposition, which will most likely be much stronger and without any doubt more cohesive that it is in the present parliament. But first of all, already today the Party of Regions has to imagine that one can as well lose at the elections. Thus, if the opposition wins, its leaders need to have a concept of how not to get into the logic of internal struggle and settling accounts and how to get together for the good of Ukraine: after the Orange Revolution nothing made a more negative impression than war between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. There is another difficult thing: how to refrain from trying to find among the members of the Party of Regions a new lodger for the cell, where Tymoshenko is now. Because then Ukrainians who are ready to believe the Orange politicians again, no matter what meaning this word has today, will lose any faith in the style of the new government policy and will sharply respond to it. The decision will be made by young people, who now use Twitter, write blogs, use Facebook and Vkontakte: politicians do not have any influence on them because the older get ready for the battles with the result that has long been determined and wake up all wet after another deja vu.
