ShareThisKIEV, Ukraine - It was the handshake that sealed the end of a revolution.
Yulia Tymoshenko, the charismatic Ukrainian prime minister and a key figure in the 2004 Orange Revolution that set the country on a pro-European, anti-Russian course, sat down late last year with Vladimir Putin. He offered her a generous deal for sending Russia's natural gas through Ukraine's pipelines, paying 30 percent more than previously.
She appeared on television warmly shaking hands with the Russian prime minister in what is widely seen as Moscow's endorsement -- some would say purchase -- of her candidacy.
The image of the handshake is everywhere this week as Ukrainians prepare to go to the polls on Sunday in an election that seems poised to bring the Orange Revolution to a close.
It marks, for Ukraine, the return of Russia.
Viktor Yushchenko, the current president and hero of the 2004 democracy movement, is polling at about 3 percent, abandoned by almost all voters. Under his watch, the country stagnated, its economy collapsed by 15 percent, its balance sheet had to be bailed out with a rescue package from the International Monetary Fund and corruption flourished.
Voters seem poised to give the greatest share of first-round votes either to Viktor Yanukovich, the Moscow-backed leader who was driven from office in the 2004 protests against his fraudulent election, or to Tymoshenko. Both have pledged to build relations with Moscow and to abandon plans to bring Ukraine into the NATO.
"We are witnessing a mass disappointment and irritation with the results of the Orange Revolution," says Fesenko Volodymyr, director of Kiev's Center for Political Studies. "Voters are more willing to ask questions now. They are more pragmatic, because they have been humbled, and it is no longer a simple decision between the East and the West."
For many Ukrainians, the pursuit of Moscow's largesse is no longer a sign of capitulation to a menacing former imperial master, a country that owned and controlled Ukraine for a century.
Almost immediately after the Orange Revolution protests brought Yushchenko to office in early 2005 amid promises to reform the economy and join NATO and the European Union, Moscow began to punish Ukraine for its defiance.
Europe was terrified by the Ukraine-Russia "gas wars" of 2006 and early 2009. Ukraine's pipelines carry much of Europe's natural-gas supply from Russia, and in both those years, Russia refused to pay Ukraine the price it wanted for carriage. In the winter of 2006, a chunk of Europe went without heat for days.
Putin's deal with Tymoshenko was an apparent signal that the gas wars would end under her leadership.
Yushchenko, sidelined by the deal, issued dark warnings that his two opponents are part of a Kremlin plot. "Tymoshenko and Yanukovich are the finest representatives of a single Kremlin coalition," he told voters in Lviv, in Ukraine's European-minded west.
Tymoshenko explained her apparent abandonment of Orange Revolution polarities as a matter of pragmatism. "We are destined to have Russia as a neighbor," she wrote in a magazine article. "So it is up to us, as well as Russia's leaders, to create mutually beneficial relations between our nations."
Voters certainly seemed to embrace this, giving her a sharp increase in support after the deal. But her handling of the economy as prime minister, during which the international credit crisis hit Ukraine especially badly and effectively bankrupted the government, have hurt her, giving Yanukovich a slightly stronger lead.
It might seem that Ukrainians are realigning their loyalties eastward after a disillusioning five-year experiment in Europeanism. Attempts at NATO membership brought only fury from Russia. Investment, when it did materialize, was short-lived.
The European Union has essentially abandoned Ukraine, building tough border defenses on its Polish flank and shutting the country out of the accession process -- even though steps toward membership have brought political and economic stability to Croatia and Serbia under similar circumstances.
The reality is far more complex than a simple shift in loyalties, however. Ukraine can no longer be described as a bifurcated country, and politics is no longer a stark East-or-West decision.
While eastern Ukrainians, who speak Russian, still tend to sympathize with Moscow and western Ukrainians are oriented toward Europe, central Ukrainians, who make up the largest population bloc, are increasingly willing to accept a closer relationship with Moscow, in part because cooperation with the West has offered them so little.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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