Where is the president leading the country?

Presidential elections in Ukraine have always been something more than just electing a person who will rule the country for five years. It’s a civilizational choice for us. Each time, we choose the direction of our development.

On February 14, 2010, the Central Election Commission announced Viktor Yanukovych the winner in the presidential elections. The inauguration has held on February 25.

A year is not a long time, but it seems that three have passed. So many events! The country has actually reversed course. Yanukovych’s presidency resulted in Ukraine proclaiming neutrality and establishing a powerful power vertical. In 2010 Ukraine again became a presidential republic and returned to the Constitution of 1996.

So, what did Yanukovych manage to achieve in the first year of his presidency? Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn believes the president “did as much as he could,” meaning that “the most important thing is that he managed to bring stability.” Indeed, we have plenty of stability now. The country is once again manageable. There is no chaos and double leadership, no constant conflicts between president and premier. But there is a powerful government vertical. As the political expert Vadym Karasiov wrote in his article in Ukrainska Pravda, Yanukovych became the main player, institutionally and politically.

Unlike his predecessor, Yanukovych is active in terms of reforms. In 2010 he initiated the tax, budget, administrative and judicial reforms. All of them were severely criticized by the opposition. But only he who does nothing makes no mistakes.

At present the pension reform, and the housing and labor codes have been elaborated. MPs predict that the healthcare reform, anti-corruption bills, the law on higher education, land sales and issues improving criminal legislation will also be considered during the future sessions.

Yet there are also failures. The Lviv regional organization of the Party Batkivshchyna compiled a Top-10 of Yanukovych’s broken promises, from his presidential campaign and his election program.

1. A minimal pension of 1,200 hryvnias already in 2011.

2. Tax holidays for small business for five years.

3. Providing the status of state officials to teachers and doctors.

4. Raising social standards.

5. Decreasing expenses for maintaining government bodies.

6. Overcoming corruption. (The human rights organization Transparency International assesses the level of corruption in Ukraine as the highest among “new independent states.” In the opinion of surveyed Ukrainians, courts are the worst offenders.)

7. Shifting to a contract army already in 2011.

8. Decreasing the price for Russian gas. [On a state level this has been achieved, largely owing to the Black Sea Fleet deal. However, utility prices for households, subsidized since communist times, have faced steep increases. — Ed.]

9. Revival and development of Ukrainian culture.

10. Moratorium on ideological issues splitting the society.

However, the Lviv opposition didn’t mention one more promise. Yanukovych guaranteed the development of parliamentarianism and democracy. Yet both have been neglected. The majority obediently votes for all the decisions Bankova Street adopts.

The Law “On Struggle against Poverty” became the first document Yanukovych signed as president. But many people personally felt that the government didn’t achieve outstanding results in the field of social policy.

According to study by the agency Veys-Ukraine, conducted in January in five eastern regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhia), over 60 percent of those surveyed saw themselves as poor, and 18 percent as living below the poverty line — barely surviving.

Every third poor family now has an unemployed or temporarily employed person. Many people have very poor housing conditions, only four percent improved them in the last five years (compared to 70 percent among the rich).

The worst is that, according to the study, a third of the poor are resigned and do not believe in change. Only four percent recognized their life as generally acceptable (compared to 73 percent of the rich). Sociologists contend: two thirds of the poor constantly see everything happening around them as unjust, over a half of them often feel they can’t continue living like this anymore, and at the same time they feel their own helplessness due to an inability to influence what happens.

The fact that Ukraine officially sank to the last place in Europe in terms of economic freedoms says a lot. Among 179 countries of the world, our country is between Uzbekistan and the Republic of Chad.

Not everything is easy in foreign policy either. As it turned out, maintaining friendly relations with all big geopolitical players is not an easy task. It’s impossible to constantly balance between them. At the end, one has to take a side.

Regarding social policy, many experts already called it “Yushchenko reversed.” Let’s start with Yanukovych’s statement on April 27 in Strasbourg, to the effect that the Holodomor was not a genocide aimed at the Ukrainian people, but a general tragedy of the peoples of the former USSR. Then the norm of Ukrainian dubbing of foreign movies was canceled. Ukrainian history textbooks have been censored in favor of Russia: the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was equated to detachments of Kovpak and Saburov, a photo of Roman Shukhevych disappeared from a textbook, and any mention of the Battle near Kruty vanished.

And here are some recent examples. The only Ukrainian school in the town of Krasny Luch is being closed. Olena Bondarenko’s bill on eliminating the quota for Ukrainian music on the radio passed in the first reading. This list can be continued.

Political freedoms are also being curtailed, and political repressions are on the rise. We now have a political refugee, the ex-minister of economy Bohdan Danylyshyn. Ukraine was excluded from the category of “free countries” in the rating of the American NGO Freedom House.

Supporters of the president, can object that only a year has passed, and it’s too early to make any conclusions. However, a year is indeed a long time, but we still do not have the answer to the ultimate question: where is Yanukovych leading Ukraine?