Ukraine gears up for presidential election; Two main contenders in tight race (10/24/04)

Ukraine gears up for presidential election

Two main contenders in tight race

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The two main contenders for the presidential seat in Ukraine headed for the finish line practically neck and neck, their campaigns touring the country extensively and the candidates utilizing all at their disposal to draw the Ukrainian electorate to their side.

With just over a week to election day, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych continued to demonstrate his financial advantage by utilizing the power of his office to appeal to voters with financial handouts and awards from the state coffers.

The last opinion polls on the presidential race legally allowed before the October 31 vote showed that Mr. Yanukovych had overtaken his main rival, National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko, and held a slight advantage. Most experts attributed the rise directly to additional support he now had among pensioners after he had utilized his authority as head of government to raise pensions by some 30 percent at the end of September.

In Sumy, speaking before a crowd of war veterans, Mr. Yanukovych continued to show the extent of his largesse by announcing that disabled World War II veterans who years ago had been promised specially outfitted automobiles - some 30,000 veterans in all - would finally receive them, and within days.

It was a day full of gift giving for Prime Minister Yanukovych who also presented computers to several schools and ambulances and medical equipment to hospitals.

While Mr. Yanukovych has effectively used the government budget to gain popularity with the voting public, his moves have also caused him some problems. The hike in pensions has resulted in an increase in consumer prices, most notably in the cost of meat and other food commodities. To offset the potential political damage, the Yanukovych government initiated a public relations campaign through the news media to explain that the meat price hikes were a direct result of price increases in Poland, caused there by the European Union's membership requirements.

In Nizhyn, a town outside of Chernihiv, Mr. Yanukovych said on October 18 that he would introduce price controls to restrain inflation and limit profit taking by commodity sellers who he said had unjustly raised prices after the increase in pensions. He promised to put the businessmen "in their place."

"We will limit profitability for all who raised prices and trade charges, and will control the situation on the markets," Mr. Yanukovych stated in Nizhyn.

Mr. Yanukovych also took advantage of the opening of a fourth reactor at the Rivne nuclear power station, which had been years in the building and in the center of much debate with the European Union over how it should be funded. He told workers and guests that he would now lead the move to turn Ukraine into a net exporter of electricity.

Without the benefits of government largesse and administrative resources, Mr. Yushchenko could only offer promises to his voters in the final days of campaigning. He continued to maintain that his administration would govern honestly and stop corruption, and would work to increase the well-being of society. He also went out of his way to appeal to the voters from eastern Ukraine by stating that he would simplify procedures for border crossings into Russia and Belarus, and underscoring that had no intention of ignoring the needs of the Russian-speaking portion of the Ukrainian citizenry.

But while Mr. Yanukovych was on the ground distributing government gifts, Mr. Yushchenko was too often quite literally stuck in the air in Ukraine trying to find a place to land his campaign plane.

On October 19 the plane that was carrying him back to Kyiv from a campaign appearance in Luhansk was denied approval to land at Boryspil Airport due to inclement weather, although it was a partly sunny day.

The campaign team then decided to fly directly to their campaign stop of the next day, the city of Zaporizhia, but was turned away at that airport as well. Apparently the weather there had turned bad, too. They finally landed in Lviv, on the other side of the country from where they had started.

On October 20 Mr. Yushchenko's plane was again not allowed to land near a campaign destination, this time at the airport outside Mariupol. The plane was finally cleared for arrival in Donetsk, which resulted in a two-hour commute by car back to Mariupol to meet with voters in that city.

Mr. Yushchenko received bad news of another sort on October 19 when an Austrian Appeals Court rejected his claim that his medical records from his treatment at Rudolfinerhaus Clinic in Vienna should not be made available to Ukraine's Procurator General's Office. Viennese police had earlier confiscated the documents, including test analyses for possible chemical poisoning. Afterwards, Mr. Yushchenko said that he would make public all his medical documents from the Austrian hospital so that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency could not misinform the public about the true results.

Meanwhile Mykola Melnychenko, the notorious former member of President Leonid Kuchma's security detail until he fled to the West after revealing that he had digital recordings implicating the Ukrainian president in the murder of a Ukrainian journalist, said on October 19 that he would reveal more recordings, these containing conversations between Mr. Kuchma and Mr. Yanukovych.

Mr. Melnychenko said the new fragments of recordings were from July 2000, when Mr. Yanukovych was the chairman of the Donetsk Oblast. They involved conversations in which the current presidential candidate asks for permission to form "a political force in the Ukrainian Parliament from Donetsk" because the Communist national deputies "to whom he paid money did not always follow his orders."

Mr. Melnychenko also noted that in the recordings Mr. Yanukovych tells the Ukrainian president that "all newspapers are under control" in Donetsk and disobedient journalists were "being backed against the wall."

The former security service employee said he would turn the recordings over to the Verkhovna Rada through National Deputy Hryhorii Omelchenko.

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