By Vestnik Kavkaza
The internet is full of pictures of violence on Ukrainian streets, which depicts the disability of the authorities. However, yesterday we could see a turning point. First, President Viktor Yanukovich accepted the resignation of the government headed by Premier Nikolai Azarov (his dismissal was one of the main demands of the opposition); and later Vladimir Putin summarized the results of the summit Russia-EU in Brussels: “Will we reconsider our agreements on loans and power industry, if the opposition comes in power? No, we won’t. We will provide a dialogue with our partners in Ukraine, notwithstanding, who heads the Ukrainian government.”
However, nobody dares predict further developments in Ukraine. Evgeny Kopatko, founder and CEO of the Companies Research & Branding Group, thinks that in Ukraine “it is quite a well-organized (though spontaneous to some extent) attempt to use force to influence the situation in the country, change the political situation that is undergoing a crisis. It is a civil conflict, and it is gaining strength. The political elite is unable to come to an agreement today. And other factors are in force, which are beyond the control of the government, or the authorities, or a certain part of the opposition. There can be no winner in a civil conflict.”
Kopatko is sure that in the big negotiations another figure is lacking – representatives of large enterprises. “In a couple of months we will feel the consequences of economic problems, for, as you must understand, it is very difficult to do business in a country that has as many internal problems as Ukraine does. And it will probably affect everyone, no matter who they support. And the question remains open – what economic consequences will we get from all of this?”
Political journalist Olesya Yakhno thinks that “politicians keep negotiating between themselves, they still believe that the way out is only by achieving a political dialogue. But whatever the politicians agree about, there is no guarantee the Maidan will accept it and it will settle the situation. What we are witnessing on Maidan is kind of a big social experiment, and we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow or the day after, and there have been several Maidans already. At first it was just a protest, then a riot, then separate terroristic actions, and it’s hard to tell what’s coming next, and doesn’t depend on the political aspect at all.”
Yakhno thinks that reasons for protests growing radical are that “the community’s need to build a post-Soviet state wasn’t fulfilled. Mr Yushenko offered us kind of a rural nationalism, and the acting government paid most of their attention to large infrastructure projects, leaving out small and medium-sized enterprises as the main subject regulated by the government. The second main reason is the society waiting for the emergence of a political nation, and for the politicians to do something for it, but the politicians only unite to advertise or defend themselves, or to allocate or reallocate some resources. The society has a higher level of demands than the politicians themselves, and the lines occupied both by the government and the opposition, are social or radical. They were also defeated here, so I think that it won’t be easy to overcome the crisis, and it won’t be limited to a legal solution. The society doesn’t trust anyone now – the ones on Maidan don’t trust politicians or the opposition, they only trust their field commanders. And what the society wants today are not just solutions like canceling some bills or amnesty for the arrested, they want some clear future, a perspective.”
