BY
Two years ago today, as the first 20 – 30 somethings
were gathering at Maidan in Kyiv to protest the failure of the then president
to sign the Association Agreement and DCFTA with the EU, this blog wrote “Perhaps those
millions in favour of the agreement will turn out en masse with a policy of
civil disobedience in numbers reminiscent of 2004/5 and panic the National
Security Council and President Yanukovych into a different decision over the
next week? Time will tell.”
Well time
did indeed tell – and former President Yanukovych and the most corrupt and the
closest of his criminal entourage fled Ukraine a few months and numerous deaths
later.
Deliberately
avoiding concentrating upon the illegal annexation of Crimea and naked direct
and sponsored Kremlin aggression within the now occupied Donbas, or any other
Kremlin inspired/sponsored/funded acts directed at crippling, undermining and
subjugating Ukraine, the result of EuroMaidan domestically nevertheless
certainly fall far short of the expectations of some.
Some with
lofty expectations despite the fact that in electing Messrs Poroshenko and
Yatseniuk, themselves products of an odious and thoroughly corrupt climate,
chose not to see that clearly they were and are only ever going to be able to
take the nation so far before those never indoctrinated in that odious and
corrupt past are tasked to take the nation the rest of the way.
Messrs
Poroshenko and Yatseniuk are quite aware that The Rubicon has been crossed
politically and within society, there is no going back – but they are simply
not keen and/or able to run from the new shoreline, creating a forcible and
unwavering beachhead of transition, and gallop into the level economic playing
fields and consolidated democratic meadows that lay ahead. Instead an oft
perceived shuffling away from, or indeed marking time within, corrupt schemes
past and present rightly haunts them.
Thus for the
more careful of thinkers, the frustrations with Messrs Poroshenko and Yatseniuk
are not that they have failed to deliver that which was never within them, but
that they are yet to deliver what they are capable of delivering in a timely
way even when accounting for their histories, the skeletons that lurk there,
and the ingrained nefarious mindset of which they were a part for the decades
they spent climbing the greasy – and corrupt to the core – political and
business pole they conquered.
Nonetheless
there has been some notable progress too, albeit almost all progress worthy of
the name has been externally forced upon the generally feckless Ukrainian
political class by those nations and international institutions that are
keeping the Ukraine economically, diplomatically and politically afloat.
But the
negatives and the positives – and there are both – that have resulted from what
started 2 years ago today are not the point of this entry.
Perhaps the
most poignant question for readers to ponder on Dignity and Freedom Day in
Ukraine, is not necessarily what EuroMaidan has achieved thus far – or not –
but what fate for Ukraine did EuroMaidan prevent?
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