Yanukovich is disowned in his own back yard
For some residents of Donetsk in the Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east, where he was born, the deposed president is a let-down and a traitor
DONETSK // To some he is a traitor, to others he is too weak. But residents of Viktor Yanukovich’s hometown in Ukraine’s Russianspeaking east have no regrets over his downfall.
Removed by parliament, rejected by his own party and wanted for “mass murder”, Ukraine’s former president has been abandoned by his erstwhile electoral heartland of Donetsk, the industrial city where he was born in 1950.
“People here are disappointed in Yanukovich,” said Tatiana, a young employee of the Donbass coal field where Mr Yanukovich’s surprise ousting failed to spark a backlash against the new administration in Kiev.
A taxi driver criticised Mr Yanukovich as “too weak”, despite the deaths of 82 people in just three days in Kiev last week when security forces opened fire on protesters. A handful of communist militants and other organisations that once supported Mr Yanukovich have gathered on the huge Lenin Square in Donetsk for the past few days, blasted by freezing winds, in support of an autonomous “Eastern Front” for Ukraine.
But even they have struggled to find words harsh enough to describe the former head of state.
Many are older Ukrainians nostalgic for the Soviet era. They believe that Ukraine’s new leaders have “sold out to the Europeans and the Americans”, according to Viktor Afinogeyev, a former construction worker.
Mr Afinogeyev and his friends have set up four small red tents decorated with a hammer and sickle – symbols of the former Soviet Union – next to the base of an imposing statue of Lenin.
But this square pales in compari- son with Independence Square in Kiev, the centre of the pro-European Union opposition, with its huge crowds and trench camps.
There is a crowd of only about 20 people, under the watch of two policemen, at Lenin Square. Donetsk, home to about a million people, seems almost asleep.
Residents in the city said Mr Yanukovich – who was Donetsk province’s vice governor before becoming its governor from 1997 to 2002 – was “legitimately elected” in 2010 as head of state for a five-year term.
The residents underline that it is Ukraine’s east that is the former Soviet nation’s economic heartland, home to most of its industry.
“The country’s whole industrial potential lies here,” said Nina Alexandrovna, 72.
The residents do not trust the opposition leaders, especially not Yulia Tymoshenko, the hero of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the former prime minister who was released from jail on Saturday and who has yet to announce her future political plans.
“The people of the West are people like us, only their political leaders are extremists,” said Ms Alexandrovna. “[Nevertheless], we can live together”.
But not everyone in the Russianspeaking east is pessimistic about the future following Ukraine’s latest upheaval.
“It will be terrific in Ukraine from now on,” said Raisa Andreyevna, 77. She dismissed fears that the nation could split into a Russianspeaking east and a nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking west.
“In Donetsk, as in the rest of the east, we are before all else Ukrainians,” she said.