Monday, December 27, 2004

Yanukovych can't pay?

I heard from a woman yesterday that her husband went without work for a couple of months because Yanukovych's campaign did not pay the factory he worked at for some mini-buses they built for him for his campaign. There were fifty in all and they haven't been paid.

And Veronica Khokhl reports this:

I passed Yanukovych headquarters maybe half an hour before I got to Maidan, and there was a Christmas tree there, too, and a stage with a screen, big for that area but small compared to the one at Maidan, but there were very few people there and it didn't feel like a celebration at all. The guy who was giving me a ride said his company remodelled the movie theater building for Yanukovych people - and they still owed them some money, even though they promised to pay "mountains of gold." He had a ribbon on his car's outside antenna and a Yushchenko sticker inside, and he was sure of Yushchenko's victory.

To be a solid opposition, they are going to need money which Yanukovych seems to be having trouble coming up with. Are the oligarchs who supported him really going to pony up to support him as the head of the opposition, an opposition out of power and not capable of doing anything more than influence policy or legislation as it passes through the Rada? I have my doubts. Yanukovych looks discredited to me on all sides. Maybe he has some support somewhere who knows. But that support has contracted significantly at the very least. And though he may represent a significant minority of the people of Ukraine, his power has never come from the people. It has come from his clan. And I can't imagine that his clan is all that happy with him right now.

Maybe they will look to Moscow for funding? What would Putin get for the investment? No one in the halls of power in Kiev. Putin bet the farm on Yanukovych and lost big. And his relationship to Yanukovych has become the object of jokes both here and in Russia. So public support for Yanukovych is a liability. Maybe the FSB will fund him on the sly but it would be hard to know what they would get for that support.

Anyway, I guess we'll see.


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