The presumed front runner (not that anyone in Kiev trusts polls) is the incumbent, Leonid Kuchma. He is also the West’s favored candidate, mainly because under fierce pressure he gave up his country’s nuclear weapons. But the president is now running a campaign that is making his erstwhile friends avert their eyes.
His most egregious sin, in what is supposed to be a fledgling democracy, has been the systematic abuse of an allegedly free press. By far the most powerful media organ is UT-1, the state-owned station that reaches nearly every household in the country with a TV set. For months, viewers have been treated to a parade of images that were just this side of North Korea: Kuchma kissing babies, Kuchma meeting foreign dignitaries, Kuchma signing one important law or another. A Ukrainian media-monitoring organization found that in September, Kuchma got more time on state-owned TV and radio stations than all of his opponents put together.
Then came an event that stunned the country. Natalia Vitrenko, an unreconstructed communist who unapologetically seeks a return to the glory days of the USSR, had begun to make headway against Kuchma. Few in Kiev took this seriously. Analysts assumed Kuchma welcomed Vitrenko in the race because she divided the already fragmented left opposition and scared the hell out of everyone else. But three weeks ago, she was almost killed when someone tossed two hand grenades during one of her rallies.
The media Kuchma controls kicked into gear. Led by UT-1, it asserted the grenade was likely the work of supporters of Oleksandr Moroz, the most credible of the left-wing opposition. No solid evidence has been brought to support the media’s charge, and when Parliament passed a motion demanding that UT-1 broadcast a speech Moroz gave defending himself, the network ignored it.
The West, in the form of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, finally got alarmed. The OSCE sent in extra election monitors–it now has 18 on hand–and will have nearly 200 in the country by election day. The “scope of our work substantially increased because of concerns raised, particularly those regarding the media,” says James Piriou, deputy head of the organization’s election-monitoring team. Too late for Kuchma’s opposition, probably. Maybe the Ukrainians will send observers to Moscow in a few months to see what a real post-Soviet election should look like.
