Can anger over corruption unite Ukraine?

Where Lviv goes, Kiev follows. And maybe now, Kharkiv, on Ukraine’s eastern frontier with Russia.

Last week Lviv, just 50 miles from the Polish border, declared independence from the government of President Viktor Yanukovych. This morning I met the mayor, Andriy Sadovuy, at a funeral for a protester who had been killed in the Maidan, the central square in the Ukrainian capital.

“We will never give up our freedom,” he said. “Lviv always has been a free city for free people. We have always lived by the constitution and not by criminal laws.”

That’s the crux of the issue here. Ukrainians say President Yanukovych (I think he’s the former president by now) has presided over a kleptocracy where a small class, including his relatives, have enriched themselves.

“Corruption,” said the young woman at reception in our hotel in Lvivv.  She indicated her neck. “We haven’t had it up to here…”

She reached her hand above her head. “We’ve had it up to here!”

“We’ve had the politics of Russia and the economy of Greece!” said another young woman.

Corruption

In Kiev, people are over-running the luxurious compound the president constructed just outside town, and even people in Kharkiv, Yanukovych’s heartland in the east, are now out on the streets waving Ukrainian flags and shouting “glory to the Ukraine!” – the protesters’ slogan. They too, it seems, have had enough.

Much has been made of the divisions in Ukraine, between east and west, pro-Russia and pro-EU, Catholic and Orthodox. But I am yet to meet a Ukrainian who wants the country to split.

Lviv is the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism and their independence was not a rejection of the east of the country but a rejection of the values and administration represented by Yanukovich.

History and geography pull Ukraine apart; the question now is whether popular anger about corruption can pull people back together.

Russia could yet be a spoiler. Some people in Crimea, the Russian dominated southern region, are reportedly now saying they want protection from any new government.

They don’t trust a new administration that would reject Moscow’s influence, and might want the same status as south Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russian enclaves in Georgia.

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