The election is on Boxing Day - one week from today. December 26th.The Ukrainian connection
Excerpt:
For Poland the stakes are high. Its large southern neighbour is one of the country's most important trading partners - before World War II much of western Ukraine was part of Poland. Warsaw wants to see a reforming democratic government in Kiev but it also wants good relations with Moscow. Kwasniewski has good contacts with all of the major political players in Ukraine and has been able to fill a big gap in the EU's mediating team. Tim Snyder from the Vienna based Institute for Human Sciences says Europe was caught napping:
"Europe right now doesn't really have something called a foreign policy. What Europe has is membership or not membership. So long as you see the world and your neighbours in terms of whether they are members or not members, you get precisely this kind of thinking. It would be very difficult to have Ukraine as a member and therefore it's nicer not to think about it."
But Russia resents Europe's role in Ukraine and accuses it and the United States of interfering in the country's internal politics. But according to Tim Snyder that's just what Russia itself is doing:
"For all of us who were observing the Ukrainian electoral campaign, it was extremely clear that there was massive external intervention. But that intervention didn't come from the west. It came from the east. Many of Yanukovych's closest advisors aren't even Ukrainians but are from Russia. The propaganda techniques that were used in the elections were largely modelled on those that Putin uses. The influx of Russian money was much greater than the influx of money from any other source."
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