Viktor Yanukovych

Viktor Yanukovych: The Twice-Toppled President

At Vilnius in November 2013 the President of Ukraine declined to sign a document his own government had spent years preparing. The Association Agreement with the European Union was postponed, ostensibly over the pace of reform; the sticking point was a condition he could not meet, the release of the opponent he had jailed. He took a $15 billion Russian loan and cheaper gas instead. Within three months more than a hundred people were dead in central Kyiv and he was in Rostov-on-Don as Vladimir Putin's guest.

Yenakiieve

He was born on 9 July 1950 in Yenakiieve, a mining town in the Donetsk region, and his early life reads as the opposite of a political CV. He was convicted of robbery in 1967 and of assault in 1970, and served time for both; the records were expunged after a court review in 1978. He began work in automotive transport in 1972 and graduated from a mining technical school the following year, later acquiring degrees in international law and economics and a doctorate in 1999. He worked as a gas engineer and a car mechanic before rising through the management of Donetsk transport enterprises.

The Donetsk Machine

He became deputy head of the Donetsk oblast administration in 1996 and governor in 1997, holding the region until 2002. Donetsk in those years was the most industrially concentrated and politically disciplined part of Ukraine, and running it was an education in the mechanics of power. In 2002 President Leonid Kuchma made him prime minister; in 2003 he joined the Party of Regions, the vehicle he would ride for the rest of his career.

The Orange Revolution

In 2004 he ran for the presidency against Viktor Yushchenko while serving as prime minister, and the election collapsed under accusations of rigging. Roughly half a million people occupied central Kyiv. Ukraine's Supreme Court found the scale of fraud such that no winner could be determined and ordered a revote, which Yushchenko won. It was as complete a public humiliation as a politician can sustain.

The Comeback

He did not retire. Elected to parliament in 2006, he returned as prime minister the same year, fought a long constitutional battle with President Yushchenko, and resigned in December 2007. Then, in 2010, with the assistance of the American consultant Paul Manafort, he won the presidency outright with 48.89 percent of the vote, about three points ahead of Yulia Tymoshenko. The man the street had thrown out in 2004 had been voted in through the front door six years later.

What he did with the office was, on the account of Ukrainian sources, a systematic accumulation. He reversed constitutional changes in order to restore power to the presidency. He prosecuted and imprisoned Tymoshenko, a step Western governments treated as political. He signed the Kharkiv Pact with Moscow, extending Russia's naval base lease in Crimea in exchange for cheaper gas, and he reversed his predecessor's policies on education and Ukrainian national identity.

Mezhyhirya

The corruption became the emblem. According to the Kyiv Independent, the circle around him known as "the family" took control of more than 7,000 businesses by coercion, and Yanukovych and his son acquired the 350-acre Mezhyhirya estate outside Kyiv, whose fittings — including a gold-appointed lavatory — became, once the gates were opened to the public after his flight, the single most effective piece of anti-corruption evidence in Ukrainian history. No amount of argument about the presidency's legitimacy survived contact with the photographs.

Vilnius, and the Hundred

The refusal at Vilnius brought hundreds into Independence Square, and the violence of the police response turned a protest into a revolution. Between 18 and 20 February 2014, special forces killed more than a hundred demonstrators, remembered in Ukraine as the Heavenly Hundred. On 21 February Yanukovych signed a compromise agreement and then fled the capital. On 22 February parliament voted 328 to remove him from office. He surfaced in Russia, insisted he remained the lawful president, and endorsed the annexation of Crimea and the war in the east. In January 2019 a Kyiv district court convicted him in absentia of treason and sentenced him to thirteen years; he has never appeared to answer the charge. Reporting after the 2022 invasion indicated Moscow had considered installing him as its administrator had Kyiv fallen.

Why Viktor Is Called a Genius

He is not, and no source in the record makes the claim. The presidency ended with more than a hundred citizens shot in the capital, the head of state in flight, a treason conviction handed down in his absence, and his country's territory annexed by the neighbour whose money he had taken. Measured by outcomes, this is among the most complete failures in modern European statecraft.

Something in the record nonetheless demands explanation, because it is genuinely unusual. In 2004 Yanukovych was driven from an election he had tried to steal by half a million people in the street, an event that ends careers permanently almost everywhere. Six years later he won the presidency in a contest that observers accepted. That recovery was not luck. It rested on a real and specific competence: the ability to build and hold a regional political machine, to keep the loyalty of the Donetsk industrial elite through years out of power, to absorb public humiliation without quitting, and to reassemble a national coalition from a base that had been declared finished. Call it durability rather than intelligence, because that is what it was.

The failure was one of perception. The same instincts that made him formidable inside a machine left him unable to read a society that had changed since 2004. He appears to have believed, at Vilnius and afterwards, that Ukrainians would tolerate the choice he made because they had tolerated so much before. He was wrong within a week, and the cost of being wrong fell on the people in the square rather than on him. Political stamina without political comprehension is not genius; his own biography is the proof.

Legacy

Yanukovych's presidency is the hinge on which recent Ukrainian history turns. His refusal to sign in Vilnius produced Euromaidan, his flight produced the vacuum in which Crimea was taken, and Ukraine's subsequent orientation towards Europe was forged in direct reaction to him. He remains in Russia, convicted in his absence, holding to the position that he never ceased to be the lawful president of a country that has spent more than a decade demonstrating otherwise.

Achievements

• President of Ukraine (2010–2014)
• Prime Minister of Ukraine (2002–2004)
• Prime Minister of Ukraine (2004–2005)
• Prime Minister of Ukraine (2006–2007)
• Order of José Martí — 2011
• Order of St. Mesrop Mashtots — 2011
• Medal of Anania Shirakatsi — 2004
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Educated at Donetsk National Technical University and Ukrainian State University of Finance and International Trade