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Having declared independence in 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine gained strategic importance in terms of its geographical location. It is regarded a "buffer zone" for both the European Union (EU) and Russia. There is a division within the country into the pro-Western and pro-Russian options. Ukraine's aspiration for the UE membership has faced Russia's objection since time immemorial. In the past, Ukraine preferred to pursue a balance policy between Russia and the EU. Ukraine's attempt to approach the West with the Orange Revolution, its inclusion in the European Neighbourhood Policy, its participation in the Eastern Partnership program were perceived as a threat by Russia. The Ukrainian crisis, in particular, brought these two countries face to face. This crisis also deeply affected both the EU's energy policy and its relations with Russia. After all the developments that followed, the issue of Ukraine's membership in the EU remains uncertain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that an important concept of authoritarian learning is missing. This is how leaders learn from domestic experience. Using Yanukovych's defeat in the Orange Revolution, the paper illustrates how he adapted to stop a new Colour Revolution. Through using Party of Regions resources, Yanukovych improved his image, developed Party of Region's electoral success, controlled institutions and the political system, coerced the opposition, built-up security forces and pro-regime groups and created a family. While the paper finds that Yanukovych adapted to the failure of the Orange Revolution these adjustments contributed to the Euromaidan and the learning from domestic experience resulted in ultimate failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom in new institutional economics suggests that property rights become more secure following sovereign commitment. The article tests this axiom in the crucial case of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. I show that despite the wide-ranging constraints imposed after the Revolution on the upper executive, the security of property rights declined. Theoretically, the article argues that the link between sovereign commitment and secure ownership hinges on vertical accountability in the state apparatus. While institutionalizing commitment by the presidency, the Revolution simultaneously exacerbated principal-agent dilemmas within the bureaucracy. Methodologically, the article contributes by triangulating available historical narratives and cross-national quantitative studies. Instead, the focus on one contemporary developing country and the use of qualitative process tracing dissects sovereign commitment and shows the mechanisms through which it can be subverted at lower administrative levels. Sixty-four semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and government officials from six Ukrainian regions, as well as analysis of the local media, provide the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political protests which took place in Ukraine were another example ot how social and content websites were used during protests on the Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev - the protests started in November 2013 and ended in February 2014. This article offers presentation of the results of research that was carried out in Kiev and Lviv in May 2015 among students of two Ukrainian universities: Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University and the National University of Taras Shevchenko in Lviv. The aim of the conducted research was to establish which of the new media (social media and blogs) and in what way were used by the students during protests and if the way of using the new media influenced the engagement of students in protests. Such comparative research also made it possible to find differences in attitudes and motivations of students participating in protests in Kiev but coming from two different cities in Ukraine - Kiev and Lviv. The research results may contribute to a deepened analysis of the ways the new media are used during political and social protests with reference to differences in people's attitudes depending on their personal or Internet engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2004 Orange Revolution failed to skyrocket Ukraine into the ranks of consolidated democracies. Some previous research claimed that, in the similar case of post-Rose Revolution Georgia, its vague democratic perspectives can be explained by, among others, a negative impact of politically biased US democracy assistance programs. This article examines five groups of US programs (electoral aid, political party development, legislative strengthening, NGO development and media strengthening) implemented in Ukraine in 2005-2010, and concludes that US diplomatic support for the pro-Western "Orange" leadership did not translate into political bias of US-funded democracy assistance programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the "sacred" dimension of the Ukrainian "Orange revolution", its festive or camivalesque quality, and properties of a communal ritual. The author argues that Ukrainian citizens who protested against the stolen elections in Kyiv found themselves in the liminoid situation of temporary egalitarian utopianism. This situation resulted in the emergence of communilas, and engendered, a powerful feeling of the birth of a civic-republican Ukrainian nation. The festive nature of the "Orange revolution", sanctioned by the overwhelming confidence in fighting for the rightful democratic cause, reinforced the impression of renewing the society along Western liberal democratic patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to compare transformative power of European Union (EU) through its enlargement policy and European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). Their goals, instruments and influences on a candidate country (Turkey) and an eastern neighbour of the EU (Ukraine) are compared. Because of the membership perspective, Europeanization through the accession process is much more influential than Europeanization of neighbourhood of EU through ENP. There has been interplay of domestic and external factors which have influenced transformative power of EU on Turkey and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This main focus of the article is an analysis of Ukraine two decades after it became an independent state through ten factors that have remained constant features of Ukrainian life. The first factor is low public trust in state institutions and the wide gulf between elites and state on the one hand and the public on the other. A second factor is the striving by political forces to monopolize political and economic power for the sake of power and self-enrichment - not for the conducting of reforms. The third factor is threats to democracy under eastern Ukrainian Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych. The fourth factor is the low quality and ideological amorphousness of political parties. The fifth factor is the absence of political will and re-occurrence of missed opportunities; a prominent example of which is the Viktor Yushchenko presidency. The sixth factor is the domination of elite greed and rapaciousness over pursuit of the national interest and national security. The most egregious example of this corruption is in the energy sector which western Ukrainians have dominated (It's a Gas: Funny business in the Turkmen-Ukraine Gas Trade, 2006). A seventh constant factor is the prevalence of virtual over actual policies and the non-fulfillment of domestic obligations which leads to low public trust in state institutions. The eighth factor is an imitation of integration into Euro-Atlantic structures because virtual policies lead to inconsistent and multi-vector foreign policies. Virtual policies make it difficult for European and American governments to engage with the Ukrainian authorities because they rarely fulfill their obligations. The ninth factor is eastern Ukrai- nian naivety about Russia, regardless of whether it is democratic or authoritarian, that pursues hard-nosed geopolitical goals, a naivety that applies to Kuchma in 1994 as much as to Yanukovych in 2010. The tenth factor, the Russia factor, is Russia's inability to accept Ukraine's sovereignty or territorial integrity. Both eastern and western Ukrainian have been unable to fashion responsive policies to deal with Russia's unacceptance of Ukraine and its hard-nosed geopolitical goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the three factors that lay behind democratic revolutions by adding two new facilitators, social populism and nationalism (in addition to election fraud), to our understanding of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Most scholarly studies of this seminal event in contemporary Ukrainian history have focused on protests against election fraud while ignoring these two important factors. Scholars who have placed the struggle for democratic rights in post-communist states in the forefront of their analysis within a ‘transitology paradigm’ have argued that a ‘fourth wave’ of democratisation in the post-communist world took place in two stages, 1989–1991 and from 1996–2004. This article argues that placing Ukraine together with other Central-Eastern countries in the second stage ignores the different role played by social populism and nationalism in mobilizing protestors in Ukraine, two factors that played a far smaller or non-existent role in Central-Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the long-standing criticisms of cross-sectional survey data is that they provide only a contextually driven “snapshot” of attitudes. These attitudes are, the “snapshot critique” contends, highly fragile—subject to significant fluctuation based on events that arise domestically and globally. Although it makes sense that a major event can alter the percentage of people who respond to a given survey question in a particular way, it is less obvious that such an event jeopardizes the validity of multivariate analyses of survey data collected prior to the event. Given the prevalent use of cross-sectional survey data in quantitative political research, this question has significant implications for comparative politics. This study employs survey data from Ukraine before and after the “Orange Revolution” and from Georgia before and after the “Rose Revolution.” Its findings challenge the snapshot critique and support the idea that, even in the wake of a dramatic political event, the underlying relationships among variables measured by survey data can remain quite stable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the democratisation process of Ukraine. As part of its democratisation process, it is said to be important to know the impact this process will have in the European Union and how it will secure its protection against the process. The process poses two problems whether the EU policy to Kyiv will still be pursued and the influence of the EU in the execution of democracy. Since the Oranges Revolution, the political development reportedly remained stagnant.

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The Russian youth movement Nashi ("Ours"), established in early 2005, has become one of the best-known realizations of the Kremlin policies to develop after the Orange Revolution in late 2004. It is evident and well-documented that Nashi's political discourse is based on the Kremlin's state patriotism and the concept of "sovereign democracy." The less-discussed aspect of Nashi's discourse concerns its style-i.e., how the group expresses itself via its ideological position. The article argues that this viewpoint is central for understanding the controversial outcomes of the movement's public image in the context of post-Orange Russia. It is examined how Nashi's political discourse is formed in relation to the movement's ambition to create a cogent "counter-Orange" community. The group's web reports concerning its most active theme-campaigns centered around the Bronze Soldier episode in 2007-2008-are explored as a primary case study of Nashi's political discourse added by sociological data concerning youth's political participation in Russia, as well as views from two Nashi leaders. Drawing on theoretical concepts of Pierre Bourdieu and cultural pragmatics, the article demonstrates that Nashi's discourse illustrates a difficult and ultimately infelicitous balancing between didactics and stimulation, angling to bring these two dimensions into a convincing wholeness, "a Russian counter-Orange community." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Orange Revolution has not led to the creation of an effective government or of democratic checks and balances. Therefore, contrary to many hopes, after the 2010 presidential election Ukraine is backsliding into "soft" authoritarianism. However, the failures of the regime to deliver socioeconomic promises have united the electorate in different regions of the country in their growing criticism of the authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ukrainian opposition faced one of the greatest degrees of state-backed violence in the second wave of democratization of post-communist states with only Serbia experiencing similar cases of assassinations and repression of the youth Otpor NGO. In the 2004 Ukrainian elections the opposition maintained a strategy of non-violence over the longest protest period of 17 days but was prepared to use force if it had been attacked. The regime attempted to suppress the Orange Revolution using security forces. Covert and overt Russian external support was extensive and in the case of Ukraine and Georgia the European Union (EU) did not intervene with a membership offer that had the effect of emboldening the opposition in Central-Eastern Europe. This article surveys five state-backed violent strategies used in Ukraine's 2004 elections: inciting regional and inter-ethnic conflict, assassinations, violence against the opposition, counter-revolution and use of the security forces. The article does not cover external Russian-backed violence in the 2004 elections unique to Ukraine that the author has covered elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the first to study the positive correlation between nationalism and demo-cratic revolutions using Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution as a case study. The Orange Revolution mobilized the largest number of participants of any democratic revolution and lasted the longest. 17 days. But, the Orange Revolution was also the most regionally divided of democratic revolutions with western and central Ukrainians dominating the protestors and eastern Ukrainians opposing the protests. The civic nationalism that underpinned the Orange Revolution is rooted in Ukraine's path dependence that has made civil society stronger in western Ukraine where Austro-Hungarian rule permitted the emergence of a Ukrainian national identity that was stymied in eastern Ukraine by the Tsarist empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the first 100 days in the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, the defeated candidate from Ukraine's 2004 elections, who made a surprising comeback and was elected in February 2010. The article analyzes the possible sources of his switch to a radical pro-Russian agenda and the content of the domestic and foreign policies that he has begun tp pursue. The article surveys the root causes and origins of the factors behind the speed and nature of the policies that stunned many inside Ukraine and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the evolution of Ukraine's space-economy from 1990 to 2009, paying particular attention to comparative regional economic performance during the country's expansionary phase from 1999 to 2008. This shows that Ukraine inherited from the Imperial and Soviet eras a space-economy that was amongst the most unbalanced in Europe. Furthermore post-Soviet regional trajectories intensified these territorial imbalances. The paper argues that these trajectories are linked to a wider political economy and especially to shifts in underlying development models and the characteristics of state power. The Orange Revolution marked a significant switch away from export-led industrial growth, which involved national accumulation towards a credit-fuelled consumption model that was reliant on importing foreign capital. The paper identifies three major types of specialized regional economy that persisted despite the change in development model. Nonetheless, their relative performance and contribution to national growth were affected by the shift in model. Centripetal tendencies were reinforced, which increased regional divergence. The paper argues that the Ukrainian space-economy is best understood as a series of historically rooted and relatively geographically bounded regional economies that are increasingly functionally integrated yet externally oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ukraine is an significant country not only from the aspect of the Black Sea Basin where it situates, but also with its political characteristics effecting beyond the regional diameter. This does not stem directly from Ukraine's power but from its distinguished geopolitical position. Ethnically-politically divided structure of the country has been the starting point for analysis on each election. The process known as "Orange Revolution" of 2004-2005 concluded with failure because of various reasons, and, anew raising of the "Blues" who connotes "Russia" against the "Oranges" is being observed. However, because of structural reasons, it became difficult for the farewell to Orange wind to convert the anti-West attitude an official policy. In this study, Ukraine victory of Russia is examined within the frame of progressing West-Russia strategic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the multi-faceted Western position of Kyiv, Ukraine, as it has developed through June 2009, attending to the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It discusses the factors which contributed to the volatility of Ukrainian-Russian relations after the Orange Revolution of 2004. It deals with the future geopolitical trajectory of Ukraine in the run-up of the presidential election of the country in early 2010.

Although Ukrainian democracy has made some progress since the 2004 Orange Revolution, significant problems remain. This article compares the difficulties facing post-Orange Revolution Ukraine to those encountered in East Central Europe in the early 1990s and maintains that Ukraine will have a harder time overcoming its challenges because its starting point and inheritances are different. That is, Ukrainian democracy must overcome many of the infirmities created during its initial decade of post-communism, and that these make establishing effective democratic governance in today's post-post-communist period arduous. Among the difficulties are designing effective institutions, managing the post-Orange Revolution coalition, removing entrenched corruption and weak respect for the rule of law, and coping with a less hospitable external environment. Events since the Orange Revolution bear out the argument that the events of 2004, while getting rid of a leadership with dubious democratic credentials, are merely the beginning of a process to bring a successful democratic government to Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that in the absence of a strong membership incentive within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a top-down institutional convergence of CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries towards European standards is unlikely to be successful. However, due to enlargement fatigue within the EU, the membership incentive is off the agenda for the CIS. The ENP must therefore either initiate or hasten a bottom-up institutional convergence by identifying bottom-up domestic forces that are willing and able to drive the convergence in a particular country. Ukraine, whose oligarchic clans are the main bottom-up forces behind institution-building, is a case in point. Having supported the first wave of institutional reforms during the Orange Revolution, these bottom-up forces are now facing great difficulties in forming sustainable coalitions for further institutional reforms. The paper shows that the EU, by providing economic incentives rather than the membership incentive, could exploit the strong business interests of the oligarchic clans in the EU markets and EU investment to motivate them to jointly drive institutional convergence from the bottom up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine is widely considered to be an instance of the ‘coloured revolutions’ of 1989 engendered by democratic values and nascent civil societies in the process of nation building. The article examines the extent to which the ‘Orange Revolution’ could be considered a revolutionary event stimulated by civil society, or a different type of political activity (a putsch, coup d'état), legitimated by elite-sponsored ‘soft’ political power. Based on public opinion poll data and responses from focus groups, the author contends that what began as an orchestrated protest against election fraud developed into a novel type of political activity—a revolutionary coup d'état. It is contended that the movement was divisive rather than integrative and did not enjoy widespread popular support. The article considers why sponsored democracy promotion and western-inspired ‘soft power’ politics have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political economy of the Orange Revolution in an effort to understand routes by which less democratic postcommunist countries might break with an illiberal status quo. The fusion of Ukraine's rent-seeking economic interests and illiberal political regime produced an unstable equilibrium that is poorly explained by two leading theoretical frameworks: 'market reform' and 'political competition' theory. Only by combining key insights from each do we get a full explanation of the pressures that generated Ukraine's challenge to illiberalism in 2004. We examine this story with a particular focus on the crisis-prone nature of 'competitive authoritarian regimes' and the related strategic calculations of business elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic revolutions and breakthroughs have occured in six postcommunist states since 1998. Nine factors are discussed as common to these revolutions and breakthroughs: a competitive- (i.e. semi-) authoritarian state facilitating space for the democratic opposition; "return to Europe" civic nationalism that assists in mobilizing civil society; a preceding political crisis that weakened the regime's legitimacy; a pro-democratic capital city; unpopular ruling elites; a charismatic candidate; a united opposition; mobilized youths; and regionalism and foreign intervention (Russia or the EU). All of the nine factors are applicable to Ukraine, but not all of them are necessarily applicable to the remaining five postcommunist states. Regionalism played a negative role in Ukraine in reducing support for the Orange Revolution while Ukraine was the only country where Russia intervened in support of the authorities. The EU's intervention in support of the democratic breakthrough in Slovakia, where it offered the prospect of membership, was not repeated in Georgia or Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine attracted the attention of the international community and became known as the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution symbolized the birth of civil society in Ukraine and created a feeling of great optimism. However, nearly half of the population voted for Viktor Yanukovych and disapproved of the Orange Revolution. They not only voted for another candidate, but also voted in a totally different manner, making their choice based on different criteria in accordance with a different set of values and orientations. It would be naive to attribute millions of votes for Yanukovych only to falsifications. This article explores the question of why Donbass, Yanukovych's stronghold, almost unanimously voted for him. Donbass is terra incognita for many Ukrainians and the broader international community. A significant number of Ukrainians envision an industrial Donbass based on old stereotypes. This article considers these stereotypes, the history of their development, and their influence on the electoral campaign. It addresses important characteristics such as roots, culture, the concept of the Donbass character, and the mass media's role in shaping public opinion. This article asserts that despite Yanukovych's loss. Donbass business and political elites still have the potential to influence major socioeconomic processes in the country and see their future only within Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The November-December 2004 Orange Revolution led to the election of Viktor Yushchenko as Ukraine's third president. Yushchenko's presidency has been associated with a number of important democratic gains such as the holding of free and fair elections, a free media, an active civil society, the dissociation of oligarchs from a corrupt relationship with the authorities, and a more robust commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration. The Orange Revolution went into crisis in September 2005, when the Tymoshenko government was removed, culminating in the victory of the Party of Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovych, in the March 2006 elections. Following five months of coalition negotiations, a revived Orange coalition was replaced by first an Anti-Crisis and then a National Unity coalition, with a government led by Prime Minister Yanukovych. The signing of a "Universal" agreement by President Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yanukovych, and three other parliamentary parties, aims to maintain Ukraine's democratic gains through the continued pursuit of Yushchenko's domestic and foreign policies. The Orange Revolution has reached a crossroads, with either the consolidation of further reforms begun by the Orange Revolution, or a return to the policies pursued in the Kuchma era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the issues of civil society in post-communist Ukraine. These issues were actualized during the Orange Revolution at the end of 2004. The "outdated" point (as it might look now) on the lack of "the civil society argument" still provides a major explanation for the difficulties of democratic and market reforms in post-Soviet countries. The article is focused upon two aspects of the formation of post-Soviet, particularly Ukrainian, civil society: the peculiarities of its discourse and the issues an of emerging civic ethos. A one-dimensional concept on post-Soviet civil society, reducing it to the NGOs network, is reconceptualized. it is concluded that optimistic perspectives for the Ukrainian civil society can be related to the recent trends in the transformation of personal identity toward the more self-reliable pattern of social activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postcommunist countries that chose semipresidential regimes can be divided into three territorial units. First, the Commonwealth of Independent States countries chose semipresidentialism as a natural evolution of Communist executive diarchy and an instrument to run clientelist politics. New European Union countries (Poland and Lithuania) largely lacked these conditions but found other reasons for semipresidentialism: as a counterbalance against populist tendencies in postcommunist politics and as a mechanism to "cultivate" newcomers in politics. It is in the border regions between Eurasia and Europe (in this article Armenia and Moldova) where semipresidential regimes cannot consolidate and continue to experience constant constitutional instability. The Orange Revolution in Ukraine resulted in constitutional amendments that violated constitutional procedural requirements and thus provided another example that the apparent "enlargement of Europe" tends to destabilize constitutional processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the analysis of public opinions of the Ukrainian people on the nature, character, and characteristics of the citizens' political activism during the Orange Revolution. The author analyzes data from the annual nationwide representative survey, conducted by the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in February-March 2005. The time lag allows for the consideration of the public's attitudes and assessments of political activity in Ukraine during the "post-Orange" period, and for comparison of the experts' analysis of the Orange Revolution. The peculiarities of the public's political participation and citizens' political engagement in Ukraine are distinguished and examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]