Orange Revolution
The peaceful 2004-05 mass protests that overturned a rigged Ukrainian election, made Viktor Yushchenko president, and alarmed a Kremlin fearful of color revolutions.
In the autumn of 2004 the pro-Western opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko dined with the deputy chief of Ukraine's security service. Within days his face erupted in cysts and lesions; doctors later concluded he had been poisoned with dioxin, one of the most brazen political poisonings of the era. He survived, kept campaigning, and when the government tried to steal the election from him, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in orange scarves filled Kyiv's Independence Square. The Orange Revolution was the largest mass revolt yet against post-Soviet electoral fraud, and the Kremlin never forgot the sight of it.
The stolen runoff
The November 21 runoff pitted Yushchenko against Viktor Yanukovych, the sitting prime minister backed by outgoing president Leonid Kuchma and openly by Vladimir Putin, who twice visited Ukraine to boost him. Official results handed Yanukovych a three-point victory; exit polls had given Yushchenko a lead of roughly eleven points. Observers documented industrial-scale fraud, from ballot-stuffing to impossible turnout figures in the pro-Yanukovych east. The most flagrant numbers came from Donetsk, Yanukovych's home region, where recorded turnout in some districts approached an implausible 100 percent. Ukrainians did not accept it. A tent city rose along Kyiv's main avenue, and on the biggest days close to a million people, dressed in the orange of Yushchenko's campaign, packed the capital in sub-zero cold.
The rerun
The protests stayed peaceful and immovable. European mediators, among them Poland's president Aleksander Kwasniewski, brokered round-table talks that averted a violent crackdown. On December 3, 2004, Ukraine's Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of annulling the fraudulent runoff and ordering it held again. In the December 26 rerun, conducted under a swarm of domestic and international monitors, Yushchenko won cleanly, roughly 52 percent to 44. He was inaugurated on January 23, 2005, his face still scarred from the poison.
The hangover, and Moscow's lesson
For a moment Ukraine looked like the model of a peaceful, pro-Western turn in the former Soviet space. The victory soured fast. Yushchenko and his fiery ally turned prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, fell out within a year; the reform camp splintered; and in one of history's sharper ironies Yanukovych returned as prime minister in 2006 and won the presidency outright in 2010. But the revolution's longest shadow fell on Russia. Putin watched a friendly candidate defeated in the streets by crowds he was certain the West had organized, one of a run of color revolutions, after Georgia in 2003, that he read as rehearsals for regime change aimed ultimately at Moscow. That conviction hardened his response when Ukrainians rose again in 2014, and it echoes in the justifications he offered for war. The orange tide receded, but the fear it planted in the Kremlin never did.