Ties sank to new lows in August when President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he would not send the newly appointed ambassador, Mikhail Zurabov, to Ukraine while President Viktor Yushchenko remained in office.
Now Yushchenko, whose pro-Ukrainian and pro-Western rhetoric repeatedly infuriated Moscow over the past five years, is all but certain to be voted out of office in the election Sunday.
The Kremlin has avoided offering blatant support to any of the 18 candidates in the election but made no secret that it hopes that front-runner Viktor Yanukovych wins an expected runoff with Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Feb. 7.
Convinced that Russia is on the cusp of improved relations with Ukraine, the Kremlin will move to restore full diplomatic ties by dispatching Zurabov to its embassy in Kiev within a few days, Vasily Likhachyov, deputy chairman of Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, told The Moscow Times.
He said he had spoken with Zurabov about the issue recently.
Likhachyov said Yanukovych and Tymoshenko would make Ukraine more politically stable and pragmatic than it is now, and this in turn would be in Russia’s interests.
“Viktor Yushchenko, the incumbent president, has been playing up every contradictory issue involving Russia in order to gain support from the West, only to shatter Ukraine’s statehood and create an explosive social situation there,” Likhachyov said.
But he and State Duma Deputy Speaker Alexander Babakov, who oversees the Duma’s ties with Ukraine, stressed in interviews with The Moscow Times that Moscow would not interfere in the election.
Medvedev also said last month that Ukraine’s election was an internal matter. “Russia does not have and cannot have its own candidate in the presidential election in Ukraine because this is an independent country whose leader can only be elected by its citizens,” he said.
Medvedev’s comments are in sharp contrast to Ukraine’s presidential election five years ago, when the Kremlin strongly supported Yanukovych and even congratulated him on his victory in a fraudulent vote that was later overturned.
But Moscow still has its preferences in Sunday’s election. In early December, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in a televised call-in show that he did not support Tymoshenko’s candidacy and noted that United Russia, which he heads, has long cooperated with the Party of Regions, headed by Yanukovych.
A senior Russian official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said there was a consensus in Moscow that Yanukovych would suit Russia’s interests best as president.
“Tymoshenko has a rich history of betraying partners and forgetting promises,” the official said, reiterating a common and well-known complaint from Russian officials about the temperamental Ukrainian prime minister.
The official said Tymoshenko caters to Ukrainian nationalists and cosmopolitan businesspeople, while Yanukovych has the support of Ukraine’s millions of Russian-speaking, largely low-income working class.
Yanukovych has repeatedly said Ukraine would remain a neutral country under his watch, leading Russian decision makers to believe that Ukraine’s inevitable integration with Europe — a priority announced by all of the presidential candidates — would not be made at the expense of Russia’s national interests, which include the security of its western borders and energy transit to Europe.
But Yanukovych might not prove to be an easy partner for Moscow. As prime minister in 2006, he took a tough stance in negotiating gas prices with Russia and spoke against entering a customs union with Moscow.
The Kremlin, however, can be confident that Yanukovych would not lavish praise on Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, restrict the Russian language, and attempt to edge out the Russian Orthodox Church — measures taken by Yushchenko that have irritated the Kremlin, said Kirill Frolov, a political analyst with the Institute of CIS Countries, a Kremlin-leaning think tank.
Yushchenko has labeled rival presidential candidates as “Kremlin projects” and called the election “a national referendum about Ukraine’s European future.”
According to several polls taken this week, including one by Russia’s VTsIOM, Yanukovych will collect more than 30 percent of the vote Sunday, while Tymoshenko will get 15 percent to 20 percent. Yushchenko is supported by slightly more than 3 percent of the electorate.
During Yushchenko’s presidency, Moscow and Kiev waged two wars over gas prices that saw Moscow cut supplies to Ukraine, leading to disruptions to Europe. Western diplomats initially accused Russia of resorting to energy blackmail and, growing weary of the continued bickering, privately wished a plague on both countries.
Yushchenko’s foreign policies that irritated Moscow most included his attempts to join NATO and to kick the Russian Black Sea Fleet out of its base in Sevastopol, which Russia rents under a lease that expires in 2017.
Moscow has also accused Yushchenko of driving a wedge between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples by trying to forge a new Ukrainian national identity through restrictions on the official use of the Russian language and support for the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church in its bid to take over parishes, many of which answer to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Putin and Medvedev have denounced Yushchenko for praising Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis and portraying a 1930s famine in Ukraine as genocide.
Medvedev offered a wish list for Ukraine’s next president during his televised New Year’s Eve address, saying he hoped “for no insults to the Russian language, for mutual relations and joint economic projects to develop, and for no strange desire to join a foreign military bloc that will make a great number of people nervous in one way or another.”
Yanukovych has said he would not try to bring Ukraine into NATO.