1994-2004 - President Leonid Kuchma

In July 1994, Leonid D. Kuchma was elected as Ukraine's second president in free and fair elections. During the Soviet Era, in the Ukrainian SSR, the so-called "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. After Leonid Kuchma was elected president, the "Dnipropetrovsk Mafia" gradually regained power in Kyiv. At his first press conference Wednesday, the president-elect of Ukraine spoke in Ukrainian, rather than his native Russian, and disavowed any plan to make his country part of a resurgent "Russian empire." In symbol and substance, Leonid Kuchma's words were wisely aimed at healing divisions between anti-Russian nationalists in the western half of the country and the large Russian minority in the east. True, he had run promising to rebuild relations and economic ties with Russia. But as the man the voters elected to replace Ukraine's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, he wanted those voters to know that he isn't about to abandon the independence they overwhelmingly voted for in December 1991.

The election of Kuchma, a former prime minister and military-industrial manager, over Leonid M. Kravchuk, Ukraine's first elected-president and former Communist apparatchik, by a margin of 52 to 45 percent confirmed the deep regional cleavage within Ukrainian society between those who sought a unilateral, Ukrainian-national road and those who want closer economic and political ties with Russia. The vote breakdown underscored the regional dynamics with the east [large Russian minorities and Russified Ukrainians] joined by Crimea and Odessa in the south voting for Kuchma and close ties to Russia. In Central Ukraine, including the Kiev region, the electoral results were much closer with the balancing shifting between Kravchuk and Kuchma.

Ukraine's March 1998 parliamentary resulted in the election of a parliament similar in composition to the previous parliament, albeit with a somewhat more Communist tilt. The left constituted about 40 percent of parliament's membership, with the remainder a mix of centrists, independents and national democrats. The new parliament included many new faces -- only 141 deputies from the old parliament were in the new one. The parliamentary elections were held under a new election law which replaced the majoritarian system, introducing a mixed electoral system where half of the 450 deputies are elected from single-mandate districts and half from national party lists. While there were violations, transgressions and irregularities during the campaign and voting, Ukrainian voters generally were able to express their political will freely, and the results of the elections do appear to reflect the will of the electorate.

Kuchma was reelected in November 1999 to another five year term, with 56 percent of the vote. International observers criticized aspects of the election, especially slanted media coverage, however, the outcome of the vote was not called into question. The 1999 elections delivered a pro-Presidential, and ostentatiously pro-reform, majority in the Rada (parliament), ending temporarily the parliamentary blockade which had stalled reform for most of the 1990s.

In January 2000, a center-right pro-presidential majority was formed, breaking the left's traditional control over the legislature. This produced, for the first time since independence, a degree of cooperation among the president, prime minister and parliament, which resulted throughout most of 2000 in an improved atmosphere for the passage of reform legislation.

Ukraine was in political turmoil since the release of secretly recorded audio tapes in November 2000, with the President's voice apparently ordering his Interior Minister to "get rid" of Mr Georgy Gongadze, an opposition journalist. Several days prior to the release of the tapes by one of President Kuchma's security guards, Mr Gongadze's decapitated body was found in a forest outside Kyiv, two months after his disappearance. Apart from the reference to Mr Gongadze, the conversations contained on the tapes suggested Presidential involvement in judicial manipulation and electoral fraud. Since then, President Kuchma has acknowledged that it is his voice on the recordings, but has adamantly denied any wrongdoing claiming that the recorded conversations are a fabrication. However, this did not placated a broad and vocal anti-Kuchma opposition, the National Salvation Front, which was formed in February by a wide range of political leaders. This union demanded the President's resignation and launched a series of protests, some of which have been crushed by the police. As its rallying point, the National Salvation Front used the figure of Yulia Tymoshenko, former deputy Prime Minister, who was arrested in January 2001 on corruption charges.

The scandal prompted widespread public demonstrations against Kuchma and the Rada's pro-presidential majority collapsed. Taking advantage of Kuchma's weakness, forces in the Rada opposed to reform, including the Communists and centrist oligarch-led parties, engineered a vote of no confidence against Prime Minister Yushchenko in April 2001 and forced him to resign. Kuchma nominated Anatoliy Kinakh in his place. Pro-reform centre-right parities refused to support Kinakh, but thanks to the support of oligarch-led so-called 'centrist' factions, Kuchma was able to put together enough votes to secure Kinakh's confirmation in May 2001.

In March 2002, parliamentary elections brought Ukraine closer to meeting international democratic standards. No one bloc or orientation won a clear majority. But the elections returned a sizeable reformist bloc, namely the 'Our Ukraine' faction, headed by the former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko.

In September 2002, relatively peaceful demonstrations against Kuchma took place in Kyiv and in major Ukrainian cities. The US then announced that the FBI had authenticated a recording of President Kuchma in July 2000 authorising the covert transfer of a Kolchuga military passive detection system to Iraq. (This recording was from the same source as that concerning the murdered journalist, Gongadze.) The transfer was never proven, but in reaction, NATO downgraded a planned NATO-Ukraine summit in November 2002 to a NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC) at Foreign Minister level. Even so, the NUC launched a NATO-Ukraine Action Plan, while the EU announced progress on its own initiative for a closer relationship (see NATO and EU above).

In November 2002, President Kuchma dismissed Kinakh and nominated Viktor Yanukovych, Governor of Donetsk oblast (region), as Prime Minister. Following his confirmation by the Rada, a new cabinet was formed.

Campaigning for the presidential elections started in earnest in August 2004. Reformist former Prime Minister and leader of the 'Our Ukraine' bloc, Victor Yushchenko, and PM Victor Yanukovych were the clear front runners in a field of 26 candidates. After some initial prevarication, Kuchma endorsed the latter's candidacy in July.