Wikipedia is my number one source of information on Ukraine and a highly useful source on most things. Every now and then I go to their article on the forthcoming presidential election there to see if the polls show Poroshenko with 50% or more. They still don't, but when I checked the article this morning I saw that the race was down to five candidates. Communist Petro Symonenko pulled out on Friday, denouncing the election as a farce.
This may represent a decision by Ukraine's Communist Party to go underground since on May 6 their deputies were forcibly removed from Ukraine's Parliament and last week the acting President, Oleksandr Turchynov (an evangelical Baptist, which to some people is close enough to a fascist) indicated he would move to ban the party. Wikipedia's article on the Communist Party of Ukraine provided this information along with an endnote that shed light on the Communist Party's thinking on the Maidan.
Here is the link stating the Communist Party of Ukraine's position back in February:
Open Appeal of the Communist Party of Ukraine
The reference to the Freedom Party is to Svoboda (that's what Svoboda translates to from the Ukrainian).
The most interesting comment I received on my previous diary on Ukraine, also built around a single link (though that one was anti-Russian), was that Timothy Snyder, who wrote the essay to which I linked, "knew better" than to believe everything that he wrote. I believe that Snyder and the Communists equally believe everything they wrote (although the civil war envisioned in the Communists' statement seems to be ending).
The Communists of Ukraine are and, since independence, always have been about resurrecting the Soviet Union so they see themselves as the natural leaders of the antifascist forces in Ukraine. The real question is, should we see them that way? They openly call for all left-wing forces in the world to oppose the Maidan (and by implication any government produced thereby). How many of the pro-Russian bloggers on Ukraine here at DailyKos will admit they are responding specifically to this call by the Communists? How many think Soviet Communism was the highest expression of the Left, even if it was unsustainable?
I will wrap this up with a straw poll of Kossacks to see who out of the current five candidates would win next week's Presidential election in Ukraine if only Kossacks were voting. The smart money in that event would be on Mykhailo Dobkin, the candidate of the Party of Regions, but in reality Petro Poroshenko will be leading and may even pull off an outright majority after the first round. I predict most of Symonenko's support will go to Dobkin, but that won't be enough to get him into the runoff.