Americans usually do their best to ignore what is happening in the rest of the world and focus on sports, celebrity gossip and the political video game of Republicans vs Democrats. On the occasions when foreign events become sufficiently dramatic to get their attention there is usually a desperate attempt to shoehorn them into a template of American politics. One side must be the good guys and the other the bad guys. That pattern is playing out with the upheavals in Ukraine that are presently grabbing headlines. Vladamir Putin is a well established international villain. He's done a number of things to earn that role. His choice of playing to the deeply embedded homophobia in Russian and Eastern European culture for political gain is one of the more negative aspects of his current brand in the west. The ouster of Putin's current ally Viktor Yanukovych has resulted in a shakeup of the Ukranian political scene. Since the bad guys have been run out of town, the people trying to takeover must be the good guys. Right? Not so fast. The reality appears to be a bit more complicated than that.
Yesterday Yulia Tymoshenko a former prime minister was freed from the prison hospital where she was being held. Today the parliament voted its speaker Oleksandr Turchynov into the position of acting president. Tymoshenko and Turchynov go way back and the picture is not entirely pretty.
At one point they were partners in a business. Their political fortunes have been closely linked over the years. The post Soviet history of the former republics of the USSR has been marked by bare knuckle struggles for control of economic and political resources. Tymoshenko and Yanukovych are examples of the oligarchs who have amassed fortunes through political corruption. Ukraine has been in a state of constant political upheaval since the Orange revolution of 2004. In that struggle Tymoshenko was allied with Viktor Yushchenko in an eventually successful effort to overturn an election that had installed Yanukovych as president. Yushchenko became president and Tymoshenko prime minister. Once in power that alliance quickly fell apart. Since then her career has been a continual series of battles and switching of sides. At times she has been a Putin ally. The oil deal she signed with Russia in 2009 was the source of the charges that landed her in prison. At other times she has been an advocate of closer ties with the west and the EU.
Turchynov has been her consistent ally through these battles. The linked Wiki article on him contains this interesting piece of information and quotation.
In August 2007, Turchynov replied to the accusation that his stance on same-sex marriage is typically conservative, "I do not agree. If a man has normal views, then you label him a conservative, but those who use drugs or promote sodomy – you label them a progressive person. All of these are perversions.”[20]
Wikileaks documents mention Turchynov, then head of Ukraine's SBU, as having destroyed secret documents evidencing Yuliya Tymoshenko's connections to organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich.
While there appears to be widespread approval of Tymoshenko's release from prison, many people are raising questions about her fitness to provide the kind of unifying leadership that the country so desperately needs. With Tuchynov having acquired a key position of power in the transition leading up to new elections, it seems likely that he and his long standing ally will be working closely together.