Ukraine: so farewell, then, Princess Leia

It looks as if Yulia Tymoshenko has lost the Ukraine presidential election. Her supporters are joined in their distress by newspaper production staff the world over. Rather like the French president’s wife who is used to illustrate anything faintly Gallic in every paper every day, Mrs Tymoshenko’s Princess Leia hair and pleasant female countenance made her stand out among the rugged, potato-faced eastern European villains. (I am paraphrasing the thoughts of British newspaper staff here.)

But how on earth are newspapers to illustrate their stories from now on? I am predicting even fewer articles than the already meagre quota, all with picture captions like: “Yulia Tymoshenko (above) still lives in Ukraine, a country whose president yesterday said…”

Moving on, I hope she does concede gracefully at a press conference on Tuesday. Ukraine needs to move swiftly forwards from its ugly election campaign. The new president, Viktor Yanukovich, needs to crack on with a spending clampdown in order to restore the flow of emergency IMF funds to his beleaguered economy. He hasn’t shown much appetite for that so far, promising instead to raise the standard of living everywhere, but I am assuming that campaign promises will soon give way to reality.

We in other countries need this geopolitically important place, central to the West’s energy security, to put divisive and destructive politics behind it. The West has rather neglected Ukraine recently – it’s hard to do business with a country riven with corruption and whose political class is so childlishly at war with itself. In the process we have allowed Russia to pull the strings more skilfully. The Kremlin was going to win whichever of the two presidential candidiates prevailed – no one talks in Ukraine any more of joining Nato and its Orange Revolution that promised to tilt the country westwards is a distant memory.

Source:blogs.telegraph.co.uk/