I wouldn’t claim that Ukraine is more of a democracy than the other countries—better to say it’s a more competitive authoritarian regime. The political system that emerged in Ukraine was from the outset more pluralistic than those of, say, Russia, Kazakhstan or Belarus. One of the main reasons for this was the country’s cultural diversity: there were very significant regional differences between the east and the west, and these were reflected in electoral outcomes from the 1990s onwards. Any candidate who won the presidential elections would not be seen as legitimate by almost half the population, who would immediately voice strong opposition to him. The strength of regional identities also tended to politicize socio-economic questions very quickly. This was one reason why the neoliberal reforms were not carried out as rapidly as in Russia, for example—the political forces behind them were unable to build up the same kind of momentum. The difference is also apparent in Ukraine’s constitutional system, which was much less presidential than those of the other post-Soviet states. In Russia, 1993 was clearly a crucial moment, when Yeltsin imposed his will on parliament by force, sending the army into Moscow. Nothing like this happened in Ukraine. The 1996 constitution, approved under Kuchma, gave the president more powers than parliament, but not to the same extent as in Russia: it was a presidential–parliamentary republic, rather than a purely presidential one. This was also a very important factor in the evolution of the political system: presidential elections were not winner-takes-all contests to the same extent as in many other former Soviet countries.

None of them were full-scale authoritarian; it was definitely not a dictatorial state. In the late Kuchma period, the presidential administration would send broadcasters recommended topics for their news programmes, but it’s unclear to what extent this was implemented; there was no direct censorship. The real problem for freedom of speech has been that the majority of the tv, radio and press are privately owned. In that sense it has worked more along Western lines, where the media corporations advance the political agendas of their owners. Economically, you could say that Kuchma, and later Yanukovych, played the role of a kind of protectionist state for Ukrainian capital. With the state’s assistance, figures like Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Viktor Pinchuk acquired old Soviet industries at fire-sale prices, and then made huge fortunes not so much by investing or upgrading as by using them to make quick money, shifting their capital to Cyprus or other offshore havens. For many years, Kuchma and Yanukovych were also able to balance on the question of whether to integrate into Europe’s economic sphere or Russia’s, moving neither to the West nor the East. This shielded Ukraine’s oligarchs, preventing them from being swallowed by stronger Russian or European competitors. It’s worth pointing out, too, that the oligarchs were able to play a different role in the political system from their Russian counterparts: here the state was unable to dominate them and exclude them from participation as Putin did.

One of the most important factors was that Russia had natural resources—oil and gas—which Ukraine did not; hence they were able to maintain living standards at least a little better. Ukraine had a lot of plant in high-tech sectors—aviation, cybernetics, the space industry—which suffered especially from the ussr’s collapse. Much of the country’s machine-building and engineering industries also went down when they lost their connections with the former Soviet republics, and what remained was not so competitive compared to Western European production. The 1990s was a period of severe industrial decline in Ukraine. Some people, including many on the left, think that it’s still a developed industrial country. I very much disagree, because although metallurgy, which accounts for a major part of its exports, entails some processing—producing rolled steel from ores, for example—it doesn’t involve a high level of value added. Still, the rise in commodity prices in the 2000s meant that there was something of a recovery, mainly concentrated in the east, and mainly in metallurgy. But the slight growth was very unevenly distributed, bringing greater inequality.