THE OPPOSITION leader Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the Party of the Regions, has won the Ukrainian presidential election, and has defeated Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the leaders of the Orange counter-revolution by 2.59% of the votes.
The other counter-revolutionary leader, ex-president Yushchenko, was knocked out in the first round of the electoral voting, winning only five per cent of the vote.
n the second round, by yesterday afternoon,Yanukovych had 48.5% of the vote, followed by Tymoshenko with 45.91% after 97.84% of the vote had been counted. The remaining votes to be counted come from areas where the majority support Yanukovych.
Election observers are expected to give the poll their blessing since there was calm throughout the country as millions turned out against the Orange counter-revolutionaries.
Yanukovych has called on Tymoshenko to quit, but she refused and will challenge the result.
Yushchenko had raised the stakes in the election, when, on the eve of the vote, he awarded a Hero of the Ukraine medal to Stepan Bandera, an ultra-right Ukrainian nationalist, who fought with the Nazis in the Second World War and took part in many atrocities against Ukrainian workers, Russians, Jews and eastern Europeans.
This award electrified the election as well as evoking mass protests throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. Tymoshenko supported the award, to make sure that she got the entire right-wing vote.
Yanukovych was a presidential candidate in the last election in 2004. When he was declared the winner he was removed from office by massive right-wing street protests led by Tymoshenko and Yushchenko, and fully supported politically and financially by the United States.
Their victory was greeted by cheers in the banking houses and stockmarkets of the world, which greeted the ‘Orange revolution’ as a knife at Russia’s throat and the preliminary to an ‘Orange revolution’ in Russia and Belarus, to restore capitalism all over the territories of the USSR.
Once in office they proceeded to discredit themselves at a rapid rate, with a privatisation campaign that enriched the new bourgeoisie and themselves.
They launched a campaign that the Ukraine must join NATO and the European Union which was met with huge hostility from the working class throughout the Ukraine.
The Orange government also armed the enemies of the working class in the region, namely the Georgian government, which was encouraged by the US to launch a surprise attack on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while Putin was at the Beijing Olympic games.
This invasion was flung back by the Russian army, and the pro-US Georgian regime was humbled.
The Orange bubble completely burst when the western banking collapse saw massive inflation and unemployment develop in the Ukraine, with a 15% drop in GDP, and with the IMF in charge of the government.
The Orange leaders, meanwhile, fell out among themselves with Tymoshenko seeking to establish a political relationship with Putin, and Russian gas and oil, by visiting Moscow.
Putin declared that Tymoshenko was a leader that he could work with.
However, the working class in the Ukraine was not following the Putin line, and in this Presidential election Donetsk workers voted by 91% for Yanukovych, in the Crimea by 80%, by 84% in the Crimean city of Sevastopol, by 91% in the Donetsk region, and 89% in the Lugansk region.
The election result will strengthen the working class all over the territory of the USSR, to take action to reconstitute the USSR and restore rule through workers and peasants soviets.
The havoc caused by the collapse of the western banks and industries has served to harden the conviction of the workers that the gains of the October Revolution must be defended and extended through political revolutions to restore soviet power. This is the lesson of the Ukrainian election.
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