Old guard tries to hold back tide as Ukraine moves on
There is no grand sign on the building, but the Kyiv taxi driver knows who his passengers have come to see. “If you want Rabinovich,” he says, drawing to a halt outside the entrance, “then this is the place.”
Vadim Rabinovich is one of Ukraine’s most colourful survivors, having come through political and business battles, a Soviet jail term, a suspected assassination attempt and bloody revolution to fight another day.
A further chance will come on Sunday, in snap elections that many Ukrainians hope will sweep away an old guard strongly linked to Russia and the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovich, and confirm the troubled nation’s pivot to the west.
For supporters of last winter’s “Maidan” uprising, members of Yanukovich’s now-defunct Party of Regions bear huge responsibility for the revolution’s victims and a war in the east that has killed more than 3,600 people.
Yanukovich and many of his associates are now in Russia. Some of his old allies have disappeared or popped up in rebel-held Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while others have formed an alliance called Opposition Bloc.
In a Ukraine battered by revolution, economic crisis, and now war with Russian-backed separatists, Opposition Bloc candidates have not had an easy ride, with several being beaten, branded political trash and dumped into rubbish bins.
In this poisonous and occasionally violent arena, the garrulous Rabinovich has become the fast-talking, wisecracking, outspoken face of the fledgling alliance. “I’m the nicest one in the group,” he says, “I’m a star on television because I tell it how it is, and I win all my debates because I talk straight.”
Failing the country
Rabinovich says the government is failing the country in countless ways: for letting Russia annex Crimea; for suffering heavy losses in the east and then proposing a ceasefire that offered the rebels “twice what they asked for” months before; and for imposing brutal but ineffective economic “shock therapy” on a weary people.
If he wins round interlocutors, it is through force of personality rather than power or consistency of argument. He denounces President Petro Poroshenko and his political allies as a “party of war”, then complains that Ukrainian troops didn’t fight Russia for Crimea and advocates a nuclear deterrent as a defence priority.
He says he did not support the Maidan movement, but then recalls seeing footage of riot police beating student protesters last November and realising that “we had crossed a line” and that Yanukovich had to go. Now the businessman – who has his own party – is sharing a political platform with long-time allies of that disgraced former leader.
“Of course they share some guilt for the situation the country is in,” he says. “But who should decide how much? Should we kill and bury people like the communists did? . . . The system should punish people, not guys with clubs.”