Ukraine: Image takes a beating as Euro Soccer nears
So for Ukraine a lot of the European reaction is unexpected and seems unfair — especially given its huge efforts to overhaul a ramshackle infrastructure in double quick-time and make it fit to host one of Europe’s biggest sporting events.
In less than two years, it has laid thousands of kilometres of new road, built new airport terminals and laid on high-speed train services between Euro locations.
Kyiv’s Olympisky stadium, where the July one final will be played, has been completely revamped from the outdated Soviet relic which first opened in 1923.
UEFA president Michel Platini, who has toured Euro venues over the past two years and often chided Ukraine along the way, recognized the huge effort. “Bravo to all responsible for Ukraine’s preparations,�, he said late last year, giving a thumbs up.
But long-standing prejudices and suspicions among Ukraine’s critics that the country was too much of a lightweight to be entrusted with the Euros have persisted.
Ukraine lends itself easily to stereotypes and clichés.
Chernobyl. Borshch soup. The Orange Revolution. The gigantic Klitschko boxing brothers. Europe’s granary. Elegant women and dating agencies. Bread-basket, bride-basket.
Platini, for all his otherwise generous comments, added another label last month when he harangued Ukraine over the sky-high prices of accommodation on offer to visiting fans.
Ukraine’s hoteliers were “bandits and swindlers� for jacking up prices tenfold in the four Euro-hosting cities of Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv and Donetsk, he said.
The Kyiv government, which expects at least one million fans to visit Ukraine, has sought to curb hoteliers with anti-trust investigations and a planned deal with a low-cost airline that officials say will offer $300 return trips from London.
All the same, there are signs that many fans are opting to stay at home and follow their national team’s fortunes on television rather than make the trek to Ukraine.
Yanukovich, a heavily built hard man who has run Ukraine since February 2010 after narrowly beating Tymoshenko for the presidency, may still hope the Euro competition will infuse people with some joy amid mounting economic woes that threaten his party’s success in an end-of-year election.
He has a lot of prestige among Ukraine’s powerful elite riding on a successful tournament.
Professional football in Ukraine is a potent symbol of wealth and power, impossible to separate from its macho, big money politics.
A successful football club is a ‘must-have’ for some oligarchs. Many top Ukrainian league clubs are in the hands of wealthy industrialists.
Take, for example, Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov, billionaire owner of the Shakhtar Donetsk club who bank-rolled Yanukovich’s election campaign in 2010.