Recently on Inter Kanal, one of the channels considered to be most biased towards the existing authorities in Ukraine, they ran a new feature that I think gets top points for being an interesting idea. Unfortunately, not even having an antenna on our TV, Lesya and I missed this one. However, our friends were good enough to explain.

For this show, a group of Inter journalists went to L'viv and to Donetsk in cars decorated with campaign symbols from the unpopular candidate for that city.

So one car was in L'viv all decked out in Yanukovych blue and white. It stopped in front of a Yushchenko campaign headquarters and waited. Eventually a number of Yushchenko supporters tried to invite them in or change their minds about their candidate. Things progressed rather calmly.

However, when the journalists went into Donetsk with their Yushchenko colors flying, a number of people started throwing rocks at their car. They were hemmed in in a tunnel and told, in no uncertain terms, to take their colors elsewhere, and left the city in a hurry.

In contrast to this display of feeling, it was the Yushchenko people that could muster many hundreds of thousands of its supporters across long distances to fight to overturn the election fraud. "Active Yanukovych supporters" and "paid" are almost exclusively in the same sentence. If a person speaks up for Yanukovych, well and good, but finding people willing to go to marches and demonstrate on behalf of the man is nearly impossible. If this was just a preference for a candidate, one would expect a much greater showing for Yanukovych.

Why is this?

Eastern Ukrainians are not fighting for anything, they are fighting against, and since they are fighting against, they have no flag around which to rally.

This is not a choice between a "western" and "eastern" route. All people in Ukraine know that the country is struggling and, yes, poor in comparison with Western Europe. All of them know that the country is rank with corruption, and this is the reason that Ukraine's potential is being squandered. West and East want the same standards of living, same prosperity. They want almost the same thing Poland wants, for that matter.

Western Ukraine is reaching for this thing that Poland has. They are reaching for greater speed. They are reaching for western standards of living, they are pushing forward to accelerate the country towards growth. They are uniting around the politician they think will clean up the country. They were animated enough by fraud in the election to shut the whole city down. 

Eastern Ukrainians, however, are fighting like people who think they are the rear guard of a retreating army. They are fighting against a system which they don't believe will increase the prosperity of Ukraine, because they believe the fall of Communism was the start of inexorable decline. They fight because progress will render their own part of the nation less and less important unless they can reform their area in a way few of them can imagine. They fear that Yushchenko is more venal, corrupt, and hideously evil than an excellent example of those traits right in front of them. Miners fight to keep their mines open, to hold onto their livelihood, to hold onto their last last scrap of dignity, while at the same time wishing with their whole souls that their children will never become miners.

The people in the east also want clean government and prosperity, they just don't know where to find it.

Yushchenko supporters can put flowers in the shields of police squads and reach out to Yanukovych supporters without violence in the middle of "their" cities. They can do this because they are fighting for a cause. When Alex (a Yanukovych supporter and frequent commenter here) says they speak from emotion it is true. That emotion is hope.

We are staying at our friend's mother's house. She's 60 years old and registered to vote in a small village outside the city. When she went back home she gathered the same stories you hear in every village. In her village of perhaps 50 houses, 3,000 people voted in the last round of the election. The observers for Yanukovych who had been in the village had been from Donetsk, she thought they'd been miners. Two said they'd been paid 1,500 and 2,000 griven to come and be observers.

When these observers got to the village, instead of the resistance they were expecting to find from "insular" L'vivians, they were welcomed just like any village in Ukraine might welcome distinguished guests. (that is to say, with overwhelming, occasionally pushy, generosity) They sat down with the village to a huge feast.

One of the observers, however, didn't eat. Instead he shoved all the food he got into a bag, and told the people there, "I'm going to take every bit of this home to my kids and tell them that the L'vivians are just like us."

Let's hope.