In contrast to Russian studies, the study of crime and corruption in Ukraine is limited to a small number of scholarly studies while there is no analysis of the nexus between crime and new business and political elites with law enforcement (Kuzio, 2003a,b). This is the first analysis of how these links emerged in the 1990s with a focus on the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts) and the Crimea, two regions that experienced the greatest degree of violence during Ukraine’s transition to a market economy. Donetsk gave birth to the Party of Regions in 2001 which has become Ukraine’s only political machine winning first place plurality in three elections since 2006 and former Donetsk Governor and party leader Viktor Yanukovych was elected president in 2010 (Zimmer, 2005; Kudelia and Kuzio, 2014). Therefore, an analysis of the nexus that emerged in the 1990s in Donetsk provides the background to the political culture of the country’s political machine that, as events have shown since 2010 and during the Euro-Maydan, is also the party most willing in Ukraine to use violence to achieve its objectives.

This main focus of the article is an analysis of Ukraine two decades after it became an independent state through ten factors that have remained constant features of Ukrainian life. The first factor is low public trust in state institutions and the wide gulf between elites and state on the one hand and the public on the other. A second factor is the striving by political forces to monopolize political and economic power for the sake of power and self-enrichment – not for the conducting of reforms. The third factor is threats to democracy under eastern Ukrainian Presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych. The fourth factor is the low quality and ideological amorphousness of political parties. The fifth factor is the absence of political will and re-occurrence of missed opportunities; a prominent example of which is the Viktor Yushchenko presidency. The sixth factor is the domination of elite greed and rapaciousness over pursuit of the national interest and national security. The most egregious example of this corruption is in the energy sector which western Ukrainians have dominated (It’s a Gas: Funny business in the Turkmen-Ukraine Gas Trade, 2006). A seventh constant factor is the prevalence of virtual over actual policies and the non-fulfillment of domestic obligations which leads to low public trust in state institutions. The eighth factor is an imitation of integration into Euro-Atlantic structures because virtual policies lead to inconsistent and multi-vector foreign policies. Virtual policies make it difficult for European and American governments to engage with the Ukrainian authorities because they rarely fulfill their obligations. The ninth factor is eastern Ukrainian naivety about Russia, regardless of whether it is democratic or authoritarian, that pursues hard-nosed geopolitical goals, a naivety that applies to Kuchma in 1994 as much as to Yanukovych in 2010. The tenth factor, the Russia factor, is Russia’s inability to accept Ukraine’s sovereignty or territorial integrity. Both eastern and western Ukrainian have been unable to fashion responsive policies to deal with Russia’s un-acceptance of Ukraine and its hard-nosed geopolitical goals.

The Ukrainian opposition faced one of the greatest degrees of state-backed violence in the second wave of democratization of post-communist states with only Serbia experiencing similar cases of assassinations and repression of the youth Otpor NGO. In the 2004 Ukrainian elections the opposition maintained a strategy of non-violence over the longest protest period of 17 days but was prepared to use force if it had been attacked. The regime attempted to suppress the Orange Revolution using security forces. Covert and overt Russian external support was extensive and in the case of Ukraine and Georgia the European Union (EU) did not intervene with a membership offer that had the effect of emboldening the opposition in Central-Eastern Europe. This article surveys five state-backed violent strategies used in Ukraine’s 2004 elections: inciting regional and inter-ethnic conflict, assassinations, violence against the opposition, counter-revolution and use of the security forces. The article does not cover external Russian-backed violence in the 2004 elections unique to Ukraine that the author has covered elsewhere.

The article surveys and discusses different definitions of regime type in Ukraine and whether they provide a sound understanding of the regime emerging in Ukraine and other CIS states since the late 1990s. Ukraine and the CIS witnessed democratic regression and therefore could not be assumed that they were on a ‘transition’ path to a consolidated democracy. The majority of CIS states have either already moved to fully authoritarian regimes, such as Russia. Or, like Ukraine, they remained as unstable competitive authoritarian regimes which exhibited a ‘hybrid’ fusion of the former Soviet system and the emerging reformed economy and polity. Ukraine’s oligarchs during Kuchma’s second term preferred a fully authoritarian regime but they were also divided among themselves and faced a formidable opposition. These factors blocked the creation of a fully authoritarian regime under Kuchma and led to the victory of the opposition through Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.