Experts in the Field: Samual Charap on the Presidential Elections in Ukraine

Ukraine is in the midst of a presidential election campaign. The country of 45 million inhabitants situated between Russia and the eastern borders of the EU will go to the polls on January 17th to choose among over a dozen registered candidates for the presidency. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a run-off election between the top two vote getters on February 17th.

As you can see from the number of election posters that are featured on practically every other billboard in the capital of Kyiv the country's political life is vibrant and the election is quite competitive. Yet average Ukrainians are on the whole disappointed in and often disgusted with their political leaders.

This is a major contrast to the situation of just five years ago, when thousands of Ukrainians from all across the country poured into Kyiv's Independence Square during what became known as the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution refers to the mass protests that followed the falsification of the second round of the presidential election in 2004. A genuinely popular opposition movement led by Presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko captured the public's desire for change. During a repeat vote he prevailed, promising reform, integration with the West, freedom of the press, and an end to corruption.

Five years later, most of those promises remain unfulfilled. The government failed to implement substantive reforms and politics quickly descended into petty bickering and deadlock. As a result, Yushchenko now polls below 5 percent. The two top contenders are Yulia Tymoshenko, the current Prime Minister, and Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the parliamentary opposition. Currently Yanukovych appears have a solid lead, but Ukrainian polling companies are notoriously unreliable, so it is hard to know by how much.

The policy differences between the candidates are for the most part negligible. more than half of the Ukrainian public believes that the election results will be falsified. But what is more important for Ukraine in the long-term is not the outcome of the elections but the manner in which the elections are conducted. Such a development would represent a major setback for Ukraine and could sour the public's interest in the country's democratic future. Already only 30 percent of Ukrainians say they favor democracy.

For the Obama Administration, Ukraine's elections have largely been overshadowed by the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During my trip to Kyiv in November, there was a pervasive sense that the U.S. is not paying attention and does not particularly care about the elections. But the administration should be paying attention because there is a lot at stake. While the administration should not support one candidate over the others, it should continue to make clear that the U.S. is strongly interested in the elections being conducted in a free and fair manner. With a population larger than Spain's and a landmass nearly equal to France's, and a strategic position as a black sea power and a bridge between the West and Russia, and with its massive agricultural and industrial capacity, and its key role as transit hub for Europe's energy needs, Ukraine is clearly a crucially important country to the United States.