Ukraine: The Orange Revolution

Timothy Garton Ash and Timothy Snyder in the New York Review of Books:

20050428kyivLast autumn, Ukraine imprinted itself on the political consciousness of the world for the first time in its history. In what was christened the “orange revolution,” vast crowds wearing orange scarves gathered in subzero temperatures in Kyiv’s Independence Square to demand a fair election for president. They won. Observers have placed Ukraine’s “orange revolution” in a sequence of peaceful democratic revolutions stretching from the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 in Central Europe, through the “rose revolution” in Georgia in 2003, to what some are already calling the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon. Yet we must look beyond the news headlines to discover how and why this change has come about, and what its consequences may be.

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