Yearning to breathe free

Radek Sikorski says Russia is using strong-arm tactics to see that its man is returned in Ukraine’s presidential elections

The architecture of Independence Square in central Kiev is late Brezhnev but the ambience is Prague 1989. Groups of people stand around tables scattered with the propaganda of the various candidates, or make impassioned speeches to cameras. The atmosphere of a genuine election, one in which the outcome is uncertain — so rare now in the former Soviet Union — is unmistakable. Boys and girls with orange scarves hand out campaign leaflets. It’s cool to be political and there is a sense of hope, urgency and foreboding that I last witnessed when I was their age during the Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980. Several of them told me that if this election is lost, their only choice is to emigrate. ‘You are our last hope,’ one middle-aged woman told us, a group of international observers watching the election.