Yes, according to one report, personal finances got significantly better on Yanukovych’s watch, at least in Donetsk (Yushchenko supporters believe that it was a result of their candidate’s long-term policies.) The letter from Luhansk I mentioned is up on Maidan’s English site. Things in Luhansk in general have not been going well today.

Whatever else one can say about Western media, they have an unfortunate tendency to mass their foreign correpondents in capitals. It’s nice to have sources like Maidan around.

That sounds plausible. But I think Yushchenko made himself unnecessarily vulnerable. He was taking a heavy beating from a negative ad compaign on Ukrainian TV, designed by Russian advisors (whose tactics are actually a legacy of the oligarch-sponsored Eltsin reelection.) In addition, since domestically produced programs in Russian have been banned from Ukrainian TV, many people were probably tuning in to Russian channels, whose journalistic standards are hitting lows unseen since the soviet days. I don’t believe eastern Ukraine even has an agressively independent print press comparable to Russia’s. For one reason or another, Yushchenko’s grass-roots campaign didn’t make a lot of inroads in the east. All the more reason not to lose his chances to hit back. It looks like the language question may be the top election issue for many if not most eastern voters. I’ve looked over a semi-transcript of the pre-election televized debate (in which Yanukovych switched to Russian for closing statements), and the only related comment from Yushchenko I could find was his dismissal of the language question as “populism”. Sounds like a bad campaign move.

It is easy for a separatist movement in Eastern Europe to gain momentum, happened many times. Unfortunately, many in the West will afterwards believe that what separated never belonged together.

It’s also not a much of a news item that Yanukovych managed to scare some Russian speakers. There’s no language on earth whose speakers he wouldn’t scare. It’s much more remarkable how Yushchenko’s campaign let itself be turned into a handy scarecrow for the same constituency. Even its main slogans weren’t tranlated. When people gather at pro-opposition rallies in strictly russophone cities, they can only make speeches in Russian, but their chants are all in Ukrainian. In a way, it’s been remarkable to see Ukrainian make the transition (in Ukrainian-Russians’ eyes) from its traditional place of a bumpkin cousin of Russian to the language of civic courage, but from a political standpoint, I think it was a big tactical mistake.

There’s a letter from Lugansk waiting in Maidan’s translation pipeline that points this out from first-hand experience. A lot of people in the east were led to believe that a Yushchenko administration would make mastery of Ukrainian a prerequisitve for making a living.