UKRAINE: The leaders of the Orange Revolution have become increasingly bitter rivals, writes Kim Murphy in Kiev
After last week's signing of a five-year natural gas agreement with Russia, President Viktor Yushchenko was basking in self-congratulation. "I would call it a brilliant achievement," he told Ukraine's NTN television.
But former ally Yulia Tymoshenko called it otherwise."Only a person with a huge New Year's hangover can call this a success," declared Ms Tymoshenko, who was a partner in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought Mr Yushchenko to power and was his prime minister until last autumn. "It's clear that the government has systematically and consciously betrayed the national interests of Ukraine," she said.
Just a little more than a year ago, the duo were a "dream team" that stood, hands clenched triumphantly together in the air, in Kiev's Independence Square. For much of the world, they came to symbolise democratic aspirations throughout the former Soviet bloc.
But just two months before parliamentary elections that could make or break Mr Yushchenko's efforts to steer Ukraine toward Europe, the showdown with Russia over gas has left the two reformists more divided than ever.
In an alarming sign for liberals, Mr Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party got just 13.7 per cent in a poll taken before the gas deal, putting it in third place, trailing Ms Tymoshenko's bloc.
Leading the pack is the party of former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia-backed candidate who faced Mr Yushchenko in 2004 and was defeated only after hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians occupied the streets and demanded new elections. His party now commands 26.6 per cent in the polls.
Many here felt Russia's move to quadruple natural gas prices was an attempt to punish Ukraine for its drift to the West. It presented the Yushchenko administration with its most serious crisis yet, the prospect of much higher gas costs.
Mr Yushchenko successfully called on a broad range of Ukrainians to rally against the Russian enemy and emerged with a pact that he said guaranteed the nation"true independence" where it counted.
"We have guaranteed ourselves a stable gas supply in the next five years, and this is the most important thing, believe me," he said.
But Ms Tymoshenko has charged that Russia shrewdly outflanked Ukraine and took home a deal that gives it almost everything it wanted.
The split with Ms Tymoshenko is fragmenting the pro-western camp amid growing disillusion over the results of last year's election. Although tax revenues have skyrocketed with a clampdown on corruption, overall economic growth is down and prices are up; foreign investment is a fraction of what the new government hoped it would be.
Mr Yushchenko's supporters blamed much of it on the populist economic policies of Ms Tymoshenko, who threw investors into retreat when she threatened to renationalise about 3,500 businesses and imposed controls to check skyrocketing petrol prices.
Since the pair split ways in September, they have swapped insinuations of corruption in the other's camp, producing more dismay than outrage among their supporters.
"We hoped that the responsibilities assumed by Yushchenko and Tymoshenko would prevail over their personal ambitions. We hoped that cravings for power would not trump efforts to meet the people's needs," the weekly Zerkalo Nedeli wrote in the autumn."What we did not expect was that so soon and bitter would be the disappointment."
Opponents say Mr Yushchenko's rich supporters who helped the president come to power used the opportunity to transfer wealth from the old guard to themselves.
"They took advantage of their new positions to get back what they invested in the orange events," said Nestor Shufrych, an opposition leader.
Mr Yushchenko's biggest challenge now is to work with a new parliament in which his Our Ukraine party almost certainly won't have a majority.
It seems unlikely that, even together, Mr Yushchenko and Ms Tymoshenko would win a majority big enough to form a government, analysts say, but they will have to accommodate Mr Yanukovych's Party of Regions. Mr Yanukovych, some say, could even become prime minister
"The policy will be less anti-Russian and less pro-western. It will be a multi-vectored one, and a pragmatic one. It means that if there's something the US wants and can offer something in exchange, then OK, we have a deal," said Mikhail Pogrebinsky, of the Centre for Political and Conflict Studies in Kiev.
"But I think both the US and Europe should be interested in this kind of coalition," he said. "Because it will guarantee stability in Ukraine."