I've been in the Donbass for a week, doing a bit of research.Ostensibly, political tensions are rising in the run up to the vital parliamentary election, set for the end of September.
The picture shows the campaign poster backing the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko. This is on Artema Street, the main road through the middle of Donetsk, which is the centre of power of the president's rival, Viktor Yanukovych, and his vehicle, the Party of Regions: that is, at the centre of a region said to be inimical to the "Orange Revolution" of 2004. The quote from Mr Yushchenko at the top of the poster says: "MPs have to create laws, but they cannot hide from them." For an apparently liberal grouping, the backdrop of the raised clenched fist—the universal symbol of workers' power—seems to me a little incongruous.
Interestingly, in Yenakivo, the sign that I saw for the Party of Regions—which preys on the fears of Ukraine's ethnic Russian minority of domination by their former ethnic subordinates—was written in Ukrainian, and made use of the yellow and light-blue of the Ukrainian national flag. The sign boasted of the region's industrial prowess and, to me, had about it a strong whiff of "political technology".
Although some of the fears of a previously paramount group are undoubtedly real, much of the split between Ukrainians and Russian looks a bit artificial, fomented, stoked. For instance, some of the pro-Russian graffiti (eg "The Donbass is Russian land", sprayed on a corrugated fence along Kuybysheva Street, on the way up to the rather grand-looking railway station) was suspiciously neat and prominent. The posters of the "red-brown" Natalya Vitrenko—the leader of some left-wing-sounding Russian chauvinists masquerading as pan-Slavists—said "No to NATO" and "Ukraine, Russia, Belarus: together we are strong".
