The Yanukovych regime is a mafia, which regularly threatens, imprisons, murders, or disappears political opponents as well as those whose possessions it covets.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.
The post-Soviet mafia wove a spider's web of dirty money around the world. Where better to attack it than to start with the Ukrainian criminal heavyweights - the 'family' and its closest circle?
Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.
There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.
As far as the Yanukovych administration is concerned, you will see, if you do any fact-checking, that I was the person that negotiated the framework which is based upon which Ukraine is now a part of Europe. That was my role. That's what I did. And when it was completed, I left.
As I've said many times, Yanukovych was a pro-Western, not pro-Putin, president.
The old bastions of the post-communist regime collapsed before my very eyes. The monsters who had kept Ukraine in a criminal state left the stage.
As long as the opposition believes the world will stand with Ukraine's democrat reformers, they will have the leverage and the courage to establish a legitimate republic under the leadership of Viktor Yushchenko.
The Soviet Union was a one-party state. In such states, enemies of the party become enemies of the state, and the state can punish with full weight of prosecution.
Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.