Quotable notes

"These elections are a watershed. Ukraine will go either toward democracy or toward dictatorship. And their characteristic trait is that for the first time the authorities directly, without intermediary structures, have sought to apply their administrative resource by intimidating voters, blackmailing managers of enterprises, and interfering in the formation of election commissions and party structures. Suffice it to say that in the Donetsk region the [pro-presidential] Party of Regions now has 480,000 members. It is more than the Communist Party had there in the Soviet era."

- Socialist Party of Ukraine Chairman Oleksander Moroz in an interview with the Ukrainska Pravda website on March 31, as cited by RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 14, 2002, No. 15, Vol. LXX

| Home Page |