Interesting blog piece on Ukraine

There is an interesting blog piece on the election in Ukraine here which gives some information on the criminal past of the so-called winner Victor Yanukovich:

Yanukovych has always seemed perfectly fitted for this campaign to lay waste any remnant of civic trust. A big man of few words and two criminal convictions (strictly not political), Yanukovych confirmed his image as the candidate from the “zone” – i.e. jail – by publicly abusing his opponents and their voters as “goats”, prison slang for stool-pigeons and passive homosexuals. His penning his profession into official papers as the Ukrainian equivalent of “pryme-meenister” and his – very dubious – academic degree as “proffessor” were the comic relief of the campaign. Yanukovych’s tough order to his bodyguards to sort out a Second World War veteran, who dared challenge him, starkly contrasted with his already famous dying-swan performance when hit by a raw egg. Collapsing, he was hurried away in best line-of-fire fashion. Yanukovych’s talking Tarantino and turning tail, capped by his initial refusal to join a legally obligatory TV debate with Yushchenko before round two, hugely popularized jokes about eggs and Yanukovych – with eggs, by a simile common to many languages, standing for male courage or its absence.

Another point made in the article is that Yushchenko is often portrayed as the “western” Ukrainian candidate, when in fact he is from an eastern province and speaks good Russian, while his opponent is a “pure” easterner who doesn’t speak good Ukrainian.

I think this election is of interest to Muslims for two reasons. For one, a defeat for the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine means a further decline in Russia’s influence, which can only be a good thing, because Russia’s presence has been baneful wherever it’s been found at any time in history. Second, Ukraine has a substantial Muslim population, particularly the Tatar population in Crimea. Crimea is said to have voted for Yanukovych, but I haven’t seen a breakdown of people’s votes in percentage terms.

This report at Islam Online claims that Ukraine’s Muslim Party supported Yanukovych, but how can they support the friend of the butchers of Chechenia? It really doesn’t make sense. (Except when you take into account that there seem to be no Islamic pages in Ukraine in languages other than Russian, and that the party is based in Yanukovych’s fiefdom of Donetsk.)