DISINFO: Yushchenko's policies laid the groundwork for the subsequent war in Ukraine
SUMMARY
Yushchenko had initially lost the presidential elections, but his supporters set up a tent city in the centre of Kyiv and blockaded the government district. Foreign NGOs played a decisive role in these events. NGOs that directly supported Viktor Yushchenko and were involved in monitoring the elections in Ukraine received foreign funding.
The occupiers of the government district in the capital demanded the annulment of the election results. The authorities responded by accusing them of attempting a coup. With neither side willing to back down, Yanukovych finally agreed to a third round of voting, which ended in Yushchenko's victory. Ukrainian society was divided in two, and Yushchenko's policies laid the groundwork for a major political crisis and, ultimately, the subsequent war.
RESPONSE
Repeated pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the 2004 Orange Revolution, claiming that it was a coup led by foreign forces, particularly from the US; connected with the unsubstantiated claim that Yushchenko's policies led to the war in Ukraine 10 years later on.
This article contains several misleading claims about the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election and the Orange Revolution: Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was sparked by election fraud. Non-partisan exit polls during the 2004 presidential election had given Viktor Yushchenko a commanding lead, with 52 percent of the votes, compared to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich's 43 percent. Yet when the official results came in, Yanukovich had supposedly beaten the challenger by 2.5 percent.
It falsely portrays the Orange Revolution as primarily orchestrated by foreign NGOs, downplaying the genuine grassroots nature of the protests and widespread domestic collected evidence about election fraud. While some NGOs supported election monitoring and civil society, the article exaggerates their role and influence. The protests were driven mainly by Ukrainian citizens responding to credible evidence of electoral manipulation.
The claim that the election results were annulled solely due to protestor demands is inaccurate. Ukraine's Supreme Court ruled that the run-off election was invalid due to extensive fraud and ordered a repeat run-off.
The article omits crucial context about the widespread reports of voter intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, and other irregularities that prompted the protests and court decisions.
It mischaracterises Yushchenko's presidency as laying the groundwork for war, ignoring complex geopolitical factors and subsequent events that contributed to later conflicts.
The Orange Revolution was a significant democratic movement in Ukraine's history, responding to genuine concerns about election integrity rather than simply a foreign-orchestrated event, as the article implies.
Pro-Kremlin outlets regularly use narratives about the West or the US behind protests or other events which the Kremlin does not support. See analogous stories on the Euromaidan here and on colour revolutions here. Read similar cases claiming that West started the Ukraine conflict by staging the 2014 Euromaidan coup and that The Orange Revolution in Ukraine was the US attempt to marginalise Russia.