121Chapter 4US Posture vis-à-vis the Orange Revolution in Ukraine The George W. Bush Presidency ContextWith Soviet-era nuclear weapons removed from Ukraine under the terms of the Trilateral Statement and the associated Budapest Memorandum, US-Ukrainian relations did take on a broader agenda beyond the denuclearization focus of their earlier years. In a number of ways, the latter part of the Clinton administration rep-resented a high-water mark for the bilateral relationship, even if Washington’s largely positive view of Leonid Kuchma and his pres-idency was quite unfounded.1This view began to sour in 1999, when Kuchma arguably set the stage for what would become known as the Orange Revolution ve years later when he manipulated the electoral process to hold on to the presidency, to include marginalizing one of his likely toughest opponents in a runo. The death of another top opponent in a car accident as the campaign was revving up also improved Kuchma’s chances. Though the United States was rel-atively slow to call out Kuchma as his authoritarian tendencies began to manifest themselves, the quality of the bilateral relation-ship began to deteriorate.International, including US, perceptions of Kuchma took another major hit, though arguably not enough of one, with the September 2000 murder of investigative journalist Heorhii Gongadze. His mutilated body was found in a forest outside Kyiv. Surreptitiously made recordings pointed to Kuchma and other senior ocials in his immediate circle. Ukraine also began to lose relative ground in American perceptions as the increasingly sick
122FISHEL. THE MOSCOW FACTORand erratic Boris Yeltsin was replaced by a former middling KGB ocer from Leningrad.Vladimir Putin was quick to reach out to new US president George W. Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, some-thing that the White House understandably appreciated and per-haps overinterpreted.2Putin agreed to reach out to the leaders of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to obtain permission for US overights of their countries on the way to Afghanistan, something that General Tommy Franks told President Bush he needed to support anti-Taliban operations. In any event, this positive interaction built on the president’s initial impression of Putin from their rst meeting, in Slovenia in June 2001, when the president claimed he was able to look into Putin’s soul and liked what he saw.3Ukraine’s stock took a further plunge when the surrepti-tious recordings of Kuchma and his inner circle, which were being transcribed, began to paint a picture of unbridled corruption and lawlessness at the very top of the country’s political leadership. Of particular interest to the United States was a recording that captured Kuchma’s July 2000 conversation with another senior ocial in which the two discussed, and Kuchma approved, provid-ing an early-warning system, the Kolchuga, to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in violation of UN sanctions.With Kuchma’s reputation in Washington gutted as a result and Kuchma essentially declared persona non grata, the formal bilateral relationship barely registered in the scope of the US government’s other priorities. And it was one of these other priorities, the US-led war to dislodge the Iraqi regime, that gave Kuchma his best opportunity to curry favor with the Bush admin-istration, by agreeing to contribute a Ukrainian contingent to the international force in Iraq.This opportunity carried an additional benet—the ability to favorably dierentiate Ukraine from Putin’s Russia, at least in the context of Moscow’s opposition to Operation Iraqi Freedom, the US-led intervention in Iraq. But with Moscow playing