Ukraine’s crisis. Orange fades

As Ukraine's revolution loses steam, a president sacks his government

WINNING power is the easy bit. Wielding it properly is much harder. That is the lesson for the victors of Ukraine's orange revolution. Squabbling and scandals among the country's new rulers have shrivelled the high hopes of the demonstrators who braved the freezing streets of Kiev to remove the corrupt and incompetent old guard from power last year. Now those squabbles have boiled over. Top aides to the president, Viktor Yushchenko, have resigned amid swirling allegations of corruption. And on September 8th he sacked the government, led by the fiery, erratic prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko.

Things had looked wobbly for months. Economic reform had stalled - partly, say people who tried to advise the government, because of Mrs Timoshenko's gnat-like attention span, and also because of deep divisions within the government between those who genuinely wanted to reform the country and those who wanted merely to rejig the old arrangements to their advantage.

In particular, much time and energy were spent on the question of the allegedly fraudulent privatisations of Ukraine's heavy industry under the old regime. Some in the new government seemed more interested in score-settling and asset-grabbing than fairness. Huge sums were at stake, and the desire of Ukraine's oligarchs to hold on to their gains, ill-gotten or not, may be at the root of the current upheaval.

Mr Yushchenko also failed to live up to his stellar reputation as a reformer (which always mystified those who remembered his undistinguished stint as prime minister). He did make some stabs at reform: sacking the country's entire traffic police, who were detested for their corruption, was a high point. But his own reputation has frayed. His son's extravagant lifestyle (involving tycoon's toys like a $40,000 mobile phone) came under close scrutiny; contradictory and angry responses from Mr Yushchenko and others made matters worse.

In the past week, the president's inner circle started disintegrating. Oleksandr Zinchenko, his impressive chief of staff, resigned claiming that other advisers had organised an “information blockade” around the president, in order to “use government posts to get their hands on everything they can”. He explicitly named the national security secretary, Petro Poroshenko, a controversial figure who has at times seemed to run a private foreign policy at variance with Mr Yushchenko's pro-western orientation. Mr Poroshenko and a colleague resigned shortly before the whole government was sacked.

The political capital of the orange revolution has been eroded but not exhausted. That is inevitably worrying for most Ukrainians, and their western friends. Only in Moscow, which dislikes revolutions in odd colours, will this week's events provide some satisfaction.