Ukraine’s government. The Viktor and Yulia show

Six months after the heady “orange revolution”, what has Ukraine's new government actually achieved?

SOME things have changed forever. Many Ukrainians say that, since the huge street protests last November and December that culminated in Viktor Yushchenko's victory in the presidential election on December 26th, they are much freer. The new government's critics, unlike the old one's, happily give their names to journalists. There have been more tangible advances: some businesses have been corralled out of the shadow economy, boosting tax and customs receipts, and helping to pay for higher pensions and public-sector wages. But there have also been disappointments - and not all were inevitable.

Amid all his rhetoric about driving the bandits out of government, Mr Yushchenko made a few specific pledges. One was to review the dodgiest of the privatisations done by his predecessor. The Ukrainian (and a few Russian) owners of the likely targets have, predictably, resisted. But prevarication by Mr Yushchenko and his prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko, is more surprising. The number of firms, the criteria for choosing them and the mechanics of re-privatisation are all unclear. The government hoped to give investors more clarity at a World Economic Forum meeting in Kiev this week, but the impression of incompetence will linger.

Another imperative should have been to allay anxieties about a Yushchenko presidency in southern and eastern Ukraine, which overwhelmingly backed his rival, Viktor Yanukovich. Mr Yanukovich's supporters still cannot muster the verve of Kiev's orange-clad masses in the winter snows. But in Donetsk, at least, resentment of Mr Yushchenko persists.

The east's suspicions were sharpened by the arrest in April of Boris Kolesnikov over the allegedly violent takeover of a Donetsk department store. Mr Kolesnikov is an ally of Mr Yanukovich, and of Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine's richest man, who jointly controls a big steel mill that is a candidate for re-privatisation. Nobody thinks Mr Kolesnikov is a saint; but his detention is seen as a show of power against the eastern oligarchs. In Russian-speaking Donetsk, Mr Yushchenko's talk of cleaning up government sounds disingenuous. When asked if the new regime is as corrupt as the old, one Donetsk businessman says: “not yet, but it will be soon.”

There have been sins of commission too, especially on economic policy. “They've been screwing up,” comments one western diplomat in Kiev. The most egregious example came when Ms Timoshenko - a formidable revolutionary, but a rash prime minister - imposed price caps on fuel, alleging an anti-Ukrainian conspiracy by Russian energy firms. Predictably, this measure led to fuel shortages. Mr Yushchenko's intervention to remove the caps provoked a contretemps; the president was rumoured to have suggested that the prime minister might consider resigning. Other missteps include a failure to pass the measures needed to get Ukraine into the World Trade Organisation.

To some, Mr Yushchenko's bigger goal - to get Ukraine into the European Union - looks imperilled by the recent French and Dutch referendums. But that gloomy view rests on an overly optimistic premise. However enthusiastic the West is about Mr Yushchenko, EU membership was always a long way off. Relations with Russia, meanwhile, have been civil but fragile. The need to preserve civility may explain why the poisoning that debilitated Mr Yushchenko during the election campaign, and scars him still, has not yet been publicly solved: some sort of Russian connection is widely assumed in Kiev. The solution of another infamous mystery - the murder of Georgi Gongadze, a journalist, in 2000 - has been hampered by the inconvenient deaths of key witnesses.

Revolutions may change governments, but they cannot instantly transform a country. And Mr Yushchenko should not be blamed for some of Ukraine's most intractable problems. The biggest, as in most post-Soviet countries, is corruption. Some businessmen say things are improving, albeit confusingly. “Six months ago I knew who, when, how much,” says one Russian visitor to Donetsk. “Now I don't.” Petro Oliynyk, the new governor of the Lvov region, says that 200 of the local tax administration's 3,000 employees have been replaced. But the clean-up has had unintended consequences: post-revolution bribes are said to have gone up, thanks to a risk premium added by unreconstructed mid-level officials. “We could make a book of taxation jokes,” says Yaroslav Rushchyshyn, a pro-Yushchenko Lvov businessman. The beautiful city of Lvov is still crumbling; as Ukraine's growth slows, many young people from the countryside around it prefer to work illegally over the border than earn a pittance at home.

If some of the disappointments of Mr Yushchenko's short tenure can be put down to inflated expectations after last year's drama, others stem from the exigencies of the revolution. Various bits of the alliance that propelled Mr Yushchenko to the presidency had to be paid back with government offices. The result has been contradictions and cleavages, both ideological - eg, between the economic liberals and the socialist who oversees the state property fund - and personal. A sub-plot to the Timoshenko-Yushchenko tension has been Ms Timoshenko's rivalry with Petro Poroshenko, a businessman-politician who wanted to be prime minister but became head of the national security and defence council instead.

Parliamentary elections next March are exacerbating tendencies to populism. Under a reform agreed last December, some powers are due to shift from president to parliament and prime minister, though this change may yet be repudiated. After the elections, will the president and - if she is still in office - Ms Timoshenko learn from their mistakes and vindicate the orange revolution? Both remain popular. And Ukrainians have learnt to be patient. But Mr Yushchenko must be steelier if he is to overcome the corrupt, fractious pathologies of Ukrainian politics.

Six months after the heady 'orange revolution' what has Ukraine's new government actually achieved.