A glance at the leading personalities in Ukraine’s presidential election

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Ukraine elections: A glance at personalities

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VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH: The Soviet industrial manager ran for president in 2004 with the backing of the Kremlin and then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. He was initially declared the winner but opposition forces charged the vote was rigged. Hundreds of thousands of protesters blockaded the capital of Kiev in the Orange protests and the courts threw out the election.

After Yanukovych lost to former central banker Viktor Yushchenko in a revote, he became the leader of the opposition. His Party of Regions regained control of the legislature and he was named prime minister in August 2006, only to return to the opposition after a December 2007 election.

An awkward, gaffe-prone speaker, he once called the people of one Ukrainian city “part of the genocide of the nation,” when he apparently meant gene pool. Yanukovych backs Moscow on issues ranging from trade to security, but owes his political resurrection to his dogged determination and his oligarch friends who control the mines and factories of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east. He is 59.

YULIA TYMOSHENKO: The current prime minister was nicknamed Ukraine’s “gas princess” in the late 1990s for being the head of a leading natural gas importer. She served as deputy prime minister for fuel and energy under President Kuchma, but the two fell out. In 2001 she was jailed briefly on suspicion of smuggling gas but the case never went to trial. She then forged an opposition alliance with Yushchenko. Her peasant hair style, a blond braid, became an icon of the 2004 Orange protests.

Tymoshenko became Yushchenko’s prime minister in January 2005, but the Orange alliance fractured after only a few months. Tymoshenko was ousted by Yanukovych’s party following the 2006 parliamentary vote but regained power after the December 2007 elections, returning to take the blame for Ukraine’s near-financial collapse in 2008.

Once a foe of Russia’s ambitions in the region, Tymoshenko last year mended fences with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. She is a hypnotic orator who has sometimes been compared to Argentina’s Eva Peron and has strong support in rural areas. She is 49.

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VIKTOR YUSHCHENKO: The patrician former central banker became prime minister in 1999 and implemented important reforms, but was ousted two years later by President Kuchma over policy disputes. Yushchenko and Tymoshenko then formed an opposition movement and he ran for president in 2004. During that campaign, Yushchenko was poisoned, shunned by the major media and defeated by a rigged ballot. But he helped rally hundreds of thousands to the streets and won the court-ordered revote against Yanukovych in December 2004, becoming an international symbol of resistance.

As president, Yushchenko was hobbled by election-eve compromises with Kuchma that stripped the presidency of much power, and by quarrels with Tymoshenko. He failed to implement promised economic and political reforms and was increasingly marginalized by the tycoons in Ukraine’s powerful parliament. He drew only 5.5 percent in the first round of the 2010 presidential vote, missing the runoff.

Yushchenko caused an international furor last month by awarding the Hero of Ukraine award to Stepan Bandera, a nationalist whose movement sided with Nazi Germany during part of World War II. Yushchenko is 55.