Who Is This Viktor?

ANTHONY SUAU for TIME

JUBILANT: Yushchenko greets a post-election Kiev crowd

Late in the afternoon of Dec. 28, Viktor Yushchenko was working on a speech in his small second-floor office at the headquarters of his party, Our Ukraine. He had plenty to feel good about: he'd survived an assassination attempt and a plot to steal Ukraine's presidency away from him, and he was finally President-elect — the results were in from the Dec. 26 poll, and he had pulled over 2.2 million more votes than his opponent, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. That evening Yushchenko was to address his supporters on "the Maidan," or Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Kiev's Independence Square: the symbol of the...

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