Freedom House is a prestigious international NGO, the activity of which I have traced for many years. I think there is an objective assessment by Freedom House of the human rights situation in Ukraine. Back in 2010—that means a couple of months after the new president assumed power and a new government was created—many analysts were asking why, so quickly, Ukrainian authorities managed to spoil the relationship with democratic institutions like the European Union and the Council of Europe.
Let me remind you that it was in October 2010 that the first critical resolution passed in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe regarding the critical situation of democracy in Ukraine. On November 25, the European Parliament approved the first critical resolution on the situation of democracy in Ukraine.
It required only nine months for the new authorities, led by Yanukovych, to spoil the relationship with the democratic community, which took his predecessor—well, before the predecessor, Leonid Kuchma—six years. For Kuchma, it required six years to spoil the relationship with democratic institutions, and Yanukovych managed to do this in a couple of months.