A CONSTITUTIONAL crisis that threatens to reverse Ukraine’s orange revolution and draw the former Soviet state back into the Russian orbit was triggered after huge bribes were offered to Ukrainian MPs to switch party allegiance, it was alleged this weekend.

The pro-western President Viktor Yushchenko, who announced last week that he was dissolving the Ukrainian parliament, claims that millions of pounds have been made available by supporters of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian prime minister.

Yanukovych refused to accept the dissolution and demonstrations by rival groups of supporters have prompted warnings of possible violence.

According to the president’s supporters, the amounts offered to MPs to defect to Yanukovych’s side have ranged up to £2.5m.

Eleven opposition MPs have been recruited in a development the president has branded unconstitutional, although there is no proof that any has accepted bribes.

Yanukovych’s coalition is aiming for a total of 300 seats that would give it the two-thirds majority it needs in the 450-seat assembly to change the constitution and strip the president of most of his powers.

According to Yulia Tymoshenko, the main pro-democracy parliamentary opposition leader, Yanukovych’s ruling Party of the Regions paid £150m to the Socialist party to secure its support.

Tymoshenko was the glamorous firebrand of the orange revolution in 2004, when millions of Ukrainians took to the streets to overturn Yanukovych’s victory in rigged elections. When Yushchenko won a rerun of the election, he made her prime minister but later fired her, splitting the pro-western political forces. He was forced to replace her with his arch foe, Yanukovych.

Russia, which sees Ukraine as pivotal in its attempt to bounce back to superpower status, is desperate to reassert its authority in the bitterly divided country through Yanukovych.

His refusal to accept the dissolution of parliament is backed by many MPs who made fortunes from a chaotic sale of state enterprises after Ukraine’s independence in 1991. A seat in parliament gives them immunity from prosecution and opportunities to expand their business empires.

Yanukovych and his cronies would prefer not to risk fresh elections because while his party would be expected to do well, its communist and socialist allies would probably be badly bruised.

This weekend Tymoshenko finally patched up her differences with the president and pledged that her party and Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine would cooperate if the elections, scheduled for May 27, go ahead.

Ukraine’s constitutional court must now rule on whether Yushchenko’s decree dissolving parliament is valid. A source close to the president admitted: “We know that the constitutional court is not ours and we don’t expect a favourable judgment.”

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