As freedoms wane in ex-Soviet bloc, Ukraine fills the gap

Similar stories abound in today's Ukraine.

Yuriy Svirko, a 33-year-old journalist from Belarus, decided he'd had enough of President Alexander Lukashenko's iron-fisted rule after he was accused of attacking a presidential body guard and threatened with arrest. (He says it was the guard who attacked him.)

Svirko arrived in Kiev right after the Orange mass movement overturned a fraudulent election and brought reformist Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency.

Ukraine today is awash in competitive elections, noisy street protests and heated debates on TV shows and occasional fist fights in Parliament. Opposition rallies are held under the windows of the president's office, and many have forgotten a time when TV channels were state-controlled.

Savik Shuster had a TV political talk show in Russia until it was closed in 2004 as the Kremlin tightened the screws on media. Now he's in Kiev, hosting a similar program on a Ukrainian channel.

"In Ukraine, freedom of speech still exists," said Shuster, 55. But for Russia today, "openness is like light for a vampire."

During the past two years, Belarusian expatriates have held an annual "Belarusian Spring" festival, featuring fare banned back home -movies, poetry readings, underground rock bands.

This year's festival kicked off with a dozen activists racing down Kiev's main avenue on cross-country skis when snow was nowhere to be seen. It was a poke at Lukashenko, a winter-sports fan who every year makes government officials and professional athletes compete with him in a ski competition which he always wins.

But rights groups say that while Ukraine is good at welcoming professionals, it is still inhospitable to relatively unskilled political refugees, granting only 3 percent of applications for political asylum, compared with over 30 percent in neighboring Poland.

Ulugbek Zainabudinov, an Uzbek opposition activist, fled to Russia after a bloody crackdown on an uprising in his country. But Russian authorities began arresting the refugees at the Uzbek government's request, so in 2006 he moved to Ukraine.