Ukraine's chaos threatens to engulf Euro 2012

 With only a month until the football kicks off, can Ukraine limit the damage done by terrorist attacks and corruption scandals?
Beaten female prisoners, hunger strikes, and terrorist attacks – surely this is not the backdrop that organisers or Ukrainian football fans imagined for the Euro 2012 football championship that Ukraine is due to co-host with Poland in just over a month.
Yet this is where Ukraine finds itself after four explosions in the eastern city of Dnipropetrovsk injured at least 27 people today, while former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has begun a hunger strike after an incident in prison where she claims that prison officials kicked her in the stomach while taking her to the hospital by force. All this adds up to a chaotic scene ahead of an event that Ukrainian authorities hoped would draw tourists to the country for a month-long celebration of the beautiful game.
The blasts, which targeted a tram stop, a cinema and a railway station, happened in Tymoshenko's home town and the recriminations have already begun. While President Viktor Yanukovych called the explosions "yet another challenge for the whole country," deputy parliament speaker and Tymoshenko ally Mykola Tomenko suggested that the attack could have been orchestrated by the government in order to quieten western criticism of the Tymoshenko case.
Tymoshenko is currently serving a seven-year sentence for abuse of office in a case condemned across the EU as politically motivated. The case has been the major sticking point in EU/Ukraine relations, with an association agreement negotiated by both sides delayed by concerns about Ukraine's judiciary.
With Euro 2012 looming, Tymoshenko gains leverage with each passing day and Yanukovych's version of the Ukraine begins to look more and more preposterous. Tymoshenko is proving that while she remains in prison, she still has the power to politically hurt her rival, and while she cannot be mistaken for the sainted Aung San Suu Kyi, she remains a sympathetic figure in the eyes of EU citizens precisely because of the heavy-handed way in which she was treated by Yanukovych and his allies, a situation that draws obvious parallels to the treatment of jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
When Ukrainian first deputy prime minister Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy implied this week that Ukraine would free Yulia Tymoshenko if the EU signed the association agreement, all the worst stereotypes associated with post-Soviet political life immediately came to mind. While this sort of transactional politics may be perfectly normal in Ukraine's political arena, it falls far outside the EU's more bureaucratic norms.
Ukraine suffered another political blow when German president Joachim Gauck chose to boycott a central European heads of state meeting scheduled for next month in Yalta. While the German team is unlikely to boycott the championships, a number of EU politicians may do so and German fans who were still undecided about following their team to Kharkiv and Lviv may think twice about going just like the English, Croatians, Dutch or French.
This is not necessarily because of poor politics, but because of atrocious public relations. If the perception among the EU press is that Ukraine is a corrupt society that cannot afford decent treatment to someone like Yulia Tymoshenko, then why should a regular fan feel safe when all the bad stereotypes of lawlessness beyond the EU's eastern frontier are being actively reinforced by Ukraine's government?
At the same time, the terrorist blasts in Dnipropetrovsk add to the perception of chaos and with reports that the police are now checking rubbish bins around the city for more explosives, the tension is unlikely to dissipate soon.
It all adds up to a public relations disaster for the Ukrainian government, and with the championships a little more than a month away, it will soon be too late for damage control, even in the arena where the authorities retain full control of the situation.
Sadly, it may not matter how beautiful Lviv is, or how good the modernisation of Kiev's Olimpiysky National Sports Complex turned out. Ukraine's championships are in trouble, and time is quickly running out.