C.J. Chivers, the man who wrote the much talked about NYT story about the Orange Revolution and the SBU, has written another piece in which he interviews Kuchma at length. Neeka’s Backlog has commentary and a couple more stories to look at.

Yet Mr. Kuchma accomplished critical tasks, including a sustained collaboration with Washington in nuclear disarmament and the closing of Chernobyl, the nuclear power plant that in 1986 suffered the worst nuclear accident in history. He leaves a country with a rapidly expanding economy, with independent parliamentary factions, an opposition television station and an often lively press. These would be all but unimaginable instruments of democracy in many former Soviet republics led by their former Communist Party men.

Judging from the article, I’d say Chivers did a pretty personal, “hands-on” interview. Or should I say “mouth-on?”

Last I checked, there is an opposition television station precisely because of Kuchma working against democracy. Though I hope I am the one incompetent in saying this, and not a reputable journalist.

To his critics and the opposition that paralyzed Kiev in November and December, he is a president who presided over the corrupt privatization of the nation’s resources, steering wealth toward supporters, relatives and eastern clans.

Maybe that’s because that’s what he did. But moving back to the beginning of the article, where Kuchma sobs into his “silk-covered, gold-leafed armchair,” complete with crown of thorns…

After 10 years in power, decades of influence and then scandal and opprobrium in his final term, President Leonid D. Kuchma’s last hours in office are upon him. He admits to melancholy and says that his pride over Ukraine’s advances since declaring its independence in 1991 is tinged with regret that he is leaving a nation divided. He concedes he might be arrested. His ambivalence is clear.

“One cannot be completely satisfied; many things I see now at a different angle,” he said, leaning forward from a silk-covered, gold-leafed armchair inside the presidential administration building that last month was blockaded by demonstrators chanting, “Criminals, out!”

“However, looking back at my life, I think it could not be done in any different way,” he said, quickly adding, “If I had known where I would stumble and fall, I would have put a cushion there.”

I am pretty sure many things could have happened differently, actually. For one, I’m thinking homosexuality would have been a funny twist to the political intrigue (and how Chivers would have loved to write about it), but as I alluded to, that may have already taken place between the two.

UPDATE: I’ve now created a followup to this post with a lot more detail. Check it out.