In late October, Ukraine re-privatized its Kryvorizhstal steel works in a live auction watched, apparently, by millions on television. The action was a reversal of the privatization that had taken place under the previous government. The old sale would have brought in $800 million. The new sale, to Mittal Steel Germany GmbH, will net $4.8 billion. Broadcasting the auction was a clear sign of transparency, a way of bringing crucial deals out of the back rooms and away from suspicion.

As the Wall Street Journal Europe noted on October 26, that sum is 20 percent of Ukraine’s annual budget. The sale increased total foreign investment in Ukraine since independence in 1991 by 50 percent.

Ukraine still has a long way to go to live up to the ideals of the Orange Revolution, and old structures are hard to root out. But this sale is one of a number of positive signs. Here’s hoping for more, as the first anniversary of the revolution approaches.

There’s a long article on Ukraine by two Tims, Garton Ash and Synder, in the New York Review of Books.

Regular readers of this site and Garton Ash’s Guardian column may not find anything revelatory, though I found this rather startling:

…the very large sums poured into Yanukovych’s campaign by Russian sources, which have been estimated in the Russian press to amount to some $300 million

but anyway it’s an interesting summary of events leading up to the election, and what the implications might be.

A happy ending for once. Has he died his hair brown?

Neeka liveblogged it. See my Ukraine Kinja digest for more blogospheric reactions.

(Added on Monday: I never got a round to publish my draft yesterday. Bollocks.)

How some of the siloviki went over to Yushchenko and, in their account, helped prevent a crackdown in Kiev on or around November. One of the reasons the orange revolution didn’t end in blood red.

Difficult to check, of course, and naturally the services want to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, but consistent in its outlines with what we were hearing at the time, too.

While wet snow fell on the rally in Independence Square, an undercover colonel from the Security Service of Ukraine, or S.B.U., moved among the protesters’ tents. He represented the successor agency to the K.G.B., but his mission, he said, was not against the protesters. It was to thwart the mobilizing troops. He warned opposition leaders that a crackdown was afoot.

Simultaneously, senior intelligence officials were madly working their secure telephones, in one instance cooperating with an army general to persuade the Interior Ministry to turn back.

The officials issued warnings, saying that using force against peaceful rallies was illegal and could lead to prosecution and that if ministry troops came to Kiev, the army and security services would defend civilians, said an opposition leader who witnessed some of the exchanges and Oleksander Galaka, head of the military’s intelligence service, the G.U.R., who made some of the calls.

Read the whole story before it disappears into pay-per-view.