Fear over Ukraine's contested presidential vote reached the country's banks on 30 November 2004, as anxious savers, many of them pensioners, crowded into branches in the eastern city of Donetsk to swap hryvnas for dollars and euros. One 76-year-old woman, Yulia Kopran, told reporters she hoped only to pull out about 1,000 hryvnas, roughly 190 dollars.
The scramble followed the 21 November runoff, which set off mass opposition protests and separatist warnings from several southeastern regions. To slow the flight into foreign currency, the central bank capped purchases at 1,000 dollars per outlet each day, though customers could repeat the deal at other booths. Many exchange kiosks stopped selling altogether, and cash machines across Donetsk carried out-of-order notices.
The strain spread. Crimea set price controls on bread, and Dniepropetrovsk told its cities to track food and fuel costs daily. Officials also limited businesses to 80,000 hryvnas in cash a month and individuals to 1,500 hryvnas a day, against an average October wage of 630 hryvnas.
Analysts said the bank had spent as much as 400 million dollars of its roughly 10-billion-dollar reserves in a week to steady the hryvna. "The economy is hostage to the political situation," said Andriy Blinov of the International Centre for Policy Studies. Donetsk backed pro-Russia Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, the declared winner, while opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko alleged fraud and demanded a rerun.
Where it stands now. The standoff became the Orange Revolution. Ukraine's Supreme Court threw out the fraudulent runoff and ordered a fresh vote, held on 26 December 2004, which Yushchenko won. He was inaugurated in January 2005.
TurkishPress summary of a November 2004 wire report.