December 8, 2015

Activists call for united front against Ukraine’s corrupt oligarchs

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KYIV – If there’s anything that Ukrainians can agree on, it’s that the country’s headed for an enormous crisis next year that promises to alter the current state of affairs, particularly the ongoing domination of the nation’s corrupt oligarchy.

Not only have Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk failed to pursue structural reforms or rein in the oligarchs, but they’ve been exposed in corrupt schemes, and so have the entourages they brought with them. Increasingly, prominent figures such as Donbas oligarch Serhiy Taruta are warning of political-economic collapse within months.

“We’ve already passed the bifurcation point of where we can’t doubt it any longer – there’s no possibility of survival in this existing model,” said Yuriy Romanenko, the director of the Strategema Center of Political Analysis in Kyiv.

The big question now is what the new model will look like. In order to stop the current descent into chaos, activists have begun calling for urgent action, and among the most-discussed proposals is forming a unifying nationwide force to challenge the oligarchs, who haven’t been able to reach a consensus amid their heavy influence over Ukraine’s politics.

“We need to set the task now that we should have done immediately after the Revolution of Dignity, which is to get together and form a political force as a counterweight to the oligarch projects. A simple unification of two small political parties is not an answer. The time has come to create a powerful platform that will win the competition for young, high-quality politicians,” Vasyl Hatsko, the head of the Democratic Alliance party, told the tyzhden.ua news site.

Among those young quality politicians are 15 national deputies of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, who held a press conference in the Verkhovna Rada on November 25 to announce they were forming a group, the Anti-Corruption Platform, within the faction to expose and fight corruption – both within their faction and beyond.

The announcement came a day after a closed-door meeting of faction deputies in which the reformists accused establishment politicians of not only indulging their own corrupt business schemes, but even undermining their reform projects.

“These were situations of the so-called ‘deoligarchization’ that began last year but was never completed and it’s happening now, when each of us is being persecuted and being destroyed in the media. All of our attempts to bring this information to the country’s leadership, to the procurator general, to law enforcement bodies merely ended with us being on our own. We decided to unite our efforts,” said Mustafa Nayyem, a Poroshenko Bloc national deputy.

Most of the 15 deputies were Euro-Maidan activists, including Mr. Nayyem, Euro-Maidan chief medic Dr. Olha Bohomolets and Svitlana Zalishchuk, a founder of the Reforms Resuscitation Package.

The mistake of that historic moment, Mr. Hatsko said, is that the Euro-Maidan activists went their separate ways for the 2014 parliamentary elections and joined oligarch parties after the protest, rather than uniting their efforts into a single force.

For example, Messrs. Nayyem and Serhii Leshchenko joined the Poroshenko Bloc, Igor Lutsenko joined the Batkivshchyna party, while Tetyana Chornovol joined the People’s Front party, which has lost so much support that it didn’t bother to run in the October local elections.

“Not creating such a platform we formed the preconditions for thousands of civic activists to become diluted in parties that hide their sources of financing,” Mr. Hatsko said. “We didn’t give these people alternatives, practically pushing them towards looking for opportunities in oligarch political projects. We can only win the fight for them when we unite our efforts and propose a dignified path towards fulfilling themselves.”

The public need for new leadership, particularly with the high stakes involved, has prompted the U.S. government to take action, reported Mr. Leshchenko, who has earned the reputation among his colleagues as “the voice of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.”

The U.S. government has already begun acting behind the scenes ahead of U.S Vice-President Joe Biden’s planned visit to Kyiv on December 7, with the aim of removing corrupt actors from government, reported the newspaper Ekspres.

The first result could have come on December 1, when National Deputy Mykola Martynenko announced he was surrendering his mandate as a national deputy. He is also widely recognized as one of the closest political allies of Mr. Yatsenyuk and a key financer of his election campaigns.

With wealth estimated in the hundreds of millions from sources such as nuclear fuel trading, Mr. Martynenko is the target of criminal charges filed by the Swiss government for allegedly taking a bribe of 30 million Swiss francs from a Czech supplier of atomic power plant equipment, as reported by Mr. Leshchenko.

Ekspres went so far as to claim the U.S. government is searching for replacements for Messrs. Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, even naming former Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko and physics major-turned-rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk as possible candidates to lead a political project.

Ekspres called this scenario “Pyatt’s plan” – a reference to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt – which is based on “a soft replacement of the government hierarchy without a loss of control.”

Yet just how this replacement is supposed to occur without an election wasn’t explained by Ekspres and eluded Ukraine’s political experts. The U.S. Embassy didn’t comment on the Ekspres report, but has previously said it doesn’t influence Ukrainian elections.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian civic leaders made their latest attempt this week to warn the current government of the disastrous consequences of its irresponsibility.

“We don’t want a new revolution that you are unconsciously approaching. We are ready to take responsibility for the future of our country. So we are not requesting, but demanding,” said the letter published on December 1 signed by civic activists and young politicians, including Messrs. Nayyem and Leshchenko, Ukrayinska Pravda Chief Editor Sevgil Musaeva-Borovik, Novoye Vremya Chief Editor Vitaly Sych, Forbes Ukraina Chief Editor Volodymyr Fedorin and Valeriy Pekar, one of the founders of the Nova Krayina civic platform.

The demands included launching a real fight against corruption, renewing justice, achieving rule of law, ensuring the transparency of government, presenting a clear plan to overcome the economic and humanitarian crisis, and returning occupied territory.

The idea of activists uniting to challenge the oligarchs is being promoted by Yuriy Romanenko, the director of the Strategema Center of Political Analysis in Kyiv and chief editor of the hvylya.net political website.

He said he’s confident that a political force or forces, led by what he described as the “new elite,” will emerge in the next three months, with Western backing, to challenge the nation’s oligarchs – or the “old elite” – to reach a consensus on the nation’s future, particularly in the context of amending the Constitution of Ukraine.

This is what happened in Tunisia in 2011, where the Jasmine Revolution led to a peaceful transition to a new model of governance.

“A significant part of the existing oligarchs is ready to transition to such a model,” Mr. Romanenko said at a November 30 press conference in Kyiv.

“The moment that a political force emerges as a guarantor of relations with the oligarch groups – which are incapable of finding common ground – is when a pivot will emerge around which the new governance begins to be built because the oligarchs begin to communicate with it and the West begins to communicate with it, since those who ensure negotiating ability gain a super position of being important for everyone and, in turn, gain a resource base that no one has,” he observed.

The effectiveness of such a political force will depend on the ability of the middle-class of Ukraine’s largest cities to organize themselves quickly enough in the next few months and gain access to a resource base to make them an equal player in Ukraine’s political landscape, said Mr. Romanenko.
If this political force fails to emerge, he outlined two alternative outcomes, the first being the current scenario of a “war of everyone against everyone.”

The logical outcome of this scenario is the fragmentation of Ukraine into a large-sized Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which the various regions are controlled by local oligarch groups and their foreign clients.

“Ukraine would become a gray zone controlled by local feudal lords: Viktor Baloha will control Zakarpattia, Rinat Akhmetov will have Zaporizhia and parts of the Donbas, Igor Kolomoisky will have Dnipropetrovsk, and so forth,” Mr. Romanenko said.

The second scenario is an armed overthrow, likely by nationalists, which will probably fail given the likelihood that they will be unable to gain access to economic resources to handle state expenses, such as paying pensions and the wages of soldiers, doctors and teachers.

“After two months, everyone will hate them, and they will have entered into conflict with everyone, who will start to kill them,” Mr. Romanenko said. “At that, the Russians will play off the destabilization, which will be exceptionally advantageous to them, and we lose southeastern Ukraine, which wants to eat.”

The threat remains that Ukraine will repeat its history from a century ago, when independence was declared only to have it lost to Moscow because the elites were unable to reach a consensus. Mr. Poroshenko is reminiscent of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, Mr. Romanenko said.

During his brief rule, which lasted less than a year in 1918, Skoropadsky formed alliances with Germany and Russia, which earned the support of wealthy landowners but incurred the wrath of hungry Ukrainian peasants.

“We are not even introspective on the historical experiences that we had,” Mr. Romanenko said. “If this experience is not fully absorbed, we’ll have a culture of endless revolts and maidans.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Taruta, the Donbas steel and metallurgical magnate, told the Ukrayinska Pravda news site in an interview published on December 1 that Ukraine has “half a year, maybe eight months, until the country’s economic collapse.”

“And that’s under the condition that we change something in that time,” he said, adding, “Earlier, people were dissatisfied, but now they’re aggressive, angry. And anger leads to them only resorting to force when they will act.”

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