September 4, 2015

Deadly violence erupts after vote to amend Constitution

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Presidential Administration of Ukraine

A military farewell ceremony for the three National Guardsmen killed in the August 31 violence near the Verkhovna Rada. The deceased are: Ihor Debrin, 24, Oleksandr Kostyna, 20, and Dmytro Slastnikov, 21.

KYIV – Ukraine endured on August 31 its most serious domestic political conflict since the Euro-Maidan when violent protests erupted on August 31 over the decision of the Verkhovna Rada to approve the first reading of constitutional amendments to shift certain state authority to local governments.

The vote prompted simple bombs and explosives to fly towards Parliament from the crowd of hundreds of protesters, the majority being Svoboda party nationalists. The attacks were capped off by a military grenade that killed three National Guardsmen (one immediately) and hospitalized more than 90, news reports said.

The conflict drove a wedge in Ukraine’s pro-Western forces, pitting the business-oriented, establishment parties against the populist, nationalist forces, who insisted the amendments betray national interests. Oleh Lyashko’s Radical Party announced the next day it was abandoning the ruling coalition in the Verkhovna Rada.

“Pay attention to who voted for the constitutional amendments – former members of the Party of Regions voted in a single impulse along with the pro-presidential majority,” said Sergei Gaiday, a veteran Kyiv political consultant. “The nightmare of a broad coalition is now practically fulfilled and the first signs are apparent: the radicals have already announced their exit from the pro-European coalition. We are currently seeing a standard step in counter-revolution and revenge.”

The amendments drew 265 votes in favor, compared to 288 votes on July 16, which was the vote to send them to the Constitutional Court for review. Three out of the five coalition factions voted against them, including the Radical Party, the Samopomich (Self-Reliance) Party and Batkivshchyna, led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.

Those in favor were the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front led by Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the Russian-oriented Opposition Bloc and two deputies’ groups, Will of the People and Rebirth, which consist of big businessmen and former Party of Regions members.

What particularly fueled the outrage was the amendment establishing a “specific order” in the occupied districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. It would grant full immunity to the Russian-backed terrorists from any prosecution, enabling them to run for political office in local elections, remain in office for the full length of their terms, appoint prosecutors and judges, form local police forces and establish “deep neighborly relations” with districts in the Russian Federation.

“This is part of Putin’s plan for splitting and federalizing Ukraine and is practically the legalization of the Russian occupation on the occupied territory of Donbas,” Mr. Lyashko said in an August 27 interview with the News One television network.

The constitutional provision would also require socio-economic financing of the occupied districts from the central budget, a condition that has particularly infuriated nationalist forces.

“Moscow needs ‘autonomy’ for the Donbas, where the ‘Russian World’ will be built at the expense of the Ukrainian budget,” said Oleh Tiahnybok, the leader of the Svoboda party who led the violent protests outside the parliament building.

“Unable to take us by storm, Putin is now trying to act by perfidy, spreading the cancerous tumor of so-called ‘special statuses’ and ‘autonomy,’ ” he said.

[The Minsk accords refer to the legal order in the occupied territories as a “special status,” while the amendments use the term “specific order,” according to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. The Weekly was not able to review the text of the amendments to verify the term used.]

The notion that the Donetsk specific order is a capitulation before Russia that won’t resolve its occupation of Crimea and the Donbas is also shared among establishment political observers such as Taras Voznyak, the director of the Renaissance Fund in Lviv.

With the governments of France, Germany and the U.S. supporting the Donbas specific order, Russia has gained the main concession it was seeking from the West, Mr. Voznyak said, which is “to gradually recreate Ukraine into a federation, or even a confederation, taking into account the possible future status of Crimea.”

“The approval of such a constitutional norm threatens fragmentation in the future,” he noted.

Criticism was directed also against the other amendments, which the president and his allies have argued will introduce long-awaited decentralization of authority to Ukrainian governance.

After independence, Ukrainian governance grew more centralized than under the Soviet Union, with at least 70 percent of spending determined by the national government in Kyiv, estimated Andriy Novak, the head of the Committee of Economists of Ukraine.

Although the amendments eliminate the “state administrations,” which is the representative body of the Presidential Administration in the country’s oblasts and districts, critics said the newly created institutions of prefects and executive committees to replace the system will only tighten the president’s authority in Ukraine’s regions.

“The government is fooling the people,” Mr. Tiahnybok said. “It’s talking about decentralization, but it’s truly strengthening the presidential chain of command and creating local chiefs and dictators.”

Indeed, the amendments arrange for presidentially appointed prefects (instead of oblast state administration chairs) to coordinate the work of regional and district governing bodies, particularly the executive committees (which replace the state oblast and district administrations).

The prefects must ensure they fulfill national programs, similar to what the state administrations already do, as well as monitor them to ensure they don’t violate national laws and the Constitution, said Vitalii Kovalchuk, a national deputy with the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR) and a close advisor to Mr. Poroshenko.

The president has the ability to dissolve the councils and appoint a temporary acting head for a term of no longer than a year. At the recommendation of the Cabinet of Ministers, the president can also appoint and dismiss the prefects, who remain subject to the president’s authority but report to the Cabinet.

“I read the law on decentralization and can say that this is what we’ve long hoped for,” Oleh Rybachuk, a former vice prime minister for Euro-integration, wrote in a column for the nv.ua news site published on September 2. “It has the support of the Venice Commission [of the Council of Europe] and de-Sovietizes the government. For the first time, the right things have been proposed at the local level.”

The president’s mistake was failing to hold a national discussion on the amendments, particularly with those opposed, Mr. Rybachuk wrote.

For instance, more than 30 leading intellectual authorities, including former Foreign Affairs Minister Volodymyr Ohryzko, signed an appeal, published on the pravda.com.ua news site on August 13, asking the president not to introduce any constitutional amendments for as long as war is being waged in Donbas.

The appeal was duly ignored by the president, said Serhiy Datsyuk, a contemporary philosopher.

“Our politicians don’t consult or agree to changes with the public,” wrote Mr. Rybachuk, who also signed the appeal. “They merely inform the public. Such things as constitutional amendments are supposed to be approved at a constitutional assembly, which would consist of people who aren’t active politicians.”

It’s clear that President Poroshenko is striving to keep in place the closed power structure, in which the only competitive political parties are those financed by oligarchs, he said. This approach is drawing the president to his political demise, he said.

“There is an absolutely reasonable chance that Poroshenko will very quickly disappear from the political arena if he continues to conduct politics using old methods, because we have a completely different society and completely different demands,” commented Mr. Rybachuk.

Such old, corrupt methods were apparent in the days leading up to the contested vote, observers said.

Government leaders pressured Samopomich national deputies to vote in support of the constitutional amendments, Andriy Sadovyi, the Lviv City Council chair (mayor) and head of the Samopomich party, reported on August 29 on his Facebook page

“They’re offering money, positions, prospects and so forth,” he wrote. “I am absolutely convinced of the firm, principled position of the majority of my colleagues. Regarding the few who are weighing their options, I am left to hope that they read the right books in childhood.”

In response, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Groisman called upon the Procurator General’s Office and the National Anticorruption Bureau to conduct an independent, objective and quick investigation of the claims.

The procurator general called Mr. Sadovyi in for questioning in the morning of August 31, the day of the vote, which sparked outrage among critics as evidence that authoritarian tactics were being used to pressure politicians. (Although he heads the party, Mr. Sadovyi isn’t a national deputy.)

“Putin succeeded in splitting the political class in the post-Yanukovych Ukraine,” said Mr. Voznyak. “Of course, there were differences earlier, but no one called a political ally or opponent in for questioning on the day of the vote for a needed bill. My question to the president’s political advisors is, ‘How will the pro-presidential electorate react to Sadovyi being called into the Procurator General’s Office?’”

After the vote, Mr. Sadovyi told the pravda.com.ua news site there was a direct link between his accusations of pressure and the results, in which five Samopomich deputies supported the amendments, including the faction head, Hanna Hopko. He pointed out that only Ms. Hopko had supported the amendments in the July 16 vote.

The faction voted that same day to evict the five, drawing the accusation from Ms. Hopko that Samopomich was drawing towards “Bolshevik authoritarianism.”

In response, Mr. Sadovyi said the constitutional amendments were an issue of principle, which demands the unanimous support of all its deputies, but only after a thorough debate, which he said occurred.

Parliament also held its latest debate on the amendments before the vote, in which National Deputy Yuriy Lutsenko dismissed claims that the prefects were local dictators and said they were in place to prevent any further separatist attempts.

In response to arguments that it’s not worth amending the Constitution at a time of war, Mr. Lutsenko said the amendments won’t take effect for another two years. He raised the example of Croatia granting special status to the separatist Republic of Serbian Krajina, which folded after four years and returned to Croatia.

“The Republic of Croatia stood barehanded, just like our heroes, against the armed-to-the-teeth Yugoslav Army,” Mr. Lutsenko said. “It voted 20 times for the special status of this separatist enclave, only so that the sun would rise and that one day, the victorious army would free this country. The sun will rise for us too if we don’t act like ‘khutoriany’ (peasants).”

Such arguments didn’t impress the many hundreds gathered outside the Parliament building the morning of August 31, which in addition to Svoboda members also included members of the Radical Party, Pravyi Sektor forces that blocked traffic on Hrushevsky Street, and Ukrop, a political party launched by billionaire Igor Kolomoisky, perhaps Mr. Poroshenko’s biggest rival.

The protests were fueled by the lack of public discussion on the amendments, which were approved by the Constitutional Court on July 31. Deputies such as Alyona Shkrum of Batkivshchyna, writing on her Facebook page, asserted that the president was merely interested in ramming the amendments through Parliament.

Inside the Parliament, deputies of the Radical Party blocked the parliamentary tribune before freeing it after more than an hour to allow the session to be held. But then they resorted to shouting “Shame!” as Mr. Groisman led the proceedings, shouting over various speakers and sounding sirens in their made-for-TV protest.

Yurii Shukhevych, the son of legendary Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) Commander Roman Shukhevych and a member of the Radical Party, called the Donbas-specific order a betrayal of national interests and compared its supporters to slaves to the European Union, quoting Lenin of all people. “A slave not realizing his slavery is simply a slave,” he said. “A slave realizing his enslaved condition and fighting against it is a revolutionary. A slave realizing his enslaved condition and delighting in the kindness of his master is a lackey.”

The conflict outside Parliament escalated once the vote occurred, just an hour after the session began.

Svoboda nationalists placed portraits of party members killed in the war, which they said were knocked down by the National Guardsmen. Shoving matches turned into attempts to storm the Parliament as party leaders swung various types of clubs and long objects.

After the vote, smoke bombs, sound grenades, tear gas bombs and simple explosives were hurled at the Parliament building, some of which were flung back at the crowd by the National Guardsmen.

Before the military grenade explosion, as many as 15 law enforcement officers were already injured, said Oleksandr Tereshchuk, the head of the Kyiv administration of the Internal Affairs Ministry.

The lethal grenade was flung at about 1:45 p.m., immediately killing 24-year-old Ihor Debrin, a Kherson Oblast native who was drafted for the war and hadn’t yet served his half-year term. By the next day, the ministry confirmed two more National Guard casualties, 21-year-old Dmytro Slastnikov and 20-year old Oleksandr Kostyna.

More than 90 law enforcement officers were hospitalized, most with shrapnel wounds or concussions; 12 of them were reported by the end of the day to have undergone surgery. A total of 125 suffered some form of injury, Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov reported by the day’s end.

By the night of September 2, 138 law enforcement officers, including 85 police officers and 53 National Guardsmen, were reported by the Internal Affairs Ministry to still be hospitalized from the day’s protests.

Within three hours of the attack, Mr. Avakov was able to identify the grenade thrower as Ihor Humeniuk, a 24-year-old activist with the Svoboda party who served in the Donbas war. He was among 18 detained that day, nine of whom were eventually criminally charged and incarcerated for their violent activity.

Mr. Humeniuk denied committing the act, despite video recordings on the Internet showing someone of his build, even wearing a similar T-shirt, hurling the deadly object. He also claimed to have been beaten by police while in custody.

Police charged him with murder, attempted murder and committing an act of terrorism, which could carry up to a life sentence.

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