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Savchenko’s allegiance questioned after meeting with Kremlin proxies

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KYIV – Nadiya Savchenko is a woman of many firsts. She is Ukraine’s first female military aviator and the first servicewoman to have received the nation’s highest honor – the golden star Hero of Ukraine medal. She was also the most trusted politician in Ukraine, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, when Russian President Vladimir Putin released her in May, after holding her in captivity for nearly two years on trumped up charges, in exchange for two Russian intelligence operatives. Now, Ms. Savchenko, 35, faces the dubious prospect of seeing her political star dim the fastest on record. She has faced a swirl of criticism from fellow lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada, including from the Batkivshchyna party on whose ticket she was elected in absentia, for secretly meeting with Kremlin-backed separatists in Minsk on December 11.

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Russian-born oligarch, a Yanukovych ally, stripped of parliamentary immunity

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KYIV – Lawmakers voted to strip Vadym Novinsky, 53, of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution on December 8 based on a motion filed by the prosecutor general that he allegedly was involved in kidnapping. The Russian-born oligarch and ally of disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych called the measure “politically motivated” and “fabricated” as did his party, the Opposition Bloc, an offshoot of the former ruling Party of Regions. “I will accept your decision calmly, whatever it will be,” Mr. Novinsky said before the vote. “Because I know that the truth is on my side, and the truth always wins.”

Mr. Novinsky said he will not “run away” or attempt to avoid the investigation, according to a post-vote briefing. Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has yet to name Mr. Novinsky a suspect.

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Kyiv defies Moscow with missile tests, as Putin ignores Ukraine in annual speech

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KYIV – Relations between Ukraine and Russia hit a new low last week when Kyiv held a series of missile tests and military exercises on December 1-2 near the Kremlin-annexed peninsula of Crimea. Kyiv had fired more than a dozen mid-range anti-aircraft missiles over the two-day period from Kherson in the south that flew as close as 30 kilometers near Crimean airspace that Moscow considers its own, yet is not internationally recognized. Even though Ukraine had sent out what are called NOTAMs, or aviation notices, on November 24 for sea and air space restrictions, Russia balked two days before the exercises. Russia’s Defense Ministry warned that it would shoot down the rockets and launchers on Ukrainian territory in a note delivered initially to the defense attaché at Ukraine’s Embassy in Moscow, according to the Interfax news agency. The Kremlin later toned its stance on December 1, the first day of the scheduled missile launches.

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Yanukovych testifies in trial related to Euro-Maidan killings

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Former president faces charges of high treason

KYIV – From the outset, post-Soviet Ukraine’s fourth president, Viktor Yanukovych, started lying. “I’ve never committed a crime,” he said via video link from a Russian court in Rostov-on-Don on November 28. It was his first testimony to a Ukrainian court, given as a witness, and related to the trial of five riot police officers who were allegedly involved in the mass killings in central Kyiv during the Euro-Maidan Revolution in 2013-2014. Like Mr. Yanukovych, many of the law enforcement officers who allegedly gunned down some 100 protesters during the uprising either fled to the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory of Crimea or to Russia. While giving testimony that lasted over six hours, Mr. Yanukovych failed to mention that he is a twice-convicted felon.

Holodomor

Kyiv solemnly remembers the Holodomor

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KYIV – Hundreds of Kyiv residents, including Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and First Lady Maryna Poroshenko, took part in a solemn ceremony to commemorate the Holodomor, or death by forced starvation, on November 26 in Park Slavy (Glory Park). Millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in 1932-1933 on the orders of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin carried out by his henchmen in Ukraine. At 4 p.m. on November 26 – the official Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holodomor – a moment of silence was observed. As the sun set, people nationwide set lit candles on windowsills to remember this act of genocide. Estimates vary, as do methodologies for counting, but researchers say that between 3 million and 10 million Ukrainians died, with approximately 24 dying every minute during the peak period in the early 1930s, according to historians.

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On Euro-Maidan’s third anniversary, many see the revolution as incomplete

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KYIV – Dmytro Zhytniy can’t lift anything heavy, and is unable to run or jump. On January 23, 2014, when authorities started kidnapping members of the so-called Auto-Maidan – the roving protest on wheels – riot police ambushed and abducted Mr. Zhytniy on a Kyiv side street called Kriposny Provulok while the trained heavyweight boxer was rushing to the protesters’ aid. He was called to action near the city’s central Trade Union building, where he provided security as a Maidan self-defense unit member during his two days off from work at a local do-it-yourself store. Police put Mr. Zhytniy, 47, and several others into a paddy wagon. They beat their captives en route to a nearby forest, where they were forced to kneel for about one and a half hours in sub-zero temperatures.

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Saakashvili resigns Odesa governorship, citing sabotage of reform by central authorities

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KYIV – In July 2015, less than two months after his one-time college chum President Petro Poroshenko appointed him as governor of the strategic Black Sea region of Odesa, Mikheil Saakashvili deployed a bulldozer through an oligarch’s beachfront property to give the public access to the seashore. It was a display of his proclaimed resolve to sever the seemingly blurry nexus of politics and business, and clean up the region whose ports historically have served as a transit point for all sorts of vice and tax evasion. To replicate the feat, the former Georgian president, whom the World Bank named the world’s top reformer in 2006 for reducing graft and opening his country up to business, brought in a young, highly educated team, some of them from his homeland, others from the West. They included David Sakvarelidze, who would simultaneously serve as the Odesa Oblast’s prosecutor and as one of the country’s deputy prosecutors general. After 17 months on the job, however, the energetic former president of Georgia resigned on November 7, accusing his boss and local mafia clans allegedly loyal to him of sabotaging him at every step, casting the sincerity of Ukraine’s overall reform project in doubt.

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Prime minister’s chief investment adviser, a Ukrainian Canadian, sees ‘the new Ukraine’

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LVIV – Few people know that the hryvnia, Ukraine’s currency, was first printed in Canada. Still fewer people know that Daniel Bilak negotiated the deal in 1991 for Canada-based Faskens law firm when his ancestral homeland regained independence. As of November 1, he’ll have to broker bigger deals in the next 12 months as the Ukrainian prime minister’s chief investment adviser and director of the newly created Ukraine Investment Promotion Office (IPO). “It’s an overwhelming job,” the now former managing partner of international law firm CMS Cameron McKenna in Kyiv told The Ukrainian Weekly over a digital voice call from Lviv. “We could fundamentally re-brand Ukraine…So that when people abroad hear about Ukraine, they don’t think corruption, but ‘wow, high-technology, agribusiness,’ they think agricultural technology, they think of a modern country that is open for business.”

Mr. Bilak’s goal is to raise at least $1 billion during the 12-month secundment from the London-based law firm.

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E-mail leak shows Russia’s plan to destabilize Ukraine

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KYIV – Further evidence that the Kremlin engineered the armed uprising in eastern Ukraine surfaced on October 25 when a Ukrainian hacker group published e-mail data allegedly belonging to Vladislav Surkov, the Russian president’s top aide and point man on Ukraine and the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Comprising 2,337 messages, the communication allegedly shows the Kremlin playing a direct role in establishing a puppet government in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s two easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. They also show expense requests to Russia, casualty lists on the combined Russian-separatist side, as well as assessments of the social and political situation during the Euro-Maidan Revolution. A separate set of documents that hacker collective CyberJunta released a day earlier purport to show Moscow’s plans starting in mid-November to destabilize the political situation in Ukraine and spur pre-term parliamentary elections. The Digital Forensic Research Lab attached to the Washington-based Atlantic Council policy center, said that “nearly every bit of information in Surkov’s inbox” could be “verified” and that the “vast majority of them” are “real.”

Ukraine’s Security Service, known as the SBU, also said that the “majority of documents” are authentic.