KYIV – Not since the Euro-Maidan revolution have Kyiv’s streets seen such unrest as what occurred last weekend and turned out to be President Petro Poroshenko’s worst domestic political crisis to date.
Several thousand protesters led by opposition lawmakers marched to Kyiv’s Independence Square on December 10, calling for the billionaire president’s impeachment, the release of ex-Georgian leader turned Ukrainian politician Mikheil Saakashvili and progress to uproot high-level corruption.
The rally at once questioned Mr. Poroshenko’s credentials of being reformist and pro-democratic, and cast his administration in the negative light of “using the old tried and tested levers of power,” said Timothy Ash, a London-based senior emerging markets strategist for BlueBay Asset Management.
Two intertwined incidents led to the culmination of the anti-government demonstration. One was the alleged concerted effort by authorities to further create logjams preventing the establishment of a long-promised anti-corruption court as they attempted to weaken graft-fighting institutions. The other is the detainment of Mr. Saakashvili, ex-president of Georgia and ex-governor of Odesa – a former university pal of the Ukrainian president. Mr. Poroshenko had hired Mr. Saaskashvili in 2015 but had a falling out with him in November 2016.
Sapping independent anti-graft institutions
While the respective heads of the independent Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Nazar Kholodnytsky and Artem Sytnyk, were visiting Washington on December 4-6, two pro-presidential parliamentary factions introduced legislation that would allow the Verkhovna Rada to remove them from office.
Meanwhile, the Security Service of Ukraine and the Prosecutor General’s Office had a week earlier, on November 30, jointly disrupted a NABU sting operation, the anti-graft agency alleges. That day, seven NABU agents had their cover blown when authorities detained them during an operation to give a $30,000 bribe to a State Migration Service official who purportedly was soliciting it.
Then, a national deputy who was vociferous on graft, former journalist Yegor Soboliev of the opposition Samopomich party, was ousted as head of the legislature’s Anti-Corruption Committee on December 7 by pro-presidential parties allied with the Opposition Bloc.
Western backlash ensued in the interim, including from the United States, the European Union and lenders like the Washington-based International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
“It serves no purpose for Ukraine to fight for its body in Donbas if it loses its soul to corruption,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement on December 4. “Anti-corruption institutions must be supported, resourced and defended.”
In turn, the EU’s delegation in Ukraine said in a Tweet on December 7 that the country “should strengthen and not weaken anti-corruption institutions.” As a result, Parliament removed the bill that would have enabled lawmakers to dismiss the heads of independent graft-fighting bodies from its agenda for next week.
Ukrainian Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko said the country could expect to install an anti-corruption court – also an IMF pre-condition for receiving additional funds as part of a $17.5 billion economic recovery plan – in February 2018.
Speaking to Reuters on December 12, the justice minister said the bill has “every chance” to pass in the first days of February, following the Verkhovna Rada’s winter break.
“If this law is introduced with the principles of non-political, transparent and independent recruitment of judges, there is a high probability that there will be a majority in the Parliament,” he noted, according to Reuters.
The nation’s judiciary is still viewed as a bottleneck for stamping out rent-seeking schemes, enabling so-called raider attacks on companies and letting corrupt officials elude conviction.
Just last week, on December 5, Petro Melnyk, the former head of the state-run academy that trains future tax collectors, was acquitted of “causing 33 million hrv ($4 million U.S.) worth of damage to the state” in 2013, the Interfax Ukraine news agency reported.
It was his second acquittal on separate corruption charges since 2015 when the post-Euro-Maidan leadership already ran the country. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group called the two acquittals “eyebrow-raising” in a December 12 statement.
From Georgian president
to alleged Russian proxy
Mr. Saakashvili, the former two-term president of Georgia who oversaw the country’s rapid transformation from a graft-ridden post-Soviet republic, was detained late on December 8 on suspicion of taking money from a Russia-based exiled Ukrainian businessman closely tied to Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle.
One of the three accusations leveled against Mr. Saakashvili includes an attempt to overthrow the current government.
Both the now stateless Ms. Saakashvili and the businessman, Serhiy Kurchenko, who allegedly resides in Moscow, denied the allegations through separate Ukrainian media outlets.
Upon being freed on December 11 by a Kyiv district court that denied prosecutors’ request for house arrest, Mr. Saakashvili said he plans “to consolidate with other political forces,” as Bloomberg reported. “We don’t need coups. We need to press the authorities so they adopt all the necessary laws. And we need to get ready for a constitutional, calm, important and necessary change of power in Ukraine.”
The two suspects denied knowing each other. Mr. Kurchenko spoke to Strana.ua, a Ukrainian online news portal, while Mr. Saakashvili has repeatedly rejected the allegations to reporters during his courtroom appearance and afterwards.
Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko released purported evidence of collusion between the native Georgian and alleged Russia-based interlocutors during a briefing in Kyiv on December 5.
During the briefing, the chief prosecutor played audio recordings from October of Mr. Saakashvili allegedly talking to Mr. Kurchenko to set up transfers of funds between their respective middlemen. Much of the 30-minute recording was between the alleged point men, who discussed a sum of $300,000 for holding anti-government protests.
Along with grabbing power, Mr. Saakashvili was to also “renew control over assets” that Mr. Yanukovych and his cronies “had criminally acquired in Ukraine,” Mr. Lutsenko said, adding that the exiled compatriots were controlled by Russia’s spy agency – the Federal Security Service.
Ambiguity currently prevails regarding Mr. Poroshenko’s administration as his re-election campaign starts next year, along with jockeying for seats in the Verkhovna Rada. Both the presidential and parliamentary elections are scheduled for 2019.
“But a pervasive view which came across on this trip [to Ukraine] was real uncertainty now [about] where Ukraine is going, and real nervousness as to whether the pace and direction of reform will be maintained,” London-based strategist Mr. Ash wrote. “Have the old oligarchic elites totally re-imposed their control/authority, and is the current situation in Ukraine all that different from the period 2011-2013 in the lead-up to the Euro-Maidan? And I think there is a real fear of a populist backlash.”