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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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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.

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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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Poroshenko congratulates Trump

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KYIV – President Petro Poroshenko congratulated Donald Trump on winning the presidential elections in the United States that took place on November 8. “My sincere congratulations to Donald Trump on being elected president of the United States and to the friendly American nation on democratic expression of will. This is a symbol of true democracy when nobody knew the results of the elections until the very last moment. And this is a feature of true democracy always professed and promoted by our reliable and strategic American partners and friends,” President Poroshenko said at a meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on November 9. Mr. Poroshenko emphasized that, by winning the highest office in the state, the new U.S. president also assumed responsibility for the global leadership of the United States in the democratic world.

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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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Leaders agree to draft road map to implement Minsk agreement

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The leaders of Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia agreed to draw up a road map by the end of next month to carry out the Minsk peace agreement for eastern Ukraine. After six hours of talks on the wars in Ukraine and Syria on October 19-20 in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel emerged to say the leaders “didn’t achieve miracles,” but the road map would enable all sides to keep pushing ahead with the 2015 Minsk peace agreement. The leaders also discussed creating zones of disengagement between the warring parties in eastern Ukraine, as well as measures to improve the humanitarian situation there, she said. “It’s urgently necessary to keep having such talks in order not to lose momentum,” said Ms. Merkel. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said the road map “should have the sequence of the implementation of the Minsk agreements and guarantee their implementation.”

He also said the leaders agreed to withdrawals of Ukrainian troops and Russia-backed separatists in four new areas on the front line of the fighting in the Donbas region.

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Newly elected president of UCCA speaks about the tasks ahead

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KYIV – Politicians like U.S. Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) call him Andriy in Ukrainian, not by his given name of Andrew. Officials at every level, whether national or local, have known Andriy Futey – the newly elected president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) – for 17 years as the leader of a government relations firm and for his advocacy efforts in various Ukrainian organizations. Now, for the next four years of his term, Mr. Futey, 50, hopes to harness the familiarity he has on Capitol Hill and in his home state of Ohio to promote the interests of the 1.5 million Ukrainians living in the United States. “Every organization as you go through it needs a jumpstart,” Mr. Futey told The Ukrainian Weekly in a Skype call on October 6, less than three weeks after succeeding two-term UCCA President Tamara Olexy and just a week after the former and current UCCA chiefs traveled to Kyiv on a working visit. Current efforts are devoted to the upcoming November 8 U.S. presidential election.