News

Anti-Corruption Bureau launched with young investigator in charge

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KYIV – The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine was finally launched on April 16 by President Petro Poroshenko at a ceremony in which he revealed its first head will be Artem Sytnyk, a 35-year-old former prosecutorial investigator who has distinguished himself with investigations that led to incarcerations. The announcement came after months of delay in creating the bureau – with Mr. Poroshenko promising its launch as early as January – and criticism that the government wasn’t doing enough to address corruption, which is estimated to have cost the state hundreds of millions of hryvni in 2014, following the bloodshed on the Euro-Maidan. Few know what to expect from the political novice. “Everything’s in the hands of the new chair. He has time, society’s support and healthy forces,” said Mustafa Nayyem, a national deputy with the Poroshenko Bloc.

News

Reforms are too few, too slow, experts say

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KYIV – It’s been four months since Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s second Cabinet of Ministers took over, and there’s no denying they’ve continued down a path of unprecedented reforms.

Never has Ukraine been independent of Russia for natural gas, shifting to cheaper European sources (for the same Russian gas, no less). Revenue from sin taxes have been shifted to starving local governments. State bodies in Kyiv have dismissed hundreds of career bureaucrats and hired dozens of business executives. All that’s nice but not good enough, said half a dozen political and economic experts contacted by this correspondent. They described the government efforts as fragmented, not reflecting consistent structural reforms with a long-term strategy, and certainly not enough to inspire confidence in Ukraine’s future.

Community

Protesters rally for arms for Ukraine in front of White House

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WASHINGTON – More than 300 people gathered on the plaza in front of the White House on March 26 to demand that the Obama administration send lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine. The protest attracted not only Ukrainians, but representatives of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Poland, Georgia, Armenia, as well as Circassians. Representing the Ukrainian community clergy, Bishop John Bura of the Ukrainian Catholic Church was in attendance. First to the podium was Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.), a member of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus, who spoke of the bipartisan support in Congress with the Ukraine Freedom Support Act (UFSA) that was unanimously passed by both the Senate and the House of Representatives in December. The world is awaiting President Obama to fulfill the terms of the UFSA, which he signed into law following its passage, Rep. Pascrell said.

News

Kolomoisky resigns after challenging the president

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KYIV – A struggle involving armed fighters erupted in Kyiv on March 19 for control of Ukraine’s biggest oil producer, Ukrnafta, between its majority stakeholder, the Ukrainian government, and Igor Kolomoisky, the billionaire who controls the largest minority stake through the Privat Group empire in which he’s a partner. The standoff lasted until March 24, when Mr. Kolomoisky submitted his resignation as Dnipropetrovsk State Oblast Administration chair (a position commonly referred to as “governor”) during a meeting with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who has led the government’s drive to control Ukrnafta. Both sides said the conflict had been settled, though neither side has yet to reveal just how. It threatened to open a frontline for the Kyiv government with Mr. Kolomoisky’s brigades based in his native Dnipropetrovsk, as well as undermine the partnership between the nation’s two most powerful figures that helped thwart the military advance of Russian-backed forces. “This battle can be a risk for the government in the sense that it can lead to a second front within the country and become a gift for Putin,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research in Kyiv.

Analysis

NEWS ANALYSIS: The plot to seize Crimea

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In early 2014, the world was caught off guard by one event after another in a crisis that culminated with Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Moscow also claimed to be caught up in events beyond its control. On March 13, just eight days before the annexation, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a meeting in Moscow that “we cannot ignore the situation evolving around Ukraine, Crimea.”

“I want to emphasize that this crisis is not of our making,” Mr. Putin said. “Nevertheless, one way or another we are being dragged into it.” A bit earlier, on March 4, Mr. Putin told journalists that the idea of annexing Crimea “is not being considered.”

But a year later, new revelations, including disclosures from Mr. Putin himself, are reshaping this part of the Kremlin’s Crimea narrative and other key aspects as well. A new documentary that is to be aired by Russian state television in the coming days is being teased with clips of Mr. Putin claiming he made the decision to annex Crimea in the early morning hours of February 23.

News

Refugees, now in Kramatorsk, recall their experiences in war-torn east

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KRAMATORSK, Ukraine – Nikita Suprun is a lucky boy, having survived three months of artillery fire that rained down upon his hometown of Artemivsk in the Donetsk region in the autumn. At the same time, he is burdened with having seen more tragedy at the age of 8 than most people do in their entire lives. He saw how his school was destroyed before he himself was wounded by shrapnel and shell-shocked. Doctors were pessimistic, expecting that he would have to learn to walk normally again. At a refugee camp in Kramatorsk (a second city that was freed from the separatists in the northern Donetsk region), there was nothing unusual in Nikita’s behavior.

Analysis

Free rein of special services makes Russia ungovernable

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It took a week for the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) to produce a pair of plausible suspects in the shocking murder of Boris Nemtsov on February 28 (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, March 2). On March 7, FSB Director Aleksandr Bortnikov reported to President Vladimir Putin that two men implicated in the crime were under arrest; on the following day, another man killed himself with a hand grenade in Grozny (Newsru.com, March 7). The authoritative statement put an end to the flurry of wild speculations in the mainstream media, which had been eager to mix rumors about Mr. Nemtsov’s private life with all sorts of conspiracy theories. Rather, the official announcement focused attention on the “Caucasian connection,” since the names of the suspects – Zaur Dadayev and Anzor Gubashev – appeared distinctly Chechen (Rbc.ru, March 3). This breakthrough in the completely non-transparent investigation fit well with the instant solution found by Chechnya’s despotic ruler Ramzan Kadyrov, who accused Western special services of organizing the murder in order to provoke internal conflict in Russia (Gazeta.ru, February 28).