June 26, 2020

Return to Yanukovych’s selective justice condemned as thousands protest plan to arrest Poroshenko

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Former Soviet dissidents have added their voices to a strong statement protesting the ever-increasing criminal prosecutions brought against former President Petro Poroshenko. They consider these “selective justice and political persecution,” returning Ukraine to the times of Mr. Poroshenko’s predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych.

Their warning that this damages Ukraine’s image in the world was surely confirmed on June 18 by reports in the international media about the thousands who came to show support for Mr. Poroshenko at a court hearing that had initially been to seek his detention. The hearing was eventually adjourned until July 1, however concerns about selective justice are hardly allayed by the fact that the judge hearing the case is Serhiy Vovk, who gained notoriety under the Yanukovych regime for his role in the politically motivated prosecution and imprisonment of Yuriy Lutsenko.

Outside the Pechersky District Court on June 18, Mr. Poroshenko stated that yet another criminal case had been initiated against him – this time over the Tomos, the recognition of the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in January 2019. The criminal proceedings, he explained, were for supposedly “inciting religious enmity” through this move.

It would be nice to dismiss this suggestion as preposterous or to assume that the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) would terminate such an “investigation” immediately after formally initiating it. Unfortu­nately, the fact of such an investigation, initially begun by the State Security Service of Ukraine (known by the Ukrainian-based acronym as SBU), has been confirmed as ongoing. In fact, the first criminal proceedings against Mr. Poroshenko over alleged “treason” had seemed just as absurd, yet they resulted in an active SBI investigation that has only helped Russia’s propaganda machine against Ukraine.

As reported, in May 2019, Andriy Portnov, former deputy head of the Yanuko­vych administration, returned to Ukraine on the eve of Volodymyr Zelens­kyy’s presidential inauguration and immediately lodged the first of a large number of criminal allegations, most against Mr. Poroshenko. On that occasion, he claimed that Mr. Poroshenko had “provoked Russia’s attack on three Ukrainian naval ships near Crimea on November 25, 2018, and its seizure of 24 Ukrainian POWs. This parroted the Kremlin’s own narrative and seemed quite ludicrous, yet months later, the SBI proved to be questioning the finally released POWs and, therefore, effectively assisting the Kremlin.

Even if the SBI does decide that criminal charges over the establishment of a fully autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine are excessive, that will still leave 17 criminal proceedings against Mr. Poroshenko initiated since Mr. Zelenskyy came to power. Small wonder that there have been warnings over recent days from former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and from the European Parliament against any attempt to take Mr. Poroshenko, who is now the leader of the largest opposition party in the Verkhovna Rada into custody.

It is unclear whether it was these warnings or the likely reaction to Mr. Poro­shenko’s detention on the eve of his father’s funeral that prompted Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova to announce that she was seeking adjournment of the court hearing. Having spoken until June 16 (the day that Oleksiy Poroshenko died) of plans to ask for the former president to be remanded in custody, the prosecutors now said that they would be asking for him to give an undertaking to appear at all hearings and to inform them of his whereabouts, at least up until July 10.

In fact, any other outcome but adjournment of the June 18 hearing would have been suicidally foolish given not only the above-mentioned reactions, but also the thousands of Ukrainians who came out to show their support and solidarity with the former president.

There had been so many criminal cases against Mr. Poroshenko that the announcement on June 10 of plans to remand him into custody was initially reported by many journalists to be over a previous “investigation.” It turned out, however, that the charges of “abuse of power” pertained to what the SBI investigators called Mr. Poroshen­ko’s “evidently criminal order to get a military official, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, to exceed his power and official duties” and his appointment of Serhiy Semochko as first deputy head of the Foreign Intelligence Service.

It was under the presidency of Mr. Yanukovych that Ukraine was heavily criticized by the international community for application of “selective justice.” While occasionally one charge or another might refer to an actual infringement, it was generally understood that Ukrainian legislation, as well as the enforcement bodies and certain judges, were being used for political motives.

The above-mentioned statement in the form of an open letter to President Zelenskyy was posted on June 14 by Josef Zissels, former Soviet dissident and now head of Vaad, the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine. Among the first signatories were Myroslav Marynovych, one of the first members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, who spent 10 years in a Soviet labor camp and exile for his courage, and also Ihor Kozlovsky, a religious scholar who was held hostage in the Russian proxy ‘Donetsk people’s republic’ for two years.

The authors write:

“We have been prompted to turn to you over recent events which are returning our country to the times of Yanukovych. Ukraine was supposed to have been freed of arbitrary rule; selective justice and political persecution after the Revolution of Dignity. We are appalled by the actions of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the SBI, which are reinstating those foul phenomena to Ukrainian reality. These contain elements of the formation in Ukraine of a police state.

“The shameful, unlawful and unprofessional stunt staged around the supposed ‘informing of suspicion’ of the fifth president of Ukraine and MP, Petro Poroshenko, ill serves the authorities. It significantly worsens the image of our country in the world. Such actions discredit the law enforcement system itself and demolish the already low level of confidence in it. The public are sent a dangerous signal that laws are not written for the enforcement bodies. And therefore, tomorrow any rights can be stamped on, all you need is the political commissioning.

“We are forced, with great sadness, to note that repression against political opponents has returned to Ukraine. It is shocking that the main target of this repression should be Petro Poroshenko, a person thanks to whose efforts Ukraine was able to hold out in confrontation with Russia during the hardest years.”

The authors express frustration that the criminal investigations were initiated by members of Mr. Yanukovych’s team and echo the messages of hostile Russian propaganda, and say that these have now been taken up by the current president’s people. All of this, they stress, hurts Ukraine’s reputation in the world. If Mr. Poroshenko epitomized for the international community decisive resistance to Russia’s armed aggression, what is Mr. Zelenskyy’s team epitomizing by persecuting Mr. Poroshenko? They refer in particular to the above-mentioned criminal investigation over the attack by Russia on Ukrainian naval ships in Ukraine’s territorial waters. This, as mentioned, was claimed by Mr. Portnov to be Mr. Poroshenko’s “treason” and has actually resulted in an SBI investigation. The authors are convinced that the charges over Mr. Poroshenko’s appointment of Mr. Semochko are also bizarre, given that such appointments are among the president’s constitutional powers. They stress that this “can place in doubt any staffing questions, passed both by the current and future leaders of the state. This is a dangerous precedent.”

As reported earlier, President Zelenskyy has already used manipulative and legally questionable methods for at least one appointment. His choice for head of the Presidential Administration, Andriy Bohdan, was prohibited from holding that post because of his role twice during the Yanukovych regime. Mr. Zelenskyy got around this by changing the name of the Presidential Administration to Presidential Office. Since the law on lustration mentions “Presidential Administration,” not this new name for the same entity, this seems an obvious attempt to bypass a law in force.

Furthermore, are all Ukrainian presidents to anticipate prosecution for alleged “abuse of power” as soon as they leave office?

The authors of the appeal call on the country’s present leaders to “stop political persecution and concentrate on uniting the Ukrainian public in countering Russian aggression and to begin upholding Ukraine’s interests on the international scene and improving the lives of people in Ukraine.”