It’s still a very cold winter in Ukraine, but the political temperature continues to rise. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pressed from all sides, has continued to stand his ground, stepping up his attack against those viewed as Russia’s fifth columnists and managing to hold his own in the opinion polls. Meanwhile, the rating of his own party, Servant of the People, and its parliamentary faction is failing to recover from its freefall during recent months.
The frigid weather and its paralyzing effect on movement and transportation, on top of the continued debilitating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, provide a gloomy background to other worrying developments.
The IMF mission has left Kyiv without any agreement on further desperately needed financial support being made available, and disappointment, frustration, and in some cases, anxiety, have been evident in some of the less than diplomatic statements emanating from the Ukrainian side.
Populist politicians, from veteran firebrand Yulia Tymoshenko to those in the pro-Russian “Opposition Bloc – For Life,” are sparing no effort to blame the Zelenskyy administration for having supposedly hiked up the price of utilities to unacceptably high levels.
For self-serving reasons they oppose the IMF’s insistence that the price of gas for households should not be subsidized by the state, and that monopolists in the energy sector should not dictate – as the market should – what the realistic prices should be.
The forces reflecting the interests of oligarchs, such as Dmytro Firtash, Ihor Kolomoisky, Rinat Akhmetov and former president Petro Poroshenko, are not interested in independent anti-corruption agencies, such as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), doing their job effectively. But this has been something that the IMF and most of Ukraine’s Western partners and supporters have insisted is necessary.
Now, a new potential crisis has arisen in this regard. The government is seeking to replace the head of the NABU, Artem Sytnyk. On February 15 it submitted a bill to the Parliament to this effect based on dubious reasoning – that the Constitutional Court, the very same one that President Zelenskyy has locked horns with and accused it of being corrupt, had earlier on challenged Mr. Sytnyk’s appointment under Mr. Poroshenko.
Observers suspect that the real reason behind the latest move to remove Mr. Sytnyk is that he has antagonized not only Health Minister Maksym Stepanov, but Mr. Zelenskyy himself by opening an investigation earlier in the month into alleged embezzlement by the Health Ministry during the procurement of a COVID-19 vaccine.
This issue is connected not only with how the IMF and Western partners perceive it, but also President Zelenskyy’s recent closure of three pro-Russian TV channels believed to be secretly owned by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s close associate and point man in Ukraine, Viktor Medvechuk.
The main accusation against Mr. Medvechuk and his TV channels has been that they have served as propaganda vehicles for Russia at a time when it is at war with Ukraine and occupying its territories. But one of the elements here is that these channels were also casting aspersions on Kyiv’s ability to deal with the pandemic while promoting a vaccine created in Russia.
So, we wait to see how this move to replace the head of NABU will play out and what the international ramifications will be. But anti-corruption activists are already fearing for the worst. For instance, Vitaly Shabunin, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center’s executive board, believes that “through this story, the government will lose the last remnants of international partners.”
According to domestic observers, the Zelenskyy administration’s perceived, or rather, portrayed, response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and its lateness in securing vaccines for the population, has played a significant role in the fall of its ratings. Calls for the firing of the health minister are growing and he could yet be made an expendable scapegoat.
And what do the latest preliminary opinion polls, conducted since Mr. Zelenskyy’s crackdown on Mr. Medvechuk’s channels, reveal? According to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KMIS), this politically charged move has resulted in a slight rise in the president’s rating, by almost 3 percent. It has shot up by almost 5 percent in the central regions, and, interestingly, around 3 percent in the east, and just over 1 percent in the south. In western Ukraine, paradoxically, it has declined by around 1.7 percent.
Ratings for other potential presidential candidates – Mr. Poroshenko, Yuriy Boiko from the pro-Russian bloc, and Ms. Tymoshenko, have remained largely unchanged, while Mr. Medvechuk, not a contender at this stage, has lost around 2 percent of his support.
According to the most recent poll published by Info Sapiens on February 16, currently around 30 percent of voters who have made up their minds would vote for Mr. Zelenskyy, just over 20 percent for Mr. Poroshenko, around 18 percent for Mr. Boyko and 12 percent for Ms. Tymoshenko.
But the situation is rather different and more alarming concerning the leading political parties. The Servant of the People party is neck and neck with Mr. Poroshenko’s European Solidarity with 23 percent, and the Opposition Block – For Life is at almost 21 percent. Then comes Ms. Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna at almost 14 percent. No other party would currently cross the 5 percent of required votes to be represented in the Parliament.
If accurate, this represents a huge, creeping change in Ukraine’s political landscape. If early elections were to be held soon, Mr. Zelenskyy’s party would no longer be a majority party and would need to form a coalition with either Mr. Poroshenko’s or Ms.
Tymoshenko’s forces, both of which are currently in strong opposition to his Servant of the People. And, given the president’s current offensive against the pro-Russian forces, any reconciliation with them seems out of the question.
Mr. Zelenskyy’s latest and not unexpected blow has been aimed at pro-Kremlin “blogger” Anatoliy Sharia. A dubious character, who in the past was an addicted gambler, and who shot a man in a McDonalds in Kyiv, he sought political asylum in the West and magically transformed himself into a bigoted pro-Russian “blogger,” and even a would-be politician.
Mr. Sharia operates from a lavish villa near Barcelona yet has a considerable following in Ukraine. He opposed Mr. Poroshenko and has since become an enemy of Mr. Zelenskyy. For Mr. Shariya, for example, the war with Russia in the Donbas is, as per the Russian script, a “civil war,” and western Ukrainians are for him third-, or even fourth-rate Ukrainians.
On February 16, the Security Service of Ukraine charged him with treason and hate mongering, and of carrying out subversive activities in the service of Moscow to destabilize the situation in the country.
Nonetheless, on February 17 there was at least one rare display of unity and common purpose within the Ukrainian Parliament. To mark the seventh anniversary of the Euro-Maidan, the Ukrainian Parliament overwhelmingly endorsed a decree highlighting the significance of the Revolution of Dignity. A large majority – 295 deputies of the 361 who could have voted on the day – supported the parliamentary resolution.
It also highlighted the real political battle lines. The entire “Opposition Bloc – For Life” voted against or abstained, including those notorious political “fifth columnists,” Messrs. Medvechuk, Boyko, Vadim Rabinovych, and Nestor Shufrich, while Maksym Buzhansky, another self-styled blogger, embarrassed President Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party by being the only one from within it to also vote against.
On this occasion, Servant of the People, European Solidarity, Voice, and even Fatherland, together with numerous independent deputies, joined together to reaffirm certain vital principles – ones which could potentially unite them in the uncertain times ahead if the political will were to be found.
In brief, the Ukrainian Parliament, expressing its frustration that investigations into what occurred during the bloody days on Maidan seven years ago have still not yielded results, endorsed a political assessment of the historic events of that time, concluding that the Revolution of Dignity was a key moment in the history of Ukraine’s state-building.
For her part, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Iryna Venediktova blamed the delay on objective factors related to on-going judicial reform and said she expects that substantial progress will be made by the end of 2021.
This then is the situation as winter is about to start switching to spring. But whether there will be a thaw in political terms in Ukraine remains to be seen.