Ukraine is de facto run by a “shadow government” whose strings are pulled by oligarchs behind the scenes, Mikheil Saakashvili, ex-president of Georgia and governor of Odesa Oblast, said on Sept. 12 at the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv.
“We certainly have the reality of some kind of shadow, parallel government,” he said. “You can describe Ukraine as a joint-stock company owned by oligarchs… Every oligarch owns his own judges, prosecutors and paramilitary units.”
Saakashvili, who accused Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Cabinet of serving oligarchs last week, said that the government had failed to reform the economy and law enforcement system.
“(People) assess it through their own experience,” he said. “And that was my thing about the government. People don’t see concrete results for themselves, and then they get annoyed, and then they get frustrated, and civil servants get even less respected, and the whole thing is going towards disintegration.”
In an apparent reference to the Right Sector and other nationalist groups, Saakashvili said that, as a result of a lack of reform, paramilitary groups were emerging to fill the void.
“This will create a further wave of chaos,” he said. “What we need to do is to speed up reform. It’s about whether Ukraine exists as a state or not.”
Thomas O. Melia, executive director of Democracy International, a U.S. election monitoring group, agreed with Saakashvili, saying that “this is not just about better governance in Ukraine but about the survival and sovereignty of this independent country.”
Serhiy Leshchenko, a Verkhovna Rada member from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, also concurred that reforms were going slowly, saying that he preferred a revolutionary approach, for example the dismissal of all judges under Saakashvili in Georgia.
“Unfortunately for me the current president decided to use the evolutionary approach and to do it step by step,” Leshchenko said. “One result of this approach is that the leadership of Ukraine is losing support day by day.”
One reason for the slow pace of reforms is that half of parliament consists of representatives of oligarchs, businessmen and corrupt people, he argued. This is possible due to parliamentary immunity, which protects them from prosecution, he added.
Nothing will change as long as law enforcement agencies go after small fry and leave “big fish” alone, Leshchenko said.
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
