President Petro Poroshenko and other officials are sabotaging efforts to purge from positions of power corrupt officials and judges, as well as those with links to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime and the Soviet Union’s KGB, critics allege.
Poroshenko’s spokespeople denied the charges.
While some progress has been made in removing officials tied to Yanukovych, lustration is stalling against judges, officials with undeclared property – a telltale sign of financial corruption – and others.
Officials in charge of lustration have faced stiff resistance to their work from Ukraine’s bureaucrats, Tetiana Kozachenko, head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, told the Kyiv Post.
“The (2014 lustration) law is being complied with – despite not only major sabotage by government officials, but also national leaders’ lack of political will. We’re facing an enormous bureaucratic apparatus that paralyzes any kind of work,” Kozachenko said.
Lustration statistics
On the bright side, at least half of the top officials of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime subject to lustration have been fired or have resigned.
The total number of Yanukovych-era officials subject to lustration is as many as 5,500 people, and 2,557 of them have been identified, according to the Civic Lustration Committee.
Only 897 officials have been formally fired under the law, though the number of those who were fired for other reasons or who resigned is larger. The Civic Lustration Committee said last December that less than 1 percent of the 2,557 officials identified were still in their jobs.
Of the top 50 highest-ranking Yanukovych regime officials subject to lustration who have been identified by the committee, 42 are no longer working.
However, most of the officials fired have already appealed in court against their dismissals, and at least 15 top officials have been re-instated, Kozachenko said.
Lustration checks are scheduled to be completed this November, when the final results will be announced.
Law enforcement
The top violator of the lustration law is the Interior Ministry, which is “ignoring all requests” and refusing to explain why it did not fire officials subject to lustration, Oleksandra Drik, head of the Civic Lustration Committee, told the Kyiv Post.
Commenting on the accusations, Yury Lavrenyuk, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said it had complied with the lustration law by firing or persuading to resign most of its 432 employees subject to the law.
One of the ministry’s ways of sabotaging lustration is to issue war veteran cards, which exempt holders from the law, to police officers, critics say. In many such cases it is very difficult to find out whether they really served on the front, Drik said.
Another method of sidestepping lustration is to issue presidential decrees exempting generals who are deemed important for national defense.
Poroshenko has issued at least seven such decrees, including one for the former chief of Kyiv’s police, Oleksandr Tereshchuk. The Justice Ministry believes the exemption for Tereshchuk to be unlawful because he is a police general, not a military one.
The Interior Ministry is also avoiding having to fire officials by arguing that the departments they headed were not “independent structural units” whose heads and deputy heads are supposed to be fired under the law.
“But their own regulations say that they are independent structural units,” Drik said. “They think we’re idiots.”
Moreover, National Police Chief Khatia Dekanoidze refused to take into account lustration criteria during the vetting of police, according to Drik.
Meanwhile, critics say that the lustration of police officers, prosecutors and judges for unlawfully prosecuting EuroMaidan activists has failed.
Only eight judges have been fired so far under this clause, and three of them have already been re-instated by a court.
The number of prosecutors and police officers lustrated for prosecuting EuroMaidan protesters is unknown, and could be zero, Drik said. It is very difficult to identify who was involved in such cases because the authorities are refusing to divulge information on them, she said.
State Fiscal Service
The State Fiscal Service is the second worst violator of the lustration law, Drik said.
Last October the Justice Ministry’s lustration department carried out an inspection at the State Fiscal Service and found out that 42 percent of employees of the agency’s central office are subject to lustration but had not been fired.
The agency, which denies accusations of sabotage, later said that it had fired all of them, but Kozachenko said that she had received documents on the dismissal of only 33 tax officials out of the 76 people subject to lustration.
Apart from foiling lustration within its own ranks, the State Fiscal Service is in charge of property lustration of all officials, but is blocking the process, the Justice Ministry says.
Property lustration, which envisages firing officials for property holdings they cannot account for, appears to have failed completely.
As of now, only a few hundred out of 700,000 officials subject to lustration checks have been fired under property lustration, according to the Civic Lustration Committee.
But all of them were minor officials who failed to declare small assets. “The anti-corruption aspect of lustration doesn’t work very well,” Dmytro Dymov, a deputy head of the lustration department, said by phone. “There are no major dismissals for (having) a Bentley. There are just dismissals for old Zhiguli (Soviet-era cars).”
SBU derails
Another government body accused of derailing the lustration law is the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU.
The SBU, which denies accusations of blocking lustration, claimed in early 2015 that it had fired 51 officials for having links to the Soviet Union’s State Security Committee (KGB), but it has refused to divulge their names or positions, Drik said. That means that the lustration could be fake, she added.
Dymov said only nine people had been lustrated for having links to the KGB, and no more than a dozen for having links to the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
One reason for such a small number is that previously the SBU had a bizarre interpretation of the law, according to which only maintenance staff like cleaners were subject to lustration, while actual intelligence officers were not, he added.
Last fall the lustration department finally convinced the SBU that their interpretation was wrong, Dymov said.
One more obstacle is that Ukrainian KGB archives were sent to Moscow in 1991, which impedes the search for information on KGB agents, he said.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko and the SBU are accused of sabotaging the lustration law by refusing to fire Serhiy Raitev and Oleksandr Dovzhenko – heads of the SBU’s Vinnytsa Oblast and Chernihiv Oblast branches, respectively. Both of them headed SBU branches under Yanukovych.
Kozachenko believes the presence of Yanukovych-era SBU officials poses a threat to national security amid Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Presidential failure
The presidential administration has also run afoul of the lustration law, critics argue.
In the case of Kirovohrad Oblast Governor Serhiy Kuzmenko, Poroshenko has chosen to ignore the law altogether, which has been indirectly admitted even by his own administration.
Kuzmenko, who was a district head in the region under Yanukovych, was appointed governor in 2014. The presidential administration told the Kyiv Post and the Civic Lustration Committee that documents on firing Kuzmenko had been sent to Poroshenko but that he had not signed them.
Another top official, presidential Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Dniprov, must be fired because he was a deputy education minister and the ministry’s chief of staff in 2013-2015, the Justice Ministry says.
But the presidential administration is refusing to fire him, saying that a letter from the National Civil Service Agency exempts him from the law. The agency argued that a “combined deputy minister and chief of staff” is not a deputy minister.
This reasoning is absurd, and the National Civil Service Agency has no authority whatsoever to exempt anyone, Dymov said. “The presidential administration and the president are ready to violate the law to give certain powers to specific people,” Kozachenko said. “Some people think they are above the law.”
