Editor's Note: The Kyiv Post tracks the progress made by Ukraine's post-EuroMaidan Revolution leaders in making structural changes in the public interest in six key areas: economy & finance, security & defense, energy, rule of law, public administration and land. The following measures were in focus on July 22 - Aug. 14.
Economy & finance
As the Kyiv Post went to print on Aug. 13 there was still no progress to report on what Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko has called the “final round” of Ukraine’s debt restructuring talks with a group of private foreign creditors who hold nearly half of $19 billion worth of external debt. Ukraine was aiming for a 40 percent debt reduction, while the offer on the table was reported to be just 5 percent. Jaresko was also seeking a reduction in interest payments. The next major payment on foreign debt for the cash-strapped country is on Sept. 23, when a sovereign $500 million Eurobond matures. Jaresko has warned that Ukraine might default on its obligations if no satisfactory debt restructuring compromise were to be reached.
Rule Of Law
Prosecutorial reform is progressing, despite attempts being made to stall it, Deputy Prosecutor General Davit Sakvarelidze said on Aug. 13. A total of 2,250 managing positions in local prosecutor offices across the country are being cut to just 700. An open competition to fill those places is underway, with 6,000 candidates having applied by the closing date of Aug. 10. “It’s obvious that many of the incumbents will not be able to retain their positions,” Sakvarelidze said. “This leads to resistance, but we’re ready for it. We have the backing of the president and the public, so there’s no way back.”
The creation of vetting commissions has been stalled by two weeks so far by the PGO, but Sakvarelidze said he was confident that the candidates could undergo testing in late August. The test involves a four-stage examination, including professional eligibility, logical and psychometric tests, and personal interviews.
Serhiy Grebeniuk, a lawyer and a deputy head of the Consultative Council of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said Sakvarelidze’s decisive reform drive has inspired many lawyers and won their support.
On July 24, the European Commission for Democracy through Law, known as the Venice Commission, approved constitutional changes in Ukraine’s judiciary as “an important step forward towards the establishment of a truly independent judicial system.”
“The proposed amendments are a generally positive text, which deserves to be supported,” the commission said in its preliminary conclusions.
The commission approved the reform of the Prosecutor General’s Office, granting the right to the president to appoint judges (as long as this remains a purely ceremonial function), the abolition of probationary periods for junior judges, and eliminating “breach of oath” as grounds for the dismissal of judges. However, it also recommended removing the president’s right to dismiss judges from the text of the bill.
While the commission welcomed the removal of the Verkhovna Rada from the process of appointing judges, it criticized parliament’s exclusion from the process of electing members of the High Council of Justice, a key judicial body that hires, fires and disciplines judges.
Ukrainian watchdog organizations were unhappy with the proposed constitutional changes though.
“These measures aim to improve legislation,” but they are not “a reform capable of resetting the judicial system and tackle corruption,” Taras Shepel, an expert from the Reanimation Package of Reforms group said on Aug. 5. Reshuffling judges will not change anything, only reappointments will, Shepel said.
Agnieszka Piasecka of the Kyiv office of the Open Dialog Foundation said Ukraine should not repeat Poland’s mistakes in judicial reform, but extensively involve the public in the cleansing process. Otherwise, public trust in the judiciary would not rise, she said.
Oleksandra Drik, head of the civic Public Lustration Committee, has reported that only 29 out of the top 50 officials from the regime of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych who should have been fired according to the lustration law have actually been sacked.
Fourteen of the 29 fired had served in the Interior Ministry, eight were from various central executive bodies and the State Fiscal Service, and only one was from the State Security Service. Moreover, the dismissals only came after political pressure was applied.
“Eight of the 14 dismissed interior ministry employees were only fired after members of parliament registered a motion to dismiss Interior Minister Arsen Avakov,” Drik said on Aug. 12.
Some of those dismissed have already been given new positions based on dubious court decisions.
“This shows nothing will change until the judiciary is dissolved, and rebuilt from scratch,” Drik said.
Security & Defense
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called an extraordinary meeting of the National Security and Defense Council on Aug. 4, at which he repeated that Ukraine will not recognize the “fake elections” that Russian-separatist forces plan to hold in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts on Oct. 18 and Nov. 1. The president also said there was a need to deepen cooperation with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to ensure there is unfettered monitoring of the ceasefire along the line of contact in the Donbas war zone.
Public Administration
The government on Aug. 5 approved plans for the consolidation of territorial communities within 21 of the country’s oblasts, while plans for the rest – Zakarpattya, Ternopil and Kyiv oblasts – are in the making. One element in the broader “decentralization” reforms, which are pending approval by a two-thirds majority in Parliament, is that only 7,500 local administrative units out of the present 11,800 will remain.
Poroshenko signed a law on Aug. 4 on a national police force, legitimizing new police patrol forces in Kyiv and eight other oblasts: Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, Zakarpattia, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolayiv, Khmelnytsky, and Lutsk. Kyiv’s new police force was officially sworn in on July 4 as part of the Interior Ministry’s pilot project to reform the nation’s corrupt police force, and has already won high praise from the public.
The government plans to outsource customs administration on the western borders to a foreign company. Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk said he had personally assigned this task to the State Fiscal Service. “This will give an opportunity to train Ukrainian custom officers so that the whole custom service, which is still corrupt, can be reformed in a short time,” Yatsenyuk said on July 22.
Energy
Addressing skeptics of Ukraine’s ability to survive the winter without Russian gas, Energy and Coal Industry Minister Volodymyr Demchyshyn said that Ukraine had cut its consumption of natural gas by 20 percent from August 2014 to July 2015. While industry and the public reduced consumption by 26 and 20 percent, respectively, district heating companies cut consumption by 12 percent. Demchyshyn also said Ukraine has 13.4 billion cubic meters of gas in storage. “We need to increase our reserves of gas. However, it is not critical. The situation is sustainable,” he said.
The State Agency on Energy Efficiency, the executive authority implementing the government’s energy policy, on Aug. 4 signed a memorandum with Kyiv City Administration on energy efficiency in Kyiv buildings. If adopted, this program will give Kyivans an opportunity to reclaim up to 40 percent of interest paid on short-term credits used to fund energy efficiency measures in 2015-2018.
According to Serhiy Savchuk, the agency’s head, 80 percent of the housing in Kyiv needs thermal modernization, which will cost Kyiv approximately Hr 700 billion. “Obviously, neither the state nor local communities have that kind of money,” Savchuk said. “That’s why we’re using the European experience of co-financing, which involves funds from the public and the banks.”
Meanwhile, Demchyshyn said Ukraine will start receiving anthracite coal mined in occupied Donbas through Russia for its power plants.
