In Ukraine, top officials never face justice.
It’s like there is a caste of untouchables who can embezzle, abuse power, and even murder with no fear of punishment.
They may face charges, sometimes even be arrested, but it always ends up the same. They post bail, they wait out, they have charges lifted.
In the worst-case scenario, they flee Ukraine for the comfort of Vienna or Monaco for several years.
This is why, when authorities set out to investigate activities of ex-President Petro Poroshenko, everyone’s eyes were on it. Will he set the precedent — someone as high-profile as an ex-president meeting Lady Justice? But the disillusionment came fast. All the investigations involving Poroshenko focus on the alleged violations that are of little importance and don’t seem to correlate with the power he had for five years.
In one of them, the ex-president is accused of appointing an official to a post that didn’t legally exist. On June 10, Poroshenko was charged with abuse of power over it.
Another case has Poroshenko suspected of illegally importing paintings for his private collection. While President Volodymyr Zelensky openly backs prosecution against Poroshenko, it keeps stumbling.
For some reason, his prosecutor general doesn’t sign the charges against the ex-president, commissioning a subordinate to do it, and giving Poroshenko grounds to question the legality of it.
Earlier, Poroshenko smartly placed the paintings that are subject to the investigation into a Kyiv museum. Investigators took the bait and searched the museum, allowing the ex-president and his supporters to moan about the “barbarians storming museums.” So far, the investigations against Poroshenko seem to be benefitting him politically.
He gets to portray himself as a victim of political persecution. It’s a position that can make him popular in the West, as we remember from the story of Yulia Tymoshenko, once a political prisoner of Viktor Yanukovych.
Zelensky complained, in an interview to Ukrainska Pravda published on June 11, that Poroshenko was badmouthing him to foreign leaders to the point that they saw the new president as “the enemy of Ukraine.”
If this clumsy prosecution of Poroshenko continues, he will get more of that attitude from the West. As for us, we feel little sympathy for Poroshenko crying wolf as a victim of political persecution. We remember that he had a taste for political persecution as well. Ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili was snatched by law enforcers and sent out of Ukraine in an instant when he fell out of favor with his old buddy, Poroshenko.
The ex-president isn’t a saint, to put it mildly. During the five years of his rule, plenty of journalist investigations alleged his administration was cynically corrupt.
It’s odd that after all of it, he is prosecuted for buying paintings. So we’re not calling for authorities to leave Poroshenko alone. Quite the opposite. We want him to be investigated, but better and with higher aim — for much more serious financial and other crimes that we suspect him of committing. If he is guilty, he should be punished through a public due process.
