Top Ukrainian officials have become experts in saying the right stuff to Western donors and pretending to be reformers while delivering no results.
In a nation dripping with the blood of unsolved murders, where billions of dollars are routinely fleeced every year, the nation’s politically subservient law enforcement system has blocked justice — not sought it.
Consequently, no major figures have been prosecuted, tried or convicted of any crime and nobody is taking responsibility.
And nor will justice be delivered under the current set-up.
Furthermore, in the nest of deadbeats and unprosecuted criminals known as the Verkhovna Rada, the lifting of parliamentary immunity against prosecution remains stuck in bureaucratic limbo more than two years after the revolution.
There’s nothing coincidental about any of it.
It’s planned obstruction from the highest level — President Petro Poroshenko on down.
Only gullible Westerners, and there are plenty of those in think tanks in Western capitals, keep stepping on the rake of incredible promises.
Unlike Western experts, the Ukrainian people know their corrupt political elite all too well to believe in their pretense.
The self-righteous bravado and flamboyant reformist rhetoric of Groysman and Lutsenko evokes the sense of deja vu. We have heard the same things from ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who never achieved anything but obstruction of justice, and from Poroshenko and ex-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who have failed to fulfill most of their major promises.
Anybody who analyzes the situation knows how empty the latest round of promises will prove to be. Isn’t this what think tankers are supposed to do? Let us look at Herbst’s op-ed to analyze his claims.
1-There’s even been progress on reforming the country’s notoriously corrupt courts.
The judicial reform bill was passed by the Verkhovna Rada earlier this month and has a lot of good aspects like vetting of judges and the creation of a special anti-corruption court.
But the legislation itself is just a piece of paper, and what matters is its implementation.
Despite all the necessary legislation, Shokin’s prosecutorial reform utterly failed last year, with almost all top local prosecutors’ jobs going to incumbents. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov is also currently killing the police reform by staffing vetting commissions with his loyalists and replacing genuine civic activists with fake pseudo-activists at his beck and call.
Given the failure of prosecutorial reform and the flaws of the police reform, why should we assume that judicial reform will be a success?
Moreover, the judicial reform was entrusted to Poroshenko’s deputy chief of staff Oleksiy Filatov, who has been repeatedly accused of micromanaging courts and giving orders to them in violation of the Constitution. He denies the accusations.
Do we really expect someone who keeps the judicial system on a short leash to make it independent and professional?
Another presidential ally, lawmaker Oleksandr Hranovsky, is suspected of interfering with and corrupting courts to obtain favorable rulings, though he also denies it.
The reform bill also provides wide scope for presidential abuse – something Poroshenko has done a lot in the past.
First, it postpones the creation of the Supreme Council of Justice, a supposedly independent body overseeing the judicial system, until 2019, giving the president effectively dictatorial powers over the courts in the interim period. So if Poroshenko is so keen on reforming the courts, why is he delaying the actual reform until the end of his term?
The Supreme Council of Justice could also be manipulated by Poroshenko, since most of its members will comprise presidentially-appointed judges and members delegated by him, the pro-Poroshenko parliamentary majority and his loyal prosecutors.
Judges will be chosen by the council but the president will have a supposedly formal right to appoint them, which is intended to be automatic. But don’t be fooled – given Ukrainian authorities’ blatant disregard for the rule of law, this “formal” right may turn into a massive tool of presidential influence on the courts.
Parliament will be stripped of its right to appoint judges, which is supposed to remove political influence in theory but, if the law is abused, will eliminate checks and balances and give the president a monopoly on running the judicial system.
2-(Lutsenko’s) early June decision to remove Shokin’s three deputies was a pleasant surprise.
Lutsenko’s decision to fire Yury Sevruk, Roman Hovda and Oleh Zalisko, who are accused of blocking reform and investigations, is praiseworthy.
But they will likely remain in the system. Sevruk became a deputy head of Prosecutorial Academy, while Hovda is being tapped for the job of Kyiv’s top prosecutor, in which case his dismissal was just a deception.
Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Stolyarchuk, a key Shokin loyalist with the reputation of an anti-reformer, will keep his job. Lutsenko did not fire him despite the fact that he started numerous criminal cases against prosecutors who investigated their fellow prosecutors’ corruption in what critics see as an effort to pressure them.
3-So too were his appointments to deputy positions of reformers Dmitry Stvorozhuk, Yevgeniy Yenin, and Valentina Telychenko.
Storozhuk, an ex-lawmaker from former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front party, and Yenin, who used to work at the Foreign Ministry, have no reformist credentials whatsoever. Storozhuk was appointed as part of political horse-trading between the two coalition partners.
Telychenko, a well-known lawyer who is in charge of reforming the office, has consistently praised Shokin and Stolyarchuk – the people who killed the prosecutorial reform she is supposed to take care of. She has shown herself to be a staunch loyalist of Poroshenko, not an independent-minded reformer.
Instead of attacking Poroshenko allies who interfere in the prosecution service, she has lashed out at critics of prosecutorial corruption like reformist lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko.
Petro Shkutyak, who was appointed to check prosecutors’ asset declarations, is a former head of the Poroshenko Bloc’s Ivano-Frankivsk city branch. To add insult to injury, his appointment was illegal because he is subject to the lustration law, which stipulates firing top Yanukovych-era officials, Tetiana Kozachenko, head of the Justice Ministry’s lustration department, told the Kyiv Post.
Lutsenko has done nothing to fulfill his promise to fire about a dozen prosecutors subject to the lustration law, including Kyiv’s notorious top prosecutor Oleh Valendyuk.
All these developments show that the Prosecutor General’s Office has become an appendix of the Poroshenko Bloc and its junior partner, the People’s Front, which makes prosecuting incumbent authorities’ crimes impossible.
Lutsenko himself is a living embodiment of Poroshenko’s empty promises. The president has pledged to hire an independent and professional prosecutor general, and Lutsenko, ex-leader of the presidential faction without a law degree, is neither.
Lutsenko has lambasted a controversial department suspected of fabricating political cases and ties to Poroshenko’s key allies Ihor Kononenko and Oleksandr Hranovsky and promised to fire its head. But he did not keep his promise.
The reason is obvious – Lutsenko would never go against Poroshenko’s will.
One of the high-profile political cases launched by the so-called Kononenko-Hranovsky department – the fraud investigation against reformist Deputy Prosecutor General Vitaly Kasko – is still in full swing. Lutsenko’s subordinates are still representing the case in court, and Kasko’s apartment is in custody.
4-It may be that political competition is spurring both the president and the prime minister toward reform.
Really? So the triumphal reinstatement of Kononenko, who faces numerous graft accusations and denies them, as a deputy head of the presidential faction in May was a sign of reform?
Or maybe the stubborn refusal by Poroshenko and Groysman to fire Roman Nasirov, the controversial head of the State Fiscal Service, was an indicator of reform? Nasirov’s reputation is plummeting to all-time lows amid corruption scandals and conflicts with his reformist subordinate Yulia Marushevska.
Besides that, almost all top reformers have been expelled from the Cabinet, the Prosecutor General’s Office and other agencies.
Ukrainian authorities have also been dragging their feet on introducing electronic asset and income declarations for top officials for a long time. The law on these declarations was signed in March but they have not been launched yet.
Poroshenko seems to be after absolute power, not reform. In his quest for monopolizing all branches of government, he now has his loyalists installed as heads of the Cabinet, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the National Bank of Ukraine and the Security Service of Ukraine. Now he’s also trying to completely take over the courts and pack the Central Election Commission almost entirely with his protégés instead of giving fair representation to opposition parties.
Ukrainian authorities should only be judged by the results of their work, not their self-righteous talk or even pieces of legislation that can be easily sabotaged.
Being naively over-optimistic and positive does not help Ukraine – it hurts it. The Ukrainian people will only suffer if the West enables corrupt actors to keep their pretense.
