Often he sounds like Cicero or Cato, replete with civic virtue. The only thing missing is the toga.
But when it comes to getting things done, he’s more of a petty Soviet bureaucrat.
One example is his attitude to the lustration law, which is intended to cleanse the government of officials linked to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, and those with undeclared property.
The most blatant case is Serhiy Kuzmenko, who was appointed governor of Kirovohrad Oblast by Poroshenko in 2014. He was a district head in the oblast under Yanukovych for over a year and should have been fired under the lustration law immediately after it was passed in October 2014.
Kuzmenko is notorious for voting for the “dictatorial laws” of Jan. 16, 2014, which greatly curtailed civil liberties and sought to strangle the EuroMaidan Revolution. He is also accused of financing “titushki” (pro-Yanukovych thugs) – a charge that he denies.
Since 2014, the Justice Ministry’s lustration department has been asking the presidential administration why Kuzmenko has not been dismissed. The administration has consistently ignored these questions, and given no reason whatsoever for its refusal to fire him.
In Kuzmenko’s case, Poroshenko has not even come up with a lame excuse or pseudo-legal formality to justify his inaction. He has chosen to simply ignore civil society and violate the law in an in-your-face, brazen manner reminiscent of the Kremlin’s blatant disregard for public opinion.
Eventually, even his administration faced up to the truth. It told the Kyiv Post and the Civic Lustration Committee recently that Kuzmenko should be lustrated and that it had sent documents on his dismissal to Poroshenko.
But, guess what? The president hasn’t signed them.
So in a surreal situation, the president’s own office has indirectly admitted that the president has been blatantly violating the law on lustration.
In another high-profile case, the president has failed to fire the Security Service of Ukraine’s investigative department chief, Hryhory Ostafiychuk, who is subject to lustration because he served as a deputy of Kyiv’s top prosecutor for more than a year under Yanukovych.
Last June SBU spokeswoman Olena Hitlianska claimed that he served for a shorter period and should not be fired, first providing one alleged period of tenure by phone and then a different one by e-mail. She promised to provide a copy of Ostafiychuk’s employment documents to the Kyiv Post to substantiate her claims, but failed to do so.
And I think I know why. The shenanigans surfaced when the public later found out Ostafiychuk had asked a court to shorten his period of tenure under Yanukovych to bypass the lustration law. He argued that the end of his term should be the day when he submitted his resignation, not the day when his resignation was officially approved. The court upheld Ostafiychuk’s motion.
We all believe in the wisdom and justice of Ukrainian courts, don’t we?
A yet more Orwellian case is that of presidential Deputy Chief of Staff Oleksiy Dniprov, who should be fired because he was a deputy education minister and the ministry’s chief of staff in 2013-2015.
But the presidential administration is refusing to fire him, saying that a “combined deputy minister and chief of staff” is not a deputy minister.
By this bizarre non-Aristotelian logic, a man who also happens to be a government official is not a man.
This absurd reasoning is an affront not only to Ukrainian society but also to common sense.
Moreover, being chief of staff to Education Minister Dmytro Tabachnyk, a Yanukovych crony accused of corruption, is more of an aggravating circumstance than a mitigating one.
All these examples show that Poroshenko and the authorities in general still treat the Ukrainian public like little kids, or imbeciles – easy to trick, and incapable of finding out the truth.
But the president has apparently failed to notice that the kids have grown up.
Ukrainians are indeed smart enough to see the truth and recognize that two plus two equals four, black is black, and white is white.
And they have also proven that if a president fails to respect the law and the demands of Ukrainian society, then he won’t stay president for long.
