I no longer live in Ukraine. After the failure of the EuroMaidan Revolution it has become too hard for many of us to stay, due to the relentless pressure on any dissenting voices against President Viktor Yanukovych and his all-powerful Party of Regions.
We can see what’s going on, but we can do nothing productive at this time in this country, they were right, the bloodshed that ended EuroMaidan was enough to tell us not to dare to challenge them; 100 people died, their lives were given in vain. The greatest insult to their memory was when Instutskaya Street was re-opened to traffic and all of the memorials and flowers were just swept away, as if we were to just forget the killing on that spot.
Ukraine continues to be pillaged by Yanukovych and his band of thieves. They treat any state-owned enterprise as a source for continuing personal enrichment, billionaire Rinat Akhmetov continues to “win” the majority of state “tenders” for anything and everything, Dmytro Firtash controls most of the media in the country which he has acquired due to the benefits he receives from his lucrative gas supply contract with Russia. At the same time Ukraine overpays for gas (it would be cheaper if Ukraine shopped around a bit), Naftogaz keeps building debts with the state, and big industrial businesses benefit from dirt cheap power, you’d think therefore that they’d be able to afford to spend a bit more on health and safety for their employees, but they’re too selfish.
Looking back, maybe not wanting to improve on health and safety was part of the motivation for backing out of the European Union association agreement in the first place? bloody Europeans and their meddling laws.
After the revolution finished, Yanukovych turned his back on his pledge to hold early presidential elections, as we had expected. Despite the obvious election rigging conducted with the advice of so called “political Scientists” from Russia, there was no way to challenge the results of his re-election last year, and the repressions that have followed that meant that remaining in Ukraine was too dangerous.
In any case, there was no point in staying as it’s impossible to run an honest business there, the tax police come round with their blatant demands for bribes all the time, and don’t even get me started on the police, useless lazy bastards.
Of course, it could be worse, at least I didn’t end up in jail like many of the EuroMaidan people, I wasn’t important enough, I was just a single voice in the crowd, the international pressure on Ukraine to end the political imprisonment of a former World Heavyweight boxing champion means nothing to Yanukovych, the sanctions are irrelevant to him as he sits in the luxury estate that he still pretends not to own. I wonder what it’s really like there? Does he really have a toilet made of gold? I’m sure the stories about there being ostriches there are fake, what would he want them for? Nobody is that stupid.
The secretly recorded footage of Sergei Kurchenko’s 30th birthday party sums things up, for a man now worth $7.4 billion (as admitted by his own Forbes magazine rating, it’s like they’re gloating) it was horribly tacky. Apparently Okean Elzy refused to perform at his party, at least there are still some principled people left in Ukraine, ironic that apparently half of them are Serbian. I can’t tell you how I know this, but I’m told the response to the “request” for them to play was “not in a million bloody years, not for all the tea in China, and not even for one of your ill-gotten billions….” Bravo.
The future of Ukraine is not hard to predict, as Yanukovych has now installed his son Oleksander into the Prime Minister’s office he’s obviously being groomed to take over as the next President, most likely the younger Yanukovych will appoint his father as his prime minster and then they’ll swap roles back again after one term, nice way to not breach the Constitution. I wonder why they even bother? They can do what they want, they won.
We tried.
What a great shame, Ukraine could be a great country. It’s a very rich place, and the people used to be wonderfully nice and kind, now everyone just seems angry, all the time, it’s not surprising, but, what can they do?
Postscript: “Of course I am still in Ukraine. It’s not perfect here, but it could be a lot worse.”
