When Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner asked me to write a column on Ukraine’s 29 years of independence, the first idea was to create an uplifting text that elaborates on how we celebrate in times of anxiety and nostalgia, admiration and despair. But I decided to write something else. I believe that Ukraine has achieved a lot and is a leader among its neighboring countries in many areas. I’m not talking about the gross domestic product per capita statistics but rather about the factors that will inevitably pull Ukraine upwards, demanding honesty from the authorities and growing awareness among citizens.
Let’s give just a few examples. You probably read this text in a newspaper or on a website. That is thanks to media that create a completely different ecosystem in Ukraine in comparison to its neighbors. Most TV channels in Ukraine are indeed owned by oligarchs. However, none of them is directly connected to the authorities. These are six large media groups, and the names of TV channel owners can make up an encyclopedia of Ukrainian politics: Rinat Akhmetov, Serhiy Lyovochkin, Ihor Kolomoisky, Victor Pinchuk, Petro Poroshenko, and Viktor Medvedchuk.
These media compete with each other and sometimes wage a dirty information war in the interests of their owners. Plus, there are several medium-caliber media groups. The economic crisis will force the oligarchs to reduce the cost of servicing their media weapons, which means that later in the conditions of their existence they would have to apply business logic. And some oligarchs will simply start getting rid of the media, as they used to get rid of football clubs, another indispensable attribute of their influence 10-15 years ago. Because life will force them to save, and the transition from the period of initial accumulation of capital to reinvestment in other sectors of the economy will eliminate the need to protect the favorable status quo.
On top of that, deoligarchization will be aided by the inevitable attention of law enforcement agencies. One of the top league oligarchs, Ihor Kolomoisky, already looks like a wounded beast who needs to spend more and more time to hide from international prosecution. And there is less and less time to weave political intrigue.
The same grueling fight with the FBI has knocked Dmytro Firtash out of the oligarch club. The tycoon brothers, Ihor and Hryhoriy Surkis, who own the former flagship of the soccer championships Dynamo (Kyiv), have already turned into moral bankrupts – they are despised by their fans, they can’t find decent coaches, and they don’t have enough money to bring in foreign players.
The investigation led by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine stripped top oligarchs – Oleg Bakhmatyuk and Oleksandr Onyschenko – of their influence and resources. They are now forced to hide abroad. The next in line is Mykola Zlochevsky, who tried to protect himself (with the help of Hunter Biden, son of ex-U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden) from the constant extortion of kickbacks to cover up his business. He is now wanted for trying to bribe NABU detectives.
Despite its biased television, Ukraine has built a powerful cluster of investigative journalism. Programs such as Schemes, Slidstvo.info, Nashi Groshi are examples of high-quality journalism that do not let any government sleep peacefully. They produce a powerful product to expose intricate schemes, which can be highly regarded around the world. On the one hand, they have an unploughed field for work, because there is still a lot of corruption in Ukraine. On the other hand, they can produce a quality investigative product every week that would take six months in a traditional democracy.
Now let’s talk about corruption. If you ask Ukrainians at any given time, they will say with their inherent fatalism that the current government is the most corrupt and it has never been so bad. Ukraine is experiencing somewhat of a “sexual revolution.” “There was no sex in the Soviet Union,” official propaganda suggested and the topic was not discussed in public.
Now the opposite is true: everybody can talk about corruption, we listen about it on all TV channels, from the rostrum of parliament and among the people. This creates an illusion that corruption has become worse now than when it was a taboo subject. This is not the case. There’s less corruption now and the consequences of exposing it have become much more severe. The primitive schemes are easily exposed, forcing people to create more and more sophisticated ways to make money through political influence and bribery.
In Ukraine, it is common to complain about how impossible it is to seek justice due to corrupt courts. It is true, but not so bad. In fact, a judiciary is a place of competition between the forces of good and evil. And along with the corrupt and traitors who cast a shadow over all the judges, there are honest ones who are not ready to betray their oath.
The country has been lately discussing so-called “Vovk tapes” – leaked recordings of violations in the Kyiv District Administrative Court. In one of the wiretapped recordings presented as evidence of their criminal activities, the head of the court, Pavlo Vovk, personally “came out,” calling himself and his colleagues “prostitutes.”
This court has also made a ruling that concerned me and the head of NABU Artem Sytnyk, and it said that we illegally interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It was the exact ruling that Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani showed on air on CNN and Fox News, fueling the conspiracy theory that eventually led to impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. The court made the ruling based on the fact that I exposed the crimes of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, in the so-called “black ledger” (a list of secret payments made by Ukraine’s pro-Russian Party of Regions) of disgraced ex-President Viktor Yanukovych. The absurdity of this decision was proved in an appeal that completely overturned it.
But at the same time, I want to say another unpopular thing. For the first time in many years, I can observe the formation of enclaves of a fair trial. Conducting a competitive selection to Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court and the Supreme Court allowed us to talk about a new quality of justice, much fairer than we’ve seen before.
We fought for the High Anti-Corruption Court in the last parliament with the ex-President Poroshenko, who blocked it for two years. Now the court is gaining momentum in sentencing. In June 2020, it sentenced a corrupt official to prison for the first time – a deputy of the Kyiv Regional Council was sentenced to five years in prison with confiscation of property. In total, we already have rulings by the Anti-Corruption Court against 10 people. The case of top corrupt officials ex-lawmaker Mykola Martynenko and the mayor of Odessa Gennady Trukhanov is at the final stages. The defendants, realizing they can’t influence anything, gradually begin to fall into hysteria.
Similarly, the Supreme Court already has a long list of cases where oligarchs and prominent politicians have lost, despite their status and capabilities. Among those is lawmaker and former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s ally Andriy Ivanchuk who lost to Mikheil Saakashvili. The Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Arsen Avakov lost to me, Serhiy Leshchenko, and the journalists of Deutsche Welle. Former Secretary of the Security Council Oleksandr Turchynov lost to journalist Denys Bigus. Ex-lawmaker Ihor Kononenko (known as a “gray cardinal” under Poroshenko) lost to Aivaras Abromavicius.
That is, judges who have passed an open competition to the Supreme Court try to live up to the highest standards of the judiciary and base their decisions not by checking the last names of the defendants but rather guided by the law. It makes you respect them. And this is exactly the kind of filtering the local courts have to go through, where people most often face corruption.
NABU has become the same proof of changes in Ukraine. For many years, its opponents were outraged that the creation of this body did not pay off: they said that Hr 1 billion allocated from the budget for its existence resulted in nothing. It is a weird logic to measure the effectiveness of the law enforcement system by the number of refunds. But even this false argument no longer works: in the first half of 2020, the economic effect of the work of NABU and Anti-Corruption Prosecution is more than Hr 1.5 billion. For example, realizing that punishment would not be avoided, Kolomoisky-related companies began repaying the largest producer of oil and gas Ukrnafta’s debts, which until recently was considered unimaginable.
Another example – realizing that it will be impossible to bribe NABU officials, they began to return the withdrawn funds to Zaporizhzhyaoblenergo, where the controlling stake belongs to the state. Withdrawal schemes were allegedly directed by current lawmaker Hryhoriy Surkis and Kononenko, who is hiding abroad.
But the forces of evil do not retreat easily. The old corrupt officials are trying to eliminate the source of their troubles. Since the beginning of 2020, there have been three attempts to change the NABU leadership. The fourth has recently started – lawmakers appealed to the Constitutional Court regarding the work of NABU head Artem Sytnyk which they consider illegal. This petition was simultaneously signed by lawmakers from the groups of Medvedchuk, Levochkin, Boyko, Akhmetov, Kolomoisky, and Tymoshenko. Plus Andriy Derkach, an independent member of Ukraine’s parliament who previously aligned with a pro-Russian faction, whom American intelligence de-facto called an agent of Russia. That is a full-fledged art gallery of clans that opposed themselves to Ukrainian society.
I wrote this text to save readers from fatalism and gloom. Ukraine remains a society that has been deliberately divided for many years. This was done so that corrupt politicians could better develop their own identity and gain access to public resources for looting.
But Ukraine has a chance to become a very good example of institutional change. These enclaves will continue to grow, and at the same time, they will be at constant risk of retaliation. And here we need the help of both civil society and partners in the United States, Europe, and Japan. This will be the best gift for Ukraine’s Independence Day.
