The impeachment inquiry and trial of U. S. President Donald Trump not only opened a Pandora’s box of American politics but also shed some light on Ukraine’s internal politics.
Every day brings even more proof that political and business interests are deeply integrated into U.S.-Ukraine relations. And it seems like we have never seen such frankness in international politics before.
The release of Trump’s phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was itself an unprecedented event. It didn’t stop there: the public also learned about the correspondence of the “three amigos,” followed by livestreamed testimonies in Congress. Finally, a critical asset in investigating the pressure on Ukrainian authorities was
Lev Parnas, a Ukrainian-American business partner of Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer.
Parnas agreed to cooperate with impeachment investigators, including providing Congress with his mobile phone containing all his Ukraine-related correspondence and a recording of his conversation with Trump.
For some countries, this may seem unheard of. But not for Ukraine, where wiretapped phone conversations have become a part of the political landscape.
A few days before the Americans heard the recording where Trump spoke about firing the U. S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a similar event happened in Ukraine. We heard Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk’s dialogues with Cabinet ministers and National Bank executives, which were secretly recorded and leaked online.
This is further evidence that, despite its ongoing battle against corruption, in some ways Ukraine is a very transparent country. In Ukraine, the “tradition” to record and publish other people’s conversations goes back to 2000, when secret recordings from the office of President Leonid Kuchma were published. Now top ministers and oligarchs forbid visitors to enter their offices with a cellphone, and guests of the president are asked to take off their watches. The precaution started after ex-lawmaker Oleksandr Onyshchenko secretly recorded his conversations with then-President Petro Poroshenko using his watch and published them.
I’d call this trend a sign of the “Ukrainianization” of U.S. politics.
But if Ukraine is exporting the standards of a “political game without rules,” then I would very much like Ukraine to begin importing law enforcement practices from the U. S. In particular, Ukraine should adopt the practice of offering softer sentences to subordinates of corrupt officials in exchange for cooperation with investigations.
Almost all those accused by the Prosecutor General Robert Mueller have followed this path. And this is what Lev Parnas is doing now. The moment these people smell trouble, it’s a competition of who gets to the FBI first.
Even one of Ukraine’s corrupt officials suffered from such rules introduced by U.S. law enforcement. It was a former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko, who was initially sentenced to nine years in jail for extortion, money-laundering through American banks and fraud. The main witness against him was his close friend and former adviser Petro Kyrychenko (incidentally, another of Lazarenko’s associate, Yulia Tymoshenko, refused to cooperate with the U.S. investigators).
Avakov’s role
Parnas submitted more than 390 pages of his WhatsApp messages to Congress. His exchanges with ex-Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko got a lot of attention. We saw Lutsenko clinging to power, ready to share information in exchange for America’s support. But some other messages from Parnas have been undeservingly left out of the spotlight.
For example, his correspondence with Interior Minister Arsen Avakov is very interesting. Avakov himself is a very controversial figure. He is the longest-serving minister in Ukraine’s history, having held his job since February 2014. Three heads of state have changed during his time in office.
Avakov’s ministry is autonomous and menacing. His stint in office has been marred with numerous accusations of corruption and sabotage of reforms. His efforts to keep the seat are understandable since he himself could be prosecuted after leaving public office.
When Zelensky took power and left Avakov in place, it was allegedly done to prevent any abuse of office by law enforcement institutions during the government’s transition period. It was said then that Avakov would stay for no more than three months.
Interior Minister Arsen Avakov reacts before a meeting of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with the leadership of the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, the Cabinet of Ministers and law enforcement authorities on Sept. 2, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Many members of the Verkhovna Rada protested against Avakov staying in power, but they were promised that the minister would quickly find a successor. Almost six months later, there is no hint that Avakov will leave. Moreover, lawmakers close to billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky (such as Oleksandr Dubinsky, a member of the Servant of the People party) claimed that by summer Avakov would replace Honcharuk as prime minister.
Avakov’s influence reached Parnas as well. Last year, when he wanted to hold a meeting between President-elect Zelensky and Giuliani to get a signal from the Ukrainian authorities about a Biden investigation, Parnas used Avakov as a channel of communication.
And although Zelensky refrained from the meeting, Avakov and Parnas continued to communicate. Avakov provided Parnas with police protection when he arrived in Kyiv to do his dirty work for Giuliani and Trump in April 2019.
“I was glad to see you, my friend,” Parnas later wrote to Avakov, indicating that the two met.
But the most interesting thing is that the two got so close that Parnas wanted to lobby for the interests of his friends through Avakov. However, his interests didn’t lie with the Interior Ministry, but rather with the Ministry of Infrastructure. This suggests that Avakov was an unofficial “curator” of the infrastructure ministry during the government of Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. After all, the network of agents of his influence extends far beyond just the National Police.
Parnas told Avakov that the infrastructure ministry wasn’t allowing the privately-owned Ukrainian Locomotive Company to start using its own locomotives on the Lviv Railway, the Western branch of the Ukrzaliznytsya, a state monopoly that controls the majority of the country’s railroad transportation.
Parnas even names the head of this firm. It is Vlad Yakubovsky. A man with the same name is mentioned in open sources as the chairman of the State Environmental Investment Agency during ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s time.
My sources say that the situation is even more interesting. It turns out that Yakubovsky, for whom Parnas was lobbying, is behind one of the key business clans in the Poroshenko era — that of Andriy Adamovsky and Oleksandr Hranovsky.
For many, these names say little, but “true admirers” of Ukrainian politics know Hranovsky, a former lawmaker, to be a key agent of influence under Poroshenko in judicial and prosecutorial circles. After losing re-election and his parliamentary immunity in 2019, Hranovsky obtained a visa to emigrate to Israel. The company of Hranovsky and Adamovsky apparently tried to start using their own locomotives for freight transportation services in western Ukraine, something that Ukrzaliznytsya doesn’t allow.
It appears that Parnas was persuading Avakov to help Adamovsky and Hranovsky. To his request, Avakov replied: “I will look into it after the weekend.” The end of the story is unknown. There was nothing more to it in the correspondence that Parnas handed over to the American investigators. But it showed that Avakov’s influence on the Infrastructure Ministry was not a myth and Parnas did not hesitate to put in a word for his acquaintances at the highest level.
In addition to Adamovsky’s interests in the railway, Roman Nasirov became another informal client of Parnas in Ukraine. We mostly know him as the former head of the State Fiscal Service who was charged with corruption. In order to avoid being held in custody, Nasirov simulated a sudden illness during the legal proceedings. He was carried into court on a stretcher and observed proceedings from beneath a blanket.
When Trump brushed off Parnas once again, he simply posted a video. In this clip, Parnas approaches the American president at one of his events in Florida and introduces him to another man. And if his face is unknown to Americans, Ukrainians would easily recognize the man as Nasirov. His criminal case has not yet been resolved, though it has been three years since he was charged. And it looks like Parnas and his accomplices will be convicted in the U.S. sooner than Ukraine finally decides on Nasirov.
This whole story with Parnas proves once again: If the authorities have the political will to fight corruption, it can be done quickly and efficiently. This American principle should be an example for Ukraine to follow.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist and a former member of parliament.
