The year 2020 was full of undesired surprises, but one piece of news was particularly surprising to me.
For the first time in more than 20 years of my journalistic career, Yulia Tymoshenko has decided to file a lawsuit against me. She is suing over my op-ed published on Aug. 6, 2020 in the Kyiv Post, titled: “Pro-Western Tymoshenko sides with Russian agents in Ukraine.”
In this article, I highlighted some obscure and obvious signs of cooperation between Tymoshenko and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk as they promote common anti-Western narratives and file complaints with the Constitutional Court. There, I also talk about such a prosaic thing as money.
For instance, I wrote that Medvedchuk and his wife Oksana Marchenko have accounts in a little-known Ukrbudinvestbank. The only remarkable fact about this bank is that until June, half of its shares were owned by Tymoshenko’s son-in-law Artur Chechotkin. Among nearly a hundred banks in Ukraine, including Austria’s Raiffeisen, France’s BNP Paribas and even Russia’s Sberbank, they preferred an institution with several branches that sit close to the end of the ranking list.
At the same time, both Tymoshenko and her fellow party member Serhiy Vlasenko received $5.5 million each at this bank, which was paid in the U.S. under the secret procedure of pre-trial settlement of a dispute. It is unknown who paid it.
And people from Medvedchuk’s entourage, two lawmakers of the current Verkhovna Rada convocation, put money into the same little-known bank of the Tymoshenko family. These are Taras Kozak, who is listed as the formal owner of TV channels 112, ZIK and NewsOne, which are pro-Russian propaganda mouthpieces, and Vasyl Nimchenko, who was a judge of the Constitutional Court 17 years ago and allowed then-President Leonid Kuchma to run for a third term de-facto opening the door to the Belarusian scenario in Ukraine. To Kuchma’s credit, he decided not to follow this path, but Nimchenko was already working in connection with Medvedchuk who headed the presidential administration.
In my opinion, the fact that Medvedchuk, his wife, and their closest allies trusted their money to a bank affiliated with Tymoshenko is a sign of political closeness.
Choice of court
Tymoshenko filed her lawsuit not by my registration address in Podilskyi District of Kyiv, but in Pecherskyi District, where I had never lived. This court is a symbol of court corruption in Ukraine.
That’s where, in recent months, rulings have been made to destroy the National Anti-Corruption Bureau cases. Tymoshenko is not the only politician who chose the wrong but the loyal court. Medvedchuk did the same when he sued me.
Unlike Medvedchuk’s lawsuit, Tymoshenko’s lawsuit against me was assigned to a fair judge, who redirected the case to the proper court.
Tymoshenko’s lawsuit concerns seven paragraphs in my op-ed, where I give a political assessment of her actions or recite well-known facts. Tymoshenko demands that I publish a rebuttal on any social network, not on the Kyiv Post pages, where a text that caused her dissatisfaction was published. This is also very unusual. I assume that it means that a rebuttal on Tik Tok will do.
The only valid explanation for this is that Tymoshenko needs not a rebuttal, but a court decision for her to use and its further distribution on TV channels as proof of her innocence.
Tymoshenko and Russia
The paragraphs that Tymoshenko demands to refute are pretty significant. They shed light on her 25-year political career.
Thus, Tymoshenko argues against the part that reads “she recently has made another political flip and now almost openly supports Viktor Medvedchuk, a leader of the 44-member pro-Russian opposition in Ukraine’s parliament and a personal friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Tymoshenko claims that these words damage her business reputation.
It means that Tymoshenko understands that her ties to Medvedchuk are toxic for her reputation. But there are many publications on this topic in the media. Medvedchuk called Tymoshenko the best pre-pared candidate for the presidency before the 2019 election. A similar assessment was made by the Russian website Ukraina.ru, which is part of the Kremlin’s propaganda toolkit: “Since the mid‑2000s, Medvedchuk has believed that Tymoshenko is the best option for Ukraine.”
In a 2017 interview, Russian political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky described in detail how the alliance emerged: “Official Russia has been supporting Tymoshenko for days and years. Yulia Tymoshenko and Vladimir Putin agreed on everything back on Sept. 23, 2005. It was historic, albeit semi-confidential, visit of Yulia Vladimirovna to Moscow after her first resignation as prime minister. She met with all the leaders of the Russian state.”
Lobbyism
The second issue, which Tymoshenko demanded to refute, concerns the cost of lobbyists in the U. S. In fact, in the U.S., this information is public — just one of a whole bunch of companies that represented Tymoshenko, Wiley Rein LLP, reported to the U. S. Department of Justice that they were transferred $1.15 million.
Not a single penny of these funds was transferred from the official account of the Batkivshchyna par-ty. Tymoshenko herself also did not sign the bill, because all these years her declaration looked like a mockery of her way of life and was full of ridiculously small numbers. Instead, payments were made from a variety of individuals and firms, including offshore companies. And one of the companies that paid for lobbying in Tymoshenko’s interests is now involved in the high-profile NABU case against Mykola Martynenko, a former lawmaker.
Tymoshenko was the first to hire American lobbyists on an individual basis — the U. S. Department of Justice’s website still contains Edelman’s 1997 report. Then, $116,000 was paid for Tymoshenko’s visit to Washington, D. C. In part, these lobbyists were also supposed to help the then-Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Lazarenko, who was later sentenced to eight years in prison in the U.S.
More allegations
Another sentence that Tymoshenko wants to disprove is that she helped the sale of a large Ukrainian corporation, Industrial Union of Donbas, to VneshneconomBank of Russia, whose supervisory board was headed by Putin himself.
This transaction took place before the 2010 presidential election. And, according to Russia’s Forbes, who cited its sources, $300 million of the whole sum could go to Tymoshenko’s election campaign. The newspaper Kommersant at the same time wrote that the deal was personally supervised by Putin.
The fourth issue challenged by Tymoshenko is the claim that the 2009 gas contract was unfavorable for Ukraine. But this is supported by the assessment of the head of Naftogaz Andriy Kobolev, who claims that in the 10 years of contracts for the supply and transit of gas with Russian Gazprom, Ukraine’s losses for Ukraine reached $32.1 billion or more than Hr 60,000 for each Ukrainian family.
The next “problematic” paragraph concerns a joint petition from the Tymoshenko’s and Medvedchuk’s factions to the Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional how Naftogaz was unbundled.
This joint work of the two politicians may be beneficial to Russia because it will allow Ukraine to cancel the 2019 transit agreement. And the risk has been and remains high, given the efforts with which the Constitutional Court tried to undo the anti-corruption reforms in 2020.
And this is not only my assessment but also that of gas expert Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Center for Energy Research. He wrote that “if the Constitutional Court declares the unbundling of Naftogaz and the gas transmission system operator illegal, and we know the quality of Ukrainian litigation in the ‘under pressure format,’ and especially when it is Medvedchuk who is influencing, it will create grounds for Gazprom to call the transit agreement void.”
Serhiy Makogon, general director of the Gas Transmission System Operator of Ukraine, also shared these concerns: “Ukraine should not give a single chance to terminate this contract, in which forces both outside and inside Ukraine may be interested. As evidenced by the recent lawsuit about the unconstitutionality of the Gas Transmission System Operator unbundling.”
In the latest block of her claims, Tymoshenko protests that she helped Russia’s information attack on Ukraine’s negotiating position on a peaceful settlement in the Donbas. Her words were repeatedly used as strong proof of the plausibility of the most absurd accusations. Like the involvement of the Ukrainian authorities in the supply of rocket engines to North Korea. She also promoted — in conjunction with the Russian media — the narrative about Ukraine’s “attack” on the occupied Donbas and the subsequent cancellation of elections.
Another point where I noticed the consonance of Tymoshenko’s and Medvedchuk’s positions concerns the creation of an inter-parliamentary platform for resolving the conflict in Donbas. There are many publications regarding this in the media. An idea blessed by Putin and promoted by Medvedchuk originally had no support in Ukraine — until suddenly Tymoshenko suggested creating a parliamentary group for negotiations on Donbas.
In 2021, Tymoshenko will celebrate the 25th anniversary of her political career who first ran for the Verkhovna Rada in the district in the depressed areas of the Kirovograd Oblast, where the revolutionary Lev Trotsky was born. She undoubtedly influenced the development of independent Ukraine as much as he influenced the processes in post-imperial Russia, although she — same as Trotsky — didn’t reach the highest rank.
In recent months, Tymoshenko has significantly reduced her criticism, and her faction has supported the 2021 budget. Taking advantage of the fact that the Servants of the People party has lost mono-majority, Tymoshenko is trying to take a chance and get back into power, giving votes at a critical moment.
For this, reportedly, her nominee was appointed the head of the State Grain and Food Company.
Tymoshenko’s struggle for power doesn’t stop. And the topic of her relations with Medvedchuk, the coverage of which worried her, will be the subject of additional analysis due to her lawsuit.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist, and former member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
