Editor’s Note: Denys Kazanskiy, blogger and journalist from Donetsk, offers an overview of the parliamentary elections in the single-member districts in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas area, where Ukraine is defending itself against the Russian-backed war. In Donetsk, officials say only 13 out of 21 election districts will be operational while 5 out of 11 districts will be voting in Luhansk.
In Ukraine’s eastern Donbas area, where Russia is waging war against Ukraine, the representatives of the local old political and business clans are campaigning to once again get parliament seats at Oct. 26 elections.
In the Donbas, the ruling elite have not changed since the 1990s. The families that made their first big money in the 1990s during political and violent conflicts are still fighting for power in the industrial regions. Neither the EuroMaidan Revolution no war with Russia has broken their grip.
The Verkhovna Rada is about to get several lawmakers with murky pasts and loyalty to former President Viktor Yanukovych. They run for parliament in districts that the Ukrainian army won back from the Russia-backed insurgents.
Kramatorsk
In Kramatorsk, a town of 168,000 people in Donetsk Oblast, the Blyzniuk clan seeks a parliament seat.
Serhiy Blyzniuk, 43, runs for parliament in district 48 in Kramatorsk. The candidate is the son and heir of Anatoliy Blyzniuk, the former Donetsk Oblast governor. Anatoliy Blyzniuk is an acting lawmaker and Party of Regions member. Now his son is about to replace him in big politics. The son runs as independent candidate with no party affiliation.
The Blyzniuk family owns some of the biggest metallurgical and engineering plants of Kramatorsk, the biggest one being EnergoMashSpetsStal. Serhiy Blyzniuk is its director.
Anatoliy Blyzniuk started his political career in the Communist Party of USSR. In 1990 he was appointed the first deputy of the head of Kramatorsk city council and occupied this post till 1994. Two years later he was elected a mayor of Kramatorsk.
In the 1990s such post offered unparalleled advantages. Blyzniuk participated in privatization processes and received control over several plants, the giants of Soviet industry.
A photograph taken in Kramatorsk around 1997 shows then mayor Anatoliy Blyzniuk raising a glass with Oleksandr Rybak, the leader of local gang convicted of organizing the assasination of Ihor Aleksandrov, a journalist of local TV station TOR. Aleksandrov criticized the corruption of the Kramatorsk authorities.
In 2011 Korrespondent magazine estimated the net worth of Serhiy Blyzniuk as $150 million. Now he is about to enter big politics.
Blyzniuk has a strong competitor in his district – Yuriy Boyarskiy, a member of parliament elected with Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.
Boyarskiy is a former top manager of NKMZ, the biggest plant of Kramatorsk, and is supported by its owner Heorhiy Skudar, another influential figure of the city. Boyarskiy won the election in Kramatorsk in 2012 with 55 percent of the votes.
Boyarskiy’s supporter Skudar, 72, was elected a member of parliament three times, but didn’t run in 2012. Skudar doesn’t own a wide range of enterprises. Instead, he concentrated on NKMZ, the huge metallurgical plant taking the territory of 328 hectares.
Skudar received ownership of NKMZ in late 1990s when, being its director, he bought the shares of the company at a closed auction. Like many other enterprises, after the break of Soviet Union NKMZ was turned into a joint-stock company and shares were given away to the thousands of its employees.
In the late 1990s, the workers were offered to sell their shares back to the plant in order to save the enterprise from being purchased by an outsider. The shares were then sold to the top management of the plant.
In the course of privatization NKMZ turned into a joint-stock company with its shares divided among the thousands of its workers.
When the plant ownership was secured, Skudar ran to parliament in 2002.
Now Skudar’s former employee Boyarskiy is competing with Blyzniuk in the parliament run in a single-mandate district in Kramatorsk. Both were members of Party of Regions, now competing against each other.
Sloviansk
The occupation of part of the Donbas territories by the Kremlin-backed insurgents cut the number of eastern constituencies. As a result, the run is much tougher for local candidates than it was in 2012. The former allies and members of Party of Regions often face each other in the competition.
Three former Yanukovych supporters run in the district 47 in long-suffering Sloviansk – the first stronghold of the insurgents, then liberated in July by Ukrainian forces. The competitors are the former Mayor Valentyn Rybachuk, Donetsk regional council member Serhiy Belogorodskiy and Yuriy Solod, husband of notorious politician Natalya Korolevska. The chances look equal.
Korolevska has been seen trying to push the scales in her husband’s favor as she was giving away packages of free food to the voters in Sloviansk. But her background compromises her.
Korolevska, former Yulia Tymoshenko’s party member comes from Donbass and is a native of Luhansk city. Korolevska and her brother Kostyantyn Korolevskiy traded metal scrap in 1990s. Such businesses were booming in the decade when many Soviet factories became bancrupts and their eqipment was cut for scrap.
Korolevska evidently had influence in Tymoshenko’s Cabinet of Ministers in 2007. In an interview to her official website she said that “has once promise to the people of Luhansk that the city’s native will become a minister of coal industry” and she fulfilled her promise by pushing the candidacy of Viktor Poltavets.
But Korolevska and former minister Poltavets share more than a native city.
Poltavets and his son, together with Korolevska’s husband Solod, co-founded two coal trade companies – Industry and Center for Coal Industry Development. Strangely, in the national company register these two companies don’t list any production facilities of their own.
In 2008 Korolevska’s net worth was estimated as $243 million. She owns an ice cream factory, but journalists and other politicians have many times claimed that her fortune comes from illegal coal mines – a version supported by two ghost coal companies in her husband’s ownership.
Competing with Korolevska’s husband is Serhiy Belogorodskiy, a businessman from Kramatorsk.
Belogorodskiy,In 2008 Donetsk public transportation company Dopas announced that businessman Belogorodskiy was conducting a raider attack on the firm.
Krasnoarmeysk
In the district 50 in Krasnoarmeysk, two former Party of Regions members compete. Yevhen Heller, a president of Luhansk football club Zorya, admitted in interviews that he was a friend of Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man and former supporter of Yanukovych.
Leonid Baysarov, his competitor, is a business partner of another oligarch, coal magnat Viktor Nusenkis.
While Heller has better connections, the background speaks for Baysarov – he was elected in the district in 2002.
Artemivsk
Current lawmaker Serhiy Klyuyev seems to be the leader in the district 46 in Artemivsk, a city of 103,400 in Donetsk Oblast.
His brother Andriy Klyuyev is wanted and suspected in co-organizing the mass killings of the protesters in Kyiv in February. Both brothers are the subjects of sanctions in the European Union and Canada.
Despite that, Ukrainian Central Elections Commission registered Serhiy Klyuyev as a candidate.
Whoever wins in the district, it will not be a fresh face. Klyuyev’s main competitors are Leonid Perebiynos, mayor of the neighbouring town Krasniy Lyman and Dmytro Reva, former Party of Regions’ lawmaker and son of Artemivsk mayor. His father, long-serving mayor of Artemivsk Oleksiy Reva was criticized this April when he replaced the flag of Ukraine with the insurgents’ flag on the city council..
Mariupol
The two districts of Mariupol will likely give seats to more former Yanukovych allies. In district 57 Serhiy Matviyenkov runs for parliament. He succeeded in the district in 2012 elections. He was chief engineer of Ilyich steel.
The future of district 58 is less certain. Businessman and former oblast governor Serhiy Taruta competes here against well-known local businessman Yuriy Tarnavs.
