VILLAGE OF NOVI PETRIVTSI, Kyiv Oblast – In the tradition of czarist opulence and excess, ex-President Viktor Yanukovych spared no expense when drawing on inspiration from the Versailles or Peter the Great’s Peterhof palace.
See also photos and videos: A walking tour of Mezhyhirya, formerly Yanukovych’s opulent estate (PHOTOS, VIDEOS)
Now that his sprawling 140-hectare (345 acres) Mezhyhirya estate – nearly the size of Monaco – north of Kyiv is abandoned, it transformed on Feb. 22 into a makeshift amusement park where thousands descended to take stock of his self-indulgent lifestyle. Some want to turn it into Ukraine’s Museum of Corruption.
The visitors weren’t disappointed. and there was nothing ascetic about Mezhyhirya, where an eponymous 12th-century monastery once stood.
Yanukovych couldn’t build a nation, but he built mansions made of imported marble and wood. The masons and craftsman, Yanukovych had bragged early in his presidency, were German.
A lavish conference room inside a Spanish galleon and clubhouse furnished with Italian chandeliers is situated near the riverfront.
Caged ostriches and pheasants from as far as Burma and Vietnam shared space here.
A car park with Rolls Royces and a cavernous hangar with boats, a hovercraft and a 20-meter recreational vehicle still wrapped in plastic were left behind.
Carefully manicured lawns and serene ponds filled with swans and ducks dotted the area, including a vast golf course, tennis court – his favorite sport – and a cozy bathhouse. The dog houses were bigger than most apartments in which Kyivans live.
“I wanted to see with my own eyes and not rely on rumors to witness how the head of state lives, we as taxpayers wanted to see this ourselves…that the splendor we see here hasn’t been conjured or imagined,” said Serhiy Rybakov, a construction worker in Kyiv who spent four hours exploring the compound. “I wasn’t simply in wonder, I was in awe of what I saw in all its pomposity throughout the territory, including the exotic wildlife on the limited terrain that we covered and despite what was left behind (after Viktor Yanukovych fled)…I believe not many people have seen anything like this.”
Local residents in the village of Novi Petrivtsi said the last sign of Yanukovych being there was around 2 a.m. on Feb. 22 when they heard helicopters take off and saw two armored personnel carriers leave the area.
Bearing testimony to Yanukovych’s hasty exit was a treasure trove of documents that were tossed into the Kyv Sea, which leads to the Dnipro River. Those documents allegedly point to the corruption and criminality of Yanukovych’s three years in power. They included dossiers of civic activists and journalists who annoyed him, accounting records of bribes and money received from proxies, and multimillion-dollar invoices of the work that was done there and the furniture that was purchased for the estate.
Yanukovych, a twice-convicted former bus depot manager from Donetsk Oblast, liked the estate so much that he forced taxpayers to lease an office there so that he wouldn’t have to travel so often to downtown Kyiv.
Good until 2020, the lease cost the state budget $12,500 a year so that he could work from home when the average Ukrainian made less than $3,900 for the same period. Yanukovych moved into Mezhyhirya when he first became prime minister in 2002 under ex-President Leonid Kuchma. It had been a Soviet residence for the political elite, but he decided to scale up the compound to his unquenchable tastes.
A series of transactions show the allegedly illegal transfer of state ownership of the compound to a murky company that investigative journalists linked to Yanukovych. He constantly denied being the owner and modestly admitted only renting a tiny portion of land there.
But now instead of burly security guards and armed riot police officers, people’s self-defense units from EuroMaidan control the area. They said they will be stationed there until their leader, Andriy Parubiy, issues further instructions.
Public debate has started on what do with Mezhyhirya. Some want to preserve it as a “museum of corruption.” Others want to transform it into a vast botanical garden, while some want to build a children’s hospital or daycare center here.
Whatever its fate, Rybakov wasn’t jealous of Yanukovych’s former residence: “I’ve been here for four, almost five hours, and I wouldn’t want to live here, like this…I don’t think many would want to live in these conditions when its built on other people’s blood, on other people’s money…I don’t see the sense of dwelling in such apartments, it’s not for us.”
Kyiv Post editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected]
