Late on Sept. 27, Ukrainian President Poroshenko was accepting two U.S. speed patrol boats, Island class, on the U.S. Coast Guard base in Baltimore.
The same night in Kyiv, more than 100 activists, journalists, lawmakers and worried citizens came to his office on Bankova Street demanding to stop ignoring the beatings of the civil activists all over Ukraine. Over 55 attacks on activists and whistleblowers have been committed in Ukraine since 2017.
A strong feeling of déjà vu was in the air on Bankova Street, outside the presidential administration, that night. Similar rallies were common five years ago, which later developed in the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted Poroshenko’s predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, on Feb. 22, 2014.
Surrounded by cordons of police officers and the National Guard, some men were wearing Ukrainian flags on their shoulders. Activists were handing over sandwiches and hot drinks to the protesters, who listened to the civil activists, who came to Kyiv from all over Ukraine in order to tell their terrifying stories.
Many people were talking about how hard it was to believe that again, after the bloody winter of EuroMaidan Revolution of 2013-2014, they would have to protest against persecution of activists on the streets of Kyiv.
Despite the cold weather, people spent several hours demanding from the president to defend the justice, and from the police to investigate the attacks.
“Law enforcement agencies start investigating the attacks only under the public pressure,” reads the joint statement of several civil society organizations, published on Sept. 26.
The protesters projected on the building in front of Bankova the laser image of Kateryna Gandziuk, a whistleblower official from Kherson, who became a victim of one of the most vicious cases and a symbol of the current protest.
Gandziuk was attacked by a battery acid splash on July 31, which left 40 percent of her body covered with acid burns.
The police have qualified the attack as hooliganism, but after the numerous protests they reclassified the case into the “attempted murder.”
First, the police arrested an innocent man and only after civil society pushed for justice again, another four suspects were arrested. But those, who ordered the attack, still remain unknown.
“I know I look bad. But still not bad as current Ukrainian justice and rule of law. Because unlike me, nobody cures our justice system,” Gandziuk said in a video address recorded at the hospital and published on Sept. 26.
Gandziuk called on Ukrainians to come to Bankova to support people, who stood for justice and fought against local corrupt officials in their hometowns as she did in Kherson. These people were attacked, beaten and even killed in revenge for their actions, she said.
Similar rallies took place in 11 other Ukrainian cities, including Lviv, Kharkiv, and Dnipro.
The activists from Odesa came to Kyiv to draw attention to atrocities in their city. There was the highest number of attacks in Odesa among all other Ukrainian cities — at least 14 over the last 12 months.
The local activists blame the city authorities including the mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov of organizing many of them.
“I’ve been attacked six times and in four of them there was City Council behind that,” said Yuriy Diachenko, head of the Odesa branch of Democratic Alliance reformist political party. Trukhanov consistently denies such accusations.
The Presidential Administration issued a statement saying that Poroshenko “shares the concerns of the activists” which he links with the rise of criminality in the country.
The activists, however, link the violence against them with the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in 2019, saying the central authorities turn a blind eye on violence in the regions in exchange for support of the regional elites to get the high election results.
Protesters said that Poroshenko has not yet reacted on the attacks against activists properly. And law enforcement agencies “only simulate the hectic activity that helps to avoid punishment for perpetrators and increases violence every day,” reads the statement of the organizers of the rally, which they called “Silence is killing.”
On the other wall near Bankova there was a portrait of Poroshenko hanging with the inscription “President of silence” written under it.
