The year 2011 was one of kleptocracy, corruption and a crackdown on the opposition. Ukraine’s rich were rapidly growing richer, especially those with links to President Viktor Yanukovych and his party.
Ukraine’s poor were struggling even to buy buckwheat, a popular staple of the local diet.
Tensions between the rich and poor manifested themselves in protests over several deadly traffic accidents caused by rich brats, who usually went unpunished for their dangerous driving.
The lack of justice in Ukraine sparked concern worldwide when a court sentenced ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s political opponent, to seven years in prison in what was largely regarded as a show trial to sideline the president’s greatest foe.
On the bright side, independent Ukraine turned 20 in 2011, and it was preparing to co-host Euro 2012, the European soccer championship and the biggest sporting event in its history.
Billionaires rule
In 2011, Ukraine had eight billionaires, three more than the previous year, Forbes magazine showed in its ranking. All the billionaires earned their wealth in metallurgy, energy, and agriculture. The richest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, became three times richer than in the previous year. In the list of 100 richest Ukrainians compiled by Korrespondent magazine, every fourth person — including Akhmetov — was either a member of Yanukovych’s party or a native of Donetsk Oblast, where Yanukovych came from.
For the first time, Yanukovych’s elder son Oleksandr was listed among Ukraine’s top 100 richest people, according to Korrespondent. The term “the family,” which meant the inner circle of people close to Yanukovych and his son Oleksandr, first appeared in 2011. It would be the major phenomenon for the country in the coming years.
Rich brats
About a quarter of Ukrainians were living below the poverty line in 2011, according to the country’s Institute of Demography, and the average salary was about $300. Nevertheless, Ukraine was No 3 in Europe after Russia and Germany by the number of purchased luxury cars.
The division between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless was best seen in unpunished crimes or acts of hooliganism committed by the children of politicians, oligarchs, and top law enforcement officials.
In July 2011, Roman Landik, the son of a lawmaker from Yanukovych’s party, was caught on video viciously beating a young woman in a Luhansk restaurant. Luhansk police issued a search warrant for him only after that video became viral. This incident led to protests in Kyiv.
Activists recalled Serhiy Kalynovsky, the former stepson of oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who killed two people in a car accident in 2007, but managed to go into hiding abroad; Dmytro Rud, son of a prosecutor in Dnipro (then called Dnipropetrovsk), who hit and killed three women in his car in Dnipro, but was released on bail; and Yanukovych’s younger son Viktor, who was also a fan of riding fast in the expensive cars.
There was also Margaryta Smilianska-Halytska, step-daughter of the head of Ukraine’s State Employment Service. Although her driving did not lead to fatal consequences, it certainly caught public attention: In September 2011, she crashed her Bentley into four other luxury cars — an Aston Martin, Mercedes, Ferrari and Porsche — in Monaco.
Political persecutions
Yuriy Lutsenko, then an opposition politician and former interior minister, spent the entirety of 2011 in a detention center. He was arrested in late 2010 while walking his dog and accused of abuse of office while minister for giving a state-owned apartment to his driver. The politician was then sentenced to four years in prison.
Lutsenko called the case politically motivated. In 2012, the European Court of Human Rights agreed in a ruling.
In August 2011, a court arrested Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been Yanukovych’s main rival in the 2010 presidential election, losing by only 3.5 percentage points. That sparked clashes in Kyiv between Tymoshenko’s supporters and the police. In October 2011, a court sentenced her to seven years in prison for abuse of office over the gas deal she signed with Russia in 2009.
Members of the opposition and the international community called Tymoshenko’s trial political persecution. Tymoshenko was released from jail in late February 2014, a day after mass protests in Kyiv known as EuroMaidan Revolution ousted Yanukovych, who fled to Russia.
Grain quotas
The government of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov extended the quotas on grain exports, allegedly to secure the grain reserves and prevent hunger in the country. By many of the grain traders and experts said this was actually corruption at work, since the largest Khlib Investbud, a company linked to Agricultural Minister Mykola Prysiazhniuk, received the largest quotas. In March 2011, Nibulon, one of the largest grain producers, went to court against the government. In late May 2011, the government lifted the grain quotas under pressure from market players and foreign partners.
On April 15, 2011, the Kyiv Post published an interview with Prysiazhniuk in which he gave conflicting explanations about who owned Khlib Investbud. The minister, now in exile abroad, pressured then-Kyiv Post publisher Mohammad Zahoor to fire the newspaper’s chief editor, Brian Bonner, for publishing the interview. Zahoor did but reinstated Bonner five days later after the staff went on strike.
Another money-making scheme was linked to buckwheat. The government obliged farmers to sell buckwheat at prices far below market level, ostensibly to help the poor. However, buckwheat disappeared from supermarkets. Azarov’s government then imported a large amount of buckwheat from China at an outrageously high price in what appeared to be an obvious kickback scheme. The main operator of the purchase was notorious Khlib Investbud.
Ukraine turns 20
In August 2011, the government pompously celebrated the 20th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, while the opposition marched to Presidential Administration in protest against political persecutions. The protest ended with demonstrators scuffling with police.
At the same time, the country was preparing for the Euro 2012 football championships with numerous major infrastructure projects. They included purchasing high-speed trains in South Korea and reconstructing Ukraine’s Olympic Stadium in Kyiv. The year was also an absolute triumph for the Ukrainian boxer brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, who together held the champion’s belts in all four of boxing’s main heavyweight divisions.
