Two weeks later, the March 20 protest outside the presidential administration is still in the headlines in Ukraine.
Hundreds of people protested near the President’s Office, demanding justice for convicted activist Serhiy Sternenko. They broke windows and vandalized walls and doors, leaving slurs on the building’s facade.
Instead of addressing the reason for the protest — a broken court system — authorities and politicians have been trying to use the unrest for political gain.
“If the government would have successfully compelled judicial reform, there wouldn’t have been a need for protests,” said lawmaker Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, who represents the 20-member Voice party. He participated in the protest.
On March 30, the parliament called an extraordinary session amid a lockdown to pass a resolution condemning the protest and formally order the National Police to investigate it — even though it was already doing it.
Police detained six suspects — activists Roman Ratushnyi, Serhii Filimonov, Oleksiy Bilkovsky, Denis Mishchenko, David Gadzhimuratov and war veteran Vladyslav Hranetsky-Stafiychuk, better known as Vlad Sord.
All were charged with “armed hooliganism” even though none of them are known to have carried weapons at the protest.
Most were placed under house arrest. They are facing up to seven years in prison.
Protest gets radical
The protest near the President’s Office wasn’t the most violent that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency has seen, but it was the most politicized one.
Odesa’s Primorsky District Court on Feb. 23 convicted Sternenko and another activist, Ruslan Demchuk, of robbing and torturing Serhiy Shcherbych, a local pro-Russian council member, in 2015.
The two were sentenced to seven years in prison and confiscation of half of their property. Sternenko appealed.
Sternenko, the former head of Odesa’s branch of the right-wing Right Sector organization, became a popular figure among activists and nationalists. His popularity made the trial against him highly politicized.
The March 20 protest was triggered by what many saw as an unfair verdict reached with procedural violations and political motives by a controversial judge.
However, it wasn’t all about Sternenko. His questionable conviction is just another symptom of a broken judicial system and Zelensky’s failure to reform the courts and clear out tainted officials.
Sternenko and his supporters accuse the president of deliberately sabotaging judicial reform. The protesters have also been demanding the release of musician turned activist Andriy Antonenko, who has been kept in prison without a trial for over a year. Along with two other people, he was charged in 2019 with murdering Belarusianborn journalist Pavel Sheremet in Kyiv on July 20, 2016.
Since 2019, animosity has grown between the government and people demanding judicial reform, who often center their demands around Antonenko’s and Sternenko’s release. Still, the protests were peaceful for over a year.
That changed after Feb. 23, when Sternenko was sentenced. Twenty-seven police officers were injured in the protest that followed, according to the National Police.
However, the March 20 protest was largely peaceful. Protesters gathered in front of the presidential office to mark Sternenko’s birthday and demand justice for the activist. Some of them broke windows and painted on the walls. Someone wrote “sucker” on the sign saying “The President of Ukraine.”
Police didn’t intervene and no people were injured.
“The protest has succeeded in drawing attention to this problem,” said Yurchyshyn, one of the few lawmakers who publicly supported the protest.
Government PR
Yet the protest appeared to have touched the nerve for Zelensky’s administration.
On the day after the protest, the president’s office published a statement, estimating repairs to cost the state Hr 2 million ($73,000). Critics ridiculed the apparently inflated sum. It ended up being much smaller.
Soon the police began arresting those who took part in the protest. Most of those arrested were activists of right-wing organizations.
Critics say that it appears that the Interior Ministry was using the farright connection to discredit the idea behind the protest.
The government’s response peak in absurdity when Deputy Interior Minister Anton Herashchenko brought the vandalized front door of the President’s Office to a live political talk-show to discuss vandals and radicals.
Judicial watchdogs say that the charges of “armed hooliganism” against protesters are absurd since the protesters didn’t have any weapons.
“What kind of weapon are they talking about — a flare? Spray paint?” said Mykhailo Zhernakov, head of Dejure, a legal non-profit tasked with promoting judicial reforms in Ukraine. “It’s absurd. It’s an obvious attempt to escalate the conflict.”
Three of the people arrested for the protest, Filimonov, Bilkovsky and Mishchenko, are part of a low-profile right-wing organization called Honor. Most Honor members are former volunteers of the Azov Battalion, who fought against Russia in the Donbas.
In 2018, a provision in an appropriation bill passed by the U. S. Congress blocked military aid to Azov on the grounds of its white supremacist ideology. The battalion is currently part of the Interior Ministry.
On March 30, Zelensky’s 245-member Servant of the People faction convened a special session of the parliament to pass a resolution condemning the protest. No opposition lawmakers supported the resolution.
Yurchyshyn believes that the Interior Ministry’s zeal to go after the protesters is Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s attempt to justify the ministry’s budget, which is growing every year.
“Avakov is trying to prove his critical importance to Zelensky,” said Yurchyshyn.
Avakov has been the interior minister for over seven years, the longest in history. Analysts often allege that Avakov has kept his role by promising to protect Zelensky from street protests, something that neither the minister nor the president have confirmed.
Broken courts
Behind the protest and the government’s reaction, one aspect remains forgotten — the need for judicial reform.
“If Zelensky comes out and says we are ready to start a dialogue with (activists’) representatives, hear out what they have to say — that would already be an improvement,” said Zhernakov.
However, two weeks after the protest, the government has remained silent about the problems that the protest was meant to highlight — corrupt judges and courts, lack of transparency in judicial appointments and the inability to get a fair trial.
Zelensky’s office made four statements about the cost to repair the president’s office building. Judicial reform wasn’t mentioned once.
Ukrainian courts are among the least trusted institutions, delivering questionable rulings regularly.
The most notorious Ukrainian courts are the Constitutional Court which attempted to topple Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions and Kyiv’s Administrative District Court led by judge Pavlo Vovk, who is charged with organized crime, abuse of power and bribery. Vovk denies the accusations.
In late October, the Constitutional Court ruled to strip the National Agency for Corruption Prevention of its powers, leading to the closure of many high-profile corruption cases.
After a public outcry, anti-corruption activists saw a window of opportunity to push for much-needed reforms. However, nothing happened.
First, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party appointed new judges to the Constitutional Court, tacitly supporting the institution that actively sabotages reforms in Ukraine.
Later, the party supported the revival of a tainted institution called the High Qualification Commission for Judges.
The bill has been lambasted by anti-corruption activists and legal experts. According to them, without proper judicial reform, creating a new judicial body with old judges will only legitimize and entrench the current corrupt system.
“Instead of lowering tension, the government is trying to put out the fire with kerosene,” says Yurchyshyn. “I don’t even know where this can lead.”
