Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European integration, wasn’t allowed to enter a Ukraine-European Union summit, a top meeting between Ukrainian and the EU officials held on June 8 in Kyiv. Relations between Ukraine and the EU are her area of responsibility.
When Klympush-Tsitsadze tried to enter Mariinsky Palace, where the summit took place, she found she wasn’t on the list of participants.
For a while, she stood by the gates of Mariiinsky Palace, greeting EU officials who passed by.
Klympush-Tsintsadze blamed her boss, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, for taking her off the list. Groysman’s representative denied the accusations, saying that the president’s office put together the list of participants.
Klympush-Tsintsadze called this situation “absurd.”
“I consider this a sabotage which undermines Ukraine’s position in dialogue with the EU,” she wrote on Facebook.
In a comment to the Kyiv Post, she said it was Groysman’s “petty revenge” for a conflict going back to end of May. Klympush-Tsintsadze then said she would be ready to head the government if Groysman resigned.
Groysman’s office called her claims “political.”
“This is very strange that an official responsible for this area doesn’t know that it is the president, not the prime minister, who forms the list of participants in the delegation to the Ukraine-EU summit,” Groysman’s spokesperson, Vasyl Riabchuk, said in response.
Riabchuk called Klympush-Tsintsadze’s accusations “no more than a political game of a candidate for parliament.”
Klympush-Tsintsadze is running for parliament in the July 21 elections as No. 10 on the list of European Solidarity, the party of former President Petro Poroshenko. The party has about 8 percent support. The threshold to enter parliament is 5 percent.
Groysman is also running for parliament with his own Ukrainian Strategy party. It enjoys less than 3 percent support and has little chance of making it into parliament, according to recent polls.
