Olha Bohomolets, the head of parliament’s health committee, has announced she will run for president in the upcoming election scheduled for March 31, 2019.
Bohomolets is a member of parliament with the 135-member President Petro Poroshenko Bloc and a staunch critic of the health care reform implemented by Acting Health Minister Ulana Suprun.
“I’m running for president of Ukraine to become the guarantor of justice for every Ukrainian,” Bohomolets said in a statement published on Dec. 6.
This will be Bohomolets’ second bid for presidency. She ran for president in 2014, coming in eighth with 1.91 percent of the vote. Poroshenko won that election with 54.7 percent of the vote.
In a video attached to the statement, Bohomolets invokes the EuroMaidan Revolution, the popular uprising that drove then-President Viktor Yanukovych out of power on Feb. 22, 2014, and refers to the “Heavenly Hundred” – the popular name for the approximately 100 protesters who died in clashes with riot police during the revolution.
“Despite the Heavenly Hundred looking at us from the sky, despite tens of thousands of our heroes having given their lives and blood (in Russia’s war in Eastern Ukraine) – there still has been no justice,” Bohomolets says in the video, standing next to St. Michael’s Monastery where protesters took refuge during the revolution.
In her reference to “our heroes” Bohomolets appeared to be exaggerating the number of Ukrainian soldiers who were killed or wounded in Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014. According to Ukraine’s authorities, about 2,400 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and about 9,000 were wounded in the war.
The lawmaker also said in her announcement video that Mykhailivska Square where she recorded the video had been “covered with dead bodies” during the EuroMaidan Revolution. In fact, the bodies of the killed protesters were gathered on Maidan Nezalezhnosti Square, the main theater of events, located several blocks away.
In the video message she also reflected on what kind of person the president should be, implicitly criticizing the current president, a wealthy Ukrainian oligarch.
“We must have a guarantor of not only the Constitution, but also a guarantor of justice,” Bohomolets said. “A president who will start with himself first: he won’t violate the Constitution, he will live the life of ordinary people.”
“And then we will have fair pensions, a fair health reform, fair taxes for businesses without pressure, and a fair life.”
The video ends with the shot of the monument to Bohomolets’ namesake Princess Olga, a regent ruler of the Kyiv Rus in the 10th century.
