A petition to fire President Volodymyr Zelensky’s deputy chief of staff Oleh Tatarov, a suspect in a bribery case, has collected the necessary 25,000 signatures.
The petition reached the threshold on June 18. Now Zelensky is required by the law to respond to it.
One of the signatures on the petition bore the name “Joe Biden,” the name of the current president of the U.S. It’s unclear if the name belongs to a real Ukrainian citizen.
Vitaliy Shabunin, head of the watchdog Anti-Corruption Action Center, and author of the petition, believes that the signature is fake and can be traced back to the office of the president, which doesn’t want to fire the deputy chief of staff.
Tatarov was charged in December with bribing a forensic expert when he was a lawyer at state construction firm Ukrbud. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) published WhatsApp correspondence with Tatarov agreeing to the bribe. Tatarov denied the accusations.
Former Ukrbud CEO Maxim Mykytas, a suspect in a theft case, has also testified that Tatarov gave a $600,000 bribe to employees of the High Anti-Corruption Court in 2019 to release Mykytas on a minuscule bail, law enforcement sources told the Kyiv Post.
Additionally, Mykytas testified that he had allegedly given a bribe through Tatarov to judges of Kyiv’s Solomyansky District Court, the sources said.
But Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova blocked the charges against Tatarov in December 2020 by replacing the group of prosecutors in the Tatarov case twice. She then transferred the case from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to the politically controllable Security Service of Ukraine.
In February, a court refused to extend the Tatarov investigation, and prosecutors effectively killed it by missing the deadline for sending it to trial.
Tatarov has also been involved in other controversies.
In 2011-2014, he was a deputy head of the Interior Ministry’s main investigative department under then-President Viktor Yanukovych.
According to Ukraine’s 2014 lustration law that forbids the appointment of top Yanukovych-era officials, Zelensky had no legal right to make Tatarov his deputy chief of staff. Under the law, heads and deputy heads of Interior Ministry units under Yanukovych for more than a year are banned from holding state jobs for 10 years.
Tatarov has been investigated and questioned about the unlawful persecution of protesters during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, although no charges were formally brought against him, Sergii Gorbatuk, the ex-top investigator for EuroMaidan cases, told the Kyiv Post. Police officers charged with persecuting demonstrators said that crackdown orders came from the Interior Ministry’s leaders, who included Tatarov, according to Gorbatuk.
Tatarov also handpicked pro-government members of the commission for choosing the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, according to a May 13 report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s investigative program Schemes. Commission members either know Tatarov personally or are connected to him, Schemes reported.
