Ukraine’s impoverished pensioners will get a one-time payment of nearly $90 in March and April by the order of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the president announced on Feb. 25.
The payment will apply to retirees with lowest pensions, benefitting some 1.8 million out of the country’s 11.5 million pensioners, and will be paid in two parts: in March and April. Moreover, all pensioners will get their monthly pensions adjusted to inflation in March, increasing the monthly payments by Hr 248 ($9) on average.
For Ukrainian retirees it’s quite a bonus: an average state pension is just Hr 2,645 ($98) a month, and some receive as little as Hr 1,555 ($55) a month.
The timing of president’s move is being viewed with suspicion, coming as it does only a month ahead of the March 31 presidential election, in which Poroshenko is one of the leading candidates, and retirees being statistically the most active voters.
Olha Kotsuruba, a legal adviser at Opora, a non-profit that observes elections, says that such apparent use of state budget funds by a candidate could cast a shadow on the presidential vote.
“This increase of social payments by a candidate creates non-competitive conditions during the elections, and is evaluated negatively by international experts,” Kotsuruba told the Kyiv Post.
Also, decisions on pensions aren’t technically in Poroshenko’s power: they are prerogative of the ministry of social policy. But the Social Policy Minister Pavlo Rozenko is the president’s loyalist, having been appointed to the post in 2014 on Poroshenko’s party’s quota.
Hitting back at criticism, the president denied the allegations of vote buying, saying that the move is a part of his administration’s fight against poverty.
He said that in 2015-2016 the state was prioritizing rebuilding the army and protecting the country from the Russian aggression, and had no money to index pensions in accordance to inflation and changes in the pension legislations.
Now the money was allocated. Social Policy Minister Rozenko said that the money for the special $90 bonus for the low-paid pensioners, amounting to $163 million, came from the fees paid for the legalization of imported cars with European Union license plates: The government recently closed a legal loophole that allowed the owners of such cars to drive them in Ukraine without registration, and without going through the expensive custom clearance.
According to Poroshenko, since providing a reduced excise rate for the customs clearance of cars with foreign license plates on Nov. 25, the state has received Hr 13.6 billion, or $503.33 million.
Poroshenko promised that the indexation will from now on be carried out regularly.
Social payments rain down on Ukrainians in the run-up to the presidential election.
Earlier in February, the ministry of social policy announced that come March, it would change the way it subsidizes utilities for low-income households. Instead providing a discount on the utilities bills and compensating the difference to the utilities companies, which the government has been doing all along, it will start paying out the cash equivalent of the discount.
This will concern some 4 million Ukrainian households, who in March will receive Hr 1,500 on average. There will be no control over how they spend the money – on utilities or elsewhere.
This move, coming from the government led by Poroshenko’s loyalist Groysman, has also been seen as an attempt to increase the incumbent president’s popularity. The president polls second in the race.
According to the latest poll, conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology on Feb. 8–20 and published on Feb. 25, the actor-turned-politician Volodymyr Zelenskiy is leading the election race with 26.4 percent of the vote among the decided voters. He is followed by Poroshenko with 18 percent, while one-time race leader Yulia Tymoshenko of the Batkivshchyna Party is on 13.8 percent.
