The same day that Volodymyr Zelensky publicly tapped him as his choice for prosecutor general, on July 23, a weary Ruslan Riaboshapka returned from a meeting with the Ukrainian president to his office in the Stalin-era administration complex.
It was about 6 p. m., and, for the next hour, he gamely answered questions from the Kyiv Post about his plans for establishing what the business community wants most: rule of law.
While Riaboshapka’s history with Zelensky is brief, he is already one of the key players in whether the president will be able to make good on his campaign promise to end impunity and start fighting high-level crime and corruption in Ukraine.
“If people see there is no impunity in this country, they will believe that success is possible,” he said. “That is one of the priorities.”
Riaboshapka met then-presidential candidate Zelensky only in January, when they started devising an anti-corruption strategy. He was offered the prosecutor general’s job around the time of the president’s landslide election victory on April 21.
Two days after the president’s party won a strong majority in the July 21 parliamentary election, Zelensky went public with the announcement that he would nominate Riaboshapka for the post.
Riaboshapka, who currently serves as deputy head of the administration in charge of anti-corruption policy and legal reform, has another important connection to the president.
He and Zelensky’s chief of staff, the 42-year-old lawyer Andriy Bohdan, have known each other since 2007, when they worked together in the Justice Ministry during President Viktor Yushchenko’s 2005–2010 term. They continued to have a close working relationship in the Cabinet of Ministers under Prime Minister Mykola Azarov during President Viktor Yanukovych’s four years in power, which were cut short by the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014.
“He’s very strong and a very good player and he has very good intentions,” Riaboshapka said in praising Bohdan.
Plenty to fix
As Zelensky consolidates his power, his administration will have no excuses for failure.
The English-speaking Riaboshapka seems acutely aware of the responsibilities that will come with the job of leading 15,000 prosecutors who, collectively, have a terrible reputation for bribe-taking and failing to deliver justice.
Under ex-President Petro Poroshenko, who lost in a landslide to Zelensky, Ukraine had four prosecutors general, including non-lawyer and political appointee Yuriy Lutsenko for the last three years. Lutsenko will leave office with a reputation for talking big and achieving nothing.
“We just wasted three years,” Riaboshapka said of Lutsenko’s tenure. “Lutsenko didn’t clean the system of prosecutors. He cemented the old-style, Soviet-style prosecutor system.”
“If the prosecutor’s office works properly, it means that you bring to court well-prepared cases, which wasn’t the case under Lutsenko,” he said. “Judicial reform was also part of Poroshenko’s agenda and he failed to do it. Lutsenko is Poroshenko’s close ally, close friend. They had all the resources and power in the country, but they used those resources and power not for the good of Ukraine.”
His strategy
Given Zelensky’s control over parliament through his Servant of the People party, Riaboshapka’s ratification is a foregone conclusion when the new Verkhovna Rada convenes in late August or September. He then wants lawmakers to pass a number of laws to help him transform the judicial system.
“There are urgent amendments needed to be able to dismiss prosecutors who are not working with high standards of integrity,” he explained. He also said prosecutors “should be more integrated into the judiciary.” He will serve Zelensky as co-chair of the Commission on Legal Reform, which will recommend other legal changes to the criminal justice system and judiciary as well as constitutional amendments.
He also wants to slim the service to 10,000 prosecutors, replace regional prosecutors who are abusing their powers, and set priorities for the prosecution of crimes.
“The idea is not to prosecute small cases but to prosecute big financial crimes and murders,” he said.
In terms of “big financial crimes,” nothing is bigger than the $5.6 billion bank fraud allegedly perpetrated by billionaire oligarchs Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennady Boholyubov when they owned PrivatBank. The bank, the nation’s largest financial institution, was taken over by the state in 2016 and recapitalized with taxpayer money. Criminal investigations and a civil lawsuit are under way.
President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and his deputy chief of staff Ruslan Riaboshapka sit in a meeting in Kyiv on July 18, 2019. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
But the public is closely watching the relationship between Zelensky and Kolomoisky, given their business association through the oligarch’s 1+1 TV channel, which buys the president’s popular comedy shows, and the influence of Kolomoisky’s former lawyer Bohdan.
Riaboshapka promises to be truly independent and said he will refuse instructions from the president or anybody else about whether to prosecute an individual for crimes.
“The president should define the general policy and not instruct on specific cases,” he said. “I cannot follow such instructions.”
His background
Riaboshapka was born on Oct. 14, 1976, in Liubashivka, an Odesa Oblast city of 11,500 people located 430 kilometers south of Kyiv. He and his wife, Olesia Bartovshchuk, have three sons. His children are citizens of France, according to his public declaration.
He graduated from law school at International Solomon University, a private institution in Kyiv started in 1991 that has since closed.
“It was quite close to the date when the U.S.S.R. was dissolved, so I could not say this education was a modern one,” he said. “At the same time, it was a private university. It was possible to engage the best teachers and best professors and I am happy with that.”
Since that time, he’s gained a lot of international experience. He headed the Ukrainian delegation to GRECO, the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption. He’s also worked with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and the U. S. Agency for International Development.
“I know international standards quite well,” he said.
If there’s one part of his biography where he sounds a bit defensive, it’s the years he worked for Azarov, the former prime minister who is now living in exile abroad after fleeing the EuroMaidan Revolution.
In 2010, Azarov appointed Riaboshapka as head of the Bureau of Anti-Corruption Policy within the Cabinet of Ministers.
“It was the first time in the history of Ukraine that an anti-corruption body was established,” he said. “It was a new experience, so why not? If you can somehow change or assist your country, why do you have to refuse?”
The office, however, existed for only six months. He said it was closed in February 2011 after he launched an investigation. “That was one of the reasons the office was abolished,” Riaboshapka said. He went on to become the deputy head of the legal department in the government’s secretariat.
“We started some investigations at that time,” he said. “One of the most popular stories was with the investigation of the state registries, which were used by a former minister of justice and his partners for personal enrichment. He (later) became one of the most known authors of the law on lustration. Some others we initiated with the government of Mykola Azarov. There were (signs) of corruption in Euro 2012,” the international football championship co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland.
“I don’t see anything wrong there,” he said of his service in Azarov’s government. “Why should this time in my personal history be considered wrong?”
Riaboshapka took umbrage at the description of Azarov as corrupt. Official estimates put the theft by Yanukovych and his cronies at $40 billion — about one-third of the current annual economic output — during his rule from 2010–2014. Except for a treason conviction against Yanukovych, no officials from his era have been successfully prosecuted and little money has been returned to Ukraine. Instead, Yanukovych left the country nearly bankrupt.
“There are no criminal convictions against him,” Riaboshapka said in defense of Azarov. “Poroshenko controlled law enforcement but didn’t manage to prosecute Azarov.”
But “no criminal convictions” applies to almost everyone in Ukraine, given the feeble track record of combating graft by Ukraine’s police, prosecutors and courts.
In fact, the Prosecutor General’s Office has charged Azarov with taking a Hr 140 million ($5.5 million) bribe, embezzling Hr 220 million ($8.65 million) and abuse of power. In 2014, Western countries imposed sanctions on Azarov.
Azarov denies the accusations and sees the cases as politically motivated.
Good reputation
Leaving aside his Azarov-era service, Riaboshapka has distinguished himself as a corruption fighter through his work with Transparency International and the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption.
One of his fans is Daria Kaleniuk, the executive director of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv.
“Ruslan is committed to do a reboot of the judiciary and prosecution, as well as strengthening anti-corruption institutions. He has a good understanding and knowledge of how to do it,” Kaleniuk said. “I’d like him to be prosecutor general. He’d be a good one.”
After 15 months, Riaboshapka quit the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption in 2017 in protest of Poroshenko’s control over what was supposed to be an independent anti-corruption institution. Along with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, it was one of the new agencies established in the post-revolution era and charged with investigating high-level corruption. The Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, or SAPO, was charged with prosecuting it.
Riaboshapka said in 2017 that the agency had been completely discredited due to its failure to check the electronic asset declaration of a single official since the declaration system was launched in 2016. He called for re-launching the agency and appointing new leadership.
“I left because of Poroshenko,” he said. “Poroshenko controlled this agency, which should be independent, and no other members or commissions in this agency were able to resist this interference and they didn’t want to do it. The president wanted to use this agency as his own.”
Riaboshapka believes that NABU, headed by Artem Sytnyk, “was and is an independent agency,” while SAPO, headed by Nazar Kholodnytsky, is only “so-so” independent. Kholodnytsky has thus far survived numerous calls for his resignation after NABU recordings implicated him in obstructing criminal investigations, charges he denied.
Some have argued that Ukraine should have focused on fixing its distrusted police, prosecutors and courts rather than setting up new corruption-fighting agencies. But Riaboshapka disagrees.
“The anti-corruption infrastructure which is in place is a good idea,” he said. “The only issue is sometimes the wrong people in top positions of the anti-corruption bodies.”
He favors the creation of a state financial investigation service to investigate large and complex economic crimes. He also backs changes to limit the powers of the Security Service of Ukraine, the 27,000-person law enforcement agency whose economic crimes unit has been criticized for extorting from legitimate businesses. The agency, known as the SBU, should limit its focus to intelligence and counter-terrorism, many — including Riaboshapka — believe.
He also said that the criminal investigation units of the National Police, under Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, needed to be improved, although he said he has no conflict with Avakov.
“This is the next stage of reform of the National Police,” he said.
Riaboshapka also acknowledged shortcomings in the courts, which he said is the weakest link of the judicial system. Courts are still largely distrusted in Ukraine and many of the nation’s 6,000 judges are seen as doing the bidding of powerful businesspeople or issuing favorable rulings in exchange for bribes.
Convictions soon?
“Regarding a reboot of the whole system, it’s an extremely complicated process. I am not sure it’s possible,” he conceded. “We definitely should have a strategy for how to get results step-by-step. If you have the right people in the top positions in the prosecutor’s office, NABU and SAPO and the Ministry of Justice, we will reform the judiciary,” Riaboshapka said. “In connection with the political will, the president believes we can get results in the near future.”
Will Ukraine have to wait another five years before anybody is convicted of corruption?
“No, why do we have to wait five years?” he asked. “Starting from June and July, SAPO and NABU are delivering results. Starting from September, the Anti-Corruption Court is starting its work. Hopefully we will see the first convictions before the New Year.”
