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Thousands of demonstrators — the police said as few as 2,500, while the organizers said as many as 20,000 — marched in Kyiv on Dec. 3 to demand passing a law on presidential impeachment to remove President Petro Poroshenko from office.
They walked from Taras Shevchenko Park through Khreshshatyk Street to Institutska Street and then to Yevropeiska Square.
The Ukrainian Constitution envisages presidential impeachment but a lack of a law that regulates impeachment procedures makes the impeachment of any president impossible in practice. The demonstrators called for a law that would allow any president to be impeached in the future.
The protest movement, which began on Oct. 17, initially called for the creation of an anti-corruption court, stripping lawmakers of immunity from prosecution and passing a fairer election law.
However, as the authorities failed to comply with their demands, the focus of the protests gradually shifted to presidential impeachment.
Ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said at the rally that the protesters were giving a chance to parliament to comply with their demands next week but he did not expect the Verkhovna Rada to do that.
He scheduled the next rally for Dec. 10 on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the main site of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution
He also said that impeachment committees would be created in all regions.
“Our enemy is the oligarchic system and one of its representatives – Petro Poroshenko,” Saakashvili said. “… Even if (the authorities) expel me from the country, you should expel them from their offices.”
Saakashvili said on Nov. 29 that, according to his sources, Poroshenko had given an order to arrest him and charge him with plotting a coup d’etat and could later expel him from Ukraine. The Presidential Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
The protesters also demanded the release of people they deem to be political prisoners, including Oleksandr Novikov, Anatoly Vynohrodsky and Leonid Lytvynenko – Ukrainian veterans of Russia’s war against Ukraine who were arrested in November and charged in two criminal cases.
They were among the co-organizers of the current protest tent camp in front of the Verkhovna Rada and are members of the Liberation movement, led by Samopomich Party lawmakers Semen Semenchenko and Yegor Sobolev.
Semenchenko and Sobolev argue that the veterans were arrested because of the protests.
The demonstrators also protested against the expulsion of Georgian associates of Saakashvili from the country.
Seven Georgian associates of Saakashvili, a co-organizer of the protests near the Verkhovna Rada, were deported to their homeland on Nov. 17 and Oct. 21 in what they say was an illegal operation without due process or any court warrants. Several of them say they were beaten.
The authorities deny accusations of wrongdoing.
Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that one of the deported Georgians, Vano Nadiradze – was arrested on Dec. 3 by Ukrainian and Moldovan border guards as he was trying to cross the border into Ukraine. Nadiradze, a veteran of Ukraine’s war with Russia, had been deported despite the fact that his deportation had been banned by a court warrant.
Another theme of the protest was the authorities’ pressure on the independent National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine.
The demonstrators protested against what they deem to be Poroshenko’s efforts to crack down on NABU Chief Artem Sytnyk and destroy the bureau.
Sytnyk on Dec. 1 accused the authorities, including the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, of foiling all NABU undercover operations and trying to destroy the bureau.
He said that the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office had foiled NABU operations by illegally publishing the personal data of NABU undercover agents involved in a corruption case into the State Migration Service and obstructing the case.
The NABU’s investigation against alleged corruption at the National Agency for Preventing Corruption on Nov. 28 was transferred on the orders of the Prosecutor General’s Office from the NABU to the presidentially controlled Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU.
The transfer of the case to the SBU is deemed by critics to be an effort to bury the investigation, since the SBU is controlled by the Presidential Administration, which was accused by Hanna Solomatina, a whistleblower at the NAPC, of influencing her agency.
Meanwhile, several nationalist groups on Dec. 3 started a blockade of the NewsOne television channel, owned by lawmaker Yevgeny Murayev, an ex-member of former President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. They barricaded the channel’s building with bags of sand, wooden planks and barbed wire.
The nationalists demanded that Murayev apologize for his claim that the EuroMaidan Revolution was a coup d’etat.
But Saakashvili and his supporters said that, although they disagree with Murayev, the blockade had been orchestrated by the authorities to pressure the opposition channel. NewsOne was one of the few channels that broadcast the Dec. 3 rally for impeachment and had repeatedly invited Saakashvili to its shows.
