President Volodymyr Zelensky has offered on July 11 to ban from government and parliament jobs the top officials who served under his predecessors Oleksandr Turchynov and Petro Poroshenko. This measure would mirror the similar ban that exists for the top officials who worked under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010-2013.
In fact, Zelensky proposed the change in response to critics who accused him of sabotage of the lustration law aimed at the officials of the Yanukovych era.
Zelensky faced this criticism for appointing Andriy Bohdan his chief of staff in May. Bohdan was the anti-corruption ombudsman in then-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov’s Cabinet under Yanukovych in 2010-2014 and is subject to lustration.
Zelensky said he doesn’t want to revoke the lustration law but plans to “expand it instead.” He said his team already drafted a bill that would do it.
“I propose to add to the list of people who get under lustration the president of Ukraine, all the lawmakers, speaker of parliament, members of government, prosecutor general, head of SBU (state security service), heads of anti-monopoly committee and state property fund, heads of fiscal service, customs service, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, heads of defense enterprises who obtained the positions in a period from Feb. 23, 2014, by May 19, 2019,” he said.
Feb. 23, 2014, is the day when Turchynov, then speaker of parliament, became the acting president after Yanukovych ran to Russia. May 19, 2019, was Poroshenko’s last day in office.
Zelensky’s idea is close to the one proposed just a week earlier by Andriy Portnov, an infamous lawyer who was Yanukovych’s deputy chief of staff. On July 4, Portnov wrote on his Telegram channel that he prepared a draft law to ban from any state jobs the officials who were appointed from Feb. 22, 2014, by May 20, 2019.
Zelensky also has some Poroshenko-era top officials in his team. They are Oleksandr Danyliuk, the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, who served as the finance minister in Poroshenko’s times. Also, Zelensky’s loyalist Aivaras Abromavicius, who currently heads the supervisory board of Ukroboronprom, a state arms producer, was the minister of economy under Poroshenko.
When he was asked about Danyliuk and Abromavicius, Zelensky’s representative in parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk said that if being adopted, the new law will make no exceptions.
