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KIEV, Ukraine — Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the prime
minister of Ukraine, announced his resignation on Sunday in a surprise
move that opened a new period of political uncertainty here.
Mr. Yatsenyuk, an economist backed by Ukraine’s
Western allies, including the United States, came to power two years ago behind
the wave of popular anger that culminated with the Maidan street protests,
which led to the downfall of President Viktor F. Yanukovych. Mr. Yatsenyuk and
Petro O. Poroshenko, who became president, emerged as the nation’s most
prominent political figures.
But the revolution’s leaders soon turned on each
other. Although authority is supposed to be balanced evenly between the
president and the prime minister, Ukraine’s Western allies eventually sided
with Mr. Poroshenko and pushed Mr. Yatsenyuk to step aside.
In recent months, both men had been resisting
compromises on appointments and were reportedly thwarting corruption
investigations into allies, threatening Western aid.
In a video released to television stations on Sunday,
Mr. Yatsenyuk signaled that he would try to smooth over the cracks in the
post-Maidan alliance. He said he would support as a candidate for prime
minister Volodymyr B. Groysman, a member of Mr. Poroshenko’s political party
and the current speaker of the Parliament, and would keep his party in the
coalition after leaving office.
“We cannot allow
destabilization of the executive branch during a war,” he said. “The desire to
change one person has blinded politicians and paralyzed their will to bring
about real changes in the country.”
Slender, cerebral and nicknamed “The Rabbit,” Mr.
Yatsenyuk had become emblematic of Ukraine’s impasse after the heady days of
the pro-European street movement.
He emerged as a popular figure, but his support
largely evaporated because of various scandals and missteps. A political ally,
for example, was forced to resign from Parliament after it emerged that he was
under investigation for money laundering in Switzerland.
Mr. Yatsenyuk confronted tremendous challenges as
prime minister, not least because of the Russian annexation of Crimea and
military intervention in the east during his tenure. Ukraine’s morass of
financial problems required a $40 billion international bailout package.
In tackling them, he faced deep suspicions from the
public, and from political opponents and allies alike, that he had fallen back
on traditions of negotiating back-room deals with Ukraine’s post-Soviet business
elite, the oligarchs.
“He couldn’t abandon the former practice of consulting
the oligarchs before making decisions,” Yuri V. Lutsenko, the head of the
president’s faction in Parliament, said in a telephone interview on Sunday.
Mr. Poroshenko, a chocolate and confectionary magnate
whose offshore accounts surfaced in the leak of legal documents known as the
Panama Papers, has also faced criticism of mixing business and politics, a
longtime bane of Ukraine.
Before Mr. Yatsenyuk’s appointment as prime minister
in 2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J.
Nuland, a United States assistant secretary of state, and the American
ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, seemed to underscore the West’s
support for his candidacy. “Yats is the guy,” Ms. Nuland had said.
By this year, the
West’s support had begun to wane. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of
the International Monetary
Fund, which props upUkraine financially,
said progress had been so slow in fighting corruption that “it’s hard to see
how the I.M.F.-supported program can continue.”
Five ministers will also resign in a cabinet shuffle,
but the governing, pro-Western parties resisted calls for new elections that
polls indicate could usher in pro-Russian politicians in eastern Ukraine.
“Objectively, it is ridiculous to claim responsibility
remains only with Yatsenyuk for the bad state of the economy and ongoing
corruption,” Oleh Voloshyn, a consultant for the Opposition Bloc political
party, which represents Russian speakers in Ukraine’s southeast, said in an
interview. “The best solution is the cleansing process of an election. Let the
people decide.”
In this reshuffle of the post-revolution leadership,
the powerful position of prosecutor general remains unfilled.
Mr. Lutsenko, who formerly held the top law
enforcement position in Ukraine as minister of interior, before being sentenced
to prison on political charges after a previous change of government here in
2010, confirmed that he had discussed with the president taking the post.
Having been a police officer and a prisoner, Mr.
Lutsenko said, qualified him to oversee prosecutions. “I
saw both sides of the coin,” he said.
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