BY
For the few people out there who
think that the resignation of Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk will
stop the ongoing slide in Ukraine toward political crisis, let’s clear
something up: It won’t. In fact, the most likely outcome is that the country
will continue on its trajectory toward chaos. The man at the center of Kiev’s
problems, President Petro Poroshenko, still refuses to combat the endemic
corruption that infuriates Ukrainians and strangles their economy. And thanks
to the West, which continues to back him, Poroshenko is more deeply entrenched
in power than ever before.
It’s not that Yatsenyuk wasn’t a problem: The fluent English speaker, who
was favored by Washington and the International Monetary Fund, has faced plenty
of scandals and accusations of being in league with
Ukraine’s old oligarchical class. His attempts to implement IMF-mandated reforms have done little except
hurt his approval ratings.
But Yatsenyuk’s poor performance as prime minister is not what triggered
this crisis. It began back in February, with the resignations of two respected
high-profile reformers: Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius and Deputy
Prosecutor-General Vitaliy Kasko, who said they could no longer stand by as
reform efforts continued to be systematically blocked by figures in
Poroshenko’s inner circle. “The deeper our reforms, and the
deeper our progress, the more pressure we had to endure,” Abromavicius wrote, in a scathing resignation letter. “Lawlessness, not the law, rules here,” Kasko added for good measure.
The resignations came as bombshells, and things spiraled from there: Serhi
Leshchenko, a respected anti-corruption crusader and member of parliament,
revealed in a March 16 interview that on several occasions Poroshenko had
pressured him to avoid criticizing Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s reviled
prosecutor-general, because Shokin was “part of the family.”
Then, in late March, Poroshenko’s party used a new law to expel two members of parliament who had publicly accused the president’s allies of corruption. And
although the president finally fired Shokin, the disgraced prosecutor’s last
act in office was to get rid of David Sakvarelidze, another deputy prosecutor who said that Shokin
had personally stymied his efforts to root out corruption.
These, along with other revelations of corruption and intimidation, paint a
sobering picture: When it comes to Kiev’s inability to battle the endemic
corruption crippling the country, Poroshenko and his inner circle are part of
the problem.
“The desire to change one person
blinded politicians,” Yatsenyuk said
in his resignation speech on Sunday. He’s a crook – but on this, at least, he’s
right.
Poroshenko — a billionaire with a decades-long track record of being
neither reliably pro-Russian, nor pro-Western, but pro-his own money – has lost
whatever little credibility he may have once had as a reformer. Perhaps if
Yatsenyuk was being replaced by an independent outsider, the new prime minister
could have revived the moribund reforms process. American-born Minister of
Finance Natalie Jaresko, who is highly regarded by U.S. and international
entities for her work in restructuring Ukraine’s debt and other measures was at
one point said to be a leading contender for the role.
Now, however, all signs
indicate that Volodymyr Groysman, speaker of the parliament, will become the
new premier. Unlike Yatsenyuk, whose People’s Front party is independent from
Poroshenko’s, Groysman is widely seen as little more than the president’s
protégé. The net result is not a restructuring but a consolidation of power,
with Poroshenko placing a loyalist in the prime minister’s seat.
The legacy of the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk government is a sordid record of
resisting reforms in ways big and small. As U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland stated in her March 15 Senate testimony, they leave behind the
very real risk that Ukraine will begin “sliding backwards once again into
corruption, into lawlessness, into vassal statehood.” It’s hard to imagine a Poroshenko-Groysman (read: Poroshenko-Poroshenko)
government would do any better. The only chance at meaningful change for
Ukraine now has to come from the outside.
Up until now, the West has resisted pressuring Kiev. Poroshenko’s March 31
trip to Washington is a case in point. At the time, Ukraine’s president was
having a horrible week: It began with an uproar over Shokin’s sacking of
Sakvarelidze. It ended with protesters burning tires on the
streets of Kiev, after the Panama
Papers leak revealed that Poroshenko was busy setting up offshore accounts the
same day Ukrainian soldiers were dying in a heated battle with Russian-backed
separatists.
In between those two disasters, Poroshenko had lunch at the White
House, where he was handed $335
million and the promise of $1 billion more in the near future.
Poroshenko’s power lunch is the latest iteration of what is by now a
predictable pattern. Every few months, new corruption allegations rock the
government; Western diplomats fly in to issue rebukes and pleas for Ukraine’s
leaders to think of their people; Kiev promises to do better; the West relents.
In the meantime, reforms stagnate, the grip of the oligarchs tightens, and the
Ukrainian people grow even more disillusioned.
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