You're reading: Parubiy’s political journey from revolutionary to Rada speaker

Twice a month, Andriy Parubiy makes one of the longest commutes in Ukrainian politics.

He travels for seven hours by car between Kyiv, where since April he has been parliament speaker, and his family home in Lviv in western Ukraine, where his wife and daughter live. He hasn’t bought or rented a home in Kyiv, preferring for the last nine years to live in a parliament-funded hotel room.

Although a veteran of Ukrainian politics, Parubiy was rarely in the political limelight. He came to prominence during the EuroMaidan Revolution, but paid a dear price for it: As commander of the self-organized defenders of the protesters camp, he saw dozens of his comrades shot dead by riot police and unidentified snipers.

“I always have a feeling that I should have died with them,” Parubiy says in a subdued voice as he sits in a back room of his office on the second floor of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.

His days now are a far cry from the EuroMaidan routine. His office of several rooms is typical for a top-level official: spacious, impersonal, with eggshell-paint walls and dull landscape paintings. A glossy white iMac towers over his desk, while a much smaller, black laptop peeks out from behind it.

Parubiy has only been here since April, when he became speaker of the Rada, succeeding Volodymyr Groysman, who became prime minister. Before that, Parubiy occupied the cozier office of a deputy speaker on the same floor.

He has his interview with the Kyiv Post in the back room, which has only a sofa and a few chairs.

It was in this room, Parubiy said, that he first heard the suggestion that oligarchs be appointed as governors in several oblasts in 2014. Back then he was outraged by the idea.

Oligarch influence

Today, he probably hears of oligarchs more than ever, but if he’s still outraged, he doesn’t show it. Reports by Ukrainian media suggest that some of the most notorious oligarchs, including billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky, retain their influence on parliament. But Parubiy says that they don’t impair the reform work.

“I have reason to believe that some oligarchs have representatives in the Verkhovna Rada,” he says. “But at the same time, this parliament hasn’t failed a single test in the fight with the oligarchy.”

He said that he met Kolomoisky two years ago, but has never been in contact with him since he became deputy speaker in 2014. He sidesteps a question about the alleged influence of oligarchs on Vidrodzhennya, 23 lawmakers who sometimes vote with the governing coalition on key issues.

“Every other decision by parliament has a different mosaic of support,” he says. “It would be unfair to say that every time there’s some sort of horse-trading behind it. It would be unfair to speak about things I don’t know about.”

Defining moment

Parubiy was a 13-year-old boy in Lviv, when one day his father called him up to the attic of their house.

There, making sure they weren’t overheard, his father told him a great, exciting secret: Everyone in their family used to be in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The army, known as UPA, was a resistance movement fighting against the Soviets in western Ukraine. By the end of the 1950s, the resistance had been defeated. Many of its members were exiled in Siberia – including relatives of Parubiy.

For a teenager in 1984, learning about the family’s ties to a resistance movement was a watershed moment, and a patriotic awakening. In a way, Parubiy was ready to continue the cause of the UPA: He was sure that one day he would have to fight for Ukraine’s independence.

Then independence came, bloodlessly, in 1991.

But that formative episode could explain why as a professional politician, Parubiy so readily threw himself into the revolutions of 2004 and 2013-2014, taking on grueling roles such as a commander of protesters’ defense fighters, while his peers were just making speeches from the stage.

Moreover, the future revolutionary was an obsessive reader who grew up in the literary worlds of O. Henry, Mark Twain and, especially, Jack London — whose stories championed fortitude and courage in harsh circumstances.

Branded a radical

Parubiy started his political career as an anti-Soviet activist in the last years of the doomed union. In 1991, he co-founded the Social-National Party. Thirteen years later it was rebranded as Svoboda, a nationalist party that was briefly a force in the Ukrainian parliament in 2012-2014.

Parubiy left the party in the mid 2000s, but the labels of nationalist and radical have stuck. Some publications go as far as accusing him of sympathizing with Nazism – which he strongly denies.

“They don’t have anything on me, so the only thing they can do is hyperbolize my patriotism,” he says.

His early political career, the 1990s and early 2000s, was spent in Lviv, serving on the city and oblast councils.

He participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution, which overturned the fraudulent election of Viktor Yanukovych and brought Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency. In 2007 he was elected to parliament with Yushchenko’s party Nasha Ukrayina (Our Ukraine).

But over the years his political position has changed: he first switched from Nasha Ukrayina to former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s Front for Change, then to Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna, and finally, after the EuroMaidan Revolution, he ended up with Yatsenyuk again in the People’s Front. After the party’s success in the 2014 election, he was made deputy speaker of the Verkhovna Rada.

After the revolution, he spent five months as the head of the National Security and Defense Council, confronting the challenges of the early period of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“When I was saying, ever since the 1990s, that Russia was the main threat to Ukraine, they called me a radical,” Parubiy says.

Now his dream is to see Ukraine join both NATO and the European Union. Then, he says, the country will be safe and he could retire and write adventure books for teenagers.

Today’s challenges

On July 5, the Verkhovna Rada will start its last two-week period of daily meetings before taking a summer recess in mid-July.

Drama is expected in these next days of plenary meetings: Lawmakers will be asked to lift immunity from prosecution from lawmaker Oleksandr Onishchenko, who is suspected of embezzling money from a state enterprise. His arrest is sought by prosecutors. Parubiy said he expected parliament to support the decision.

Another key decision is about to be postponed until the next session — the law on elections in the occupied territories of the Donbas. The elections are part of the Minsk peace deal, but top Ukrainian officials, including Parubiy, argue that elections are impossible until there is a full ceasefire. Russian-backed separatists in Donetsk have threatened to hold elections themselves if parliament doesn’t pass the law before summer break.

And away from the Rada, other troubles hang over Parubiy. Every day, as he walks the short distance to parliament from the Kyiv Hotel, where he has lived in the same room since 2007, he is reminded of the EuroMaidan protesters killed in this street and nearby.

No one has faced justice for these murders. Parubiy blames incompetent and possibly corrupt prosecutors for sabotaging the cases.

“I feel like I will never make peace with that,” he says. “But if we had to go through it again… It was the right thing to do. No one knows what would have happened if we hadn’t stopped Yanukovych.”