Two years after the bloody end of the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted the unpopular and spectacularly corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine has again been plunged into a deep political crisis.
And there are signs that even more trouble and uncertainty is ahead.
The government survived a vote of no confidence in parliament, but critics have described the events in the Verkhovna Rada as a trick played on Ukrainians by the country’s powerful political elites and oligarchs.
President Petro Poroshenko was slammed by lawmakers from his own party for double-dealing. And in the wake of the Feb. 16 events, the pro-government coalition has collapsed, with snap parliamentary elections looking increasingly likely.
One possible compromise is a change in the government after a few months, while a new coalition is now in the making. But experts say this could only be a temporary measure without a renewed drive to fight corruption and overhaul the government.
And in the absence of such reform, Ukraine’s leaders – the former leaders of the revolution – are starting to look more and more like the corrupt regime they replaced.
Rada shenanigans
While Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk was preparing to present his report in parliament on the achievements of his government in 2015, three groups of lawmakers were collecting signatures to force a vote on the Cabinet’s dismissal.
Yatsenyuk, who had personal trust rating of 45 percent in October 2014, saw his popularity slump to less than 1 percent by October 2015.
In recent months, Odesa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili has accused the prime minister of corruption, while lawmaker Sergii Leshchenko has claimed that Yatsenyuk is looking out for the interests of oligarchs.
So the government looked all but finished on the afternoon of Feb. 16 after Poroshenko called on Yatsenyuk to resign. Many saw it as a signal from Poroshenko for the lawmakers of his party to support a no-confidence vote.
But this seems to have been a deception.
While 120 deputies of Poroshenko Bloc voted to declare the work of Yatsenyuk’s government unsatisfactory, only 97 of them supported the Cabinet’s resignation in a vote just 15 minutes later.
Before the vote, parliament speaker Volodymyr Groysman puzzled observers when he rejected a call from long-term former speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn to hold a “signal vote” – a procedure in which lawmakers determine how many of them would support legislation if there were to be an actual vote. Critics say Groysman, who has frequently used signal voting to judge the Rada’s mood in the past, failed to use it in this case so as to deliberately derail the no-confidence vote, as groups of deputies left the session hall just minutes before it was held.
“They were in hurry to initiate a non-confidence vote to actually prevent Yatsenyuk’s dismissal,” said political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko. “It was a show.”
Poroshenko’s game
Immediately after the unsuccessful vote, several lawmakers from Poroshenko’s own party accused the president of double-dealing and conspiring with Yatsenyuk. “I call this a plot of cash against ideals,” Leshchenko wrote in his blog after the vote.
Leshchenko stressed that the lawmakers who are most loyal to the president, including Groysman, didn’t vote for Yatsenyuk’s dismissal, which was an indicator of Poroshenko’s real intentions.
Deputies from various factions close to oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov, Igor Kolomoisky and Victor Pinchuk also failed to support the anti-government vote, Leshchenko added.
Poroshenko, who claimed Yatsenyuk should leave because of the critically low approval rating of the government, has also seen his own rating nosedive over the last two years – from 55 percent in May 2014 to just 16 percent in October 2015.
And earlier this month, Poroshenko’s popularity was shaken further by a scandal involving Economy Minister Aivaras Abramovicius, who, upon resigning, accused the president’s close friend lawmaker Ihor Kononenko of corruption. Despite critics in Ukraine and the West calling for the disgraced lawmaker to lose his seat in parliament, the Kyiv Post saw Kononenko on Feb. 16 walking the corridors of the Vekhovna Rada, seemingly in a fine mood, and not giving a hint of intending to resign.
Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk talks to deputy speaker Andriy Parubiy before his speech in parliament on Feb. 16. Speaker Volodymyr Groysman sits to the right. Yatsenyuk’s government survived a non-confidence vote, but plunged the country into a deeper political crisis. (Anastasia Vlasova)
Meeting with his faction late on Feb. 17, Poroshenko denied there was any conspiracy with Yatsenyuk or the oligarchs, according to Mustafa Nayyem, one of the deputies of the president’s faction.
Olga Bielkova, a lawmaker from Poroshenko’s party who supported the vote to declare the government’s work unacceptable but who didn’t vote for Yatsenyuk’s resignation, said she did so of her own accord. “Nobody pressured me, nobody asked me, nobody offered me money,” she told the Kyiv Post by phone.
Bielkova, who used to work in Pinchuk’s charity foundation and his company EastOne Group, said she didn’t like the government’s work, but saw no good alternatives to Yatsenyuk just now.
Lame government
The parliament won’t get another chance to oust Yatsenyuk’s government until its next session in September.
But with both parliament and the president declaring the government’s work unsatisfactory, the authority of the Cabinet in talks with Western partners has now been deeply undermined, experts say.
“We have a weak government, so no foreign investors will negotiate with it, because this government will not be able assure them that it will fulfill its commitments,” said Maksym Latsyba, an analyst at the Ukrainian Center for Independent Political Research.
“This government will not be able to work normally, and get the required laws passed in parliament,” Latsyba said, adding that this would only increase the distrust between the public and those in power.
Fesenko, however, said Yatsenyuk’s dismissal would be untimely at the moment, since Ukraine is expecting a new tranche of urgently needed loan money from the International Monetary Fund.
Nayyem reported that Poroshenko said at the faction meeting that Western ambassadors in Ukraine also supported Yatsenyuk staying on for a while. “There is a strategic decision that Yatsenyuk must leave – (but) this must only happen within the next three months,” Nayem added, according to Ukrainska Pravda.
Coalition dead
But if there was a plot by Poroshenko and the oligarchs to keep Yatsenyuk in power, it looked to be unraveling by Feb. 18. By then, both remaining junior partners in the parliamentary coalition, the Batkivshchyna and Samopomich factions, had announced they were quitting.
That would leave only the parties of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk in the ruling grouping, commanding about a dozen deputies less than the necessary majority of 226 deputies.
According to the constitution, Groysman will have to announce the breakup of the coalition, which will trigger a 30-day period for parliament to form a new coalition. If the parliament fails to do so, Poroshenko has the power to dissolve parliament and announce snap elections.
Poroshenko has said he would use this power only as a last resort. His party would hardly gain more seats in a new parliament, while the popularity of Batkivshchyna and Samopomich is on the rise.
The Opposition Bloc party, formed predominantly of former Yanukovych allies, also said in an official statement that snap elections are “the only way” out of a full-scale political crisis. As of December 2015 the party’s rating had risen to 11.5 percent, up from 9.4 percent in 2014.
Meanwhile Yatsenyuk held hours of talks with Oleg Lyashko, the head of radical Party, reportedly offering him seats in the Cabinet in exchange for joining a new pro-government coalition. Lyashko, whose party left coalition last autumn, has yet to announce a decision.
Fesenko said the snap election are still an unlikely scenario while there is a chance to form a new coalition.
Yanukovych’s ways?
Meanwhile, Poroshenko finally fired the unpopular Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who has been accused of stalling reform and covering up cases of corruption among his subordinates.
Shokin reportedly submitted his resignation this week, after Poroshenko asked him to do so at a meeting on Feb 16. But Shokin is also reported to be on vacation, and president cannot accept his resignation when he is on official leave.
Nevertheless, the United States hailed Shokin’s resignation, seeing it as an indication of “Ukraine’s seriousness about its reform process” deputy spokesperson for the U.S. Department of State Mark C. Toner said.
But with the Yatsenyuk-Shokin resignation drama, little attention was paid to two laws passed by parliament at first reading on Feb. 16, which critics say gave a green light to yet more corruption.
The first one is the law on electronic property declarations, which allows officials to receive presents worth up to $10,000 without declaring them. The second law, already dubbed the “party dictatorship bill,” allows party leaders to remove the names of critical lawmakers from party lists even after elections are held.
On Feb. 18 parliament failed to cancel either of the bills, which critics said was appalling.
“With these laws, the authorities, including Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, have started an assault on political rights, and the dismantling of anti-corruption legislation,” Lukerya said.
“They’ve given a signal that we’re moving back on the track of development of the corrupt gangster state of Yanukovych’s times.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov contributed to this story.
