You're reading: Glamorous lawmaker of Radical Party thanks Lyashko for promoting youth

Alyona Kosheleva’s first day in the new Verkhovna Rada was marred by scandal. The new deputy refused to answer a question from a journalist about Ukraine’s political structure. The answer to that is parliamentary-presidential republic, but it looked like she did not know.

This earned Kosheleva a lot of special attention from the media, which tried to find the merits qualifying this glamorous 24-year-old brunette with a ponytail and heavily made-up eyes to get into parliament on Oleg Lyashko’s Radical Party ticket.

Lyashko stepped up to defend his colleague, saying on his Facebook page that Kosheleva was both beautiful and smart as she had two university degrees, in radio electronics and architecture, from a Kharkiv university. He added that apart from Ukrainian and Russian, the young lawmaker spoke English and German.

This education was apparently not enough for the young lady to find a good job, so she took employment as a hostess of a luxury restaurant in Kharkiv. She left the job soon, and at the time when Lyashko picked her for his team, she was unemployed, the parliament website says.

Having rich parents must have been helpful when she was unemployed, and explain Kosheleva’s chic style. Kosheleva’s father, Volodymyr Koshelev, was director of a Kharkiv-based distillery, and her mother was in charge of managing excise duties for alcohol in Kharkiv, according to an Ukrainska Pravda investigation.

Not only did these findings explain her expensive fur coat on her first day in parliament, they also stirred suspicions that Kosheleva received a seat in parliament thanks to her family’s links to former lawmaker Pavlo Klymets, founder of Olimp company that owns the distillery.

Kosheleva refuted these accusations, saying all her family was shocked to hear them. “My father really worked at this distillery but he was just an employee there… He has never had any relation to founders,” she told the journalists, who caught her up during the open meeting of the faction on Dec. 2. “My father is an ordinary man, who fought in Afghanistan. Now he is a pensioner.”

 

But Koshelev’s postings in social networks show that he’s a little more
than that. His profile in Odnoklasniki.ru social network shows that he
is a big fan of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Soviet Union.
He shared black-and-yellow St. George ribbons on his page and called on
people not to send money for the needs of the Ukrainian army. He also
had postings glorifying Putin and humiliating Ukraine.

Nevertheless,
Kosheleva claimed she volunteered at the Kharkiv hospital and posted
several photos in social networks depicting her feeding wounded soldiers
and washing hospital floors.

But a well-known Kharkiv volunteer,
Yaryna Chahovets, said she never saw Kosheleva at the Kharkiv military
hospital and the doctors she spoke to have never heard about her.

Kosheleva
explained that she worked at the other floor of the hospital, so
Chahovets could be unaware about her work. “I had nothing to do with
work of Yaryna, but I know her very well. I know people who work in her
organization,” she said.

Kosheleva said her charity activity and
active support of the Radical Party in Kharkiv made Lyashko think she
was worthy of the 13th place in his party list. “He claimed he was going
to promote the youth, the young thoughts, the young interests,” she
said. There are 21 deputies in his faction.
Kosheleva said she still
feels very uncomfortable in parliament and feels she needs to learn a
lot. She looks visibly nervous when she talks to journalists, clutching
her gilded cell phone and small box with a lawmaker’s badge in it.

“I’m
now reading a lot of information. They gave me a package of papers
needed to be read to answer the questions,” she said, elaborating that
this package included Ukraine’s Constitution and some other papers about
country’s structure. Maybe next time she is asked about it, she will
know the answer.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected]