The main message of Vitali Klitschko’s Jan. 13 opinion piece in German newspaper Bild was: We want sanctions from the West.
“From far away, condemning violence and the absence of a legal system in Ukraine is no longer enough,” Klitschko wrote. “We immediately need international sanctions against (President Viktor) Yanukovych and his corrupt and criminal government.”
The opposition and civil society generally agree, hoping that the U.S. and the European Union will issue visa-travel bans against top Ukrainian officials and start tracing their financial assets as part of a campaign to punish those involved in the violence and criminal prosecutions against EuroMaidan protesters as part of a broader rollback of democracy in Ukraine.
But it does not look like they will be getting their wish any time soon.
When a delegation of German EU parliament members came to Ukraine in December, their message to the opposition was clear: we do not simultaneously engage with governments and introduce sanctions to them, according to Marieluise Beck, the German Green Party’s spokeswoman for Eastern Europe.
A Jan. 15 hearing in the foreign relations committee of U.S. Senate showed that the State Department has a lot of bark, but not much bite.
At the hearing, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland offered little more than moral and possibly a little more financial support for Ukrainian civil society and independent news media. She reiterated that sanctions are an option, but merely a distant one.
“All tools of government are on the table, including those,” she said.
Frustrated by the lack of action by the government, some senators went on to suggest that Congress will drive the move towards sanctions on its own.
In December, a bipartisan vote in the U.S. Senate made a step in that direction, calling for consideration of whether to “apply targeted sanctions, including visa bans and asset freezes, against individuals responsible for ordering or carrying out the violence (on Nov. 30 and Dec.1).”
Sen. Robert Menendez, a Democrat of New Jersey who chairs the foreign relations committee, went on to suggest that the Senate may consider its own legislation on sanctions.
“If the Yanukovych government continues to act against its citizens, as we have seen so far, then I’m not sure that we will wait for the State Department to look at sanctions and visa revocations against those committing those acts,” he said.
The opposition has suggested lists of government officials who should face sanctions, while the Ukrainian diaspora in the U.S. has made its own suggestions. Moreover, sources in Washington say that the U.S. government has a list of its own.
Arseniy Yatseniuk, leader of the opposition Batkivshchyna Party faction in parliament, said on Jan. 13 said that Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko should be the primary target of sanctions since he controls law enforcers who have repeatedly attacked peaceful demonstrators in the past few months since mass demonstrations began on Nov. 21.
Moreover, as a member of the so-called “family” close to Yanukovych, any sanctions against him would send a clear signal to the very top.
A recent news report in Ukrainska Pravda suggested that, despite the official reluctance to use sanctions, U.S. authorities have intensified scrutiny of payments in foreign currency and have demanded more transparency about company beneficiaries.
But several bankers who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about sanctions, told the Kyiv Post that these international control and screening procedures have been in place for a while, and started to tighten before EuroMaidan started. But they have been getting a lot of attention lately as an effective pressure tool, they say.
Meanwhile, local anti-corruption activists have been trying to come up with alternative ways of applying financial pressure against certain individuals. Investigations into assets and businesses of Energy Minister Eduard Stavitsky and Zakharchenko have been released recently.
A detailed interactive map of the president’s luxurious estate Mezhyhirya was released this week at mezhyhirya.com. The business schemes behind the privatization of the park where the president’s residence lies were released online in December, complete with names of foreign individuals and companies who are tied to the long chain of offshore companies and operations.
But activists can only do so much, and need authorities to back their effort.
“Law enforcement in Ukraine will never start an investigation here based on our information about (politically exposed persons) even though this information is enough to do that,” says Daria Kaleniuk, executive director of the Anticorruption Action Center, a watchdog that monitors public spending.
“There are existing instruments to freeze the assets of Yanukovych and other members of his regime. But there needs to be political will abroad to voluntarily freeze his assets like what was done by the Swiss to freeze (deposed former Libyan dictator Mommar) Gaddafi,” she says.
In the meantime, foreign asset tracing specialists say that Ukrainians can still learn to do more.
One tactic that anti-corruption groups use is to buy shares in companies with the aim of exercising minority shareholder rights to obtain heightened company disclosure information that includes accounting and other records that allow them to identify beneficial owners.
The main principle is the higher one’s shareholding, the more information access they are entitled to in a particular company.
Russian anti-corruption blogger Alexander Navalny has been known to do this in his investigations, experts noted.
Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya and editor Mark Rachkevych can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
