Less than a week after ex-Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka criticized President Volodymyr Zelensky on the front page of the Kyiv Post on May 1, 2020, he now faces a spurious criminal investigation led by someone who should be fired and prosecuted for corruption himself.
That’s how perverse Ukraine’s upside-down criminal justice system works — and always has. Nearly 30 years into independent statehood, nobody of any significance has been convicted of any major crime or corruption. Politicians have, instead, and this unhappy tradition is continuing under Zelensky, installed loyalists who protect corrupt insiders and persecute critics. Criminal cases are opened and closed for bribes or political reasons.
The case against Riaboshapka was supposedly ordered by the High Anti-Corruption Court, the latest piece of Ukraine’s supposedly revamped anti-corruption infrastructure. If true, it signals to the nation not to expect anything good from this court.
Moreover, in a bitterly ironic development, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky is leading the probe of Riaboshapka on suspicion of bribery and making false statements on his asset declaration.
The vagueness, timing, and choice of the prosecutor all lead us at the Kyiv Post to call bullshit on this charade. Kholodnytsky and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU, which is supposedly joining the investigation, refused to release details.
Prediction: Nothing will come of this case because there isn’t a case. The investigation is meant to silence Zelensky’s critics, pure and simple.
Even if true, and we highly doubt Riaboshapka committed any crime, the choice of cases to pursue is outrageous in a nation where oligarchs and crooked bankers routinely fleece billions of dollars from citizens, where politically motivated murders remain unsolved and where members of parliament break laws with impunity.
Want to send a signal that the rule of law is coming to Ukraine? Prosecute billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky on criminal bank fraud in fleecing $5.5 billion from his former PrivatBank and sticking taxpayers with the bill of the now state-owned institution.
Kholodnytsky, also, should have been prosecuted after he was caught on multiple tape recordings obstructing criminal investigations, including tipping off suspects about upcoming law enforcement searches and coaching others on how to testify and avoid criminal charges. If true, Kholodnytsky should be in prison, not directing criminal investigations.
One of Riaboshapka’s mistakes as the general prosecutor was defending Kholodnytsky instead of firing him, as Ukraine’s Western friends and domestic anti-corruption fighters have long demanded. Look what this mistake cost Riaboshapka, who also would have been well-advised to launch criminal bank fraud indictments amid overwhelming evidence that Ukraine’s former leading bankers fleeced the nation of $20 billion in the last decade.
Kholodnytsky is a particularly loathsome person, the antithesis of a corruption fighter. Looks like he’s been blackmailed into doing what his political masters say — or else.
In April, he transferred a corruption case linked to Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak from the NABU to the police, an effective way to bury a case considering the Interior Ministry is led by Arsen Avakov, a distrusted and discredited political hack with unchecked powers. Yermak denies any corruption involving his brother, who was recorded demanding bribes in exchange for top-level political appointments.
In 2018, Kholodnytsky’s office also closed an Hr 14 million embezzlement case against Avakov’s son Oleksandr. The decision was made despite the fact that the NABU investigated video footage in which Oleksandr Avakov can be seen and heard negotiating the corrupt deal. Oleksandr Avakov denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
Many true corruption fighters — such as ex-member of parliament Hanna Hopko — have called on Western nations to impose sanctions against specific members of Ukraine’s corrupt elite when evidence of wrongdoing is credible. It is a good idea that has gone nowhere, unfortunately.
Ukraine’s leaders have always counted on its Western friends to overlook their corruption out of a strategic yet genuine desire to help the people of this suffering nation. They also bet that while the justice-starved citizenry can unite for revolution. It’s a well-founded fear that curbs some of the leadership’s worst impulses. However, as the leadership knows, Ukrainians united by revolution tend to get divided and distracted easily afterward the success.
Hope dies last. Someday, luck will run out for Ukraine’s corrupt elite and they will face justice. We hope we’re around to see it.
