As the third anniversary of the beginning of the EuroMaidan Revolution approaches on Nov. 21, the Ukrainian public has more proof of how far the country’s leaders have diverged from the ideals of the revolution that drove a corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, from power on Feb. 22, 2014.
President Petro Poroshenko is the leading embodiment of this divergence. From the revolutionary people’s leader who mixed with the crowds and climbed a bulldozer to give a speech, Poroshenko went on to become yet another untrusted ruler who is divorced from the people he governs, and from the rule of law.
His detachment was highlighted when Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalists found and filmed Poroshenko’s multimillion-dollar coastal villa in southern Spain that he uses for a weekend getaway.
The villa is absent from Poroshenko’s asset declaration. The law isn’t clear on the criteria for declaring property owned through businesses, and the president chose not to vex Ukrainians, who on average live on $2,400 per year, by parading his luxurious property before their poor eyes.
The villa might have been forgiven if it wasn’t topping a pile of other failures of Poroshenko, including – and we never get tired of listing it – no rule of law, continuing top-level corruption, doing business in Russia in times of war, refusing to sell his business — including the factory in Russia — after gaining the presidency and his failure to go after oligarchs and corrupt top officials.
To keep Ukrainians’ impatience from pouring over the edge, the president-controlled Prosecutor General’s Office gives them a bit of bread and circuses in the form of occasional prosecutions of top names.
The latest one in the arena is Vadim Novinsky, a controversial pro-Russian oligarch and lawmaker profiled in the Kyiv Post’s “Oligarch Watch” series on Nov. 11. Novinsky has been under investigation, but not for corruption or shady privatization deals, as one might expect with an oligarch involved.
Instead, Novinsky is accused of tampering with the church’s business. He was allegedly scheming to replace the head of Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 2013.
The parliament refused to lift Novinsky’s immunity from prosecution on the demand of Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko on Nov. 16, saying that it would need evidence of Novinsky’s guilt to do so. Lutsenko was furious. The show made headlines, offering the public a simulacrum of rule of law. The show could last for weeks, diverting more attention from Poroshenko’s mounting failures and his Spanish villa.
