Four years after the Euromaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power, Ukraine is in search of new leaders. Opinion polls show that two thirds of Ukrainians (67%) demand new faces in politics, but only 19 percent can identify them.

The winners of the last 2014 parliamentary elections keep disappointing by their record low approval ratings. Since 2014, Petro Poroshenko’s bloc slid from 21.82 percent to 7.7 percent, Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadoviy’s Samopomich Party from 10.97 percent to 3.7 percent, and Arseniy Yatsenyuk-led People’s Front – from 22.14 percent to just 0.6 percent.

Some hoped that a new charismatic leader from the cohort of post-Euromaidan reformers would offer a solid alternative. But the clock is ticking and Ukraine’s Emmanuel Macron is nowhere in sight. Social activist and musician Svyatoslav Vakarchuk still enjoys a rather promising public trust of 7%, but lacks political courage to take specific steps and consolidate pro-reform activists. The ratings of various civil society-based political parties like Democratic Alliance, Power of the People, and the New Forces Movement do not exceed 1 percent. To pass the 5 percent threshold they will probably form a single electoral bloc with one of the parliamentary race champions – the Civic Position party led by the former defense minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko.

In order to fill the seeming leadership vacuum and satisfy the public demand in new heroes, the StarLight Media group, owned by Ukraine’s steel magnate and former president’s son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk, designed a new reality show The New Leaders. This ambitious TV project aims to identify regional political talent, present various action plans of previously unknown activists to the broader audience and hopefully boost public interest in politics before elections.

The project has an unusual administrative structure. Pinchuk’s ICTV channel and StarLightMedia will be fully responsible for TV production and advertisement, while the coalition of 34 civil society organizations will implement the project’s preparatory stage. The New Leaders’ supervisory board is made up of such civic sector heavyweights as the International Renaissance Foundation, Transparency International Ukraine, Opora, Center.UA and others. The board must guarantee objective evaluation of 1400 applications and select 100 mega-stars to present their leadership plans in 5-minute TV interviews. Based on performance, the Committee will then name 10 finalists. The winner will be identified in a series of live TV debates. Whoever scores the highest number of one-line votes will win the impressive financial trophy – a seed grant of Hr 1 million (approximately $38,000) – to implement the promised action plan.

Sounds like a great idea and amazing opportunity. Especially in a country like Ukraine, where, as some claim, activists and public visionaries have almost zero access to national TV channels to boast about their achievements and recruit potential followers of their civic causes.

Laudable as it is, the project has suddenly sparked a heated public debate full of controversies and ethical dilemmas. In various TV and radio interviews, social media debates and private discussions, observers raise a myriad of sensitive issues related to the oligarchic funding of civic engagement and moral aspects of civil society’s role in oligarch-led projects.

One of the arguments was summarized by the former director of International Renaissance Foundation Yevhen Bystrytsky, who wrote: “When asked to comment on the New Leaders project, I was dragged into a debate about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ oligarchs. Some argued that NGOs, which supported this project, previously attacked the oligarchic system and criticized the authorities for corruption. Then they suddenly changed rhetoric to justify their partnership with the oligarch.” Having underscored the importance of de-oligarchization process, Bystrytsky concluded that “the value of the New Leaders project as a mechanism to identify new faces for society and politics outnumbered all risks and any doubts, even justifiable, about project’s benefactor.”

Many are still unconvinced. Some politicians, like chairwoman of the Rada Foreign Relations Committee, Hanna Hopko, stresses that partnership with oligarchs like Victor Pinchuk cannot be tolerated. Hopko makes a point of boycotting Pinchuk’s Yalta European Strategy forum to demonstrate zero tolerance to kleptocracy and encourage others to follow her lead.

Partnership with Ukraine’s oligarchs, be they “good” or “bad,” can indeed result in lesser vigilance and loss of independence, as nongovernmental organizations’ very presence in this project volens nolens inadvertently legitimizes all potentially dubious (or fake) leader stars and Pinchuk’s impact on political processes in the country. Indeed, the StarLight Media’s cumulative market share is almost 30 percent and with such a considerable influence Pinchuk can easily exercise political control and formulate political agenda. Just as he did in the 2002 parliamentary elections by promoting the Winter Crop Generation – another «leadership» project seen by many as a spoiler party.

When asked to comment the New Leaders project, Crimean journalist Larisa Voloshyna reminded that Pinchuk advocated for “painful compromises for peace with Russia,” claiming that “Crimea must not get in the way of a deal that ends the war in the east.” Voloshyna and numerous Crimean activists regretted that CrimeaSOS NGO joined the New Leaders’ supervisory board in spite of Pinchuk’s questionable compromises with the aggressor.

Observers are similarly appalled by the fact that the New Ukraine think tank, founded by the former chief of President Yanukovych’s Chief of Staff Serhii Lyovochkin, is also part of the New Leaders’ Supervisory Board. Nobody could explain who invited this organization and whether it would continue serving after the massive public outcry.

Much criticism was voiced over the project’s entertaining character. As a TV show, the New Leaders can pay a lip service to civic engagement, devalue the very notion of leadership and undermine its societal importance. True leaders, after all, are forged in continuous hard work at constituencies and local communities, not random TV interviews. Political expert Ihor Semyvolos sarcastically compared the attempt to find new leaders in the format of reality shows to the “sale of a rotten political product” and “artificial reproduction of new leaders in vitro hydroponics.”

Having just started, the New Leaders project has had unfortunate outcomes. It polarized the already divided Ukraine’s civil society and demonstrated the worrisome tendency of civil society’s readiness to rub shoulders with Pinchuk at his lavish international forums and let his TV channels dictate the post-Euromaidan leadership agenda.

It is similarly disheartening that the network of 34 civil society organizations has preferred to work with ICTV and missed the opportunity to propose this important project to Ukraine’s fully independent public TV station Suspilne – one of the biggest achievements of the Revolution of Dignity.

The conclusions I drew from this debate are two-fold. First, there is no shortage of political leaders in Ukraine, but a catastrophic lack of public trust in their actions. The game changers will be leaders grown by political parties with strong connection to society, ability to formulate policies, drive reform and educate the public opinion. If Pinchuk sincerely cares about leadership, he should simply encourage his TV channels to give more air time to Oleksandr Solontai, Vasyl Hatsko, Anatoliy Hrytsenko, Vladimir Fedorin, David Sakvarelidze, Viktor Chumak and other leaders of post-Euromaidan parties, who honestly try to develop their grassroot parties with no oligarchic funding.

Second, Ukraine’s civil society should realize there can be no shortcuts on the path to democracy. As co-founder of Ukrainian Crisis Media Center Nataliya Popovych wrote, “Ukraine must do its homework and acknowledge that.. there will be no new Ukrainians and no new Ukraine, unless our present-day public opinion leaders, who position themselves as ‘new’… clearly define their principles and just live by them.’