As Ukraine unchains itself from Russia religiously, unholy alliances in business and politics thrive as normal, without much international attention. But not without a heavy dose of Russian influence. Soured by the latest defense procurement scandal, the consolation prize of President Petro Poroshenko’s half-baked reform presidency (call it “nonlethal war on corruption”) couldn’t be more bittersweet.
How’s so? Well, ask our legendary Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko (aka “Dr. Iron Fist”), who migrated from boxing to politics as a pro-construction ally of Poroshenko.
Also, ask Ksenia Pavlovska, a Rivne Oblast assemblywoman who’s exploring construction business opportunities in Kyiv as an ally of presidential hopeful Yulia Tymoshenko. Finally, ask former Russian national (until 2015) Garik Korogodsky and active Russian national (reportedly) Aleksandr Melamud, the duo that has built a real estate empire in Kyiv over the last two decades. Did you know that the Leonid Kuchma regime signed off on their Globus mall at the Maidan to dislodge the 2000-2001 opposition protests there? The now-iconic “Ukrainian chick on a d**k” that rises above the mall (in Korogodsky’s architectural critique terms) epitomizes an era no less grotesque (he’s running for mayor).
To be fair, they’re not the only Russians with a longstanding presence in town as Russia’s smoldering war of aggression against Ukraine enters its sixth year. So what’s with this somewhat odd but well-connected cast of characters, you may ask?
At first glance, in times of war and razor-sharp electoral polarization, they and their tribal leaders may be at each other’s throats. Flip on the TV and watch them play mortal enemies and immortal visionaries every Shakespearean chance they get, which makes comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s lead in the race a bit redundant. Judging by the avalanche of lofty and feisty Ukrainian rhetoric that descended on Davos, Switzerland, this January, the battle for that coveted “Best Reformer” Oscar was hotter and bloodier than the borsch. But hey, back home in Ukraine, colder calculations prevail. When big money can be made, the big iron fists these ladies and gentlemen pack often give way to big iron fist bumps.
If you’re looking for a sizzling hot example of how such forbidden romances flourish, look no further than the protest-plagued Kyiv City Council and its draconian security measures. No matter how fed up the electorate, how fragile its trust and how close the elections, many elected officials there can’t wait to fist-bump through a string of lucrative but not-so-legal and local-friendly construction projects.
For more than a decade, bloody clashes have flared up all across Kyiv between developers’ private armies (aka titushki) moving in equipment and unconsenting locals defending beloved parks and lakes, with riot police often acting as bystanders. One such flash point may soon be coming to our overcrowded, pipe-bursting community in Kyiv’s Obolon district. Interestingly, in our case, Tymoshenko’s City Council members have repeatedly voted no, local public pressure being a factor. Apparently, no such pressure in the entire universe applies to their fellow partisan from Rivne Oblast, the expeditionary developer-assemblywoman. Could her galaxy be a million light years closer to Tymoshenko’s then ours?
Never mind dozens of letters sent, a thousand angry Oboloners’ signatures collected, a criminal case opened — and spectacularly stalled — and up to ten protests held at City Council over four months — face-to-face with the heavily guarded officials involved. “No one’s knee-kicking anyone’s will in two,” Mayor Klitschko told us on camera back in December. So much for promises made by someone seeking reelection next year. And so much for the promise of decentralization, so aggressively marketed since 2014. This self-government reform promised to magically vaccinate away tensions between the central government and local communities, thus strengthening Ukraine’s immune system in the face of viral Russian aggression. How? By holding a separate set of local elections and forming so-called “united territorial communities.” That parallel structure would give people a greater say in local affairs, unlocking badly needed funding for schools, hospitals and infrastructure, funding that used to get stuck in Kyiv’s massive bureaucracy.
To be clear, as a self-funded group of locals, mostly women, we seek no government funding. We just want our flyover community in Kyiv’s Obolon district out of the claws of bureaucracy married to special interests. No, we don’t want a children’s pool privatized only to be milked like a cash cow and then slaughtered like a pig, with sun-blocking high-rises shoehorned in its place — on land that belongs to the community, in gross violation of that land’s original designation. And yes, especially when Russian nationals are involved. Especially when sitting right next to the pool-on-the-chopping block is the school that had graduated Oleksiy Durmasenko, a war hero who fought and died for Ukraine.
By extension, he died for the post-World War II order, for the principle of Europe’s borders’ inviolability, n’est-ce pas? Now who’s going to defend Durmasenko’s lakeside school — my school — against being overcrowded and the lake from being in any way encroached on? Do our jet set reformers and their Western admirers have a clue? Meanwhile, in the poorest country of Europe called Ukraine, a pro-construction man claiming to be a war vet approached us at a City Council protest on Feb. 28. Frankly, we expect more divide-and-rule tactics to come our way.
And buried in our microcosmic drama lie some hellishly inconvenient truths about the trajectory of Ukraine’s reforms. So inconvenient that the Western media’s silence sounds fairly bipartisan. Here’s the trick: If you dig into decentralization reform a little deeper, you’ll find that it’s part and parcel of the Minsk Accords. Why on earth would the internal affairs of a sovereign state be subject to an international agreement, you may wonder? Unless, of course, it’s an “agreement” made at gunpoint, in an echo of the 1938 Munich Agreement.
Sound too harsh? Go ahead and ask former French President Francois Hollande, who took part in the February 2015 peace talks in Minsk, the capital of Belarus — Russia’s closest ally — alongside Germany’s Merkel, Russia’s Putin and Ukraine’s Poroshenko. In his memoirs, Hollande recalls Putin losing patience with Poroshenko — to the point of threatening to “crush” Ukraine’s military. Somehow, that bombshell revelation wouldn’t find its way into the news until late August 2018. But once it had come to light, bingo! Out of the woodwork comes Poroshenko, ordaining Hollande with Ukraine’s Order of Freedom.
Let’s face it: How much freedom did Ukraine secure in Minsk courtesy of Hollande and Merkel? How many reform ingredients did Poroshenko take home, his factory in Russia still churning out candy, alongside his murky British Virgin Islands company? Anything other than a demoralizing blow to civil society and a liberating dog whistle for the oligarchs: Forget the war, forget the reforms; things will soon be back to normal, back to divide-and-rule, back to business as usual?
When Moscow set out to drag Kyiv back into its orbit in late February 2014, the Russians were all about business, juggling sticks and carrots. A federalized Ukraine, with no right to join NATO and even the European Union — essentially, with no right to decide its own fate — was offered by the Kremlin as a generous and peaceful compromise. Eager to meet the Putin Doctrine halfway, former U.S. State Secretary Henry Kissinger put forward a “Finlandization” recipe for Ukraine, endowing our now slightly dismembered country — once the world’s third-largest nuclear power — with the right to join the EU only.
The carrots hadn’t worked. Russia’s tough love expanded from Crimea into Donbas, this time encountering military resistance, causing losses on both sides and creating image problems. Scenes of burned out tanks, charred corpses and war-ravaged homes had taken their toll on the once-shiny federalization brand. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had to polish up his talking points. Alas, federalization sort of reincarnated into decentralization: “You can call it what you want — federalization, decentralization. What matters is the substance, not the name.” Really? Do names like Ulyanov and Dzhugashvili ring as much of a bell as their front-and-center nom de guerre versions, Lenin and Stalin? So…by late 2014, decentralization had clearly appeared to be the more marketable brand name, one that, with Western leaders’ charms and decorations, wouldn’t be heavily opposed by a demoralized and disoriented Ukrainian public.
A few humiliating months later, decentralization officially swelled to include “special status” for Russian-held Donbas, or Ukraine’s de facto federalization by military force. Adding insult to injury, the compromise effectively reduced our Constitution to toilet paper status, creating a toxic “safe space” off limits to our country’s sovereignty and unitary statehood, enshrined in Article 2. Who cares? With the stroke of a pen in Minsk, Donbas had become the Trojan Horse of Russian diplomacy — returnable “reintegration” (read: reinTANKgration) goods.
By contrast and omission, Crimea had become the crown jewel of Russian national pride — a nonnegotiable taboo. Unwilling to rush to nuclear-disarmed Ukraine’s defense militarily and equally unwilling to be perceived as abandoning us to our fate, “deeply concerned” Western leaders stood their ground — their “nonlethal aid” middle ground, that is. With his “right side of history” peacockery, Obama even tried to canonize his fence-sitting position into a portable moral high ground. Quick, how many Ukrainian critics of this fundamentally flawed policy had made it to the elevated media platform of blue checkmarks on Twitter? And down the memory hole the super-thorny subject went, sanitized and marginalized by an intellectually dishonest dominant narrative, more popular and convenient to this day. Music to Western leaders’ feel-good, we-did-the-best-we-could echo chambers. Unfortunately, a tiny chamber of horrors refuses to go away: How do you sell security assurances to Kim Jong-un with the battle-scarred Ukrainian model of denuclearization hogging the catwalk?
Oh wait, isn’t that where the bodies are buried? Isn’t that the Grinch who stole our reform borsch of half-measures and half-miracles? You wouldn’t know that if you’re lost in a garden variety of Orwellian half-truths and outright untruths — the matrix of appeasement.
A war is not a war!
Even after six waves of partial military mobilization. It’s just an ATO (Anti-Terror Operation) or a JFO (Joint Forces Op). State-on-state-aggression? File that under “Ukraine conflict,” “Ukraine crisis,” or better yet, “civil war.” An invasion involving hundreds of Russian tanks, artillery pieces and SAMs? Definitely, an “insurgency.” Russian invaders and local collaborators? Make it “Russian-backed separatists.” And what do they call a regular army with regular supplies, regular drills, regular command, control, communications and yes, currency (the Russian ruble)? “Rebel-held” stuff! Oh boy, Ukraine’s reform of decentralization of funds better catch up to the Western media’s decentralization of facts! If calling a war a “war” and pneumonia “pneumonia” and treating it with antibiotics — not with cough syrup — is too much to ask, then what hope is there for recovery?
Back to the central part of our story, should Kyiv City Council finally say yes to the unwelcome “Russian-backed” advances on our communal land, we reserve the right to challenge them in court. Any hope of winning? Well, in a country whose Constitutional Court blindfolds itself to the Constitution’s Article 157 — which expressly prohibits amending the Law of the Land in wartime — you get the idea. At least we know our land must be worth something.
