Editor’s Note: This story is the second installment of a four-part series called “Unkept Promises” about the lack of progress in four key areas since President Volodymyr Zelensky took office in May. This article takes a look at Ukraine’s unreformed law enforcement. The first story in the series examined why no one has been successfully prosecuted for the multibillion-dollar bank fraud of the last decade. The next installments will focus on mayors of big cities and oligarchs.
While running for president, Volodymyr Zelensky harshly criticized Ukraine’s nonexistent rule of law and blamed its failures on then-President Petro Poroshenko. He won the presidency on a promise to overhaul the flawed law enforcement system and imprison corrupt officials.
Yet so far, Zelensky achieved alarmingly little in this area.
Nine months after he took office, corrupt officials are still free, courts show no improvement and sketchy appointments are becoming a key feature of Zelensky’s presidency.
In Zelensky’s first year, Ukraine dropped by two points in the Corruption Perception Index, an annual ranking by Transparency International.
The organization specified where Ukraine was failing: no independent judiciary formed, anti-corruption bodies lack capacity and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), successor of the Soviet-era KGB, still has the power to prosecute economic crimes – which effectively means harassing or extorting businesses.
Almost all top law enforcement bodies have been disappointing under Zelensky. Some, like the Interior Ministry or the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, remain in the hands of disreputable officials. Others, like the SBU or the judiciary, continued business as usual and didn’t undergo the anticipated cleansing.
“What some see as the incompetence of the current government is used by someone more capable to achieve their own personal goals,” says political expert Vitaly Bala.
One-man ministry
If there is one person who embodies the problematic state of Ukraine’s law enforcement, it’s the unsinkable Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, one of the most powerful men in the country.
When Zelensky rose to power, Avakov was expected to be sent packing. Instead, he managed to find his way into the president’s heart.
Avakov is one of the most maligned top officials: Anti-corruption activists and non-governmental organizations describe his five years in office as a failure. Many high-profile criminal cases stalled, including ones prosecuting the murders of activists and journalists. The police remained largely unreformed.
Meanwhile, Avakov and his family were implicated in corruption at the ministry. The minister’s son, his deputy and an alleged mediator were accused of embezzling over $500,000 by supplying backpacks to the Interior Ministry at inflated prices.
In the end, the mediator reached a plea bargain with prosecutors and Avakov’s son and deputy escaped prosecution — despite surveillance footage and audio recorded by law enforcement implicating them in the deal.
Avakov, his deputy and his son denied wrongdoing.
Protesters burn torches in front of the president’s office, while holding letters which read “Avakov is the devil” as they attend a rally demanding not to reappoint Arsen Avakov as interior minister, in Kyiv, on Aug. 28, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Besides his alleged connections to corruption, the interior minister also had no political backing: His former party, the People’s Front, didn’t even run for parliament in 2019.
Kicking him out would be a popular move. And yet Avakov stayed.
“Avakov is on a trial period,” Zelensky said in October. “I don’t owe him anything.”
The president said he gave Avakov until the end of 2020 to demonstrate results. But when asked about it in early February, Zelensky said he was willing to wait longer.
Meanwhile, Avakov’s influence grows.
Avakov has accompanied Zelensky on several key foreign trips, including a visit to Italy and the Vatican in February. He stood next to the president as he met with Pope Francis.
One of Avakov’s main tools of influence is the 60,000-strong National Guard, which is run by his ministry. Its powers are growing. A new bill seeks to let it operate abroad and conceal its procurement.
The Anti-Corruption Action Center nonprofit has issued a statement sounding the alarm: A concealed budget creates openings for corruption, a crime Avakov has been accused of in the past, it warned.
“I understand that a group of people close to the president is working closely with (Avakov),” Vitaly Shabunin, head of the center, told the Kyiv Post.
Avakov’s safety net could be his friendship with Ihor Kolomoisky, the powerful billionaire oligarch who used to be a business partner of Zelensky.
“There is some kind of an agreement among Avakov, Zelensky and Kolomoisky, and it’s apparently being implemented,” says Bala. “There is no other explanation as to why Avakov remains at his post.”
Kolomoisky and Avakov call each other friends. The oligarch publicly called for keeping Avakov in office.
Shabunin of the Anti-Corruption Action Center told the Kyiv Post that the pair have a common enemy – the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and its head, Artem Sytnyk.
NABU under attack
Another top crime-fighting official who kept his job under Zelensky is Sytnyk, who leads NABU and enjoys relatively positive assessments of his work. However, contrary to the recommendations of anti-corruption watchdogs and international organizations, lawmakers from Zelensky’s party are set to remove Sytnyk from office.
On Feb. 7, Oleksandr Dubinsky, a Servant of the People lawmaker who worked on Kolomoisky’s 1+1 channel, said that a draft law on removing Sytnyk from office had gathered the necessary 150 signatures to be presented to parliament for a vote.
Sytnyk told the Kyiv Post that Avakov and Kolomoisky were behind the campaign to remove him.
Sytnyk’s agency recorded the surveillance footage of Avakov’s deputy and son while investigating the backpack case. NABU is also currently leading investigations into Kolomoisky’s alleged siphoning of $5.5. billion from PrivatBank. It previously belonged to the oligarch and his business partner, but was nationalized in 2016.
Avakov denied targeting Sytnyk to avenge his son.
“I forgive idiots,” Avakov said of the NABU chief.
Riaboshapka’s clean-up
Among all the law enforcement agencies, the Prosecutor General’s Office has changed the most under Zelensky.
In October, Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka began cleaning out the vastly overstaffed agency he took over from Yuriy Lutsenko, his predecessor and another in the long line of incompetent or corrupt top prosecutors.
As a result, 55.5% of the 1,339 prosecutors employed by the central office failed a vetting and lost their jobs.
Riaboshapka’s opponents say that the procedure for firing prosecutors was arbitrary, lacked transparency and did not comply with the law. Some controversial prosecutors accused of sabotaging investigations and falsifying evidence passed the vetting and kept their jobs.
Shabunin says that, overall, the cleanup carried out by Riaboshapka has been positive.
“It’s a great result,” he says. “I remind you that the two previous reforms ended with 98% of prosecutors keeping their jobs.”
Oleksandr Lemenov, a former anti-corruption expert now serving as an advisor to Riaboshapka, says that most prosecutors who had been caught making questionable decisions or who had possessions exceeding their official income were sacked.
But this is only the beginning. Riaboshapka’s office is expected to begin a similar cleanup among regional prosecutors.
“A final verdict of the reform can be given only after a similar vetting is held on the regional and local level,” Lemenov says.
The vetting of local prosecutors is set to be completed by September.
Dent in Riaboshapka’s office?
Despite these positive developments, one department of the prosecutor’s office poses a threat to top-level investigations, experts and activists say.
Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky, the deputy prosecutor general and head of the prosecution’s anti-corruption branch, is another controversial official who, like Avakov, kept his seat under Zelensky.
Kholodnytsky was elected to lead the agency through an open competition back in 2016. Two years later, corruption allegations blew a gaping hole in his reputation as a crime fighter.
From left: President Volodymyr Zelensky, future Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka, Head of Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov and Nazar Kholodnytskyi, head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecution, during the National Council for Anti-Corruption Policy meeting in Kyiv on July 28, 2019. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
In audio recordings made public by NABU in 2018, Kholodnytsky appears to sabotage corruption cases against Odesa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov, ex-lawmaker Georgii Logvynskyi and other powerful figures.
Kholodnytsky has denied wrongdoing. In 2018, the qualification commission consisting of 33 prosecutors stated that he violated the law, yet it didn’t press for his removal. The head of the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution can only be fired by the Prosecutor General if the qualification commission requests it.
Shabunin, who has been vocal in calling for Kholodnytsky’s removal, says the anti-corruption prosecutor has limited powers to sabotage NABU’s anti-corruption investigations now that his boss is Riaboshapka and not Lutsenko.
“If we look at all anti-corruption investigations, it’s Riaboshapka who is signing them now,” says Shabunin.
Slowpoke agency
Another key anti-corruption body, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption, has been effectively useless since its creation in 2016.
The agency was charged with checking state officials’ electronic asset declarations, but, in its first year, it was able to verify only 91 declarations out of the 1.5 million that were submitted.
Under Zelensky, the parliament rebooted the agency on Oct. 2, increasing the powers of its head and giving the agency access to all asset declaration databases. The agency is also required to speed up reviewing declarations by automating the process.
In late December, Oleksandr Novikov, a former prosecutor, was selected as the agency’s head. He has yet to demonstrate any results.
Investigations Bureau
Zelensky also decided to reboot the agency responsible for investigating cases against top officials.
In late December, parliament fired Roman Truba, the toxic head of the State Bureau of Investigations, replacing him with Iryna Venediktova, a lawyer and a member of parliament from Zelensky’s party.
Since November, the agency, which was created in 2018, has been placed in charge of investigating the murders of some 100 anti-government protesters during the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013-2014. The investigations have a sad history: six years after the revolution, no police officers or officials have been convicted of murdering or persecuting protesters.
Anti-corruption activists and experts have criticized the decision to give critical and complicated cases to Venediktova, a lawyer and a legal scholar.
“How can a person that never took part in an investigation lead an agency responsible for investigating the most complicated cases,” says Shabunin. “It’s insane.”
In January, Venediktova appointed Oleksandr Babikov, a former defense lawyer of President Viktor Yanukovych, the disgraced former president who was ousted by the EuroMaidan Revolution, as the bureau’s deputy head. Babikov, among other things, will be in charge of investigating crimes committed by his former client.
Moreover, on Jan. 2, the bureau’s former deputy head, Oleksandr Buryak, was put in charge of the EuroMaidan cases. That appointment also drew criticism.
According to Yevhenia Zakrevska, the lawyer for the EuroMaidan victims’ families, Buryak was already in charge of several EuroMaidan-related cases once when he worked in the General Prosecutor’s Office of Kyiv in 2014. He efforts proved unsuccessful.
“They were doing nothing to investigate them, absolutely nothing,” Zakrevska told the Kyiv Post.
“All appointments (in the bureau) are the sole responsibility of Venediktova, and the president who appointed her,” says Shabunin.
SBU in friend’s hands
Many appointments overseen by Zelensky and his loyalist parliament go against reforms the president promised.
On Aug. 29, parliament appointed Ivan Bakanov, Zelensky’s childhood friend and former head of the president’s production studio, as chief of the SBU security agency. He had served as the SBU’s deputy head since late May.
Bakanov was tasked with curtailing his agency’s expansive powers. International partners and national reformers have long advocated only a few main roles for the agency and its 40,000 or more employees: counterterrorism, counterintelligence and protecting legitimate state secrets.
But the SBU has always asserted sweeping powers over many spheres of Ukrainian life, including investigating economic crimes, where critics say agents abused their powers.
On Oct. 15, Bakanov submitted a proposal to Zelensky that would allow Ukraine’s intelligence agency to maintain its powers to oversee economic activity and postpone creating a parliamentary supervisory board to check and balance the powerful agency.
The European Commission criticized the draft bill based upon that proposal on Dec. 12. “The legislative framework for the fight against organized crime requires revision and improvement,” the report reads.
Courts not in focus
Similarly, the judicial reform promised by the president is currently stalled. Ukraine has missed deadlines for creating two commissions tasked with cleaning up the judiciary, and foreign experts who are supposed to help Ukraine with judicial reform haven’t been appointed.
The Ukrainian parliament passed the reform law in October and Zelensky signed it in November.
According to the deadline set by the law, the new High Qualification Commission – a body that hires and fires judges – should have been created by Feb. 7. The High Council of Justice, the judiciary’s highest governing body, should have appointed foreign experts and local officials by a mid-January deadline to form the High Qualification Commission, but has not done so.
The panel of judges leaves the courtroom on Dec. 28, 2019, during the court case against ex-police officers who are accused of killing protesters during the 2014 Euromaidan revolution. The court freed the defendants on the Prosecutor General’s request, violating the law and sparking outrage from civil society. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
The main reason is that the High Council of Justice, the judiciary’s main governing body, published rules that effectively deprive foreign experts of a major role in the reform on Dec. 11.
Anti-corruption activists have called on Zelensky’s team to submit another bill to resolve the situation, but this has not happened yet.
Halyna Chyzhyk, a member of the Public Integrity Council, a non-governmental judicial watchdog, says that many feel Zelensky’s team has forgotten about judicial reform.
“It hit a dead end,” she says. “The president isn’t doing anything to change this situation. It looks like he’s simply ignoring the problem. The more he ignores it, the worse it gets.”
