The Supreme Court on July 15 allowed Renat Kuzmin, a terrorizing ex-prosecutor and ally of former President Viktor Yanukovych, to run in the July 21 parliamentary election.
Now it is up to the Central Election Commission to make a final decision on Kuzmin.
Kuzmin was a deputy prosecutor general in 2010 to 2013 and a deputy secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in 2013 to 2014. He is running as No. 35 on the list of the pro-Kremlin Opposition Platform-For Life party.
The Supreme Court ruling triggered a backlash.
Mykhailo Zhernakov, a member of the Public Integrity Council, said that the decision was a result of what he sees as ex-President Petro Poroshenko’s failure to reform the Supreme Court.
The court canceled the commission’s refusal on July 5 to register Kuzmin and banned the commission from further refusing to register him on the grounds of his alleged violation of residency requirements.
The Supreme Court partially upheld a July 11 ruling in favor of Kuzmin by the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal. However, the Supreme Court canceled the lower court’s statement that the Central Election Commission’s actions were unlawful.
The Supreme Court argued that the Central Election Commission had failed to prove that Kuzmin had violated the 5-year residency requirement for lawmakers. The court also said that the commission had not received any information on Kuzmin from the State Border Guard.
Kuzmin claimed that he had been on Ukrainian territory since 2014.
According to information provided to the Central Election Commission by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Security Service of Ukraine, known as the SBU, Kuzmin had not legally crossed the Ukrainian border since he returned to Ukraine on May 8, 2014 and had been placed on the wanted list. According to the prosecutor’s office and the SBU, Kuzmin could be hiding either in Russia or in Russian-annexed Crimea.
Some lawyers also argued that the burden of proof should rest with Kuzmin, not with the Central Election Commission.
Under Yanukovych, Kuzmin was involved in two major cases that have been recognized by Ukrainian and European authorities as political persecution – the abuse of power case against ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, in which she spent more than two years in prison, and the embezzlement case against Yuriy Lutsenko, then an opposition politician and now prosecutor general, who also spent more then a year in prison.
At the time, Kuzmin was seen as the embodiment of a corrupt and politicized prosecution system. There were also exposes about him living a lavish lifestyle beyond the means of a public servant.
As a result of his controversial reputation and involvement in the Tymoshenko case, Kuzmin was banned from entering the U.S.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has charged Kuzmin with illegally seizing land in the Pushchya-Vodytsya resort near Kyiv and has also opened an investigation into the allegedly illegal arrest of Lutsenko in 2010. Kuzmin denies the accusations of wrongdoing.
