The president's "round dance" with Firtash and Medvedchuk is a death sentence for the "new government" with its old thieving approach.
In recent days, P. Poroshenko has frequently spoken about the possibility of imposing martial law in Ukraine. Russia's military aggression could be the reason for this, he claims. In reality, martial law could become the only way and mechanism for Petro Poroshenko to maintain his own—and corrupt—power.
Today, it's already clear that decisions in the state are made neither by Parliament, nor by the Cabinet of Ministers, nor by the President—according to the constitutional "chart" of their rights and responsibilities. In fact, the state is run "manually" by a few individuals who wield various levers of influence over the overall situation in the country.
Yulia Tymoshenko names seven "arbiters of the destinies" of 46 million Ukrainians: Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, leader of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction Yuriy Lutsenko, and Chief of Staff Borys Lozhkin. (How many of them truly represent the Ukrainian people is up to you to decide.)
But this is far from the whole truth; Tymoshenko simply doesn't want to make enemies among potential allies.
The tandem of Dmitry Firtash, Sergey Levochkin, and Viktor Medvedchuk, Vladimir Putin's permanent representative in Ukraine, exerts enormous influence on processes in Ukraine.
In fact, it's precisely the behind-the-scenes "deals" within the Poroshenko-Firtash-Medvedchuk triangle that are setting the trend in Ukraine today, as it experiences Russia's military invasion. All the other names are, so to speak, "technical executors"; it's fair to say that Rada Speaker Groysman isn't mentioned by Yulia Tymoshenko among those with whom Poroshenko consults at least in some way: whatever the "boss" tells him, that's what he does.
The EU and US also have significant influence on processes in Ukraine. But, unfortunately, it is not decisive.
Otherwise, for example, Mikheil Saakashvili wouldn't have been "sent" by Petro Poroshenko into virtual exile—to govern the peculiar Odessa region, thoroughly infiltrated by Russian intelligence agencies and criminals and living off smuggling. It's difficult to achieve victory in the Odessa region, yet Saakashvili almost succeeded—and Kyiv immediately began to undermine him: Poroshenko's protégé in the State Fiscal Service, Roman Nasirov, immediately created massive financial problems for the successful governor. And no one stopped Nasirov, let alone reprimanded him.
At the same time, R. Nasirov received an advisor from his "senior comrades," Gennady Romanenko, who established the old smuggling schemes that had existed under Yanukovych and long before. To put this into perspective, G. Romanenko is a friend and confidant of the former head of Ukrainian customs, Ihor Kaletnik. And Ihor Kaletnik is a member of Viktor Medvedchuk's ranks. And Viktor Medvedchuk is Vladimir Putin's right-hand man in Ukraine. So, at the very least, customs in Ukraine today appears to be controlled by Russia. Or by Russia and Petro Poroshenko, on some sort of parity basis. Why so categorically? Because the "string" R. Nasirov, despite his protection racket for smuggling, his oppression of White House protégé M. Saakashvili, and his falsification of his own official declaration, still holds the post of chief fiscal officer. And despite the enormous political costs, neither Poroshenko nor Yatsenyuk have removed this obvious criminal from his post, and the criminal investigation hasn't even begun.
The same situation is at the Prosecutor General's Office, where, at Saakashvili's instigation, a young, uncorrupt prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, was appointed. He was nearly torn apart by his Ukrainian "colleagues," with the support of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, a protégé of Poroshenko. The president himself quelled the conflict, but only after a media scandal and pressure from the US State Department. Sakvarelidze was retained as Deputy Prosecutor General, with his powers curtailed; however, four Deputy Prosecutors General, each of whom is beyond reproach, retained their posts. Moreover, it is these four Deputy Prosecutors General who are responsible for selecting personnel for the "new prosecutor's office"—Sakvarelidze was not entrusted with this task, even though the program is funded by Western grants.
There are dozens of such examples from just the last few months.
This is Petro Poroshenko's style of doing business: a smile in the face, a stab in the back. And it seems this has already been realized not only in Ukraine, but also in the EU and the US. This likely explains the wary attitude toward the country's top leadership, the "no to Javelins," and even the EU's growing attempts to localize the events in eastern Ukraine within Ukraine itself.
The employees of the "renewed" SBU, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Prosecutor's Office are watching all this vileness from the "top"—this is clearly not reform, and certainly not a fight against corruption. And it's certainly not a war with Russia. Because no warring state in the world can afford such political unscrupulousness from its commander-in-chief, a part-time businessman.
Great mood! Petro Poroshenko and Oleksandr Turchynov 20 meters from the site of the Heavenly Hundred massacre, on the anniversary of the tragedy.
So, there's no war. There's bargaining between Petro Poroshenko, Vladimir Putin, and a number of Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs over yet another "redivision" of Ukraine.
The logic of these negotiations perfectly aligns with the special role of Viktor Medvedchuk and his longtime partner and even colleague (from the KGB, SDPU(o), etc.), Yevhen Marchuk. Who did Poroshenko authorize to conduct negotiations in Minsk with the "DPR-LPR"? People who specialized for decades in the fight against Ukrainian nationalism. Officially. V. Medvedchuk was the KGB-appointed lawyer for Ukrainian nationalist human rights activists, two of whom later died in prison camps (Yuri Lytvyn and Vasyl Stus). And Yevhen Marchuk, throughout his Soviet KGB career, served in the 5th Directorate of the KGB, whose main task was to combat dissent, dissidents, and Ukrainian nationalists. He rose to the rank of head of this directorate in the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR. It was this department that fabricated all the criminal cases against Ukrainian patriots and Ukrainian nationalists.
Today, Medvedchuk and Marchuk, on behalf of the State of Ukraine (!), are negotiating peace in Donbas in Minsk. At the same time, a large-scale campaign to discredit activists of national-patriotic movements has been launched in Ukraine, led by President Petro Poroshenko (supporting roles are played by Arsen Avakov, the Minister of Internal Affairs, and Oleksandr Turchynov, the National Security and Defense Council; both are from the pro-Russian BYuT, but after the Maidan of Dignity, they allegedly became "independent" politicians).
Significantly, the first public campaign of "Poroshenko's team," aimed at the state, was a campaign to discredit the volunteer movement. Volunteers were widely accused of amateurism, self-interest, and even theft. Moreover, the media and online have been particularly vicious in their attacks on volunteers who speak the truth about Poroshenko and the entire current government.
It's significant that the army of internet bots serving the interests of Poroshenko's team is an order of magnitude larger than the team that worked under Yanukovych against the Maidan. Boris Lozhkin is a style icon. With a "minus" tag.
Then followed a campaign to vilify the volunteer battalions, claiming they were bandits and murderers, hindering the valiant Ukrainian Armed Forces from fighting. A certain negative system was established from isolated examples.
Now, logically, it's the turn of the national-patriotic forces. The grenade explosion outside the Verkhovna Rada on August 31st marked the beginning of a campaign of persecution against all patriots of the country, outraged by the treacherous Minsk agreements. Understandably, the greatest rejection of the Putin-Poroshenko "Minsk agreements" has been felt among the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the nascent Ukrainian business class—those very same "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists" whom Petro Poroshenko's "trusted representatives" Viktor Medvedchuk and Yevhen Marchuk have been fighting for decades.
Regardless of who threw the grenade at the Verkhovna Rada—a dim-witted nationalist, a simple fool, or an individual used covertly by FSB agents—the fact remains: Petro Poroshenko's team, along with those who have joined them, Turchynov, Avakov, and Yatsenyuk, are now using the full extent of their administrative resources to once again crush the nationalist movement in Ukraine. A movement that is essentially still in its infancy, since all the old "fragments" of the nationalist movement in Ukraine had been disunited, marginalized, and destroyed by the "Ukrainian" authorities, with the help of Russian intelligence agencies (Marchuk and Medvedchuk), since the mid-1990s. And those remaining "little guys" were unable to exert any influence on the life and fate of the country. The war with Russia mobilized Ukrainian society; society, in many ways, became aware of its national identity; society produced a powerful volunteer movement—volunteers and volunteer battalions—and a few sincere national patriots became a symbol of resistance to the Russian occupier.
It was Ukraine's tragedy that gave the national-patriotic movement in Ukraine a chance to consolidate the Ukrainian nation and establish fundamentally new nationally oriented political forces, parties, and movements. "Svoboda" is already a thing of the past, but the former place of the slain Vyacheslav Chornovil's RUKh could well be filled by a modern political force, based on the national self-identification of the overwhelming majority of our country's citizens. Citizens who created the volunteer movement and volunteer battalions, who rebuilt the army and offered armed resistance to separatism, could very well unite in the very near future into a powerful national-patriotic movement to achieve today's most important goal: quickly, decisively, harshly, and brutally cleanse the country of embezzlers, "prosecutors," "judges," "cops," and "customs officials" of the old-new government, and of the top 10 oligarchs and their family clans.
And at this very moment, Poroshenko's team, with the support of Turchynov, Avakov, and Yatsenyuk, is launching a campaign to discredit their main and—alas!—only opponent in Ukraine. Because today, the country lacks political forces capable of restraining the usurpation of power by Petro Poroshenko and the political bankrupts who have joined him.
"Opposition Bloc"? Firtash and Lyovochkin have already reached an agreement with Poroshenko, defending their respective spheres of influence. As a result, all embezzlers from the former Party of Regions are guaranteed freedom, and D. Firtash is even launching new political projects. For example, expect the reincarnation of Valentyn Nalyvaichenko soon, who is expected to lead a party with the working title "Progress," and so on and so forth. For non-Ukrainians, Firtash and Lyovochkin, being true national patriots, means a guaranteed loss of business and freedom. And so, the media outlets of this criminal duo have actively joined the campaign to "terrorize" patriots.
The massacre of national patriots appears to have been coordinated with Moscow, which warmly—at the official level—welcomes Poroshenko's initiative. The Kremlin, and Putin more than anyone else, is interested in discrediting the Ukrainian volunteer movement, Ukrainian volunteerism, and, especially, Ukrainian nationalism. Incidentally, a little-known detail from Putin's KGB-era career is that he also worked for the 5th Main Directorate.
Thus, Poroshenko allowed something the President of Ukraine had no right to allow: the destruction of the national-patriotic movement in Ukraine. A movement that, in essence, made this insignificant man head of state.
Perhaps the pogrom against national patriots, in the view of P. Poroshenko and his entourage, should make it easier for the Petro Poroshenko Bloc to reap some dividends in the upcoming local elections—both by rigging the results in favor of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (as recently happened in Chernihiv) and by courting the electorate of southern and eastern Ukraine, where Russian propaganda and Poroshenko's old and new friends from the Party of Regions have turned the "Ukronazis" into a bogeyman. If so, then SUCH an action to achieve SUCH a result is an act of desperation on the part of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc's top brass, who lost the trust of their fellow citizens just as quickly as Poroshenko's "hostile" Svoboda Party.
Following this behavioral stereotype, after dispersing the national patriots, Petro Poroshenko needs to destroy all the few, but genuinely oppositional, media outlets. To do this, like Yanukovych, Poroshenko will have to employ corrupt prosecutors and a corrupt court. After all, he hasn't created any others (nor has he sought to).
And when Poroshenko's "throne" begins to tremble, his only remaining option to maintain personal power, at least for a while, is to impose martial law. Given the growing rate of theft in the highest echelons of power and Poroshenko's desire for personal power at any cost, this could happen very soon.
Instead of fostering the emergence of a fundamentally new political force, oriented toward true patriotism and national values—with an eye on the long term—Poroshenko has created yet another rift in a state where there is no prosecutor's office, no police, no courts, and where the army has been rebuilt thanks to the patriotism of its citizens and with their money.
But there are many Ukrainians ready to prove to Poroshenko and his accomplices that selling out the Motherland is punishable, and you can't take all your money to the grave.
Nationalist Yuriy Syrotyuk, a defender of Pesky and a volunteer in pretrial detention, against the backdrop of the well-fed, still-well-groomed face of Serhiy Lyovochkin in the Verkhovna Rada chamber—this is the best explanation for the situation in the country for every Ukrainian patriot. Poroshenko's "round dance" with Marchuk and Medvedchuk, against the backdrop of patriots being crucified by the authorities, is a condemnation of the "new government" with its old, thieving approach.
It's only a question of time. Soon.
—
Sergey Fedorov, Argument
Subscribe to our channels in Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, VC — Only new faces from the section CRYPT!