The personal problems of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk have become a problem for the entire state.
Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk squandered the people's unprecedented trust in record time. The reason was their personal corruption and unwillingness to change the clan-oligarchic model of government they had become accustomed to.
Minister Aivaras's revelations merely voiced what literally everyone already knew: Ukraine's ruling elite is corrupt and out of touch with reality. A sort of Soviet collective farm, rebranded "The Road to the EU."
The pathological, hyper-greed and personal enrichment of these two have buried the reform of the prosecutor's office, the reform of the judicial system, and the reform of the state's political system. And the anti-corruption component of the government, pushed through by patriots and the West, has been sent into a long circle by cunning officials. At the end of which, the NABU and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office will inevitably run into the leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office (Poroshenko's protégé Viktor Shokin) and the rotten judicial system.
All key reforms in the country have been buried by Petro Poroshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk—it was their factions that delayed, failed to vote, or voted against laws that would genuinely change the rules of civil coexistence in Ukraine. The selection of deputies for the parliamentary factions of the People's Front and the Petro Poroshenko Bloc is the will and hand of Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, and no one else. And if deputies from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc and the People's Front block (sabotage) reform laws, defeat them in the Rada, vote with multiple voting cards, and disregard the Rules of Procedure—then the responsibility for this lies personally and solely with Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko. They brought this gang into parliament, and they are responsible for it.
Two years have been largely wasted.
Poroshenko's faction is in dire straits: it includes "overseers" from the previous government and even FSB agents. And there are dozens of people with a staunch reputation as thieves. And the president of a country at war himself meets regularly with Viktor Medvedchuk. This is known even in the trenches on the front lines.
While Yatsenyuk is responsible for the lack of economic reform and the embezzlement of the state's strategic assets by his entourage, Poroshenko's list of "dirty deeds" is far longer. The Ukrainian president bears personal responsibility for shielding the entire Yanukovych organized crime group, including himself, from prosecution and trial. In other words, the people who robbed the state—meaning us—of billions of dollars, and who are guilty of murdering hundreds and thousands of Ukrainians, were able to reach an agreement with Petro Poroshenko and escape responsibility. The Prosecutor General's Office, headed by Poroshenko's protégé Shokin, deliberately wrecked virtually all high-profile criminal cases against members of Yanukovych's gang, giving each of them the opportunity to a) siphon off assets, b) make prosecution impossible. And for some, to flee.
On the topic: Petro Poroshenko will be jailed along with Viktor Shokin.
Today, Putin is a true savior for Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko. Because by blackmailing the Ukrainian people with a Russian attack if the country's central government weakens, this pair of cynical kleptomaniacs have taken their own citizens hostage to their thieving "wants." "A third Maidan will bury Ukraine!" "Re-elections during wartime are unacceptable!" "Putin is about to attack!"—these are the talking points defending the thieving team at the helm of state.
At the same time, neither Poroshenko's business team nor Yatsenyuk's business partners are even thinking about giving up their habits that are detrimental to the country.
We must "tolerate" the thieves' clans in power—or else "Putin will come!" The thieves themselves are unwilling to change their habits, burying the state in a struggle for power and super-profits.
Teetering on the brink of political death (sociology is already singing the death knell for both Poroshenko and his BPP, and Yatsenyuk and the People's Front), these two empty figures are trying to survive, again, at the expense of the state and its citizens. Through a series of mutual accusations, they are trying to distract attention from the main point: both Poroshenko as president and Yatsenyuk as prime minister have proven themselves incompetent. The meager scale of their personalities—PR aside—is incomparable to the threats to our state. And worse, they themselves pose a challenge.
The situation is theoretically fixable. But to do so, both Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk would literally have to overcome their compunctions. That's unlikely.
It's impossible to believe that tomorrow Petro Poroshenko will change the paradigm of his entire life: he'll stop lying, stop profiting from the budget, renounce his association and joint business with the thieving circle with whom he's been "in cahoots" for 25 years, etc. It's also impossible to believe that the vain, self-important, but weak-willed and morally deficient Arseniy Yatsenyuk will voluntarily resign as prime minister and fade into oblivion.
These two characters wasted 25 years of their lives to climb to the very top of the power pyramid. How much "bending," dodge, betrayal, "bribes" and "kickbacks," political prostitution—to become "king of the mountain"—and then suddenly slide back down voluntarily?
Moreover, the events of recent months have shown that neither Poroshenko nor Yatsenyuk are as sensitive to criticism and pressure from Ukraine's Western partners. Poroshenko couldn't care less about the State Department's wishes regarding the removal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin—because Shokin is currently the main protector of the corrupt deals between Poroshenko and Yanukovych's entourage, as well as Poroshenko's management, which the president has placed at the state's troughs.
Mikheil Saakashvili refused SBU protection not out of a love of populism: the head of the Odesa Regional State Administration realized that the security detail assigned to him was the "eyes and ears" of President Poroshenko, and only then security. Political orders for the SBU remained as commonplace as they had been under Kuchma and Yanukovych. Clearly, with this approach, Petro Poroshenko personally has no need for SBU reform, a purge of the Service, or a massive influx of patriotic personnel. Therefore, even today, two years after the Maidan, the Security Service of Ukraine remains an ineffective clone of the KGB. Its personnel are demotivated by the agency's personnel policy and the discrepancy between the words of the top leadership and their actions.
The best illustration of the Poroshenko-Yatsenyuk administration's incompetence, which humiliates millions of Ukrainian citizens, is the state security detail of Rinat Akhmetov, the leader of the Donetsk organized crime group "Lux," a Kremlin stooge. There's Viktor Medvedchuk and the Surkis brothers, who are free. There's Vadym Novinsky and David Zhvania, stooges of the Russian secret services, who illegally obtained Ukrainian citizenship. And there are hundreds of such markers.
And here we are - a stalemate.
The critically thinking part of society understands that you can’t build a new country with such “Kermanychs”.
Hoping that circumstances will force them to become patriots of Ukraine, rather than of their own pockets and ambitions, is in vain.
To remove the scoundrels with another Maidan would put the state at risk of a Russian invasion and lose the chance to break away from a Russia driven mad by the bloodshed.
To do nothing, to "go with the flow" in the wake of this gang of thieves' desires, is to trample on one's own dignity. Dignity paid for with blood.
And there's only one way out: re-elections. A reboot of power. Despite all the risks involved.
The prelude to these elections must be the resignation of the pro-Kremlin head of the Central Election Commission, Mikhail Okhendovsky. This protégé of Viktor Medvedchuk must be placed in pretrial detention as part of a criminal investigation into all his past "eccentricities." Otherwise, these Ukrainian elections too will be riddled with widespread fraud, with commissions counting votes for weeks, and candidates from the Lubyanka "winning" in the local elections.
The elections should conclude with a reshuffle of the leadership of the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Security Service of Ukraine (the most important criterion being genuine, active patriotism, plus personal participation in the war with Russia). And a renewed Cabinet of Ministers, without any hint of another "coalition government," should be a purely technical government, without candidates being tied to any particular political party. It should also be completely independent in its decision-making.
If there are no elections, the leadership of the State of Ukraine will be completely discredited. Then, the state's governance system will collapse. Then, mass citizen disobedience to the corrupt "elite." And then, Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk will follow in Yanukovych's footsteps. If they have time.
And we'll have to build states literally from scratch. Because we're partly to blame for what Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko have done and are doing. We elected empty-headed people, believing their empty promises.
We ourselves let thieves into our house.
We are responsible for those we choose.
—
Sergey Fedorov, Argument
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