President Petro Poroshenko's Solidarity party, whose supporters have filled half the city with campaign tents, has begun publishing a newspaper for Kyiv residents. The authors ensured colorful content, but forgot to include circulation figures and other information necessary for an official or advertising publication. It's noteworthy that adherents of MP Tretyakov's "My Kyivans" movement have already made similar mistakes. The similarity in campaign approaches and promoters suggests that the newspaper is either being published by Tretyakov's people, or that "My Kyivans" and the Kyiv branch of "Solidarity" are related entities with less-than-friendly agendas toward Mayor Klitschko.
Today, July 23, a KyivVlast correspondent was presented with a four-page copy of the newspaper "Solidarity. Kyiv" at the Pecherska metro station. The front page was adorned with the young face of Volodymyr Prokopiv, deputy head of the Kyiv branch of the presidential party and co-chair of the UDAR-Solidarity faction in the Kyiv City Council.
The distributors' tent was set up at a very short distance from the Klitschko Public Reception Office tent.
A KV correspondent couldn't resist the pleasure of reading the landmark reports on the high-quality work of the "Solidarity" activists in the Kyiv City Council. He picked up the newspaper and, as is his journalistic habit, began searching for the editor-in-chief of this masterpiece of print.
Having leafed through all the pages and not finding the original, the correspondent became upset and reported to the editorial office that “Solidarity” was distributing underground newspapers.
This story might have gone unnoticed if not for KV's March article about newspapers without source materials from Alexander Tretyakov's "Mi Kiyani."
Imagine the editorial staff's surprise when, after examining the copy, it was discovered that the same person, Kyiv City Council deputy Viktoria Mukha, was responsible for the victorious activities of "Mi Kiyani" and "Solidarity" in the capital.
As KV reported, Mukha worked for a long time as an assistant to Alexander Tretyakov. She shares a parliamentary reception office with him in the Svyatoshinsky district of the capital and is a leading figure in the "Mi Kiyani" movement. She is even listed as the editor-in-chief of this public organization's publication.
Meanwhile, Mukha's presence in the Solidarity party publication is justified: she is a member of the Kyiv City Council representing UDAR-Solidarity, and her patron is MP Oleksandr Tretyakov, close to the BPP due to his long-standing friendship with Petro Poroshenko. However, there is one catch.
Both publicly and privately, "Mi Kiyani" promotes Azov Battalion commander and parliamentarian Andriy Biletsky, and considers him a likely candidate for Kyiv mayor. This means that representatives of a seemingly monolithic team, considered by many to be "UDAR-Solidarity," are prominently featured alongside both Klitschko and his likely rival in the election.
Furthermore, the authors of the newspaper "Solidarity. Kyiv" for some reason asked Volodymyr Prokopiv about the split within the faction. If you read his answer carefully, it might seem to particularly skeptical readers that the co-leader of the "UDAR-Solidarity" faction in the Kyiv City Council:
a) does not know whether Klichkov’s supporters and Poroshenko’s supporters will go to the elections on a single list;
b) convinces the people of Kiev that the World Boxing Champion's comrades should stop quarrelling with the President's people.
However, we will leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions and will only provide the question and answer:
"A year ago, candidates from the Solidarity party, Poroshenko Bloc, ran alongside UDAR under its banner. Will the party participate in the local elections in the fall of 2015?
V. Prokopiv : The party will participate in the elections. I am convinced that ideologically aligned parties should go into the elections as a united team, without dissipating their strength. Everything else is secondary. Differences should be resolved at the negotiating table, after which they should unite and work together to achieve results.
Political expert Konstantin Novopolsky emphasized in a commentary to KV that only the hopelessly naive believe in a "chocolate relationship" between Klitschko and Poroshenko.
"They have had difficulties in their relationship since August 2014, when Poroshenko's people were blocked from entering the Kyiv City State Administration. Furthermore, those in the know have long known that Tretyakov, a close associate of Poroshenko, was tasked with creating an alternative force to Klitschko in Kyiv, promoting it, and securing an alternative mayoral candidate. And what Prokopiv voiced in the party newspaper is indeed Solidarity's official position on Klitschko today—not against working together, but let's negotiate," explained Kostyantyn Novopolsky.
According to him, the newspaper's lack of source material can be explained by two factors. "One is the negligence of the perpetrators, the other is conspiracy theories. What if something changes and both sides start making accusations? Prokopiv, for example, will say, 'I didn't give an interview,' and what was published on some unmarked piece of paper has nothing to do with me," the political expert concluded.
Egor Shilbaum, KievVlast
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