Poroshenko is repeating Yushchenko's mistakes and is preparing, with his own hands, a revenge for these outright crooks and traitors.
The Party of Regions, which is virtually non-existent in current Ukrainian politics, is heading to the local elections in several columns.
The Party of Regions is like the Dragon Gorynych. They cut off one head, and three grew in its place. In place of the defeated Party of Regions, three parties, brimming with former Yanukovych allies, are planning to participate in the upcoming local elections: Revival, Our Land, and the Opposition Bloc. All of them have a real chance of forming local governments in certain districts and cities.
On the one hand, such fragmentation plays against the formerly monolithic Party of Regions. The new parties will drown each other and steal votes from each other. On the other hand, the negative trend is alarming. Instead of helping the wreckage of Yanukovych's party sink completely, the current leadership and oligarchs are openly moving closer to the Party of Regions and trying to push some of them into power in exchange for loyalty.
It should be noted that only one of the Serpent's three heads is genuine. Only the Opposition Bloc, formed by Akhmetov, Firtash, and Lyovochkin's people and operating as an independent force, can be considered a full-fledged successor to the Party of Regions.
"Revival" and "Our Land" are clones, bait for the electorate. The first clone is a political force revived by Ihor Kolomoisky, once founded by Heorhiy Kyrpa. The other is controlled by Poroshenko's Administration. However, this doesn't mean the fake Party of Regions poses no danger to the country. There's no need to explain how these games could end. Of course, for the time being, such partners can be obedient puppets, meekly accepting the right decisions handed down from above at the right moment. But if the political situation in the country suddenly changes, there's no doubt that these certified political prostitutes will immediately defect to the other camp and stab their former friends in the back. The Party of Regions are masters of betrayal; that's something they have.
Svyatoslav Oliynyk, Kolomoisky's former deputy at the Dnipropetrovsk Regional State Administration, is leading the "Vidrodzhennya" (Revival) party in the elections. He plans to run for the regional council from this party. The fact that "Vidrodzhennya" is composed predominantly of former members of the Party of Regions, including such notorious figures as Vitaliy Khomutynnik and Gennady Kernes, doesn't bother Oliynyk at all. According to him, those members of the Party of Regions who generally opposed separatism and held patriotic positions joined "Vidrodzhennya," while all the "bad guys" went to the Opposition Bloc. This statement appears to be patently false and reflects much more on Oliynyk and his boss than on the political force they created.
"Now, during the local elections, I see that the radical part of society is demanding new revolutions and saying that the current government has failed the people. Meanwhile, the Opposition Bloc is running in the elections, driven by nothing but a desire for revenge and a return to the 'trough.' 'Revival' is a party that has managed to maintain a line of compromise and unite the healthy, creative forces of society," Oliynyk said at the party conference on September 22.
For those who believed in the "patriot Kolomoisky," this turn of events came as a rather unpleasant surprise. It turns out the oligarch isn't above being friends with Kernes, who, according to numerous accounts, played a role in the anti-Ukrainian unrest in Kharkiv last year and has previously made a number of openly Ukrainophobic attacks.
Kolomoisky's alliance with Yanukovych's fellow party members leads us to another obvious conclusion: the UKROP party, which has gained the confidence of many ATO volunteers and veterans and which positions itself as a party of patriots, is run from the same office as the Renaissance party. Despite the apparent difference in ideology, the two political forces are like communicating vessels, and those running for election through them clearly espouse no ideology at all.
Even more alarming is the situation with the "Our Land" project, which is being overseen from within the government. To tame and exploit a portion of the Party of Regions' electorate in the southern and eastern regions, Poroshenko's team hastily cobbled together a monstrous party, recruiting former Party of Regions members who had played supporting roles in Yanukovych's party. They even didn't disdain separatists and collaborators. For example, in Mariupol, the current mayor, Yuriy Khotlubey, ran for mayor from "Our Land," a candidate who spoke at anti-Ukrainian rallies in the spring of 2014, lobbied for the Russian occupiers, and collaborated with representatives of the "DPR" militants during the occupation of the city.
Bankova makes no secret of its oversight of the "Our Region" project. In early September, a member of parliament from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction Maxim Efimov He headed the Nashi Krai (Our Region) party council in Kramatorsk and is now promoting the party on billboards. When the author of this article called Yuriy Lutsenko, the chairman of the BPP faction in parliament, and asked for comment, Lutsenko feigned ignorance of Yefimov's new political leanings and promised to look into the matter. Naturally, we still haven't received a clear answer.
The chairman of the Donetsk Regional Civil-Military Administration, Pavlo Zhebrivsky, also makes no secret of his ties to Our Land and openly supports it. (Although he recently asserted something quite different: Zhebrivsky: elections in Donbas should be held no earlier than 2017.)
"They may have done some unsound things yesterday, but today they're ready to implement our program. Why not? Let's work with them. Let's forget their sins of yesterday and work for the good of the country today. Because, I repeat, there are very few smart people," Zhebrivsky explained to journalists about the strange political alliance.
Like Kolomoisky's people, Poroshenko's people claim that the Party of Regions clone they created only brings together good managers and "proper," patriotic regionalists. "Imagine there's a manager with experience and authority in the city, who's willing to work according to Ukrainian laws. But he was in the Party of Regions. And now they're really giving him a certain niche. An opportunity to realize his potential and hold the city together. It's something between the BPP and the Party of Regions. A kind of cesspool, so to speak. A transition point. The reason? The severe personnel shortage in the government," Zhebrivskyi frankly admitted in an interview with Zerkalo Nedeli.
The consequences of such an alliance are obvious. Not only is the phrase "a strong manager from Donbas" absurd, given the region's current state, but the current government is repeating Viktor Yushchenko's mistakes with astonishing consistency and is plotting revenge against outright crooks and traitors. Today, "Our Land" is a political Frankenstein, completely controlled and dependent on the Presidential Administration. But tomorrow, the situation could conspire to reunite the fragments of the Party of Regions and become a formidable force, stifling Ukraine's development at the Kremlin's behest.
Once, President Yushchenko, in a struggle against Yulia Tymoshenko, whose influence was growing, personally revived the defeated Yanukovych, thus signing the death warrant for thousands of Ukrainians. Yanukovych, rising from the political grave a few years later, steamrollered Yushchenko and his "beloved friends," including the current Donetsk mayor, Zhebrivsky.
Unfortunately, with such a painful experience behind them, yesterday's "orange" people are once again joyfully handing the axe to Ukraine's executioners in the hope that they will use it exclusively for slicing sausage.
In topic: Kolomoisky – the Vidrodzhennya party – Levochkin
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Denis Kazansky, published in Tyzhden.UA
Translation: Argument
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