Yatsenyuk
Our Prime Minister Yatsenyuk recently announced to Urbi et Orbi, the city and the world, that he had successfully completed the lustration process and is therefore as clean as a child's tear before Mother Ukraine. And although the lustration process itself was completely concealed from the general public, a closer look reveals that Yatsenyuk's case is a brazen profanation, a complete perversion of the very idea of lustration purging the government of corrupt officials serving the interests of the mafia-clan oligarchy, as well as individuals complicit in the plundering of the country, responsible for the country's deterioration to the point where it is now incapable of adequately fighting back against Moscow's aggression and local criminal separatism.
In fact, after such, so to speak, lustration, the topic of “revolution of dignity” can be closed... And a new revolution can begin?
As a reminder, the lustration law entered into force on October 15, 2014. This regulation establishes the organizational and legal framework for the vetting of civil servants and equivalent individuals, as well as local government officials. According to the law, the vetting is being conducted to restore trust in the government and create conditions for the creation of a new system of government bodies in line with European standards based on the principles of the rule of law and legality; openness, transparency, and publicity; the presumption of innocence; individual responsibility; and the guarantee of the right to defense. During the behind-the-scenes lustration vetting, Yatsenyuk demonstrated the highest degree of "openness, transparency, and publicity."
Despite his relative youth, Yatsenyuk has such a rich track record, stretching back to the mid-to-late Kuchma era, that he could, as in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf," be "purged of the first category" from government positions. After all, why was the experienced General Vorobyov purged simply for serving in the General Staff during Yanukovych's time, while Yatsenyuk, who held a ministerial position in Yanukovych's government and held several senior positions under Kuchma, was declared immaculate, like the Virgin Mary?
Do you remember how it all began?..
In the early 1990s, Yatsenyuk, by his own admission, sold cars at a bazaar, a fact he now seems almost proud of, claiming to have gained a wealth of life experience in the process. This is certainly something to be proud of, and his experience is truly vast—as anyone who has encountered bazaars and their traders knows! But there are far more controversial chapters in Yatsenyuk's biography…
In 1992, as an 18-year-old student at Chernivtsi State University, Yatsenyuk founded the law firm YurEk Ltd., which, as it's now loosely described, "dealt with privatization issues." Simply put, the firm participated in the plundering of former public property, which was then actively unfolding in the newly independent country. We are currently experiencing the consequences of this, incidentally, including in the form of the war in Donbas. We'll leave the talk of a young talent who graduated from an English-language school and built a highly successful privatization business solely on his talent for the "Yapik" students of "prestigious" business schools. Adults are well aware that privatization, the plundering of what had been created by the sweat and blood of millions of workers during the Soviet era, was a gangster-mafia enterprise. And no matter how much Yatsenyuk talked about his beloved financial law teacher, who provided him with invaluable academic and methodological assistance, the media repeatedly reported that Yatsenyuk ran a business with the son of the then-governor of the Chernivtsi region, Ivan Hnatyshyn, who was able to provide convenient access to assets, so to speak, of a carve-up... pardon me, privatization! Moreover, according to some reports, Yatsenyuk was patronized by such local authorities as the former owner of the Inter TV channel, the highly controversial Igor Pluzhnikov, as well as the former Minister of Social Policy, ex-governor of Bukovyna, and prominent figure first in Medvedchuk's defunct SDPU (o) and then in the Party of Regions, Mykhailo Papiyev, who is also, to put it mildly, an extremely dubious character.
In short, the young and early Yatsenyuk's business was a resounding success, with the obvious complicity of a number of notorious characters...
Then, after working at Aval Bank, where this young talent, apparently thanks solely to his exceptional talent, managed to rise through the thorny ranks from consultant to deputy chairman of the board in three years, in September 2001, Yatsenyuk entered government service, immediately becoming Minister of Economy of the Crimean Autonomous Republic. Apparently, during Yatsenyuk's hectic tenure, the economy flourished so profusely that by January 2003, he was quickly promoted to Kyiv as deputy to then-National Bank Governor Tigipko. When Tigipko joined Yanukovych's campaign team during the infamous 2004 presidential election, Yatsenyuk became head of the country's main bank.
He considers himself the savior of the hryvnia from its collapse during the Orange Revolution of 2004. Yatsenyuk sees his salvation in issuing an order prohibiting commercial banks from repaying deposits early. The fact that this order grossly violates citizens' rights and the Civil Code doesn't bother our young talent, who, incidentally, is burdened with a law degree. At the same time, Yatsenyuk modestly conceals the fact that, unlike the current, truly dramatic situation, in 2004 there was no frenzy; the economy demonstrated a steady growth due to a global inflationary recovery and the infusion of dollar liquidity into the global financial system, some of which freely flowed to Ukraine to inflate prices, primarily in real estate. All of this, combined, was accompanied by the inflation of global "bubbles," which ultimately led to the 2008 crisis. In short, anyone with even the slightest understanding of global financial processes, and therefore understanding how the situation in 2004 differs from today, will find Yatsenyuk's claims about saving the hryvnia to be the delirious boasting of a drunken teenager! But let's leave that nonsense on his conscience...
In February 2005, after Yushchenko came to power, the National Bank was headed by the latter's confidant, another "savior" who had brought down the hryvnia in 2008-2009, Vladimir Stelmakh, who purged Yatsenyuk from the country's main bank. After spending several months as deputy head of the Odesa Regional State Administration, in September 2005, Yatsenyuk received the portfolio of Minister of Economy in Yekhanurov's government. A year later, our hero was already serving as first deputy head of the presidential administration (secretariat), headed by Baloha. Here, Yatsenyuk oversaw the Security Service, although his knowledge of intelligence matters remains a complete mystery to this day.
Then came a very interesting turn of events. In March 2007, Yatsenyuk received the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs in Yanukovych's second government.
Having won the 2007 snap parliamentary elections as the third candidate on the Yushchenko-led Our Ukraine – People's Self-Defense list, Yatsenyuk was elected Speaker of Parliament in December 2007. In this position, he became involved in a scandal surrounding the installation of a so-called third touch button, dubbed "Yatsenyuk's finger," in the electronic voting system. Its purpose was to prevent people from using someone else's voting cards to "vote for the wrong guy," a practice that continues in the Rada to this day. It turned out that considerable money had been spent, but the system could allegedly be easily tricked, for example, by placing a condom wrapper on "Yatsenyuk's finger," which inspired numerous satirical exercises on the topic. However, rumors circulated that not only "item number one" could be used, but also lighters, cell phones, and even antique metal chamber pots. What's important here is that the taxpayers' money spent on "Yatsenyuk's finger" was not just wasted, but rather wasted into someone's pocket, but Yatsenyuk seems to have nothing to do with it!
Then there were games of some "Front of Change" with inadequate advertising posters and equally inadequate images of Yatsenyuk himself with the simple caption "Arseniy." Rumors circulated that this nonsense was the work of Firtash, who was then funding Yatsenyuk to siphon votes from Tymoshenko. After Yanukovych came to power, Yatsenyuk, who had previously been increasingly associated with the government, became a fiery opposition figure, in which capacity he took control of Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna party while its owner remained behind bars, following a contractual verdict from "the most honest court in the world."
Then, let's remember, came the tragic revolutionary Maidan and the war in Donbas, the bloodshed of which saw Yatsenyuk return to his accustomed seat of power, even as prime minister. He then consolidated his position in the 2014 parliamentary elections, during which, together with Turchynov, he took a lion's share of Tymoshenko's aforementioned Batkivshchyna party and renamed it the People's Front. Exactly which "people" this "front" represents and who financed its election campaign can only be guessed at.
We won't go into detail about Yatsenyuk's turbulent tenure as prime minister, as it's unfolding right before the eyes of the public, and ordinary citizens are feeling the consequences firsthand. We'll just briefly recap the monstrous devaluation of the hryvnia, soaring inflation, inflated prices and tariffs, serving the interests of oligarchs, and high-profile corruption scandals within the government.
True, sometimes Yatsenyuk and his government begin a showy fight against the oligarchs, taking, to put it mildly, controversial measures, for example, a sharp increase in rent on the extraction of minerals, for example, gas.
In fact, the topic of "Yatsenyuk and Gas" is worthy of a separate poem in verse or prose! Under seemingly correct slogans about confiscating excess profits, gas production is being cut. And all this is accompanied by Yatsenyuk's vociferous demagoguery about energy independence from Russia as an aggressor state. How many times have we heard the prime minister publicly, directly in front of television cameras, make pathetic appeals to Moscow, Gazprom, and Putin personally. In these angry speeches, Yatsenyuk rightly denounced the Kremlin for its attempts to put a gas noose around the neck of Ukrainian independence. But in reality, gas production in Ukraine is stagnating and even gradually declining, and wells from the state-owned Ukrgazdobycha are slowly but surely being transferred to private control, as the current head of Naftogaz has repeatedly stated. Kolobov, which is directly subordinate to Yatsenyuk. Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk's ostentatious campaign is in fact further increasing Ukraine's dependence on external supplies, primarily from Russia's Gazprom. After all, even reverse-flow gas from Europe is largely of Russian origin.
Moreover, it was Yatsenyuk, as prime minister, who, along with another current patriot and head of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), and previously speaker and acting president, Turchynov, surrendered Crimea in February-March 2014, literally handing it to Putin on a silver platter.
Against this backdrop, Yatsenyuk's not-so-modest estate in Novopetrivtsi, Vyshgorod district, Kyiv region, next to Yanukovych's infamous Mezhhirya, seems like a mere "trifle," to put it mildly.
And much more…
It would seem that Yatsenyuk is someone to lustrate...
Yatsenyuk's Lustration, or Also sprach Yatsenyuk
But then came Yatsenyuk's loud and boastful statement about how he had quickly but honestly passed the lustration process with a positive result: "The State Fiscal Service sent me a request demanding an explanation for the arithmetic discrepancy between the data in my declaration and the data available at the State Fiscal Service. I had 20 days to find the documents. For 14 years, I had to submit data on all deposits, all interest, all property, royalties, and all expenses. Within 20 days, I had to find documents that were not easy to find." Judging by such a cheerful text, Yatsenyuk's discovery of certain mysterious "papers" should be equated to the labors of Hercules, and simultaneously with all twelve feats of the hero of ancient Greek mythology. And since a newly-minted Homer couldn't be found in time to extol Yatsenyuk's "exploits," our hero was left with the "difficult" task of promoting them himself in front of television cameras right at a government meeting.
It got to the point where Yatsenyuk thanked the tax authorities for their work and, in a third-party statement, noted: "According to the State Fiscal Service's conclusion, the Prime Minister complies with Ukraine's law on the cleansing of power; he has passed the test."
Since the lustration issue with him personally has supposedly been resolved, Yatsenyuk emphasized that a similar check should be conducted on all officials. "If the same check is conducted on all officials, it will be evidence that the law is working... Unfortunately, we lack a specific database. But the prime minister or ministers are political figures. And if they can't find this or that document, they will be asked questions they won't have answers to. Furthermore, I want to draw your attention to the fact that it doesn't happen that someone manages to pass the checks simply because they don't have the data. As part of the check, every property, every penny of income, must be scrutinized very carefully and thoroughly... And everyone—judges, prosecutors, and officials—must be checked. And we shouldn't allow anyone to claim that the documents were lost. Let them look. And if they don't find them, we will ask the Ministry of Internal Affairs, along with the Security Service of Ukraine and the Prosecutor's Office, to help the official find the documents."
Harsh, though!..
In general, Yatsenyuk's actions increasingly resemble Gogol's Khlestakov. A parallel between Khlestakovism and "Yatsenyukovshchina" is immediately apparent. Let us reiterate that Yatsenyuk underwent lustration in a non-transparent, non-public manner, without the presence of independent observers or representatives of the public. In fact, it is largely unknown whether he underwent it at all. And if, as Yatsenyuk has stated, other figures in power are subject to lustration in the same manner, then it is not necessary to initiate it, so as not to waste time and money, and, most importantly, to avoid discrediting the very idea of purifying power.
As far as can be understood, the lustration procedure took place in two departments: the Ministry of Justice and the State Fiscal Service (SFS).
The Ministry of Justice is headed by Petrenko, appointed to the government through a quota from the People's Front, led by Yatsenyuk. Like the Ministry of Justice, the State Fiscal Service reports directly to the government and the prime minister, and the heads of these agencies report directly to Yatsenyuk. The idea of subordinates vetting their immediate superior is absurd.
The fiscal service's lustration of official tax returns is also utterly absurd, as the returns are usually in perfect order. Judging by the returns, even Yanukovych's best friend, Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, aka Yura Yenakievsky, is a conscientious taxpayer, just like Yanukovych himself, who is rumored to have stolen billions of dollars from Ukraine.
What's particularly cynical is the fact that there's a war going on, and hundreds and thousands of people are dying precisely because people like Yatsenyuk and his ilk have been plundering the country for nearly a quarter of a century. And against this backdrop, we're being shown a salacious spectacle about Yatsenyuk undergoing lustration "with a single touch."
Alexander KARPETS, WORLD
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