There is one move that President Petro Poroshenko could take to satisfy his critics and reassure his backers in the West that he is committed to reform — fire Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko.
Lutsenko has never been independent; he is a political appointee. Parliament even had to amend the law to permit his appointment (Lutsenko has no law degree and no prosecutorial experience.)
Under Lutsenko, not one high-profile political corruption case has been brought, not one murderer of EuroMaidan Revolution participants has been put behind bars and not one corrupt crony of runaway ex-President Viktor Yanukovych has been made to pay for looting the country of billions of dollars. Moreover, Lutsenko ignores corruption in the Poroshenko administration, among oligarchs and among other powerful elites.
Instead, Lutsenko is a tool of the president’s political vendettas — against Poroshenko’s former ally and now sharp critic Mikheil Saakashvili, and, absurdly, against the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, or NABU — the agency charged with investigating top-level corruption in Ukraine.
Lutsenko and Poroshenko are not reformers committed to democracy and the rule of law. They are holdovers of the old political guard in Ukraine, determined to reverse the meager gains made since the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and keep in place the kleptocracy that Ukrainians have twice revolted against in a decade.
What we fear is that Lutrsenko, when gone, will be replaced by a yet another hack who obstructs justice until he or she is forced out by scandal. We’ve seen it happen with Lutsenko’s predecessor, Viktor Shokin, whose appointment in 2015 was initially welcomed. He turned out to spend his time — as all prosecutors general have done — in protecting the corrupt elite with an army of 15,000 mostly useless, incompetent or corrupt prosecutors.
A politically independent prosecutor general has no chance of appearing until truly independent corruption-fighting institutions, from investigative to prosecutorial and judicial, are strengthened and start doing their jobs: Throwing thieves in jail, confiscating their stolen assets and solving murders.
