Another week in Ukraine – another political scandal. Earlier this month it involved hours of leaked video recordings showing the brother of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak discussing appointments to influential government and business posts with candidates willing to pay.
And now we have the strange case of the State Bureau of Investigations suddenly targeting former investigative journalist, EuroMaidan activist, and parliamentarian, Tetiana Chornovol.
The scandalous 40-year-old Ukrainian Lara Croft wannabee is being investigated on, among other things, charges of murder connected with her role in the storming of the former Party of Regions headquarters in Kyiv on Jan. 18, 2014, during which a guard in the building choked to death after militants set it on fire.
Already her political patrons ranging from former President Petro Poroshenko to the current Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, are expressing outrage and denouncing the move against Chornovol as political repression aimed at the heroes of the Maidan.
And Adrian Karatnycky, writing the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert has described it as a “step towards tyranny” smacking of “counterrevolutionary revisionism and revenge against the Maidan.”
While not disputing the dubious nature of both the circumstances in which the investigation has been launched, and the nature of the accusations against Chornovol, it is nevertheless important to be aware that this political loose cannon is no saint and does not deserve to be transformed into a symbol of what the Maidan was about, or for that matter a national cause celebre.
It is important to see her for the complex personality that she has shown herself to be, complete with double standards, unbridled ambition, and reckless opportunism and self-promotion. Only then will it become more apparent why she has made so many enemies, including within the circles of those committed to the values of the Maidan, and why she has now drawn the ire of at least one of the law enforcement agencies.
Chornovol started her political life in the 1990s in the ranks of the ultra-nationalist UNA-UNSO organization, becoming its press secretary. She moved to radical civic activism and gradually investigative journalism. She sought to expose businessmen and politicians considered corrupt, including billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, and to combat illegal land development. In August 2012, Chornovol scaled the walls of President Viktor Yanukovych’s palatial Mezhyhiria residential compound to expose the affluent lifestyle of the kleptocrat.
That same year, now under the wing of politician and shady businessman Serhiy Pashinsky, she unsuccessfully ran for parliament for Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party.
During the Euromaidan Revolution that ended Yanukovych’s presidency in 2014, she distinguished herself as a militant. On Dec. 25, 2014, she was almost beaten to death by assailants who stopped her car at night. Overnight she became a martyr figure both domestically and abroad. The reasons for the savage attack on her – political or criminal, were never fully established. In June 2017, the suspected main organizer of the crime, Oleh Netrebko, was found hanged in his investigation cell shortly after being extradited from Belarus.
After her rather speedy recovery, Chornovol was back in action. The following month she was in the forefront of the assault on the Regions’Party office. The attackers managed to firebomb the building before being pushed back by the police.
Chornovol’s defenders, including Poroshenko, say that this was justifiable in view of the excessive use of force and shooting at the protesters elsewhere that day in Kyiv by the riot police and the revolutionary atmosphere prevailing at the time. We know what the unchecked use of Molotov cocktails by both sides resulted in a few months later during protests in Odesa: on May 2, 2014, 42 pro-Russian militants perished when the trade unions building they had barricaded themselves in from EuroMaidan supporters was set on fire.
In August 2014 Chornovol’s husband, a volunteer in the Azov Battalion, was killed in the fighting against Russian-backed forces in the Donbas, which added to her aura of heroism. In October 2014 she was elected to parliament as the second on the list for the newly created National Front party led by Arseny Yatseniuk along with her close colleagues from the EuroMaidan period, Pashinsky and Andriy Parubiy. Another founder of this party, Avakov, had already been appointed as interior minister and he made Chornovol one of his advisers.
Questions remain about the activities of Pashinsky, Parubiy and Avakov during the tragic days of February 18-20, 2014, when around 100 people were killed, mostly anti-government activists. What triggered the bloodbath has never been properly investigated.
During the five years of Poroshenko’s rule, the investigations into the Maidan killings were effectively blocked and this thorny issue has been inherited by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. Having become identified with the EuroMaidan, Chornovol as a member of parliament for some reason did not press for the truth be known.
Indeed, her record as a deputy between 2014 and 2019 did not display the kind of behavior which would have been expected of a EuroMaidan heroine and war widow. She appears to have been very selective in opposing corruption, pressing for the seizure of Yanukovych’s assets and taking on some of his former partners, but turning a blind eye to corruption within the new post-EuroMaidan Revolution administration.
Chornovol remained closely connected to Pashinsky even as he and others appeared to be drawn into schemes believed to be corrupt by civic activists. From 2014 to October 2016 he was the head of the supervisory board of state-owned Ukroboronprom, the giant military weapons company, which was eventually exposed as having been part of a corruption system profiting from expenditures on Ukraine’s war effort.
Chornovol herself was a member of the Verkhovna Rada’s National Security and Defense Committee, which Pashinsky headed, and worked with the financing of defense plants for the repair and modernization of armored vehicles, tanks and artillery.
In 2016 she strongly supported the controversial appointment of Poroshenko’s legally unqualified loyal associate Yuriy Lutsenko as general prosecutor and seemed unperturbed by his docile performance. Oddly, for a militant patriot, in 2017 she also strongly opposed the blockade by activists of trade across the front line in the Donbas.
Not surprisingly, Chonovol fell out with, or was ostracized by, many of her former colleagues among journalists and civil activists. Already on March 19, 2017, a leading journalist from the EuroMaidan period, Roman Skrypin, accused her on his program of mendacity, glossing over corruption and unscrupulously exploiting both the attack on her and her husband’s death.
What was unexpected though was the crudity with which Chornovol began to besmirch these people and in particularly anti-corruption activists, whom she labeled “foreign grant-consumers,” pointing the finger at the Poroshenko administration.
In the 2019 parliamentary election, Chornovol appeared in 27th place on Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party. It won only 23 seats so she failed to get in. In October Pashynsky was arrested for a shooting incident in 2016 in which he wounded a man in the leg. Chornovol rallied to his defense in her characteristic manner. She blamed his detention on former associates of Yanukovych, such as Andriy Portnov, who she claimed were merely seeking revenge.
On Oct. 9, she forced her way into a press conference being given by the State Bureau of Investigation Director Roman Truba and interrupted the proceedings. Nine days later, she got into a scuffle in a courtroom with a journalist.
Chornovol did not stop there. On Dec. 6 she posted a video of herself holding an automatic rifle, with a nationalist march in the background, calling on Ukrainians to come out against the alleged “capitulation” of the Zelensky regime.
After this implicit incitement to revolt, on Jan. 28 she broke her way into a briefing being given by the new deputy director of the State Bureau of Investigation, Oleksandr Babikov, who until recently had been a lawyer representing Yanukovych. Under the watch of the surveillance cameras, the intrepid firebrand scaled the wall outside the guarded building, got across the barbed wire at the top of it, and made her way into the meeting room. She had to be forcibly ejected.
In view of her latest political caprices, which to be fair would hardly be tolerated so leniently in most democratic states, the revenge factor on the part of the SBI becomes evident. Of course, focusing on Chornovol’s actions during the EuroMaidan seems totally inept in the circumstances, given that her flagrant disregard for law and order, civility and apparent readiness to instigate civil disobedience of a violent type provides more understandable grounds for putting her in her place by legal means.
What has been so distasteful is the rush with which Poroshenko, Avakov and even foreign observers have overlooked all this and rushed to make Chornovol into a heroic victim of political reprisals. After the way that Poroshenko treated the problematic Nadia Savchenko (what was really behind the arrest of the war hero?), the arbitrary deportation of ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and the stripping him of Ukrainian citizenship, and the unresolved questions about Poroshenko’s own involvement in corruption schemes, he is hardly in a position to take the moral high ground.
But Avakov’s behavior is all the more bewildering.
The country’s chief of police rushing to defend a woman who, among other things, has filmed herself brandishing a weapon and calling for revolt, and letting it be known that he in fact has permitted her to possess such arms? Old bond and working relations aside, what example does this set for the country?
So, in short, as they would say in a Laurel and Hardy film, “another fine mess you’ve got me into.” Only trouble is that this is the reality here. Yes, the State Bureau of Investigation, and probably Yanukovych’s associates, are settling old scores. But there are more sophisticated ways of doing things. But, as I wrote in my last piece, here anything goes, for TIU – This is Ukraine.
