Three years ago, Euromaidan Revolution protesters made three demands: remove the corrupt Viktor Yanukovych’s regime from power; leave the orbit of authoritarian Russia to join Europe and, finally, confront and defeat Ukraine’s legacy of endemic graft.
Three years later, while the faces at the top have changed, Ukraine’s political class remains as venal as ever and make every effort to prevent the implementation of reforms. Lustration is sabotaged and challenged in courts. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the most independent law enforcement agency ever, is in continuous jeopardy. The National Agency of Corruption Prevention is being turned into a body for political reprisals. The draft laws on anti-corruption courts stuck in the parliament. Not a single e-declaration millionaire has been punished so far.
The results of this obstructionism are clear: European integration efforts have stalled, Ukraine remains near the bottom of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions rankings – tied with Russia as the most corrupt country in Europe — and Ukrainian oligarchs and corrupt officials continue to plunder the country with impunity.
And on top of that, the parliament adopts and President Petro Poroshenko signs an unconstitutional, discriminatory law targeted specifically against anti-corruption non-governmental organizations and the news media that have been pushing so hard for reforms for the past three years along with a few empowered by Euromaidan agents of civil society. The law has received a fast and alarming reaction from the key international partners of Ukraine, yet Poroshenko signed the law, despite his legitimate powers to fix the situation. This revealed the true face of the current political elites, for the very first time since Euromaidan striking at the rights of the civil society while neglecting the position of international partners.
How did Ukraine end up here?
The reason is that the current leadership of the state remains an integral part of the oligarchic system, which reformers have been fighting against for years. That is why the political class – from Poroshenko on down – continue to block, sabotage and delay reformers’ efforts to change the system. Instead, their aim is to imitate reform while keeping the status quo. As demonstrated by the constant sabotage of reforms by Kyiv’s leaders, Ukraine’s political class is ready to sacrifice the future of the country for their own interests and the preservation of the existing corrupt oligarchic system of governance.
Within the last three years, for the first time in Ukraine’s history, genuine anti-corruption legislation and anti-corruption institutions such as the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor and the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption were created specifically to overcome the resistance and remove deep-rooted corruption from governing the state. Lustration has resulted in the removal of many corrupt Yanukovych-era officials, yet more importantly – the implementation of e-declaration system has revealed that current elites are no different. Instead of fighting corruption they have headed it. And that explains the sabotage and constant flow of obstructions the e-declaration system meets, from breakdowns when launching to political influences on the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption that fails to verify them. Thus the importance of e-declaration is not only in being an instrument which for the first time in the history of Ukraine gives new institutions and society a legitimate weapon to punish and remove corrupt officials from the power. It is also an instrument that if protected would foster the change of the political elites.
It has never been easy. In fact, we spend 80 percent of our time protecting these changes. Instead of going further and fostering new reforms the major part of our time we spend forcing to work something that should have worked by default provided there is a will for this change: either protecting lustration from saboteurs, like Poroshenko himself, who do not dismiss officials’ in violation of the law or monitoring lustration proceedings in courts where those same Maidan judges are trying to cancel lustration of their former and current masters; either forcing the National Association for Prevention of Corruption – whose management is paralyzed by external political influence – to verify e-declarations or highlighting attempts to water down anti-corruption legislation in the parliament; either protecting the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine or achieving dismissals of those who try to avoid lustration; either protecting anticorruption legislation from the Constitutional Court, where the same judges who helped Yanukovych to usurp power, want to abolish the lustration law and eliminate e-declarations at the request of the very politicians subject to these laws or training activists across the country to control the government and encouraging to purify the local governments.
We protect the operation of anti-corruption institutions, fight for reloading the judiciary, purification of the government, transparent spending of public money and property of those performing the functions of the state — all those reforms that threaten the oligarchic system, simultaneously defending the integrity of the state from the Russian invasion. While oligarchs headed by the main oligarch, Poroshenko, keep enriching themselves — continuing to trade with occupied territories and the aggressor as if there was no problem at all.
The oligarchy, which has close ties with Russia and Vladimir Putin’s regime and international organized criminal groups, continues to have the Ukrainian economy by the throat, considering Ukraine only a territory for making money. With no people, no nation, no state interest existing. Building upon the reforms and strategic economic breakthrough without solving the issue of destructive oligarchic influence on the political and economic life in the country is absolute utopia and self-deception. They make the real change impossible.
Despite the tremendous amount of work fulfilled during the three past years, this core problem was not eliminated, which seriously limits the effect of change and maintains the possibility of full backsliding.
Harboring illusions that current political elites are capable of delivering reforms is dangerous. They cause the degradation of the state and pulling Ukraine closer to the failed state. What we fought for was supposed to open an abscess that would then be cured. But those who possess the powers to cure it have no will to doing so. Because they are the cause of that abscess.
It is tragic that a president and parliament elected on avowedly reformist agendas fight us every step of the way. Irreversible changes in Ukraine will only be possible when the government is purified of those with a vested interest in the old system. We believed in this three years ago and we continue to believe in this now.
However it is obvious now that the change is possible only if the empowered majority are those who will act in the interest of the state rather than their own. And this no longer seems to be a whim but a matter of survival which will be resolved in either evolutionary or revolutionary way.
The evolutionary scenario will require the change of the rules by which the face of the parliament and thus government is formed — the electoral system followed with a complete reboot of political elites. It is precisely the new elites that should ensure the new rules of economic relations, reduce the impact of monopolies and oligarchs on the economy, empower the middle class and make the new anti-corruption legislation deliver. This coming battle for new elites will be severe, but at the end of the day, it will determine whether Ukraine moves forward or loses everything achieved at a very high price.
Oleksandra Drik is the head of the board of Civic Lustration Committee, a nongovernmental organization in Kyiv.
