Allies of Yanukovych trying for parliament

But some are running—not on the disgraced party label – but in other parties, including the bloc of President Petro Poroshenko, or in single-mandate districts.

Taken as a whole, and individually, the former ruling party symbolizes unpunished oppression, corruption and criminality to EuroMaidan activists, who are still seeking justice for the sniper murders of more than 100 people during the popular uprising.

That memory was still fresh on Sept. 13 in the town of Liubotyn in Kharkiv Oblast. Activists there staged a flash mob to protest of Volodymyr Katsuba’s candidacy in that constituency. The former Party of Regions member is running as an independent but with implicit backing from Poroshenko’s bloc, the activists fear. Katsuba could not be reached for comment.

His two sons featured in the award-winning Yanu­kovychLeaks investigation that implicated them in a corruption scheme related to the financial activities of young oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko, suspected of being a front man for Yanukovych’s assets.

Because voters will elect 225 lawmakers based on proportional party lists and an equal number in single-mandate districts, many politicians from Yanukovych’s camp likely will get re-elected, said Yegor Sobolev, who headed a civic committee to vet government of corrupt officials.

“So far only the voters can lustrate them” based on their past and reputations, he says.

Candidate registration ends on Sept. 30, but activists and local media are discovering plenty of people with murky pasts who are trying their luck. Some of them are suspected of having the tacit support of Poroshenko’s bloc.

Lawmaker Davyd Zhvania is running in an Odesa Oblast constituency, said Poroshenko’s Solidarnist Party leader Yuri Lutsenko, a former interior minister. Zhvania left the Party of Regions faction in November after riot police brutally dispersed a small encampment of most university students on Independence Square.

Lutsenko couldn’t be reached for comment to address the choice of candidates.

Lutsenko said Poroshenko’s bloc is also nominating Vitaly Nemilostivy, who in April 2013 exited Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna faction in parliament.

Arseniy Yatseniuk, then Batkivshchyna’s leader, accused Nemilostivy and others of accepting bribes from Yanukovych’s team for defecting. They denied the charge.

Zhvania and Nemilostivy were not available for comment.

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In a Mykolayiv Oblast constituency, businessman Borys Kozyr has thrown in his hat, according to local activists and media reports. He served as the deputy head of the port department at the infrastructure ministry in the times of Yanukovych. EuroMaidan activist Dmytro Kovalchuk said that letters to Poroshenko exposing Kozyr’s connections have failed to have any effect. Kozyr did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said most of the chameleon candidates who were part of Yanukovych’s regime are businessmen from the war-torn parts of the country. “The authorities are … looking for partners in the east,” he said.

He said that a part of the Party of Regions’ electroate will now support Poroshenko’s bloc, which seems “more moderate” than other post-Maidan forces.

Poroshenko also surprised many when, according to Lutsenko, his elder son Oleksiy Poroshenko was nominated to contest a constituency in Vinnytsia where Petro Poroshenko’s chocolate factory is located and where he was elected to parliament in 2012.

Many likened this move to how the sons of Yanukovych, ex-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and ex-General Prosecutor Viktor Pshonka became parliament members.

Running as an independent is Serhiy Kivalov. He was implicated in the rigged 2004 presidential election as the head of the central election commission during Yanukovych’s first bid for head of state that failed. Not only is he running for a parliamentary seat in an Odesa constituency, he still represents Ukraine in the Venice Commission, a European Union body that assesses legislation.

Vitaly Zhuravsky, the author of a scandalous law during the EuroMaidan Revolution that was supposed to criminalize libel, is advertising his candidacy on billboards in Zhytomyr Oblast. Oles Dovhyi, the former right-hand man of notoriously corrupt Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetskiy, is running in Kirovohrad Oblast election district.

Many former Party of Regions members have appeared on other party tickets, such as Strong Ukraine, headed by Sergiy Tigipko,a former Deputy Prime Minister under Yanukovych. His list features many controversial names, such as that of former President Leonid Kuchma’s aid Oleksandr Volkov and former Deputy Prime Minister and chief of Security Service Valeriy Khoroshkovskiy.

The Opposition Bloc, founded by Yanukovych’s former chief of staff Serhiy Lyovochkin, is expected to carry a fair share of controversial candidates. It’s not clear, however, if this bloc can make it over the 5 percent threshold.

Meanwhile, some former leaders of the Party of Regions, including Borys Kolesnikov and Mykhailo Dobkin, announced they would not participate in the upcoming elections at all. Fesenko of Penta consulting believes they have pragmatic motives not to. Their party’s political base is in the Donbas region. But only tiny parts of that region will vote because large swaths of land are occupied by separatists. So, candidates and their sponsors have decided it is a waste of money because they believe the new legislature will serve for only a year, Fesenko said.

Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].