Presidential round table had a fake student leader

The
real student leaders of EuroMaidan said they were not invited to take
part in the discussion designed to start a dialog on ways out of the
political crisis.

The round table, organized by former
President Leonid Kravchuk, was attended by three leaders of the
opposition, representatives of the government, parliament, clergy and
civil society.

There was no live broadcast on any national channel, and the live stream of two TV channels got disrupted when opposition leaders spoke.

Dmytro Levin, the 18-year-old student
of Kyiv’s International Relations Institute, gave an unmemorable
speech at the round table. His two main messages were that Ukraine
needs to strive for the European Union and build a new society in
Ukraine.

This brief and vague messages is
uncharacteristic for the real leaders of the student strikes, who
were one of the first Maidan communities to articulate their demands
and even come up with their own specific set, such as stopping
repressions against students and dismissal of Education Minister
Dmytro Tabachnyk.

“He’s not ours, we were not invited,”
said Anton Savidi, one of the student Maidan coordinators, when asked
about Levin’s performance.

Levin himself told Hromadske TV after
the round table that he represents a student organization registered
on Nov. 24, three days after EuroMaidan kicked off of the day the
government took a decision to not sign a political and trade deal
with the European Union.

He said his organization has less than
90 official members, and they only were on EuroMaidan for six days.
Levin said they stopped coming after Nov. 30, after the beating of
peaceful demonstrators in the early hours of the morning.
“Politicians started using us,” he explained.

But it appears that the young man who
pretended to be a student leader is a representative of the Young
Regions, the youth wing of the Party of Regions. His personal
account in a social networks – where he called himself Dima Tequila – featured  photographs of him posing with
other young men in front of banners of his party and with the party
logo superimposed. The account was deleted after the round table incident.

Levin said that he simply wrote a
letter to the organizers of the round table when the idea started to
get circulated, and were invited when the date and time was set.

The leader of Young Regions could not be reached for comment.

Dmytro Levin is the third on the right.