Investigative journalist Dmytro Gnap said on June 25 he was leaving journalism and becoming a politician.
Gnap, 40, who until now headed Slidstvo.info team of investigative journalists, attributed the decision to a lack of new faces in Ukrainian politics since the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution.
He said he would take part in the parliamentary election, set to take place in October 2019, and in primaries for a single liberal opposition candidate in the presidential election, scheduled for March 2019.
All major incumbent politicians have been in politics for many years, and many of them have a track record of numerous corruption scandals.
“Why four years after the EuroMaidan Revolution do we have to choose between faces that we’d gotten sick and tired of even before the revolution?” Gnap wrote on Facebook, announcing his decision. “Why is no one in jail for corruption? Why do enemy agents feel good, and some of them run cities and make business with the president? Why hasn’t a single fundamental reform been carried out? Why do those who were caught stealing red-handed teach us how to live on television and babble about patriotism?”
Gnap said that nothing would change as long as the incumbent kleptocratic elite is in power.
“As long as they are in power, and we are out of power, nothing will change,” he said. “They tell us ‘don’t mess with politics, it’s so dirty! We are corrupt traitors. We have smeared ourselves with this dirt like pigs, and we’ll stay here. And you, honest people, keep away from politics and leave it to us’.”
Gnap said that “nature doesn’t tolerate emptiness, and, if emptiness is not filled with a solid substance, it’s filled with shit.”
“It’s time to throw this shit out of power,” he added.
Gnap isn’t a complete political newcomer: In 2001-2007 he was a member of Nasha Ukraina (Our Ukraine), the party headed by Viktor Yushchenko, who won the presidency in 2004 in the Orange Revolution.
Gnap, who comes from the eastern Ukrainian city Donetsk, now the epicenter of Russia’s war against Ukraine, unsuccessfully ran for a seat in Donetsk Oblast Council on the party ballot in 2006.
Gnap and the team of Slidstvo.info were behind some of the most scandalous discoveries concerning the incumbent and former top officials, including the investigation of President Petro Poroshenko’s offshore dealings. Most recently, they looked into a secret negotiation between the representatives of the Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine and a runaway ex-minister Eduard Stavytsky.
