More than five years after Russia invaded and occupied Crimea and waged war against Ukraine in the Donbas, the pro-Russian Opposition Platform — For Life is set to become the second largest party in the Ukrainian parliament.
As the exit polls rolled in on July 21, the mood was cheerful in the elite business center in downtown Kyiv where the party’s leaders had gathered. The polls showed that Opposition Platform would take a projected 11.4 percent of the vote through party lists. That would give the party roughly 33 seats in parliament.
The other half of the parliament is elected through single-member districts, where there are no exit polls. Still, Opposition Platform is confident that it will pick up more seats in these districts.
Despite the EuroMaidan Revolution, which ousted corrupt former President Viktor Yanukovych and marginalized pro-Russian politics in Ukraine, pro-Kremlin politicians are again riding high.
Happy opposition
The stage was still empty 20 minutes after the national exit polls were revealed. Journalists ate the caviar, fried fish and other foods served at the event, while they waited for the Opposition Platform leaders to arrive and deliver a speech on the results.
The leaders arrived 30 minutes after the results were published — and they were quite pleased. Their fortunes had turned, and a political force with close ties to Russia was now among the two leading parties in Ukraine.
“Of course we are happy,” said Vadym Rabinovych, second on the Opposition Platform party list. “Why wouldn’t we be happy with the silver medals?” But Rabinovych acknowledged that the party couldn’t compete with Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, which gained 44 percent of the vote according to exit polls.
Asked whether Opposition Platform would aim to join the government, Rabinovych said that all parties must join to save the country. Still, the Opposition Bloc will most likely remain in the opposition due to hostility from the incumbent elite, he added. “However, we should consider dropping the ‘opposition’ name and simply being (called) For Life – we can’t join the government being called opposition,” Rabinovych joked.
Crimea is Ukraine, but Russia is our friend
The Opposition Platform is consistent in its pro-Russian approach.
The party leaders – Yuriy Boyko, former energy minister under Yanukovych, Rabinovych and businessman and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, whose daughter’s godfather is Russian President Vladimir Putin — frequently travel to Moscow, where they negotiate with the Kremlin without the backing of Kyiv.
Rabinovych presents their visits to Russia as efforts to free Ukrainian prisoners held hostage by Moscow. Meanwhile, Medvedchuk told journalists that his meetings with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev focused on prisoners and lowering gas prices.
Viktor Medvedchuk, one of the leaders of the Opposition Platform – For Life party, talks to journalists after exit polls were revealed handing his party second place in the July 21 snap parliamentary election. (Oleksiy Sorokin)
Asked about the 24 Ukrainian sailors Russia detained in the Kerch Strait in November, Medvedchuk said that they were not a part of his discussions. According to him, the Russian authorities proposed transferring the sailors to Ukraine provided that Kyiv would put them on trial. Ukraine refused.
The Opposition Platform’s leaders also take an odd approach to one of the biggest issues between Ukraine and Russia. The party’s position is that Crimea is Ukrainian, Medvedchuk told the Kyiv Post. However, he personally does not think that Russia is part of the conflict in Crimea or Donbas.
“We need to investigate how the former elite gave away Crimea,” he said.
But Rabinovych contradicted those statements.
“We don’t have a position on Crimea, because no one has a position on Crimea,” he told the Kyiv Post. “But I always said that Crimea is Ukraine.
“I think Russia is also part of the conflict,” he added.
Medvedchuk says he doesn’t raise the subject of Crimea during his negotiations with Russia because he knows the official Russian position. Rabinovych says he always brings it up. “I tell them they’ll have to eventually give it back,” he said.
Nonetheless, both agree that Ukraine must drag itself back to Russia.
Rabinovych says that the country’s European political vector doesn’t work. And Medvedchuk says that the association agreement signed between Ukraine and the European Union after the EuroMaidan Revolution is killing Ukraine’s economy.
“I don’t see them (Europeans) giving us a gas price cut,” said Medvedchuk. Previously, he said that Russia is ready to give Ukraine a 25 percent price cut.
According to Medvedchuk, the new Ukrainian parliament must pass amnesty for the Russia-led insurgents and must offer special status to the occupied regions in Ukraine’s east, granting them vast autonomy. It must also hold special elections in these territories.
Rabinovych believes Ukraine must begin direct talks with the Russian-led insurgents. The Ukrainian government has long refused to do that.
“We must fulfill the Minsk Agreements,” Medvedchuk added, not mentioning that Russia and the insurgents also have unfulfilled responsibilities under those peace agreements.
Signed in Minsk in February 2015, the accords were intended to deescalate the war in Donbas and create a roadmap to the region’s peaceful reintegration into Ukraine.
But the agreements didn’t create peace. As recently as July 19, two Ukrainian soldiers were killed by Russia-led insurgents, the latest casualties in Russia’s war that has killed 13,000 people.
Massive falsifications
While remaining positive, there was one thing that made Opposition Platform members angry. They alleged massive falsifications at polling places in Ukraine’s east, which they claimed were carried out by their former colleagues.
“If during the presidential elections falsifications against our candidate Yuriy Boyko were performed by (former President Petro) Poroshenko, now the Opposition Bloc together with former and current elites is trying to discredit us,” said Yuriy Pavlenko, an Opposition Platform member who was previously in the pro-Western Our Ukraine party that led the Orange Revolution back in 2004.
The similarly named Opposition Bloc is another, less popular pro-Russian party. According to the exit polls, it will receive 3.3 percent of the vote and not make it into parliament through the party list.
The two “opposition” parties were once part of a single political entity called the Opposition Bloc. However, internal conflicts led them to split up late last year. Opposition Platform blames the break on ideological difference, but critics present business conflicts as the main reason.
In the 2019 parliamentary election, both parties competed for the same electorate. However, Opposition Platform says that it wasn’t permitted to campaign in major Ukrainian cities — Odesa, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia — where the mayors are members of Opposition Bloc.
Oleksandr Puzanov, No.32 on the Opposition Platform party list, directly accused the mayors of these cities of violating the law and banning the party from campaigning.
Serhiy Lovochkin, the former head of the presidential administration under Yanukovych and No.5 on the Opposition Platform list, seemed to relish talking about the Opposition Bloc.
“They chose to go after us, and look where it got them,” Lovochkin said.
Now, the Opposition Platform will be the second largest and only Kremlin-friendly party in the newly elected parliament.
