While Ukraine has officially backed Belarus’ peaceful protesters, Yevhen Shevchenko, a lawmaker with the Ukrainian president’s Servant of the People party, traveled to Minsk on Dec. 22 to support the country’s dictator.
Shevchenko is just the most recent addition to a growing group of lawmakers from President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party who defy the president and the party leadership. However, the party appears to prefer quantity over quality – it has been holding on to dubious lawmakers in an attempt to maintain a majority in parliament.
David Arakhamia, leader of the Servant of the People faction in parliament, told the press that he is willing to keep Shevchenko in the faction despite breaking with the party line.
Lawmaker Yevhen Shevchenko during a parliament session in Kyiv on Oct. 20, 2020. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Arakhamia says Shevchenko has asked him on multiple occasions to be excluded from the faction, yet he has denied these requests.
“No, (Shevchenko) will ‘suffer’ until the very end,” Arakhamia joked.
Although the Servant of the People party has 247 seats in parliament when 225 votes are needed to pass legislation, since March it hasn’t been able to pass most laws and appointments without drawing support from the opposition.
Praising the dictator
On Dec. 22, Ukrainian lawmaker Shevchenko traveled to Minsk to meet with Belarusian lawmaker Andrey Savinykh, head of the Belarusian parliament’s international relations committee.
Shevchenko claimed that people in Belarus are protesting “because they are bored.”
In August, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner of the country’s presidential elections. He was re-elected to his sixth consecutive term.
The Belarusian opposition, most developed countries and hundreds of thousands of Belarusians accused Lukashenko of falsifying the results. Soon, over 200,000 people took to the streets of Minsk to protest against the regime. They have been protesting regularly ever since.
Riot police attacked the protesters and many were detained and tortured in incarceration. In response, Ukraine, the European Union and the U.S. have imposed sanctions on Belarusian officials.
This is not the first time that Shevchenko has found himself in a scandal.
In 2019, Shevchenko appeared on a Russian state-owned propaganda networks and accused “Ukrainian nationalists” of stalling the Donbas peace talks. Russia has been occupying Ukraine’s Crimea and eastern parts of the Donbas region since 2014. Most Ukrainian politicians boycott invitations to appear on Russian TV.
Quantity over quality
Since its creation in the run-up to the 2019 parliamentary election, the Servant of the People party has held onto members — even highly questionable ones — at the expense of popular support.
The party won 54% of the seats in parliament during the election. But, according to December polls by the Rating Group, it now only enjoys the support of 21% of voters.
Besides Shevchenko, the party has also kept notorious lawmakers Oleksandr Dubinsky and Maksym Buzhansky in its ranks.
Dubinsky and Buzhansky have supported oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky’s desire to regain control over PrivatBank and often push a pro-Russian agenda, which he co-owned until it was found insolvement and nationalized in 2016. Dubinsky and Buzhansky voted against laws that could have hurt Kolomoisky’s interests, even when the party and the president backed them.
The party was also silent after lawmaker Yuriy Kamelchuk said that coronavirus is a hoax and that he doesn’t trust coronavirus vaccines during an appearance on the Nash channel.
However, there are exceptions to what the party can tolerate.
Several lawmakers were expelled from the party faction: Oleksandr Yurchenko, after he was charged with bribery; Maksym Polyakov, for voting against the party line; and Geo Leros, for publicly accusing Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, of corruption.
Lawmaker Anna Skorokhod was expelled from the party for alleged bribery. She denied all accusations.
