Boyko, Medvedchuk meet with Medvedev, Miller in Moscow

Yuriy Boyko and Viktor Medvedchuk, the leaders of the
Opposition Platform For Life party, traveled to Moscow to meet with Russian
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller on March 22. The
meeting was necessary owing to the deep crisis in bilateral relations between
Ukraine and Russia, Medvedev said, as reported by the tass.ru news site. In his
turn, Boyko said, “We truly have an important reason to request a meeting with
you because Ukrainian and Russian relations are of extreme importance for our
economy. They are currently undergoing their most difficult period in their
history.”

Addressing a key election issue of boosted natural gas
prices for households (as had required by the IMF), Medvedchuk vowed to reduce
them by least 25% by arranging direct supplies from Russia (at a price of USD
240-260 per tcm in 2020.) He called for agreeing to Russia’s latest conditions
for gas transit through Ukraine, as well as creating a gas consortium involving
Ukraine, Russia and the EU. In his turn, Boyko said he will seek to remove
mutual restrictions and sanctions in order to renew normal trade.

Commenting on the gas negotiations in Moscow, a
Naftogaz of Ukraine spokesperson wrote on social media that Gazprom is required
to sell Ukraine gas at a 48% discount to the price of the 2009 contract, as implied
by the Stockholm arbitration ruling in 2018. The company also highlighted that
the EU gas price was USD 226/tcm on average in March, while the April futures
price is USD 217/tcm. “Therefore, offering a 25% discount is somehow not
serious,” Naftogaz wrote on Mar. 22. 

The same day, President Petro Poroshenko accused Boyko
and Medvedchuk of acting against Ukrainian national interests when traveling to
Moscow and seeking to renew Ukrainian dependence on Russian natural gas. He
also accused them of planning to create “unions” with the Kremlin after the
elections. “What have they – with tears in their eyes and outstretched hand –
crawled on their knees for and requested from Putin?,” the president said at a
regional development meeting in Chernivtsi, the latest in a national tour of
such meetings that is criticized for being  tacit campaigning at taxpayer
expense.

Zenon Zawada: A fierce
competition has emerged between Boyko-Medvedchuk and Oleksandr Vilkul (head of
the Opposition Bloc for Peace and Development party) for Ukraine’s
Russian-oriented electorate. After Yevgeny Murayev announced that he
will be merging  his Nashi party resources and electorate with Vilkul’s
party, Boyko and Medvedchuk felt the need to respond with
an act to impress the Russian-oriented electorate, which is what this visit
aimed to accomplish. They are sending the message to the Russian-oriented
electorate that they are the ones who are most capable of renewing ties with
Russia (not Vilkul-Murayev or Volodymyr Zelenskiy).

Poroshenko was sure to try to score political points
off the Moscow visit, which has been his strategy of dividing the electorate
along pro-Russian and anti-Russian lines. Poroshenko has a tacit political and business alliance with Boyko and
Medvedchuk, in which they have agreed to play
the role of the fake opposition. These politicians expected to play the pro-
and anti- Russian electorates against each other in order to gain the most
votes and retain positions of power (and access to corrupt shadow schemes in
government). This strategy has largely failed as the Ukrainian public has been
more actively supporting the real opposition, as represented by Yulia
Tymoshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Understanding that he won’t win the presidential
vote, Boyko nonetheless needs to show a strong result in order to outcompete
Vilkul in mustering political support and financial sponsors for the October
parliamentary elections. When the Russian-oriented forces were still united in
the autumn, we expected they would have strong results in that vote. But that
has been thrown into question now that they are cannibalizing their shared electorate.
As a direct result of this division, comedian Zelenskiy is laughing his way to
the bank, having stolen their southeastern electorate for the presidential
elections. Boyko and Vilkul will be aiming to take it back by October.