Poroshenko moves to dampen scandal as opponents plan more protests

Ukrainian President Poroshenko signed a decree on
March 12 appointing Col. Serhiy Kryvonos as the new first deputy secretary of
the National Security and Defense Council. Kryvonos had served as the first
deputy commander of the special operations forces of the Armed Forces of
Ukraine. He had campaigned for president representing the Anti-Terrorist
Operation Fighters party before announcing on March 6 that he was withdrawing
his candidacy to endorse Poroshenko. Kryvonos has “absolute intolerance for
corruption,” the president said in the ceremony with Kryvonos, citing “enormous
societal demand for this appointment.” The president selected him to replace
Oleh Hladkovskiy, who was dismissed on March 4 after the eruption of the Russian military parts scandal.

The National Corps, which is the political wing of the
Azov paramilitary battalion, will continue its protests on March 16 against the
president on the maidan, demanding the criminal prosecution of all those
involved in the Russian military parts scandal, including Oleh and Ihor
Hladkovskiy. “We won’t stop until these people sit behind bars,” said National
Corps Head Andriy Biletskiy on March 11, without citing any names. The National
Corps, and the National Squads activists (alleged to be street thugs by
critics), are widely recognized to be controlled by Internal Affairs Minister
Arsen Avakov, who is widely recognized to be allied with Yulia Tymoshenko for
the presidential elections.

Zenon Zawada: The
president has been acting feverishly to dampen
Russian military parts scandal, while the Tymoshenko campaign is working to
keep it at the center of the elections discourse and news cycle. An essential
part of that effort is the protests being conducted by the National Corps and
National Squads, which were deliberately violent this weekend
in order to draw media attention and incite the public. (One National Corps
leader said he expects triple the number of protestors this weekend.) It’s no
coincidence that the March 16 protest is planned for Kyiv’s famous maidan, and
we expect the National Corps (working with the Tymoshenko campaign) to continue
these Saturday protests though election day itself, gradually evolving their
central theme from military corruption to elections fraud.

Given that the Tymoshenko campaign is incapable of
mobilize mass protests of average citizens (who don’t have enough motivation to
join), it will be relying on radicals like the National Corps and National
Squads to serve as the backbone. And as the second-round runoff draws closer
(and if the president claims to have won the runoff), then the goal will be to
expand the mass protest to include as many anti-president forces as possible.
With enough momentum and support (depending on how the president behaves in the
coming weeks), these weekly maidan protests could continue until the October
parliamentary elections.

If these types of violent protests had been planned
under normal conditions, the president would have responded harshly. But since
we’re approaching the final leg of the election campaign, the president’s advisers
understand that a crackdown on the violent protestors could backfire against a
president who is being depicted as a harsh authoritarian by his political
rivals. Tymoshenko has been making direct comparisons between Poroshenko and
former president Yanukovych. In essence, the Tymoshenko campaign is trying to
bait him into overreacting to the protests. So the president’s security has to
tolerate the violence being inflicted so as not to give his enemies the
campaign fodder (and mass media images) that would fulfill their accusations
against him.