Allegedly corrupt officials active in Ukraine politics despite corruption fight

Former members of the Party of Regions will be competing in the Oct. 25 local elections under the Solidarity-Petro Poroshenko Bloc party, reported the pravda.com.ua news site. Viktor Paramonov, the lead doctor of the Cherkasy regional cancer clinic, will compete for the oblast (regional) council, while Volodymyr Kovalenko, the mayor of Nova Kakhovka in the Kherson region, will run for re-election, despite objections from Solidarity party members, the report said. Kovalenko was responsible for dispatching thugs to intimidate and beat EuroMaidan protesters, the report said.

In another case involving alleged corrupt officials, it was reported that the Odesa City Police Administration will be led by the son of the former vice president of Imeksbank, Yuriy Ivushkin, who stands accused of stealing UAH 7 bln (about UAH 875 mln at the time) that belonged to depositors and the state, according to the dumskaya.net news site. A career police officer, Dmytro Ivushkin was appointed on Sept. 18 for his active fight against corruption, the Interior Ministry reported on its website. In a separate incident on the next day, an Odesa police officer was arrested for demanding a bribe of UAH 20,000 for returning a confiscated automobile from a local resident.

Zenon Zawada: Certainly, no one should be judged or condemned for the actions of a parent. Yet in the post-Soviet sphere, family and business are tightly intertwined. The high stakes of the crime allegedly committed by his father should have disqualified Dmyto Ivushkin from any position in law enforcement, let alone the local police chief.

This series of loosely tied events demonstrates several points, the main one being that influential people aligned with the president, or politically useful to him, are immune from the fight against corruption, which is mostly aimed at disposable low and middle-ranking state officials.

The reports also lend credence to what critics of the president have referred to as the creeping “counterrevolution,” with Poroshenko essentially have formed alliances, if not absorbing, members of the defunct Party of Regions.

The president has essentially decided to consolidate the status quo that has existed in Ukrainian politics for the last 10-15 years, using a fight against corruption as a smokescreen, which will only serve to destabilize the situation in Ukraine even further.