Poroshenko dismisses Hladkovskiy from key posts

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree
on March 4 dismissing the scandal-plagued Oleh Hladkovskiy as the first deputy
secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. He also dismissed
Hladkovskiy from his position as head of the interdepartmental commission for
military hardware cooperation and export monitoring, stating that he is seeking
to provide for a fair investigation. “So that everyone can be sure that in
similar situations, if guilt is proven, neither their position nor their ties
to the president can rescue them,” he told a regional council meeting, as
reported by thepravda.com.ua news site. He said he will ask the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau to investigate the corruption claims against
Hladkovskiy, which it announced it has begun to do.

In the latest broadcast – shown on March 5 – of the
Nashi Hroshi series exposing the alleged sales of Russian parts to Ukraine’s
armed forces, Oleh Hladkovskiy is alleged to have gained kickbacks from the
sale of Russian airplane parts to the Ukrainian monopoly defense procurement
firm, Ukroboronprom, at prices inflated by at least five times. Ukroboronprom paid
UAH 14.38 mln for the parts, which were purchased in Moscow at UAH 2.3 mln,
said the report broadcast on the bihus.info news channel. As with the previous allegations, it cited
text messages exchanged between those involved.

The Nashi Hroshi investigations on the Hladkovskiys’
alleged corruption are based on fraudulent evidence, said Ihor Hladkovskiy, the
son of the defense official who himself has also been implicated in the alleged
schemes. He alleged the journalists used a computer program to create the text
messages of the alleged culprits, thereby “making real any non-existing
conversation. Interesting times. Fake info is added to reality and can’t be
distinguished from the truth,” Ihor Hladkovskiy claimed on March 5 in a video
published on the Internet. Besides having filed a criminal complaint against
the journalists on March 4, he vowed to expose the people in government who
“pasted together this fake” and leaked it to the media.

Zenon Zawada: Poroshenko
dismissed Hladkovskiy for several reasons, the most obvious being the damage
his ongoing presence in government was doing to the president’s re-election
campaign. That’s especially the case when these investigative broadcasts continue
to be released that expose the alleged corruption of the president’s entourage
ahead of the March 31 vote. It’s also possible that the president was removing
Hladkovskiy from government in order to cut ties to any further evidence of
corruption that could be exposed (including links to Russian defense
contractors), also freeing Hladkovskiy to take shelter abroad, if necessary at
any point. If Hladkovskiy was truly innocent, we believe the president would
have more vigorously defended him. Instead this dismissal reflects a certain
panic in the Poroshenko re-election campaign.

This Russian military parts scandal will hurt
Poroshenko’s poll ratings to the same extent as the establishment of the first
canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine benefitted them. In our unscientific
estimate, that’s no more than 3%, but likely less. This would normally be
significant in a neck-and-neck race against two contenders. But given the
president’s wide access to state resources and alleged evidence of his abusing them
already, this scandal won’t
significantly affect his ability to qualify for the second-round runoff, in
which he is most likely to face the upstart Volodymyr Zelenskiy.