Latest accusations of political persecution leveled against Zelensky

A Kyiv district court ruled on June 15 to place under
24-hour house arrest Serhiy Sternenko, a Ukrainian nationalist activist from
Odesa who was named a suspect last week in a May 2018 murder. Sternenko has
argued that he killed his attacker in the incident, åðó 25-year-old Ivan
Kuznetsov, in self-defense, while prosecutors insist Sternenko deliberately
murdered him. Western-backed NGOs have issued statements in Sternenko’s
defense, including the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union; as well as
Western-backed mass media, such as the pravda.com.ua news site that alleged
Sternenko is being persecuted in a show trial; and pro-Western Ukrainian
political parties (European Solidarity, Fatherland and Voice), who alleged the
same.

Volodymyr Omelian, the former infrastructure minister,
alleged on June 12 that he’s the target of a persecution campaign against
political rivals being conducted by the Zelensky administration. He made the
claims after investigators with the State Bureau of Investigations (DBR)
performed an early morning search of his suburban Kyiv house that morning. The
formal pretext for the search was to investigate a murder that may have
involved the house’s alleged owner, Hennadiy Bobov. Omelian said Bobov sold the
property in 2016 and he’s currently renting it from an unnamed landlord. “For
such a basis, they can come to anyone tomorrow. The search was conducted
properly, though with automatic guns as tradition,” he said in a Facebook post
that day. He referred to Zelensky as being “totally Soviet, fighting even with
the families of your political opponents.”

Another prominent citizen targeted with a DBR search
on June 12 was Andriy Vavrysh, a Kyiv real estate developer with close ties to
Andriy Bohdan, the first head of Zelensky’s President’s Office. Since his
February dismissal, Bogdan has been critical of the Zelensky administration,
alleging as recently as June 11 (the eve of the Vavrysh search) that the president
has surrounded himself with “unprofessional and egomaniacal people who are
manipulating you.” DBR investigators searched the offices of Vavrysh’s firm,
SAGA Development, in what they alleged to be pre-trial investigations on the
possible abuse of authority by state officials involving the firm’s real estate
projects throughout the city. “We asked them whether this can be interpreted as
fulfilling the president’s program on halting economic pressure on business,”
Vavrysh wrote on his Facebook page.

Zenon Zawada: Zelensky’s
jokes aren’t funny anymore as these incidents establish a pattern by his
administration of using the courts to intimidate political enemies. We believe
that with the selection of Iryna Venediktova as prosecutor general, President
Zelensky deliberately ceded control of the state prosecution to pro-Russian
forces in a backroom political deal. Among those directing from the shadows the
actions of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Bureau of
Investigations (DBR) is likely to be Andriy Portnov, who is suspected of
guiding these offices’ activities from the very start of the Zelensky
administration.

Portnov was former President Yanukovych’s first deputy
head of the Presidential Administration during the peak of the EuroMaidan
revolt in January-February 2014. He has been defending the interests of
Yanukovych and his entourage ever since their flight during those events. And
his actions and words since his return to Ukraine in May 2019 have made clear
that Yanukovych and his entourage are interested in revenge against their
political enemies, which Zelensky has given the green light for.

We are confident that in exchange for controlling
these law enforcement bodies, Portnov et al. assured Zelensky (and probably his
righthand man Andriy Yermak) that their persecution campaign won’t egregiously
violate any laws or threaten Ukraine’s relations with the West. That is the
case so far, despite provoking statements from Western authorities, as recently
as June 12 from the European Parliament, warning against persecution of former
President Poroshenko. What they gain from these political stunts is (1) petty,
emotionally driven revenge against political enemies and (2) the intimidation
of pro-Western forces.

What the Zelensky administration gains is television
fodder for Zelensky’s core electorate in the Russian-oriented regions of
southeastern Ukraine. Overall, we don’t believe any of these mentioned,
targeted with political persecution, will be convicted or sit in jail. These
events reflect the Zelensky administration’s overall policy of seeking one-off
political solutions to problems, and trying to appease both pro-Russian and
pro-Western forces in playing them off each other.