Latest vote-buying claims surface against the Poroshenko campaign

The re-election campaign of President Poroshenko is
engaging in vote-buying schemes through the use of closely linked civic
organizations, according to a March 25 video broadcast on the bihus.info news
site. One such organization, the Institute for Developing and Supporting
Democracy, was formed only in December and has since been collecting data for
vote-buying schemes under the pretense of conducting opinion polls, the report
said. The institute’s director, Kateryna Pop, has worked with the staff of
Serhiy Berezenko, who is the deputy head of Poroshenko’s re-election campaign.
“Three influential civic organizations – with hundreds or even thousands of
workers – have been active practically throughout all of Ukraine,” the report
said. “These organizations are tightly tied to the Poroshenko Bloc party and
MPs close to the president,” including Berezenko, who himself was caught by
authorities buying votes in a 2015 special election for a parliamentary seat,
the report said. The evidence included “social contracts” that voters signed
promising to vote for him, as well as UAH 200,000 in cash distributed in
envelopes.

Berezenko announced the day after the broadcast that
he is filing a defamation suit against candidate Anatoliy Grytsenko for
claiming on television in early February that the president ordered his
campaign staff to set aside UAH 2 bln for buying votes. Candidates Grytsenko
and Yulia Tymoshenko, as well as Internal Affairs Minister Arsen Avakov, have
alleged on television that the Poroshenko campaign’s vote-buying schemes are
being directed by Berezenko.

Zenon Zawada: What’s most
relevant about the vote-buying claims is whether the key organization that will
be involved in election observing, the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), will consider this evidence in determining
whether to endorse these elections as having met international standards.
Without criminal prosecutions however, we believe the ability to consider this
evidence is quite limited for all Western authorities evaluating Ukraine’s
elections. Not only are their resources limited, but they can’t give legitimacy
to alleged crimes that haven’t been proven in a court of law. Besides the OSCE,
evaluations will likely be offered by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

Unless there are egregious violations on Election Day
itself (as well as the second-round runoff scheduled for Apr. 21), we expect
all the leading Western authorities to endorse these elections, with
maintaining geopolitical stability as the key political incentive for doing so
(besides ensuring international standards). Nonetheless, Western authorities
are concerned about the potential for standards being violated and have already been warning the president.