Ukraine parliament approves new prosecutor general

Ukraine’s parliament voted on Feb. 10 to appoint Viktor Shokin as prosecutor general of Ukraine. His candidacy gained the support of 318 MPs, including the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front party led by the prime minister and the Putin-aligned Opposition Bloc. In his remarks to the legislature, he vowed to prosecute unresolved criminal cases, including those surrounding the EuroMaidan. “That applies to all high officials of that criminal regime,” he said. Shokin also vowed to prosecute those involved in the Donbas separatist movements and terrorist acts.

Shokin is most distinguished for filing criminal charges in 2003 against Oleksiy Pukach, a high-ranking police officer later convicted for his role in the murder of Ukrainian journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. Shokin also filed criminal charges in 2005 against Donetsk oligarch Borys Kolesnikov, Kharkiv politician Yevhen Kushnariov and Dnipropetrovsk billionaire Igor Kolomoisky, all of which were eventually dropped.

Shokin’s predecessor, Vitaliy Yarema, submitted this resignation letter on Feb. 9, which was approved by parliament the next day. He served as prosecutor general since his appointment in mid-June. “I’ve said that Vitaliy Yarema should be held politically responsible and resign in the event that European Union sanctions are removed from the Yanukovych entourage at the fault of the Prosecutor General,” wrote on his Facebook page MP Serhiy Leshchenko. “It’s almost 100 percent certain than sanctions will be removed from some of those people at the beginning of March, when the year since their introduction will expire. Yarema decided not to wait for the storming of the Prosecutor General’s Office and go at his own will.”

Zenon Zawada: It’s hard to say what was worse – appointing someone as deeply entrenched in Ukrainian corruption as Yarema or dismissing him nearly eight months into his term. We see a disturbing pattern of the president dismissing his highly criticized appointments without them facing any accountability for their poor performance and accusations of corruption. Unfortunately, dismissing Yarema enables him to evade responsibility for failing to prosecute those who murdered the EuroMaidan protesters a year ago. Moreover, all the failures in filing criminal charges against the Yanukovych entourage, which will lead to sanctions being dropped – and could lead to efforts to arrest and prosecute them being dropped in the West – will be dumped on the new convenient scapegoat, Vitaliy Yarema.

Replacing him is a veteran prosecutor deeply entrenched in Ukraine’s post-Soviet corruption. Shokin has served as deputy prosecutor general since December 2004, which means he knows and has seen everything in Ukrainian politics for the last decade. His defenders point out that he’s perhaps the only prosecutor who pursued criminal charges against Ukraine’s oligarchs and politicians in the past. Yet such efforts usually come at the order of superiors. Moreover, they have traditionally been an instrument of selective justice in the game of politics, rather than a genuine effort to establish equality before the law.

We don’t expect any breakthroughs in Ukrainian law enforcement with Shokin at the helm. We don’t expect any efforts to improve rule of law or equality before the law. His nomination by the president and approval by parliament indicates the corrupt oligarchy is firmly intact, firmly betting that Washington will put its geopolitical interests above their misdeeds. It should raise eyebrows his candidacy was supported by both the Poroshenko Bloc and the Putin-aligned Opposition Bloc, which represents the interests of “all high officials of that criminal regime.”