Ukraine parliament to vote on Nalyvaychenko June 17 or 18, MP says

Ukraine’s parliament will vote on dismissing Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, the head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), on June 17 or 18, said Ihor Kononenko, the deputy head of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, as reported by the Interfax-Ukraine news agency on June 16. Nalyvaychenko has been offered several positions, including the post of vice prime minister for Euro-integration.

Nalyvaychenko arrived at the Prosecutor General’s Office on June 16 and submitted criminal evidence against Yurii Baulin, the chief justice of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, the SBU press service reported. The evidence is for abuse of authority charges that led to the usurpation of power by former President Viktor Yanukovych. Nalyvaychenko also invited former deputy prosecutor Anatoliy Danylenko for questioning this week, after accusing him of taking bribes from a corrupt gasoline retailer.

Nalyvaychenko declined to comment on the president’s offer to lead the SBU’s Foreign Reconnaissance Service when speaking to journalists on June 16. He also didn’t confirm whether he participated in the president’s meeting on the night of June 15 with top state officials, including the prime minister and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council. “As the head of the SBU, I reported to the president about the united efforts of the Prosecutor General and the SBU to investigate the ‘ecocide’ matter,” he said.

Zenon Zawada: This situation is very similar to the president’s conflict with oligarch Igor Kolomoisky in March, during which insults and vicious accusations were hurled from both sides, making a compromise nearly impossible in the near term. In this case, the sides are Poroshenko’s team and those politicians aligned with Dmytro Firtash, another powerful oligarch, particularly Nalyvaychenko.

Poroshenko is trying to muster enough votes in parliament for Nalyvaychenko’s dismissal, but if he fails, we expect he will succeed in removing him as SBU head, one way or another. Too much bad blood has been exchanged. Meanwhile, Nalyvaychenko’s media stunt involving the Baulin evidence was a direct jab at Poroshenko, given the judge is widely identified as being loyal to the president after having survived a lustration campaign in the judiciary despite his close ties to Yanukovych.

Nalyvaychenko remaining in government, in some capacity, would be a positive development because it would indicate some compromise was reached between the oligarchs. Few people have the illusion that this government will remove the oligarchs from power, so they might as well be cooperating on behalf of  the state, particularly in a sphere as sensitive as the SBU.

Indeed this whole episode has been a public relations project for Nalyvaychenko, given that he accused Danylenko before questioning him, in violation of basic legal principles. Nalyvaychenko is widely reported to have presidential ambitions, which would motivate him to leave the government altogether at this point. Yet we don’t see him as a presidential contender. He looks nice and speaks well, but he lacks the charisma of politicians like Yulia Tymoshenko and Oleh Liashko. He also lacks a consistent ideological position.