Ulterior motives alleged in canonical church campaign

Ulterior political motives have been identified by
Ukrainian political observers in President Petro Poroshenko’s campaign to establish
the canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Notably, among those attending this
weekend’s ceremonies establishing the church was Oleksandr Petrovskiy, widely
identified by mass media and politicians as a leading criminal authority in
Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth largest city. Petrovskiy was among the Ukrainian
delegation at the Jan. 6 ceremony in Istanbul that received the tomos, or
ecclesiastical document, establishing the canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
Petrovskiy stood alongside Parliamentary Speaker Andriy Parubiy, who received
the document, and the next day was beside the president at the first Divine
Liturgy of the newly established church.

Petrovskiy’s involvement is intended to rehabilitate
and legitimize him in the eyes of the public, said MP Serhiy Leshchenko on his
YouTube video blog. “Poroshenko needs a support base in Dnipro,” he said. “The
region is controlled by two clans. The city is controlled by the clan of (Igor)
Kolomoisky, and Kryviy Rih is partly controlled by (Oleksandr) Vilkul.” Vilkul
is a candidate in the presidential elections, while Kolomoisky is backing three
leading candidates.

The Presidential Administration is planning to release
a series of polls that it reserved that will allege Poroshenko’s poll ratings
have surged owing to the establishment of the canonical Orthodox Church of
Ukraine, alleged on Jan. 9 Valentyn Hladkykh, an expert with the Leviathan
analytical group. “The tomos is simply a technology to legitimize the results
that are going to be drafted,” he told a press conference, as reported by the
golos.ua news site. “And these results that will be drafted in sociological
polls will become an instrument to legalize those results that he will
allegedly demonstrate at the elections.”

Zenon Zawada: These scenarios
are legitimate, in our view. Regarding the polls, we have identified four
organizations that conduct the most reliable polls: Rating Sociological Group,
Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, International Republican Institute
and Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Fund.

Most others should be viewed with skepticism. It’s
quite likely that the presidential administration with produce favorable poll
results that it will later use to dismiss accusations of election fraud by the
president’s rivals, particularly Yulia Tymoshenko. But the results won’t carry
much legitimacy unless produced by what we call the Big Four polling firms for
these elections.

The scenario with Petrovskiy makes perfect sense to
us, considering the president doesn’t have much of a political support base in
the city of Dnipro, which is dominated by his political rivals.