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agency’s appointment of leading officials of state bodies, including the victors of the local elections held on October 25. The agency no longer has access to state registers necessary for conducting special reviews of declarations of candidates for leading positions in state bodies, including elected officials. “With its decision, the Constitutional Court not only destroys the anti-corruption system in Ukraine, as well as paralyzes the work of bodies of local governance and the entire state apparatus,” Novikov said, according to the agency’s website.
The October 27 ruling is politically motivated, not only legitimizing the intent of politicians and state officials to hide from the public their illegally gained assets, but also protecting the interests of certain judges of the Constitutional Court, whose fraudulent declarations are under criminal investigation, according to an October 28 statement by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. “The introduction of electronic declarations is one of the key gains of the state after the Revolution of Dignity. It is the cornerstone for anti-corruption reforms that began in 2014,” the statement said. Yet the court decided “that all judicial servants should remain beyond this process, and the monitoring of their lifestyles are an alleged form of pressure, as well as submitting reports in the event of discrepancies between declared and actual assets. As a result, thanks to this ruling, no one in Ukraine monitors and has the right to ask about the assets of judges and their sources, nor prosecute them for the existence of discrepancies. Such a ruling can’t withstand any criticism, neither from an ethical nor legal point of view.”​ ​The morning of October 29, President Zelenskiy called a meeting of the National Security and Defense Council “to identify immediate response measures to the emerged threats and challenges to national security,” the president’s website reported. “The destructive blows inflicted on the country's achievements in the struggle and effective combating of corruption in Ukraine cannot be ignored,” Zelenskiy stated. “There is an urgent need for rigorous assessment of the decisions of some individuals, whose actions are becoming increasingly dangerous societally.”
“Now that it has been confirmed, it can be stated that this ruling plays out a disastrous scenario for Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic future, as we described in our October 9 report on Ukraine’s debt. Recall, such a scenario assumes Ukraine won’t be able to reach agreement with the IMF on external financing of the budget gap this year. In, which case, it will have to rely solely on internal financing sources, which is money printed by the central bank. Though this scenario is still not our base-case option, as the government still has time to repair all the consequences of the October 27 ruling, it has become all the more probable,” Zenon Zawada of Concorde Capital said in a note.
“If the situation with rule of law and corruption in Ukraine was chaotic enough beforehand (it grew more chaotic under the Zelenskiy presidency), this ruling throws open the floodgates entirely. Besides its legal implications, it sets a dangerous signal to all influential players in business, politics and justice to do as they please. It also sends the signal that any pro-Western structural reforms achieved since the EuroMaidan can be overturned at the drop of a hat.
“Although President Zelenskiy is not directly responsible for this ruling, his hands-off approach to key political issues such as corruption – as well as rapprochement with Russia – set the tone for such complaints to be filed, and for judges to have the audacity to reach such rulings, which ultimately threaten Ukrainian independence.
9​ UKRAINE Country Report​ November 2020 ​ ​www.intellinews.com