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Opinion
December 8, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 21
politicians, parties, and movements. No matter how much one disagrees with Poroshenko, taking money from an aggressor against the country to oppose him is unforgivable and should mean the end of Saakashvili’s political career.
Well, everything is not that simple in Ukraine. Many have serious doubts about whether the tapes presented by the prosecutor general
are genuine. And it's not that shocking that Ukrainians should have those doubts. Last
week the Prosecutor General's Office (GPU)
and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) made
a serious attack on Ukraine's best performing anti-corruption institution, the National Anti- Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU). The GPU and SBU revealed the secrets of an operation that NABU had been carrying out for the last half a year. Moreover, they revealed the network and real names of many of NABU’s secret agents. Prosecutor General Lutsenko went as far as to say that NABU agents are an illegal grouping and that they should have been employed by an open competitive procedure. Honestly, I still wonder whether Lutsenko fully understands the extremity of the nonsense he comes out with...
It's no wonder Ukrainians are sceptical of Lutsenko’s revelations about Saakashvili. But the problem here is much deeper than just a lack of trust in some institutions. If the tapes are real,
we have a politician that doesn't mind taking money from whatever sources and then organises provocations that could possibly have a destructive influence on Ukraine. If the tapes are fake, our intelligence and security bodies are ready to go as far as to falsify and publicly present fake evidence in order to attack a personal political enemy of the president. Whichever scenario turns out to be true, both have devastating results for Ukraine. It will either be a huge blow to the opposition and
its legitimacy, or we will learn that our current president completely disregards the rule of law.
Much more important battle going on
Still, no matter how loud and emotional the situation with Saakashvili is, let's not forget that
there is a much more important battle going on right now. Saakashvili is not the top opposition leader as some have written on Twitter, but he is definitely a master of drama who knows how to organise political shows. It wouldn't be absolutely improbable that by attacking a politician who has around 1.8% of support, but makes a lot of noise, the authorities actually want to divert attention away from a really important issue. Taking into account that the Saakashvili incident happened almost right after the attack on NABU, maybe Saakashvili is not the main player in this story?
Also worth mentioning is that the Saakashvili news has dominated the Ukrainian media space and almost completely drowned out a harsh statement from the US State Department that recent events – including the disruption of a high-level corruption investigation, the arrest of officials from NABU and the seizure of sensitive NABU files – raise concerns about Ukraine’s commitment to fighting corruption. The same position was later repeated by the EU.
That means that the biggest allies and financial supporters of Ukraine are closely following events in the country and are very dissatisfied with the attack on institutions that they lobbied so hard for. Ignoring them would be too costly for Poroshenko. But Poroshenko could save the situation through several strategies: stop the attack or continue limiting NABU’s freedom, but at the same
time hide it behind street drama and beautiful statements.
The process of transformation never goes smoothly. Old forces and old institutions fight back and this is how it works in the politics.
We must accept the reality that countries don't change after a few just words. Ukraine made con- siderable progress in its transformation and now it is witnessing a pushback from the old guard that were satisfied with the former status quo.
Does that mean that Ukraine is a lost cause that has no future? No. It means that we, Ukrainian activists, professionals, journalists and ordinary