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Opinion
April 26, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
Ivanov suggested that the Normandy format should be expanded to include the US and EU, and wants to expand the discussions as well to take in gen- eral European security concerns. This has been a long-term foreign policy goal of the Kremlin. A new pan-European security accord was first suggested by then president Dmitry Medvedev to Merkel in Berlin in his first foreign visit as president in 2008, but was rejected out of hand.
Ivanov has returned to many of the themes
in the Medvedev proposal (see the Kremlin’s proposed outline of the agreement here) and wants to, among other things, establish a high- level Contact Group (with presidents' special representatives or deputy foreign ministers)
to monitor developments and elaborate joint solutions. However, Putin's reluctance to even congratulate Zelensky suggests that relations will not warm quickly.
Zelenskiy's lack of experience will make this challenge one of the hardest to manage, but he
is already talking about a ceasefire in Donbas
and there are many willing to help him in this discussion. Amongst the options is reviving a
plan proposed by German President and former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier: a step- and-reward system whereby concrete lesser goals are laid out and sanctions on Russia are gradually withdrawn as each step is achieved.
Zelenskiy has said little about Poroshenko’s aspirations to make Ukraine a member of both Nato and the EU, but as Ukraine has been invited to join neither body these are largely non-issues for the meantime. However Zelenskiy has said Ukraine's European course has already been set.
Corruption
The failure to do anything significant about corruption was Poroshenko’s biggest failure. Indeed, Poroshenko actively lobbied against the anti-corruption measures imposed on Kyiv by its donors – specifically he vigorously worked against setting up the anti-corruption court (ACC), which was finally forced on him by the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of a new and downgraded stand-by agreement (SBA) in December (and has yet to go online).
Zelenskiy has already taken his first step in re- making the law enforcement regime by announc- ing he will sack Poroshenko’s Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko has been a controversial figure and an appointment Poroshenko forced through over the strong objections of liberals and donors as it gave Poroshenko direct control over law enforcement as a lever of power.
"Lutsenko is an old team. We will appoint new people. And this applies not only to Lutsenko," Zelenskiy said to reporters on election night.
Under Lutsenko there have been virtually no arrests of officials on corruption charges and even fewer prosecutions. Cases of murdered journalists like Pavel Sheremet who was blown up with a car bomb and civil rights activists like Kateryna Handziuk, who was killed in an acid attack, have gone unsolved. Even the highest profile senior official to be detained, Roman Nasirov whose arrest was billed as the “first big fish” to be netted in the nascent anti-corruption drive, was later released. Not only was he not prosecuted, he stood as one of the candidates in the presidential elections that just finished. His indictment on corruption charges was supposed to be a litmus test for the anti-graft campaign – a test that Poroshenko’s regime convincingly failed.
One of Zelenskiy's first big decisions will be if he should disband the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), Ukraine’s equivalent to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Instead of investigating crimes the SBU spent a lot of time fighting the other law enforcement agencies and enriching it- self. Endemic corruption that goes right to the top of the service has been exposed by local media Hromadske and others, including involvement in a recent defence sector scandal that also impli- cated Poroshenko personally. But Poroshenko’s administration failed to react to the overwhelming evidence, as the SBU is another lever of power.