Page 53 - BNE_magazine_05_2019

bne May 2019
Opinion 53
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Steinmeier: a step-and-reward system whereby concrete lesser goals are laid out and sanctions on Russia are gradually withdrawn as each step is achieved.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 remaking the law enforcement regime by announcing 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
Roman Nasirov, the former government financial controller and Poroshenko associate, was arrested on corruption charges, but never prosecuted.
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 itself. 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 implicated Poroshenko personally. But Poroshenko’s administration failed to react to the overwhelming evidence, as the SBU is another lever of power.
In general the whole judicial system needs overhauling. Donors have pushed for a new system that is independent of the government to fight corruption.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU)
has already been set up. NABU is the investigative part of a triumvirate that also includes the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), which carries out prosecutions in parallel to the General Prosecutor’s Office, but is also entirely independent from the government’s control. What is missing is an independent court to hear the cases investigated by NABU and prosecuted by SAPO – the anti-corruption court (ACC) that Poroshenko has been so energetically resisting.
Return to reform
The list of other reforms is long as over the last 30 years Ukraine has failed to make many of the changes that most of the other Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have at least started.
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