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Billionaire oligarch Rinat Akhmetov doesn’t have a stake in any of the four parties that will probably make it into the Rada. That will shut him out of Ukrainian politics for the first time in more than a decade.billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky has influence on The People’s Servant, mega-mnaire Dmytro Firtash (estimated wealth $940mn) is backing the Opposition Platform For Life, mega-millionaire Poroshenko (estimated wealth $850mn) leads European Solidarity. Tymoshenko is amnaire whose wealth has yet to be estimated.
Klitschko party to compete for parliament, invites Saakashvili to lead it.
The Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms will compete in the early parliamentary elections scheduled for July 21, the party’s founder Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a video announcement posted on his Facebook page on June 4. He invited former Georgian President and Odesa Regional Administration Head Mikheil Saakashvili to serve as the party’s head during the election campaign. He also vowed to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “if his actions coincide with the party’s aspirations.” Klitschko said he won’t compete for parliament himself in order to remain as Kyiv mayor.
Kharkiv and Odesa mayors launch new political party. A new Russian- oriented party, Trust Actions, held its founding congress on June 2 in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. The party’s founders were elected as its co- chairs: Kharkiv Mayor Gennadiy Kernes and Gennadiy Trukhanov, the mayor of Ukraine’s third-largest city Odesa. The congress was attended by the mayors and top officials of mid-sized cities such as Kropyvnytskiy, Nikopol and Uzhgorod. In his speech, Kernes boasted of leading the effort to defeat the city’s pro-Russian separatists, who launched a rebellion in spring 2014 by taking over the Kharkiv regional administration building. “Our city didn’t surrender to the many days of tumult and many thousands of hired protestors from the east and west,” he said, also striking an anti-EuroMaidan tone. At the same time, Kernes has spent recent weeks stirring pro-Soviet sentiments in the city by proposing to return the name of a major boulevard to Soviet Red Army General Georgy Zhukov. In response, local EuroMaidan activists and nationalists toppled the city’s statue of Zhukov on the morning of the party congress. Kernes vowed to lead the city council in restoring the monument and renaming the boulevard, referring to the anti-Soviet activists as “the scum of society.”
Two drunk police officers were placed under two-month arrest by a Kyiv court on June 4 in the shooting of a 5-year-old boy in the yard of his home. The boy died in a Kyiv hospital on June 3, three days after the shooting incident in a town in the Kyiv region. Witnesses said the officers were off-duty and drunk when they were shooting their rifles for target practice, causing a bullet to fly into a neighboring yard and strike the boy in the head. If convicted, the officers could be penalized with up to life imprisonment, the regional prosecutor’s office said on its website. On June 4, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and National Police Chief Serhiy Kniazev met with the victim’s mother and grandmother, assuring them that they will closely cooperate with investigators and prosecutors with the goal of reaching an adequate punishment, the ministry said in its website.The killing sparked mass protests outside the Interior Ministry headquarters after doctors couldn’t recue his life. The protests spread yesterday to a dozen cities, led by the Western-financed Anti-Corruption Action Centre, which has led a campaign for more than a year calling for the resignation of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. In June 4, the Kyiv regional police chief, Dmytro Tsenov, submitted his resignation and accepting responsibility for his subordinates’ conduct.
22 UKRAINE Country Report July 2019 www.intellinews.com