Party of Regions named after Petro Poroshenko

Party of Regions named after Petro Poroshenko

Petro Poroshenko is taking to the elections not only a party named after himself, but several satellite projects formed from the remnants of the Party of Regions.

The president also has warm, cooperative relations with the main successor of Viktor Yanukovych’s party – the Opposition Bloc.

The vote on constitutional changes on 31 August showed: the Opposition Bloc acts as a reliable partner of Bankova on key issues. The decisive votes came from Nestor Shufrich, Yuriy Boyko, Serhiy Lyovochkin, Oleksandr Vilkul, Serhiy Kivalov and other pillars of Yanukovych’s regime. And now – partners of Petro Poroshenko.

The first joint vote of the presidential faction and the Opposition Bloc took place back on 10 January 2015 – when Viktor Shokin was appointed prosecutor general. At that time he was supported not only by the coalition factions, but also by figures involved in high-profile corruption scandals – Bakulin, Boyko, Vilkul, Papiyev… All of them, by the way, feel perfectly comfortable in parliament and outside it, and prosecution for large-scale embezzlement of the country’s resources and complicity in the mass killings on the Maidan in 2014 is no longer being discussed. Which is not surprising: 40 votes from the Opposition Bloc are urgently needed by Petro Poroshenko, who cannot rely on the temperamental allies in the parliamentary coalition.

Serhiy Lyovochkin always tries to be close to the head of state—whoever that may be

One of the shareholders of the Opposition Bloc, Serhiy Lyovochkin, is a frequent visitor to the president’s office and the heads of his administration. Together with him, Bankova launched a new project for local elections – the Our Land party. Former regionals who have already defected to Poroshenko’s camp but whom it is undesirable to take into Solidarity—because of reputational risks for the president’s party—will run on its lists and under its brand. Of course, it makes no sense yet to bring such figures into BPP as the former head of the Party of Regions in Zaporizhzhia region Serhiy Kaltsov or MP from Odesa region Anton Kisse, who was not unreasonably accused of trying to stir separatist sentiments in Bessarabia.

But in the Our Land format they can calmly take power locally – with the president’s blessing and with money from Yanukovych’s associates. In Odesa region the project’s sponsors are the “authorities” Ivan Avramov, who in Yanukovych’s time oversaw the region as a “watcher” (there is no adequate equivalent for this criminal concept in Ukrainian – ed.), and Yuriy Ivanyushchenko, better known as Yura Yenakiyevskyi – one of the closest associates of the bloody ex-president. He, by the way, also sponsors Our Land in Donbas.

Yuriy Ivanyushchenko moved to Monaco after Yanukovych fled to Moscow. But he retains influence over Ukrainian politics.

In the frontline regions, the close alliance of Poroshenko with the regionals shocked everyone who naively hoped that the Revolution of Dignity would finally pull the region out from under the yoke of the regionals. But “living in a new way” in Petro Poroshenko’s imagination is merely a new head of the corrupt vertical.

“At many meetings in the region I am often ‘prompted’ like, well, that regional, and this regional. So what should I do now? Take them all out to the street and shoot them? Yes, for public-sector workers, mayors, and heads of enterprises in Donetsk region, in order to have work and stay in power, there was then no other choice but membership in the PR. Now they can form the backbone of Our Land.”

“It’s something between BPP and PR – a kind of, roughly speaking, cesspool, a transit point,” Pavlo Zhebrivskyi, head of the military-civilian administration of Donetsk region, confessed candidly about what Our Land is. He, like other regional heads, has already received an electoral plan from Bankova – how many votes BPP and Our Land must get. There are no exact figures for Donetsk, but Lev Partskhaladze, who heads the BPP headquarters in Kyiv region, according to iPress.ua must secure 35% of the votes for the president’s party and another 20% for Our Land…”

Another pro-government electoral “cesspool” for former regionals is the Revival party. In parliament it is represented by one of the PR leaders Vitaliy Khomutynnik, Yanukovych’s advisor, Odesa millionaire Leonid Klimov, Rinat Akhmetov’s manager and former head of the budget committee Yevheniy Heller, Andriy Portnov’s partner (Yanukovych’s chief lawyer) Valeriy Pysarenko, Yanukovych’s favorite “horseman” Valentyn Nechyporenko, the well-known Kharkiv ukrainophobe Dmytro Svyatash, heroes of numerous corruption scandals Volodymyr Katsuba and Anton Yatsenko… And on the party’s lists such worthy people will run as Hennadiy Kernes.

To be fair, it should be said that Revival is not entirely a Bankova project. Nor is it Igor Kolomoisky’s party, as is commonly believed given the oligarch’s partnership with the project’s informal leader Vitaliy Khomutynnik. Rather, it is a “franchise” that in some cases will be used by Poroshenko, in others by Kolomoisky, and most often by influential regional leaders like Kernes and Dobkin, who for one reason or another do not want to associate themselves with the Opposition Bloc.

Sources close to the Poroshenko administration told iPress.ua that both Our Land and Revival are safeguards against a possible comeback of the Opposition Bloc. The argument goes that it is better to have your own reformed regionals than the Kremlin’s fifth column. However, this is ordinary pretense. The same shareholders and sponsors back both the Opposition Bloc and the presidential projects. In the end, the Opposition Bloc, as we can see from parliamentary votes, is a rather conditional opposition to Poroshenko. In a number of regions BPP and the Opposition Bloc will jointly fight common enemies. For example, in Dnipropetrovsk – against Igor Kolomoisky’s team. Therefore all administrative resources will work for the victory in the mayoral election of Oleksandr Vilkul – a friend of Putin’s biker “The Surgeon” and the organizer of the beating of Maidan activists in January 2014.

***The alliance of Petro Poroshenko with the regionals only at first glance seems strange and unnatural. Petro Oleksiyovych is one of the founding fathers of the Party of Regions, and he has long-standing business and friendly ties and similar worldviews with its primary and secondary shareholders. After all, these are people with whom the president of Ukraine speaks the same language – the language of oligarchic politics, for which ideological positions and party flags mean nothing compared to the ability to convert power into cash.

ipress.ua