More Corruption, Finger-Pointing in Ukraine

Hopes were high in Ukraine on March 29 after three major parliamentary parties agreed to form a new coalition. The new coalition would have included the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko, the People’s Front, and the Fatherland party. All three parties had earlier been coalition partners along with the Radical party and Self Reliance party, both of which refused to join the new coalition. According to the Economist, the parties intended to nominate Volodymyr Groysman, the current Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament, to the position of prime minister in order to form a new government. However, later that day any dreams of a smooth transition to a new government were shattered when Yulia Tymoshenko, former Ukrainian Prime Minister and current leader of the Fatherland party, released several demands including the removal of energy price increases and a pension tax. According to New Europe,  the International Monetary Fund requires the energy price increases in Ukraine as a necessary condition for Ukraine to receive $17.5 billion in aid. This comes just after a recent failure by the Ukrainian government to negotiate an additional $1.7 billion in aid from the IMF i, which Tymoshenko also blamed on sitting Ukrainian Prime Minister Arsensiy Yatsenyuk.

As a result, the coalition never materialized, and Ukraine’s parliament continues to fall victim to factional infighting. However, on the same day, Victor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor general widely seen as corrupt, was ousted by the Ukrainian Parliament after pressure from the EU. Unfortunately, in his final hours in office, Shokin fired his reform-oriented deputy prosecutor David Sakvarelidze. Furthermore, Shokin was replaced by Yury Sevruk, another man accused of sabotaging the investigations of corrupt prosecutors, showing that Ukraine still has a long way to go if the country hopes to escape corruption.