Follow-up to 'de-oligarchization and de-corruptionization'

I wanted to clarify the processes I was describing in my previous post to avoid any misunderstanding.

The problem of my last article was that it could create the impression that Zelensky and his close circle (Yermak and so on) are actually personally interested in the ‘anti-corruption reforms’.

Andrii Yermak, head of the Ukrainian Presidential Administration

This is not exactly true, since Zelensky/Yermak are clearly trying to centralize political and economic power in their hands, which is precisely what ‘the struggle against corruption’ and pro-Western civil society doesn’t want.

However, they are forced to give support to anti-corruption initiatives because the west demands it. The Ukrainian government is forced to make this step in wartime both because of its extreme dependence on Western financial and military aid, and because any rejection of ‘the EU-integration goal’ would mean destroying the ideological foundations of the Ukrainian side in the war against Russia (see the Ukrainian article I translated about how this war is in the name of Ukraine’s European future).

The EU, IMF and USA demanded that Ukraine finally appoint a new head of the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor (SAP), a process which has taken much longer than it should. Generally, the west or its civil society activists in Ukraine have accused the government of artificially dragging out this process in order to weaken SAP. In late July, Oleksandr Klimenko, an experienced ‘anti-corruption fighter’ from the NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine) was made the head of SAP, having won the competition to become the SAP leader last year.

But there are signs of different tendencies as well. On the 11th of June, Kira Rudyk, the head of the most rabidly pro-western party ‘Golos’ (essentially a party of urban NGO employees, and it is most beloved by publications like the Atlantic Council), had her passport removed and could not enter Ukraine. She is being accused (so far not officially) of having dual citizenship (British and Ukrainian), which is forbidden by Ukrainian law and was used as the pretext for the removal of citizenship from Korban and Kolomoisky (who have Israeli and Cypriot citizenship). Of course, this is all just a very transparent pretext, since it is well known that most Ukrainian politicians have at least dual citizenship.

Kira Rudyk

The removal of Rudyk’s citizenship is a sign that Zelensky-Ermak is not willing to give over all control to so-called ‘democratic civil society’. It should be noted that it was precisely the Golos party and similar ‘grant-feeders’ that critiqued Zelensky and Ermak most before the war as being a ‘corrupt crypto-Russian revanche’.

Who is the now (in)famous Ermak? Unlike most of the ‘grant-feeders’, he was educated in the USSR and Ukraine, and worked all his life in Ukraine. As a lawyer before 2014, he often worked for a figure in Yanukoych’s Party of Regions, the quintessential political party representing domestic business elites. Another person in Zelensky’s command who is often associated with Ermak is Danylo Hetmantsev, in charge of taxation - he is often called a ‘Marxist Yanukovych fan’ by Ukrainian ‘experts’, because he is a fan of increasing taxes on business. Unlike the ‘grant-feeders’, who get paid by foreign states and organizations based on how much they weaken the Ukrainian state, such people as Ermak or Hetmantsev receive their power and income based on increasing the state’s power to collect tax revenues. Sure, they might be ‘corrupt’, but the source of their income differs from the ‘grant-feeders’.

We end up with a fairly complicated picture.

• The ‘grant-feeders’ and the west want Zelensky-Ermak to strengthen various destructive/colonial ‘anti-corruption’ organs

  • The Ukrainian government is forced to go on this path due to its financial, military, and political dependence on the west

  • But the government still wants its own revenues, which it can receive both from western funds, and from various forms of taxation

    • So while it encourages western assistance, it naturally wants to minimize, if possible, the control exercised by the west.

• Meanwhile, the most powerful domestic opponents of the ‘grant-feeders’, the west, and ‘anti-corruption reforms’ - the oligarchs - are going out of business due to the war

  • This further weakens resistance to said reforms

  • Nevertheless, nor is this class itself totally gone

Hopefully this clears up my previous article a bit.