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Zelenskiy Sets Up a Wild Ride for Ukraine

Published 29/08/2019, 17:34
Updated 29/08/2019, 19:50
Zelenskiy Sets Up a Wild Ride for Ukraine

Zelenskiy Sets Up a Wild Ride for Ukraine

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- On Thursday, the 101st day after his inauguration, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy finally sprang into action. His first moves show Ukraine is in for a wild ride.

The reason the former comedian’s first 100 days in office were uneventful is that his hands were tied by a hostile parliament and government. Last month, Zelenskiy’s party, Servant of the People, won a majority in parliament; on Thursday, the new legislature assembled for the first time. The president quickly bombarded it with dozens of new legislative and personnel proposals, some long overdue and rational, others disquieting.

Zelenskiy’s choice of prime minister, for example, is both encouraging and troubling. At 35, Oleksiy Honcharuk is the youngest to take on Ukraine’s second most powerful office. As a lawyer, he specialized in investor rights – a useful qualification for the prime minister of a country struggling to attract foreign investment. For most of the last four years, Honcharuk headed the Better Regulation Delivery Office, a European Union-funded organization meant to push the Ukrainian government toward more effective and investor-friendly regulation.

He’s a proponent of allowing agricultural land sales in Ukraine, a move that’s likely to boost the country’s economic growth. And as late as April, he was an open supporter of Petro Poroshenko, the former president. That makes his appointment a sign that Zelenskiy isn’t about to pick old, loyal friends for all the top jobs, as the novice president he played in a popular TV series did.

As Honcharuk spoke to parliament on Thursday, he promised to move quickly to ensure economic growth of 5% to 7%, and said the first 37 bills that would be necessary for economic liberalization had already been drafted. He also said eradicating corruption from the tax service and fighting smuggling would be his priorities. Pretty much any reasonable manager would start this way.

So far so good. But Honcharuk, who has little management experience, was proposed by Andriy Bohdan, Zelenskiy’s controversial chief of staff, who is thought to represent the interests of billionaire Igor Kolomoisky, the president’s early backer and a Mephistopheles-like figure in Ukrainian politics and business.

With no record as an independent figure at this level, Honcharuk could be a convenient front for potential donors, creditors and investors, while his government quietly aids Kolomoisky’s business interests. The suspicion that comes with Bohdan’s recommendation will linger until Honcharuk proves that his ostensible reformist zeal is for real. 

That Kolomoisky will have influence on the cabinet is confirmed by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov’s likely reappointment. On Thursday, one of the new, inexperienced legislators, Liza Bogutskaya, was caught by a photographer typing a text message that Avakov would stay because “Poroshenko is preparing a coup” in December – a laughable assertion since the ex-president handed over power peacefully and has been elected to the new parliament.

Avakov, responsible for the failure of Ukraine’s police reform in the last five years, is, however, an influential figure because of his role in setting up Ukraine’s powerful national guard. He’s also known to have a good relationship with Kolomoisky, an early funder of the volunteer battalions that fought pro-Russian separatists at the outset of the war in eastern Ukraine. It’s tempting for Zelenskiy not to disturb the armed might under Avakov’s control, but it also makes him vulnerable to pressure.

Other cabinet appointments are uneven. The new foreign minister, Vadym Prystayko, who had made a lightning-fast career in the diplomatic service and who once served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada and its representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is known less for spectacular diplomatic coups than for being the son of a former KGB general.

On the other hand, the new defense minister, Andriy Zahorodniuk, is a former businessman who was an adviser to the ministry, helping start a reform of the Ukrainian military’s housing, provisions and medical care. This is a welcome focus for a military that went unprepared into a war against Russian-backed forces and still suffers from poor logistics.

After his first 100 days, which Zelenskiy on Thursday called “a drive in first gear with the lights out,” the president’s focus is on speed. When he finished his brief address to the new legislature, the newly elected speaker tried to announce a five-minute break, but the president refused to leave and demanded that the session continue immediately.

The bills he has submitted strip legislators of legal immunity, set up a new, relatively easy impeachment procedure for the president himself, revamp the prosecutor’s office, make changes to the judiciary system, and, alarmingly for some, propose to reduce the size of the legislative majority needed to change the constitution.

The weak Ukrainian opposition sees this as a move to usurp dictatorial powers. It’s probably unwise for Zelenskiy to make such a naked power grab before he’s proved the purity of his intentions, but he’s clearly in a rush to get things done while his sky-high approval rating lasts. 

To keep going in the current tempo, however, Zelenskiy will need the support of key foreign creditors (the International Monetary Fund is sending a team to Kyiv to negotiate a new loan program) and progress in resolving the conflict in the east. There are signs that a major prisoner exchange with Russia is coming in the next few days.

Russia has moved its most famous Ukrainian captive, Crimean film director Oleg Sentsov, from a remote labor camp to a Moscow prison, and Ukraine has released a key Russian prisoner, a journalist for the propaganda agency RIA Novosti. If the exchange, which has taken months to negotiate, takes place soon, it will set the stage for a summit meeting of the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany next month to discuss the cessation of hostilities and the next steps for the return of separatist-held territories to Ukraine.

Zelenskiy can still fall into countless traps, some of them of his own making. So far, however, he’s riding a tailwind of unexpectedly rosy economic numbers, and is aided by the enthusiasm within his young, ambitious team, which was pulled seemingly out of nowhere as Zelenskiy resolved to drain the Kyiv swamp.

As the president told the legislators, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that would be a crime to waste.

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