UkraineAlert
While Ukrainian interest in Germany has always been high, in Germany interest in and information about Ukraine has only recently started to grow.
The first way to meddle is easy: support pro-Russian candidates.
Polls show that in spite of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian candidates still enjoy strong approval ratings. Among them are Yuriy Boyko, former vice prime minister and an MP with support at 9.7%, and Vadim Rabinovich, leader of the “For Life” party at 9.5%. Both have over twenty years in politics and their records strongly support the Kremlin.
If Boyko and Rabinovich were to agree on a single candidate in the 2019 presidential election, it would make for a strong ticket, and this potential merger is already drawing worrying parallels to the 2010 election when pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych returned to power six years after the pro-democratic Orange Revolution and turned Ukraine back toward authoritarianism. The Kremlin will undoubtedly press for the same scenario in 2019 by supporting one of their candidates with large amounts of cash.
There’s at least four other ways the Kremlin may try to influence the election.
If this account is accurate, it is difficult to exaggerate how troubling the American leader’s comments are.
Ukrainians have been waiting for four long years for justice. None of our high-profile crooks are behind bars. Plus, Ukraine needs the next IMF tranche of $2 billion to avoid default, and everything depends on the new law.
So what’s in it?
Good and bad. High-profile corruption cases will finally be heard by an impartial court, but the authorities did manage to water down the law.
That is emphatically no longer the case. Few would doubt that Russia and the Western world are engaged in the most intense geopolitical struggle since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Perhaps even more remarkably, Russia appears to be winning.
Despite perfect name recognition, the frontrunner Yulia Tymoshenko has only 9 to 13 percent support, according to recent polls (Rating, SOCIS, and Democratic Initiatives). Other candidates, including the incumbent president, are in a tight cluster, suggesting they all have a fair chance of making the second round since no one is expected to win outright.
Past elections showed that sitting presidents, other than Leonid Kuchma, haven’t benefited from the power of incumbency. Poroshenko may be nervous and trying to undermine his main challenger former Defense Minister Anatoliy Gritsenko through a new special investigative commission charged with looking into embezzlement in the armed forces from 2004 to 2017 (Gritsenko was minister from 2005 to 2007).
The current polls are an anomaly given that voters typically favor two strong candidates whose support is based on geography: the east votes for a pro-Russian candidate, and the west backs a pro-Western one. But this dynamic seems to be changing. Public trust in the old guard is currently so low that more than a third of voters are undecided, 11 percent would vote for another candidate, and almost 14 percent are leaning toward unconventional choices: 7 percent favor rock star Svyatoslav Vakarchuk and and 6.6 percent back comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
The public clearly wants new leaders who are honest and patriotic, so Ukrainians are considering outsiders like Vakarchuk and Zelenskiy.
What follows is a saga that left Solomatina disillusioned about corruption within NACP itself. Ultimately, it led her to a crossroads: stay silent and keep her head down, or speak out and risk everything. She spoke out, bravely becoming one of Ukraine's most prominent whistleblowers, and her life hasn't been the same since. This is her story.
