The struggle between the Office of the President and Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Dmitry Razumkov and the Mayor of Kyiv Vitaly Klitschko entered an open phase.
YURI ROMANENKO
The struggle between the Office of the President and Volodymyr Zelenskyy with the Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Dmitry Razumkov and the Mayor of Kyiv Vitaly Klitschko entered an open phase.
The parties openly exchange blows. On the last show of Savik Shuster members of the President’s party Servants of the People openly attacked Razumkov while he parried the blows rather sharply. On September, 20th, the tension only increased when Razumkov led the Agreement Council remotely, which drew criticism from the Party leadership. Meaning, if you are sick, stay home, we will prepare the necessary solutions. And the actions are rapidly bringing Razumkov’s resignation closer. Realizing this, Dmitry Razumkov is already openly talking about the fact that the Servants generously paid to the deputies for his resignation.
In parallel, another front of the struggle is unfolding – no less significant. This week, the authorities are planning to pass the law on the capital in the second reading.
It was adopted in the first reading two years ago. At the same time, the bill contradicts the decision of the Constitutional Court, since the head of the Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) must be a mayor elected at the elections. The decision of the Constitutional Court from 2003 reads as follows: “KSCA should be headed only by a person elected by the Kyiv city mayor, who is appointed by the president of Ukraine as the chairman of the Kyiv city state administration.” At the same time, it is important to take into account that opinion polls show that almost 55% of Kyiv residents oppose the appointment of a new chairman of the Kyiv City State Administration, and more than 50% of Kyiv residents are ready to re-elect Klitschko as the mayor of Kyiv, if the elections were held in the near future. In fact, by adopting this bill, the authorities want to legitimize the impending decision to remove Klitschko from the head of the KSCA. As in the case of the law on deoligarchization, the draft law must receive an expert opinion from the Venice Commission. By the way, the law on deoligarchization went to her assessment. Why are the Servants of the People forcing a hit on Razumkov and Klitschko? In fact, the conflict over Razumkov and Klitschko today marks the transition of the Zelenskyy regime to the third stage.
The first stage was until February, 4th of this year, when Zelenskyy and his team took power. After ratings began to fall at the end of last year and the Green party lost everywhere in the local elections, the Bankova decided to change its strategy and began to play “Chapaev” (a metaphor for insane change of rules, comes from a board game, where on a chess board players takes their turn by flicking one of his pieces with the index finger to shoot it at one or more of the opponent’s pieces – ed).
The sanctions against Medvedchuk and the subsequent turbo regime of the NSDC launched the second stage, which solved the problem of forcing the violent to obey by punishing them with sanctions. After making sure that this format works, Zelenskyy and his team launched a new offensive, which was aimed at solving the key task – the concentration of all power. To this end, they “persuaded” Avakov to resign in July. While Avakov was in charge of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zelenskyy did not have full control over the power vertical. And without this, there will be no enlightened authoritarianism.
After that, the “Servants of the People” attacked Klitschko and Razumkov. “Legist” Razumkov, who initially took a critical position on the sanctions regime, irritated Zelenskyy. Now it has turned into an obstacle to the implementation of a non-trivial move with early presidential elections, which was born in the minds of the Bankova. Realizing that you cannot hold out on sanctions alone, and systemic problems in the economy could bring down Zelenskyy’s rating, the Bankova began to consider the option of early re-elections, which, they hope, could allow Zelenskyy to win the election while he still has a rating. This will allow them to win 2.5 years, and since many people around Zelenskyy understand that this is a lot of money they have already tasted, 7.5 years in power is better than 5. Somewhere there is such a logic that latently stands behind the awakened messiahship Zelenskyy.
In the event of an early presidential election, two tasks need to be solved:
A) today it is impossible to find a mechanism that will allow the incumbent president to participate in them. Here I think that people who think that the “Servants of the People” will bother with some kind of legality and procedures are deeply mistaken. They succeeded as soon as they stopped playing by the rules, so they will continue to play Chapaev.
B) remove Razumkov, who may become acting President, as the head of the Rada, replacing him with the more reliable Ruslan Stefanchuk.
That is why today Razumkov is being removed so hastily, whose whole fault lies in the fact that he was too careful and did not get involved in anything, but allows himself an independent position.
They want to remove Vitali Klitschko from the head of the KCSA, because they see him as one of the main competitors in the presidential election, which Zelenskyy himself did not conceal in spring.
Moreover, Zelenskyy’s entourage seeks to gain control of Kyiv, which is too fat with its $2 billion budget to share with someone.
The third argument is that control over Kyiv in a turbulent environment is critical to retaining power. Therefore, the Office of the President began to beat Klitschko, who, in general, did not want to fight.
This logic of maximum concentration of power in hands of Zelenskyy and his team is the task of the third stage, where Klitschko and Razumkov turned out to be the figures that objectively interfere with this concentration of achievement.
This conflict situation around them comes to a climax and objectively pushes Klitschko and Razumkov into each other’s arms. Because they will be crushed separately, but if they are together, then this is already a crystallization of the dissatisfied at the level of the elite.
All this is painfully reminiscent of the fall of 2013, when the weak opposition tried to oppose the Yanukovych regime. The opposition was weak, and Viktor Yanukovych thought he was omnipotent. You know the end of this story.
