“The honour is mine!” This is how Arsen Avakov, Ukraine’s interior minister, signed his letter of resignation earlier this week. But honour is hardly the word that many in Ukrainian society would use to describe Avakov’s seven-year tenure since 2014.
Avakov, a former governor of the Kharkiv region, came to power in the wake of the country’s 2014 Euromaidan revolution – and the brutal shooting of more than 100 protesters in downtown Kyiv. Even prior to that mass shooting, police violence – and the impunity that officers enjoyed – had become a sad factor in Ukraine’s public life.
With public confidence severely rocked by the shooting, Avakov had carte blanche to reform Ukraine’s police. Instead, he used the interior ministry as his own base of political power, surviving two presidents and frequent calls to resign. Rather than a reformed police force, Avakov’s legacy appears to consist mostly of a culture of impunity for the Ukrainian police, who have been implicated in tampering with investigations, violence and unprofessional conduct through a series of high-profile and tragic cases.
