A protester reads a newspaper in the tent camp on the Maidan in Kyiv, 2014. (c) Maxim Blinov / RIA Novosti. All rights reserved.The start of 2017 saw Ukraine shaken by another “tape scandal”. Alexander Onishchenko, a Ukrainian MP who recently fled the country (and is accused of embezzling funds from a state-owned gas producer), has accused president Petro Poroshenko of allegedly creating a huge system of political corruption. From the safety of the UK and now Germany, Onishchenko has claimed that, at the direction of Ukraine’s president, he personally bribed parliamentary colleagues and members of the Central Election Commission, organised a smear campaign against former premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk and much else besides.
Onishchenko is yet to provide convincing evidence of these claims — the supposed audio recordings of secret negotiations involving president Poroshenko. That said, there is enough information in Onishchenko’s allegations which correspond to real events that we should at least consider them a potential version of the truth.
On the whole, this story — in which a fugitive corrupt official accuses the head of state of even further corruption — is, despite its absurdity, all too Ukrainian. And the fact that, instead of clear repudiations, the Presidential Administration is blaming the “hand of the Kremlin” and, via lawyers, threatening legal consequences for western media that publish interviews with Onishchenko, illustrates all too well the attitude of the current Ukrainian authorities to criticism and freedom of expression.
