Ukraine Crisis In Ukraine, the delicate political reinvention of "pro-Russian" MPs
The parties considered too close to Moscow were dissolved after the outbreak of the Russian invasion in February, but their elected representatives kept their mandates and still participate in the life of the Parliament.
By Thomas d'Istria (Kiev) and Faustine Vincent (Strasbourg), Le Monde
The online exhibition is entitled "Pro-Russian parties, fuck off". It gathers a collection of leaflets, calendars and propaganda posters of the different pro-Russian parties that have succeeded one another in Ukrainian political life since the independence of this country, in 1991, until the beginning of the current war, on February 24. The slide show, available on the website of the Chesno ("honesty" in Ukrainian) organization, is a reminder of a time when a "fifth column" influenced Kiev politics, and when the vast majority of Ukrainians did not reject the "Russian world" wholesale.
After more than ten months of war, the political formations that were considered to be vehicles of Russian influence were dissolved by Ukrainian courts. The most important of them, the opposition platform For Life, the first opposition party in the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada), did not escape. While some parliamentarians of the former party opted to leave Ukraine, the majority remained, and continues to regularly attend Parliament sessions.
"The party has been banned but the deputies still have the right to sit as long as their mandates have not been cancelled," explains Oleksandr Salzhenko, one of the analysts of the Chesno organization, whose task is to decipher the political life of the Kiev Parliament. According to the country's laws, mandates can only be revoked in case of "loss of citizenship, resignation, death or a court decision.
This sometimes creates absurd situations. For example, Ukrainian MP and oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, co-chairman of the banned party close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was arrested by Ukrainian authorities in mid-April and was at the center of a prisoner exchange with Russia in September, is still officially a member of the Ukrainian Parliament. Other deputies continue to sit in key positions. Nestor Shufrych, who, according to Chesno, has long referred to the conflict in the Donbass as a "civil war" despite evidence of Kremlin involvement, remains today the head of the committee for freedom of expression.
The former deputies of the pro-Russian party have quickly adapted to the new reality of the war. Yurii Pavlenko, 47, says that he and his colleagues first wrote a statement condemning the Russian aggression. Later, they deleted from their party's charter all articles that "mentioned [their] desire for a good-neighbourly relationship with Russia," he says, sitting over a coffee in a Kiev bar. The deputies also voted to exclude a colleague from their party, Ilya Kiva, who had called on Kiev to capitulate on a Russian television channel.
More than ten months have passed. Today, Serhi Hladkoskok is a member of the new parliamentary group Reconstruction of Ukraine. At the end of October, he was in the European Parliament, looking for partnerships and money to rebuild the Kharkiv region. "Our objective is the same as that of President Zelensky, we want to rebuild the country," he told Le Monde. The elected official does not comment on the banning of his former party, and simply recalls that it is not the only one to have been banned after the invasion. "People should not look at the name of the party but what we do. For us, as elected officials, nothing has changed," he says. "We have remained in Kharkiv since the first day of the invasion. People have seen it and remember it, so they trust us."
In Kiev, on the other hand, civil society and some members of parliament remain highly critical of the presence of former elected officials of the largest pro-Russian opposition party in political positions. In recent days, a petition to discuss in the Verkhovna Rada the withdrawal of the mandates of former deputies has begun to circulate. According to Chesno, about fifty votes out of the one hundred and fifty needed to consider the proposal have been collected.
Political analyst Oleksandr Salzhenko remains skeptical. "It is impossible to deprive deputies of their mandates because of martial law, which prohibits amending the Ukrainian constitution and holding elections. There is still the possibility that people will not vote for them in the next elections," says the observer. "But then it will take years."