Bortnik: The SBU with its own hands made an anti-vaxxer a political leader

A search in the apartment of the organizer of anti-vaccination protests Ostap Stakhiv and an attempt to detain him by the SBU turned him into a political leader.

Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics, said this in a conversation on the Politeka Online channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“30 percent of Ukrainians do not want to be vaccinated under any circumstances. There are probably more. People who do not support vaccination are probably the majority in the country. Do you think any leaders will appear there? They will. Even if this Ostap won’t exist. Cut one mushroom and three mushrooms will grow in its place.

What the SBU did against this man was that it elevated him to the rank of political leader. Now he's the leader of the anti-vaxxers, potentially 30 percent of voters. If he uses this correctly, he will hold a parliamentary party next time. (There is) poor quality of political governance, there is a part of society that is dissatisfied, it does not agree, it organizes protests, and I watched these protests under the Verkhovna Rada - they are poorly organized, organized by cluster leaders, courtyard leaders. I didn’t see any special organization. Moreover, we saw how almost all political parties immediately disowned it - “no, we are for vaccination.”

There is a protest, it has popular support, parts of the people, we need to work with it, these people, their leaders need to be gathered at round tables with medical scientists, without cameras, and explained - this is like this, this is like this, this is like this. Gather with lawyers, say, “Guys, look, here we will limit things, here we won’t, but here we will gradually lift restrictions,” convince these people to remain within the legal system.

Today, the “attack” on these people only adds electoral weight to them, tightens the screws in a system that is under serious internal pressure, because the way the state today puts pressure on people who have not been vaccinated, on such a large group of people - I can remember such an example I can't do it at all. Refusing to get vaccinated is already an internal conviction, bordering on political.

Moreover, the majority of people who do not want to get vaccinated are in Western Ukraine. The largest number of people who do not want to get vaccinated, according to sociological surveys, are Western Ukraine, the Chernivtsi region, where the epidemic began in our country, and the western regions of Ukraine. What does the hand of the Kremlin and Moscow have to do with it? In Moscow, in the Kremlin, it’s the same problem, they also chase their anti-vaxxers there, they also conduct government information campaigns, fight their leaders, it’s the same story there.

The issue is not Moscow, the issue is the lack of trust among part of society in the state, the issue is the lack of reasoning for part of society to get vaccinated. Look: before the start of the vaccination campaign, what did the state do - instead of somehow convincing people, it adopted a law in the very first epidemics, which removed responsibility from vaccine manufacturers for the consequences of using vaccines, even if this was required by the manufacturers - as delivery conditions these vaccines.

So insure these people at government expense. In fact, the number of side effects from vaccination is relatively small; we are talking about thousands, tens of thousands of people. So let's insure these people at state expense - if a person dies or his health is damaged, let the state pay him compensation. After all, vaccination is a state policy, and the person has become a victim of this policy.

There is nothing to worry about, hundreds of thousands of people are insured in Ukraine - from civil servants to the military. And then there would be trust. And so the state says: “we will bring vaccines, new, fresh, not very tested, we relieve ourselves of responsibility for the use of vaccines, then - you get vaccinated, you are criminals, because you don’t get vaccinated,” concluded Ruslan Bortnik.