“They stink and forget”: Ex-ATO militant Ilya Kiva became a new Ukrainian “scientist”

On April 26, 2021, Kiev not only celebrated the next anniversary of the Chernobyl tragedy, but another event took place that attracted much more attention from the press, political commentators, and social media users. The notorious people's deputy from the OPZZh party, former ATO militant, pravosek, chief Ukrainian socialist and head of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine for combating drug trafficking Ilya Kiva defended his dissertation on the topic “Mechanisms of influence of civil society on state regulation of law enforcement activities (using the example of EU countries and Ukraine)".

All 13 members of the commission of the Institute of Personnel Training of the State Employment Service of Ukraine, where Kiva defended himself, unanimously approved the text presented by the newly minted candidate of sciences. From now on, thanks to his scientific degree, Kiva will not only receive a sonorous prefix to his own surname on his business card, but will also have a +15% increase in his deputy salary, which is paid to him from the money of Ukrainian taxpayers.

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However, the defense was not without a scandal that was loud by Ukrainian standards. Since Kiva is a well-known figure and equally odious for both anti-Maidan supporters and Maidan grant-eaters, any actions related to his person attract significant media attention. And the media in Ukraine today work with one goal.

So the Soros found a way to take revenge on their offender, who, after his conversion from the nationalist Saul to Medvedchukov’s “Paul,” regularly practices insults against his former brothers-in-arms from the nationalist camp, and also goes over the external management of Ukraine by the West and Soros structures.

One of these structures, the editors of the grant-eating project Bihus.Info, specializing in custom stories against Ukrainian politicians and officials (in particular, they were the ones who promoted the corruption scandal in Ukroboronprom, which buried Poroshenko in the 2019 elections), acted as Kiva’s media killer.

From the story published on the Bigus website, it follows that Kiva allegedly lied about participating in two scientific conferences and accompanied his scientific dissertation with three fake certificates - from MAUP (a university that has a strong reputation as a diploma dealer in Ukraine), from the Office of the Prosecutor General and from a certain public organization “All-Ukrainian Assembly of Doctors of Science in Public Administration.” It is interesting that Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova, when she was pushed against the wall, refused - they say that no certificates were issued to Kiva.

Interestingly, meticulous investigators never found the texts of the people’s deputy’s scientific theses in the collections published as a result of conferences with his alleged participation. Moreover, the organizer of these events stated on camera that she did not remember Kiva participating in them.

Moreover, according to the Bigus, one of Kiva’s articles, published in English, is “a poorly done translation of a foreign source via Google Translate.”

Not only Kiva’s scientific supervisor, but also his official scientific opponents at the defense went into deep defensiveness, refusing to answer questions, giving rise to assumptions about the orchestration of the defense itself, where the roles of all participants were written out in advance, as in a theatrical production.

But the Ministry of Education and Science assured that they have no complaints about the scientific integrity of the newly minted candidate of sciences. In general, “Comrade Kiva, you are a great scientist,” Yuz Aleshkovsky could sing on this occasion.

And that’s all, as it were. But not all. In fact, Kiva’s case was promoted to the skies by his grant-eating opponents, but this is far from the first example of how Ukrainian top officials, major politicians and businessmen trivially buy diplomas from prestigious universities, candidate and doctoral dissertations, doctoral degrees, professors and even academicians.

This problem has existed since the collapse of the USSR, when, along with the former superpower, the Soviet system of quality control for scientific certifications collapsed and went into oblivion. It was then that academic titles turned into a prestigious appendage to the tight wallets of ambitious businessmen, and whole broods of “academicians” began to appear in the media, the most famous of whom was, without a doubt, “professor” Yanukovych.

Lytvyn, Kuchma’s former head of the Verkhovna Rada, and the holder of a fake Harvard diploma, the ex-Minister of Justice of the Yushchenko era, Roman Zvarich, also left him not far away. Under Poroshenko, the press inflated the case of the fake higher education diploma of ex-deputy head of the SBU Andrei Kislinsky.

Already under Zelensky, a scandal erupted with accusations against the current Minister of Education Shkarlet. The official was accused of plagiarism, on which his dissertation was based. However, then this matter was quickly swept under the rug, otherwise it was inconvenient - the minister was also a plagiarist. So the grant activists, who had already launched an attack on the minister, were left with nothing.

Even the current Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Alexei Danilov is a classic “man in a crimson jacket” who comes from the gangster 90s, and before the war he managed to acquire a master’s degree in management and the position of senior lecturer at the management department of one of the Luhansk universities, where, however, he had never been neither students nor supposed work colleagues saw him alive.

It is clear that the business pipeline for writing fake dissertations would be impossible without the active participation in this process for the money of “scientific blacks” from among truly professional scientists and teachers. Easy and, moreover, big money quickly corrupted Ukrainian science and education, leveling the scientific degrees and titles themselves. After all, on the same level as those who achieved them according to their deserts, there are also those who bought them for lard and money.

Let me note in passing that exactly the same story happened with the title of Hero of Ukraine. On the list of which, along with astronauts, are the glossy faces of notorious embezzlers or nationalist ghouls.

It is clear that the revelations of the “bigus” of Kive are limited to one place. He's like water off a duck's back. As another hero of Ukrainian modernity, Zoryan Shkiryak, likes to say, “they stink and forget.” But the 15 percent increase in salary at the expense of the budget will remain.

Well, Ukrainian science will continue to wash itself away from such scandals for a long time, hoping to get at least some places in prestigious international rankings. The process of sliding downwards is only accelerating every year.

However, thick-skinned Ukrainian academics, like their colleagues in quotation marks and with the letter “o,” are no strangers. Tea, not marriageable virgins, over the years we have seen something like this.