Ragnarok on the farm. How Zelensky’s evil defeated Kolomoisky’s loot
In Ukraine, by-elections to the Verkhovna Rada were held in several constituencies in different parts of the country. The loudest and most scandalous elections were in two places: district No. 87 in the Carpathian region (Ivano-Frankivsk region) and No. 50 in Pokrovsk in the Kiev-controlled part of Donbass. However, different circumstances gave the results in these districts a touch of scandal.
In Pokrovsk in Donbass expected for observers the mayor of the neighboring town of Dobropolye, Andrey Aksenov, won the victory already in the first round with more than 50% of the votes, who already occupied the chair of the Pokrovsky head during the time of Poroshenko and was then put on the wanted list for visiting the Russian Crimea and was even temporarily removed from office for this. What’s interesting is that the votes in district No. 50 were counted quickly, in less than one day, and in the evening the winner was announced. And most importantly - no scandals. No one disputed Aksenov’s victory.
Carpathian district No. 87 showed the complete opposite. Here, in the battle for the mandate, three heavyweights clashed at once. The pro-government “Servant of the People” nominated champion fighter Vasyl Virastyuk, the party of Kolomoisky’s namesake and business partner Igor Palitsa “For Maybutne” (nicknamed “Maybach” by Ukrainian political wags) bet on the businessman, owner of the Bukovel ski resort Alexander Shevchenko, and “Svoboda” “Tyagnibok moved her top functionary and ex-vice speaker of the Rada Ruslan Koshulinsky.
All these “cream of society” launched such a “struggle for peace” in the district that the banal by-elections, in terms of the degree of pathos and intensity of passions at the end of the campaign, resembled some kind of farm Ragnarok. Bubble's fight against Evil. Where the role of Bubble was played by Kolomoisky’s protege, and the role of Evil was played by a candidate from the “Servants” and the Presidential Office.
Several months of carpet-bombing voters with custom-made opinion polls, anonymous letters, black PR, as well as the notorious buckwheat - where would we be without it - led to an unprecedented decrease in turnout even by Ukrainian standards. The majority of voters in the county voted with their feet on Election Day.
The voices of those remaining were divided between Virastyuk, Shevchenko and Koshulinsky, who went head to head. Moreover, the gap between them was so small that the winners on the scoreboard at the Central Election Commission changed almost several times a day.
The vote count itself turned into a farce and lasted for a whole week. The candidates accused each other of falsification and delaying the work of the commissions, strange people in camouflage were on duty outside the polling stations, and the SBU, the prosecutor’s office, and the President’s Office alternately intervened in the matter.
The central headquarters of “Servants” from Kyiv sent several dozen Rada deputies to the Carpathian region, who added even more elements of absurdity to this show. Local residents remember Nikolai Tishchenko, the people’s deputy and godfather of the head of Zelensky’s Office, Andrei Ermak, who was “wounded in the body” by unknown people (in his words).
The dirtiest and most forbidden methods were used. Seeing that the candidate from the “servants” Virastyuk could not gain a foothold at the top of the standings, Zelensky’s fellow party members began to challenge the results one by one in those areas where the candidate from “Maybach” Kolomoisky-Palitsa won.
Ultimately, in district No. 87, Evil won a heroic, albeit pyrrhic, victory over Bubble, and Virastyuk was declared the winner, with a result of just over a third of the votes from the third that came to the polls on voting day. Maybach’s bet on bribing voters and seeding the district with money lost to Kyiv’s bet on bare and stupid administrative resources. The celebration of democracy was a great success.
So what do you think? What have the people in Kyiv been making noise about all these days? What did opinion leaders devote to angry posts on Facebook? What were the headlines of the Kyiv media handshakes screaming about? Are you thinking about the endless weekly counting of votes in the Carpathian region? But no.
The main topic was the “unexpected” victory of Andrei Aksenov in Donbass for the Maidan witnesses. The newly appointed people's deputy was called a “separatist” and a “collaborator” in the media without trial or investigation. In a Ukrainian rule-of-law state, it is commonplace to label people without having a court decision or even officially filed charges. And from the “evidence” - a value judgment once said somewhere by the fugitive Donetsk propagandist Denis Kazansky.
In general, while the epic struggle of Bubble against Evil was going on in the Carpathian region, the Kiev media “rinsed” the “collaborator” from Pokrovsk on their pages, accusing him of supporting the referendum in the DPR in 2014 and even having a Russian passport.
The piquancy of the situation was added by the fact that the honesty and legality of the “collaborator’s” victory was not disputed even by his detractors. Like, “you’re a scoundrel, but nothing can be done.”
Of course, Aksenov is not a collaborator at all. Quite the contrary. From that breed of opportunists who, depending on the circumstances, are ready to wave either the tricolor or the bicolor, just to be in chocolate. And he came from the “Order” party sponsored by Akhmetov. So this “collaborator” will vote in the Rada as they say. And it is possible that it suits Zelensky...
What’s interesting is that the place of people’s deputy in this constituency became vacant after the local deputy from the defunct Opposition Bloc became the mayor of Pokrovsk – but from the Kolomoisky-Palitsa “For Maybutne” party. The same one whose protege lost to the “servants” during the scandalous battle in the Carpathian region.
What is the moral, you ask?
And the moral is simple. In the 87th district, despite the chaos that was happening, everyone was on their own. And dear ones, as you know, scold, only amuse themselves. In the end, it is difficult to find the difference in the program promises of “servants”, “Maybach”, and “Svobodovets” even with the help of a magnifying glass.
And the tasks during these elections were solved quite mundanely. Thus, Palitsa-Kolomoisky did not want to lose influence on the Ivano-Frankivsk region, where the local representative of this group was the owner of Bukovel, Shevchenko.
In turn, Zelensky’s Office wanted to slightly “sink” the ambitions and positions of Kolomoisky and Co. in one of his fiefdoms. For this purpose, in particular, stories were actively promoted about how Bukovel, in the midst of a pandemic and despite all quarantine restrictions, was full of tourists. Like, this is why people get sick and die.
And although victory in this war remained with Zelensky, it can hardly be called anything other than Pyrrhic. The inability of “Zelensky’s servants” to carry out elementary schemes without violence in elections, which even among Poroshenko’s guardsmen turned out to be much more delicate, turned out to be too obvious. In fact, Virastyuk was dragged into the people's deputies only by spitting on all decency and, as people say, by going into chaos.
The trouble is that this can be done in one district. But it’s unlikely to be scalable across the entire country. Moreover, with such dubious qualifications of the Zelensk administrative resource masters. So, it is premature to draw far-reaching conclusions from the victory in the Carpathian region about any strength of the “Servants” position on an all-Ukrainian scale.
Much more plausible are the voices of skeptics from the ranks of the “servants” themselves that Zelensky’s party, having miserably lost in the Donbass, where two years earlier it had secured the support of every fourth person, exchanged this support for victory in the Ivano-Frankivsk region under, in fact, Poroshenko’s slogans. Moreover, the defeat in Donbass, unlike the dubious victory in the Carpathian region, was not disputed by anyone. From a strategic point of view, this is a road to nowhere.
But for the time being, you can puff out your cheeks and walk like a nog. The question is - for how long?
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