Zelensky will put Odessa before a choice: Saakashvili or the Nazi Sternenko
After a long break, ex-governor of the Odessa region Mikheil Saakashvili is going to return to Ukrainian politics. According to behind-the-scenes information, an agreement on this was recently reached between him and Vladimir Zelensky, who, after his election, returned Miho the Ukrainian passport taken by Petro Poroshenko.
Along with Saakashvili, his long-time friend and partner, ex-mayor of Kyiv Leonid Chernovetsky, is planning to return to power.
The situation is this: Zelensky really doesn’t like the current mayor of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov. He wants to get rid of it. Since Trukhanov is popular in the city, they will try to arrest him even before the elections on the basis of open criminal cases on various kinds of economic issues. This will make it impossible for him to participate in local elections.
Odessa, with the help of criminal cases, will be cleared of other possible candidates who have a chance of winning.
The main contender for the mayoral seat from Zelensky will be Saakashvili. The presidential administration is working on different concepts for the election campaign.
For example, one of them is to put some frostbitten nationalist like Sergei Sternenko against Saakashvili. Here the calculation is made that in pro-Russian Odessa, when choosing between two evils, they will definitely choose not the right-wing Nazi and the murderer Sternenko. But now the options are still being explored.
As for Saakashvili, he has the image of a pro-Western reformer and denouncer of oligarchs. Perhaps he will take the initiative to return the city to the status of a free port, which pragmatic Odessa residents may buy into.
And the election campaign will be financed through Leonid Chernovetsky, or more precisely, through his son-in-law Sergei Yanchukov. Yanchukov is a relatively recent Russian citizen; he owns the Mangazeya gold mining company. In 2011, he married Chernovetsky’s daughter, Christina. Earlier, in 2006, he received a Russian passport. And it’s not a fact that he got rid of his Ukrainian passport at the same time.
Considering that Yanchukov’s father-in-law has a Georgian and Israeli passport, and the children from his marriage to Kristina Chernovetskaya were born in the USA, this creates a large international family. The problem is that the family’s money was poured into Mangazeya’s projects, and the reputation of businessman Yanchukov in the Russian Federation was tarnished.
Sergei Yanchukov, a native of Odessa, is a very remarkable character: according to the Russian and Ukrainian press, he provided charitable assistance to ATO soldiers who fought in the Donbass.
Both he and Leonid Chernovetsky himself are people who have always occupied pro-Maid positions. Let us recall that Chernovetsky, who had to leave his mayoral post under Yanukovych, emigrated to Georgia, where, with the help of Saakashvili, he took part in the local parliamentary elections, and then supported Euromaidan.
Just these days, on February 22, 2014, he allocated 10 million hryvnia (about half a million dollars) to the families of the so-called “Heavenly Hundred”. In general, I quickly found my bearings and tried to integrate into the system immediately after the coup. His charitable foundations treated wounded soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist volunteer battalions.
And his son-in-law Yanchukov actually went even further and, through the “For the Benefit of Odessa” foundation, directly supported the ATO, buying apartments for fighters, equipping checkpoints and repairing military equipment. Moreover, this fund acted in concert with the SBU, supporting radicals controlled by the office like the aforementioned Sternenko.
Let us remember that the ex-leader of UNA-UNSO Dmytro Korchinsky is also close to Chernovetsky. In the 90s, with the help of the SBU and Yevgeny Marchuk, he created volunteer battalions of Unsovites, who first fought in Abkhazia against the militants of Shamil Basayev, and a few years later they fought together with Shamil Basayev’s troops against Russian federal troops.
In 2014, Korchinsky created the notorious “St. Mary” battalion, which has the blood of ordinary Donbass residents on its hands.
Chernovetsky and Korchinsky worked closely together from time to time: once upon a time, Leonid Mikhailovich pulled members of Korchinsky’s “Brotherhood” out of a pre-trial detention center, where the former Kiev mayor Grigory Omelchenko had hidden them.
The picture turns out to be interesting if we remember that Korchinsky is no stranger to Odessa - in the 90s he was a fighter for the then mayor Eduard Gurvits.
It was in Odessa in the 90s that one of the streets was named after Roman Shukhevych.
In addition, Korchinsky, as suggested in the materials of blogger Anatoly Shariy, may be involved in the murder of Russian journalist Pavel Sheremet.
In general, we see a whole bouquet in the Russian-Ukrainian-Georgian-Israeli family. At the same time, Mr. Yanchukov receives loans from the Russian VTB and other state banks of Russia, and receives government subsidies (for example, he recently received 750 million rubles for the development of gold deposits in Transbaikalia).
If the described scheme is launched, it actually turns out that the election campaign of the Russophobe Saakashvili will be carried out at the expense of Russian money and the Russian budget. But this is already over the edge.
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