'Mr. Saakashvili spoke of post-Soviet malaise, of kleptocrats and party hacks who steal the people’s money and hope. The crowd soon warmed to his heavily accented Russian. Given the anger at corruption, it seemed to work.''President Petro O. Poroshenko’s appointment of Mr. Saakashvili and a number of foreign technocrats created tension between anticorruption forces and those who want to respect a tacit agreement made with the country’s business elite in exchange for their support against pro-Russian forces.
The tension surfaced again on Tuesday when Ukraine’s economic minister resigned to protest pressure on his ministry from an oligarchic businessman with ties to Mr. Poroshenko.
The minister, Aivaras Abromavicius, a Lithuanian and one of the foreign technocrats appointed to root out corruption, said that a businessman, Ihor Kononenko, had lobbied to have his loyalists appointed managers of a government-owned ammonia fertilizer company to skim off the profits.
“I don’t want to be a smoke screen for obvious corruption or a marionette for those who want to return control in the old style,” he said.
The United States ambassador, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, posted on Twitter in support of the aggrieved minister, calling him one of the country’s “great champions of reform,” as the gap widened between Ukraine’s oligarchs and a Western-backed, reformist wing of the government.
Standing astride that chasm is Mr. Saakashvili, one of the post-Soviet era’s most contentious and best-known politicians in the region, a graduate of Columbia Law School who came to power in his native Georgia after the bloodless Rose Revolution in 2003. So impressed were Western politicians that Mr. Saakashvili once joked that when he walked through Congress he turned more heads than Britney Spears.
..
Mr. Saakashvili, a shrewd politician with a populist streak, has set about organizing rallies around Ukraine to build a grass-roots anti-oligarch movement called Cleaning Up Ukraine. And he started the movement, pointedly, here in Mr. Avakov’s hometown, Kharkiv, in January.
“What I hear from Ukrainians, unfortunately, is it’s never been this bad in Ukraine,” Mr. Saakashvili told the crowd in Kharkiv. “We need to change this government. Who do we need to change it for? For us, for you and for me.”
Mr. Saakashvili spoke of post-Soviet malaise, of kleptocrats and party hacks who steal the people’s money and hope. The crowd soon warmed to his heavily accented Russian. Given the anger at corruption, it seemed to work.
The oligarchs who feed the rotten politics of Ukraine, even now, he said, must go. People chanted and cheered.
Afterward, Mr. Saakashvili waded into the crowd. The poor and elderly in frayed sweaters and cheap overcoats pressed in, asking him to lead them out of the mess.
Women sidled up to snap pictures. In the swirl, Mr. Saakashvili smiled and soaked up the attention. “He’s our last chance!” somebody yelled.'
- Andrew E. Kramer,
Railing Against Graft, a Georgian Leads Calls for a Cleanup in Ukraine, February 03, 2016
Context(Ukraine) - 'If they let big fish get caught, those people will start to speak''Ukraine's .. Stalled Reforms'