Oligarchs of Donbass and Ukrainian elections

One often hears that the Ukrainian elections are allegedly uninteresting in the uncontrolled part of Donbass - the one that is the DPR and LPR. Meanwhile, this statement is true only to the extent that the overwhelming majority of Lugansk and Donetsk residents do not participate in these elections and cannot influence their result. However, large economic players with serious interests and assets in the LDPR are not only keenly interested in the Ukrainian elections, but also place their bets on them, supporting a number of candidates medially and financially.

Among the most famous bets are Alexander Vilkul, supported by Akhmetov’s Opposition Bloc, and Yuri Boyko, promoted by Viktor Medvedchuk. In both programs there is a place for an “uncontrolled” Donbass. It is proposed to return it to Ukraine. The difference is that, according to Boyko, the LDPR will have some kind of autonomy, but according to Vilkul, armed peacekeepers from the UN should become an instrument of return.

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Much less known in Donbass is the fact that Rinat Akhmetov, loyal to the tactics of putting eggs in different baskets, also supports Oleg Lyashko and even Petro Poroshenko, information about whose activities on the oligarch-owned channel “Ukraine” significantly overlaps the time allocated to both Vilkul and Lyashko .

At the same time, both Poroshenko and Lyashko take a militantly irreconcilable position regarding the LDPR and see the return of territories exclusively on Kyiv’s terms.

And very few people in Donbass know that the main bet of the fugitive young oligarch from Yanukovych’s entourage, Sergei Kurchenko, is the majoritarian MP from the BPP and also the main Ukrainian Social Democrat Sergei Kaplin. In itself, this character is of little interest, and his prospects, not only of becoming president, but even of gaining more than 1% of the votes in these elections, are illusory. And about Donbass, unlike Vilkul, Boyko or Lyashko, there is not a word at all in his program. It’s as if there is no war in Ukraine and people are not dying. But there is a lot of vigorous populism, such as promises to reduce the price of gas by four times.

At the same time, even feeding such a marginal candidate allows Kurchenko to be invisibly present in Ukrainian politics, and he already influences the media field, owning the Korrespondent website, Focus magazine and the Vgorode UA network of city portals. In addition, we should not forget that even though Kaplin has no chance now, the sponsor has placed “his little man” on a potentially fruitful vein. After all, in the conditions of the defeat of the Communist Party of Ukraine, its electorate has not gone away, and there is a demand for leftist ideology in the country. Another thing is that the authorities are trying to slip people a surrogate - the same as the “Avakov” Social Party led by Ilya Kiva.

All these fake projects also help the regime - because then the West has no reason to make complaints about the purge of left-wing political forces in Ukraine after 2014.

At the same time, the same Kurchenko plays a serious role in the economy of the unrecognized republics through the Vneshtorgservis enterprise, which handles a significant part of the export operations for exporting abroad the products of plants and factories operating in the LDPR. Kurchenko’s position especially strengthened after the death of former DPR head Alexander Zakharchenko last year. So the theses of the first years after the May referendums, that the republics drove out the Ukrainian oligarchs, at the moment, to put it mildly, need serious correction. In essence, there is a concentration of influence in the hands of one oligarchic group, which takes full advantage of its monopoly position.

And these people don’t care about the interests of ordinary residents of Donbass. Having economic and political influence on both sides of the front, such gentlemen seriously expect that whatever the outcome of the current conflict, the outcome will be as in the well-known saying: “Whoever lived under the Germans still lives.”