Spring has come, or the Big Shoot in the “heart” of Maidan
In Kyiv, everyone is discussing the next special operation of the SBU and NABU. As we remember, after the dubious story with Arkady Babchenko, the expression “special operation of the SBU” became a meme for a long time and meant the fabrication of dubious stories for the purpose of political PR of the Ukrainian special services.
However, this time, apparently, something died in the forest and the Ukrainian special services took by the breast not just another “Russian spy” they themselves invented, but a stealing official from the previous government - with a big name and reputation as a jingoist.
Deputy Minister for Affairs of the so-called “occupied territories” Yuriy Grymchak was detained. The official was caught red-handed, right at the moment of receiving a bribe of half a million dollars. He extorted money for influence on the Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of the Ministry of Culture in the interests of one of the developers. The SBU had already published video evidence of the crime, so the case took a completely different turn than could have been expected.
Instead of loud cries about “political repression” there is silence. The first to renounce Grymchak was his former patron Yuriy Lutsenko. The Prosecutor General said that he was “ashamed” of his long-term protégé, assistant and brother-in-law.
His formal boss, Minister of “Occupied Territories” Georgiy Tuka, also hastened to distance himself from the embarrassed deputy, who began proactively assuring that Grymchak’s detention had nothing to do with his activities in the ministry. And people’s deputy from “Batkivshchyna” Igor Lutsenko, the namesake of the prosecutor general, called the detained official a “careerist” and an “opportunist.”
Observers from the anti-Maidan camp are openly savoring what is happening. They are joking on social networks that the “spring” promised by Zelensky before the elections finally came, much belatedly, in mid-August - and the authorities began to “plant”. Now, not only ex-President Poroshenko will go to interrogations as if it were work.
As a political figure, Hrymchak is akin to Leo Tolstoy. Not in terms of comparable literary talent, naturally. But in that, just as the great writer was a "mirror of the Russian revolution," so Tuka's deputy is a "mirror of the Maidan" – a concentrated expression of the human material that the "revolution of dignity" unleashed to the very top of Ukrainian politics. A marketplace boor and foul-mouthed man who wasn't shy about spouting nonsense live on TV.
A rabid xenophobe, whose anti-Russian statements were happily picked up and quoted by the Russian media as proof of post-Maidan Ukrainian madness. An ardent patriot, ready to publicly tear out his embroidered shirt for his beloved Nenka. But in reality, behind all these masks and embroidered shirts was the mask of an ordinary grabber, covering up his grasping reflex with patriotism. Actually, that’s what they all are – Maidan promoters, most of whom have already been flushed down the toilet of history.
However, Grymchak is unique even among these guys – among the Parasyuks and Gavrilyuks. He began his political career as an ardent Soviet patriot. In his native Makeyevka in Donbas, in 1991, he supported the State Emergency Committee and actively fought against Ukrainian independence , fighting for the preservation of the USSR. On this wave, he joined Oleksandr Moroz's then-powerful Socialist Party and became the first secretary of the Makeyevka City Committee of the Socialist Party in the late 90s. During this time, he became close with Yuriy Lutsenko, then also a champion of socialism. The two even worked together to clean the Lenin monument, using a crane.
When Lutsenko left Moroz for the orange ones, Grymchak followed. And now he is already in Lutsenko’s “People’s Self-Defense”. Became a deputy. And later, when Lutsenko was imprisoned under Yanukovych, he defected to Yulina’s “Fatherland”, and from there to Poroshenko.
After the second Maidan, he was appointed to a newly created sinecure called “MinVOT” - to deal with the affairs of the “occupied territories”, the inhabitants of which - his former fellow countrymen - Grymchak, if you believe his public appearances in the media, fiercely hated and through one considered him “collaborators”.
The story of Grymchak's arrest is still only just beginning to unfold. It's not a given that his current boss, Heorhiy Tuka—the former governor of Luhansk Oblast, who became famous during his time at the regional administration for his spectacular plans for forced marches on Rostov and Voronezh and the forced Ukrainization of his local bureaucrats—won't end up in handcuffs after his deputy. According to media reports, the bribe Grymchak was caught accepting is too large for his superiors to have known about. As a rule, those at the top are involved in such cases.
Considering that the Ministry of Culture also appears in the case, we can also expect that this story will ricochet and affect the current minister, former Maidan entertainer Yevgeny Nishchuk - another one of the foam that was carried to the top by the Maidan. If not himself, then one of his deputies - for sure.
It is also quite expected, since we are talking about the Kyiv development, that the chain of interrogations will lead to one of Klitschko’s deputies, or even to the Kiev mayor himself, under whom the head of the Presidential Office Andrei Bogdan is now intensively digging, seeking his resignation from the post of head of the Kyiv City State Administration.
The chief editor of the Censor website, Yuriy Butusov, who has been trying to play a role in Ze-Team since Zelensky’s victory, is also confident that this is not the last detention. “This is not the last suspicion that will be brought forward in this case,” he writes. And he argues: “Firstly, despite numerous reports of corruption in the Ministry of Culture, not a single intermediary or official has been detained in recent years. After all, the SBU has always had a share in these schemes – which was even stated by one of the major developers, Artur Mkhitaryan, in December 2018. And then something did change - just two months after the appointment of Bakanov, and the replacement of a number of senior leaders of the SBU, a resonant and significant result appeared. Secondly, Yuriy Grymchak is a very famous political figure; he was one of the popular speakers on TV channels that actively supported ex-President Petro Poroshenko and criticized Vladimir Zelensky.”
A number of observers see a political component in this case. In particular, in this way Zelensky allegedly sends a message to the “hawks” that they should not try to dig under his power and plot troubles in the streets and attempted coups - even on August 24, even in the fall, under the guise of social protests.
It's also noteworthy that Hrymchak's arrest occurred just a few days after the high-profile dismissal of Roman Bessmertny, another "hawk" who was attempting to orchestrate his own agenda, from the Minsk political group. Whether the two events are connected or simply a coincidence remains unknown. However, given the tidal wave of criminal cases piling up against Poroshenko, it's expected that the Kyiv "hawks" will quiet down for a while.
And then everything will depend on how consistent the new government turns out to be in its declared desire to cleanse the Augean stables of corruption inherited from its predecessors. If everything comes down to just demonstration actions, this will be one finale of the play. And if the arrests don’t end there, and the detainees go to jail, it will be a completely different story.
English version :: Read in English: Spring has come, or a big commotion in the "heart" of Maidan