KIEV, March 21. /TASS/. The statement by Ukrainian General Prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko about US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch handing him a list of ‘untouchable’ individuals that should not be prosecuted couldn’t have emerged without President Pytor Poroshenko’s prior consent, Director of the Ukrainian Institute for Analysis and Management of Policy Ruslan Bortnik said in an interview with TASS. The expert believes that Poroshenko’s team willingly aggravated relations with ex-President Obama’s faction of the US establishment in order to try to strengthen relations with President Trump’s current administration.
"Yes, this [Lutsenko’s statement] can worsen relations between Poroshenko and his team on the one hand, and a section of American political elite on the other. However, the statement issued by Yovanovitch shows that they have already hit rock bottom, there’s nothing to lose anymore and they have crossed the Rubicon. In doing so, the Ukrainian authorities are, possibly, trying to find an understanding with the Trump administration on the grounds of at least having common enemies," Bortnik pointed out.
"Kiev hopes that Marie Yovanovitch is a weak figure as she was appointed back when Obama held office. The US wanted to remove her for a long time, and her mandate in Ukraine expires in a few months. She doesn’t represent the Trump team and, to a certain extent, she is connected to the scandal around Trump’s ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort," the expert presumes. "At some point, it might be even revealed that the Manafort case itself was orchestrated in Ukraine by Yovanovitch or her predecessor rather than the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. In other words, it wasn’t the Ukrainian authorities who supported Hillary Clinton, but rather US diplomats ordered them to do so," Bortnik emphasized.
Scandal as a political tool
The expert pointed out that Poroshenko’s team lost its authority a long time ago in the eyes of that faction of American elite linked to the US Ambassador Yovanovitch. He reiterated that last week the diplomat criticized the corruption scandal in the Ukrainian defense industry, as well as the Supreme Court’s decision to decriminalize illegal enrichment. "In fact, Yovanovitch has openly said that Ukraine is a corrupt country and Kiev is to blame, while Lutsenko responded that problems do exist, but it’s Yovanovitch’s fault since she herself encourages corruption," Bortnik believes, labelling this exchange between the officials as ‘finger-pointing’.
In any case, he stressed, Lutsenko’s claim about the Ambassador’s list tells us that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor has violated the law. "If the general prosecutor of any country received such a document, firstly they would initiate a criminal investigation into such illegal intervention into the operation of a public state agency and would hand the case over to the Interior Ministry, which would be obliged to summon the ambassador to explain that such actions are incompatible with one’s diplomatic status," Bortnik explained. However, this didn’t happen and "the story that was long shelved is now being used as a political tool," the expert concluded.
Earlier, Lutsenko said in an interview with the US-based The Hill.tv channel that in his first meeting with the US Ambassador to Ukraine she handed him a list of ‘untouchable’ individuals that should not be prosecuted. According to Lutsenko, he said that "it is inadmissible " and that "nobody in this country, neither our president nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime." Moreover, he lamented that his agency hadn’t gotten the $4 million that the US Embassy in Ukraine had promised to allocate to his office. Lustenko said the funds were "never received."
In response to these remarks, the US Embassy in Ukraine slammed Lutsenko’s allegation about receiving a list of "untouchables" as false, and the State Department branded his claim as "an outright fabrication.".