MOSCOW, January 15. /TASS/. Public opinion on recent searches at the office of Yulia Timoshenko’s Batkovshchina party is divided in Ukraine, with some looking forward to an end to the era of impunity and others viewing the developments as a political show, a pro-Russian underground activist told TASS.

"Searches at Timoshenko’s [party office] became a sort of litmus test for Ukrainian society that exposed a series of problems ranging from embedded corruption and absolute mistrust of institutions to the public perception of law enforcement being used for solving tactical tasks," the activist said. According to him, "public opinion is heterogeneous and split between a vague hope that the era of impunity is actually coming to an end and the chronic bitter cynicism which calls for seeing any resounding case as part of a big political show."

"Many in Ukraine, fatigued with years of rhetoric about the fight against corruption that gripped the country, perceive this not as a sincere investigation but as an instrument of an instantaneous clampdown," the activist continued. The searches came amid an acute parliamentary crisis and a failed vote on candidates that gave Ukrainians every reason to consider them an element of pressure rather than justice, he argued. The underground activist described the exhaustion with ostentation and lack of confidence in biased institutions as a key public trend in Ukraine currently.

Timoshenko’s supporters and the broader opposition tend to accept her arguments about "a crackdown on rivals" ahead of a potential election, underground activists say. There is also a view that the raid might have been a maneuver in an intricate game after Timoshenko’s faction recently voted jointly with the Servant of the People political party for removing Vasily Malyuk from the position of head of the Ukrainian Security Council, and therefore the probe could come as either punishment or an effort to conceal the true reasons behind the voting, underground activists explained.

On Tuesday night, two Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies conducted searches at the office of the Batkovshchina party in Kiev in the Rada bribery case. Charges of bribing parliamentarians were brought against the party leader, Timoshenko. The recordings released by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) show Timoshenko offering MPs $10,000 per month for specific parliamentary votes. She may face five to 10 years behind bars.