“Painful Compromises” of Local Oligarchs

UKRAINE - In Brief 08 Jan 2017 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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On Dec. 29th 2016, Viktor Pinchuk, local oligarch and son-in-law of ex-President Leonid Kuchma made a real coming out on pages of WSJ with an article ‘Ukraine Must Make Painful Compromises for Peace With Russia’. The name of the article tells for itself. Mr. Pinchuk suggests accepting agenda that Moscow imposes: temporarily eliminate European Union membership from our stated goals, forget about Crimea for 15-20 years, accept local elections on occupied territories, put aside NATO as priority, ask for security guarantees, and cancel sanctions on Russia. It’s an apparent attempt of an oligarch, who invested millions into election campaign of Hillary Clinton, to build some relations with Trump administration. I’m not sure about value of this article for Trump but it already triggered a storm of indignation in Ukraine. Over the last fifteen years Pinchuk have been investing heavily into his reputation of philanthropist – supported education, art exhibitions, arranged different conferences etc. He indeed looked differently compared to Akhmetov, Fitrash, Kolomoyskiy and other ‘hard core’ oligarchs. After the article in WSJ everything changed – it looks that for local opinion makers the proposals to compromise with Russia is even more evil than idea of Akhmetov to legalize trade with occupied territories. I can hardly describe the scale of criticism that Pinchuk faced in Ukraine. Reaction of both civil society and President Office was very harsh. President Poroshenko said he will boycott Ukrainian lunch in Davos that Pinchuk organizes (World Economic Forum will take place in Davos on Jan 17-22). What does it mean in terms of our prospects? We see a clear cut tendency of dimin...