As horrible as the attack on Gusovsky was, it represents just the tip of the iceberg. Since the beginning of 2017, more than fifty-five attacks have occurred against anticorruption activists and now reform-minded politicians.
And to make matters worse, not only are the perpetrators rarely caught (they were in Gusovsky's case), but Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko—perhaps giving new meaning to the word chutzpah—actually blamed activists for their suffering, implying that civil society's noisy criticism of Ukraine's corrupt old guard was a major contributing factor to the violence directed against them.[...]
Not everyone sees a direct tie to the elections, however. Some argue that post-Maidan Ukraine's inability to fundamentally reform the police, prosecutors, and judicial system has allowed corrupt local mafia clans which thrived under former President Yanukovych to bounce back and act with impunity. And when it comes to Odesa, reformist MP Mustafa Nayyem even warned that national security concerns are at stake and that the Ukrainian state risks seeing the city slip under the control of Russian-supported local elites around Odesa's notoriously corrupt mayor Gennady Trukhanov.[...]
For starters, the West should use its financial leverage against Kyiv and make clear to Poroshenko and those around him that unless they start solving the assaults against anticorruption activists, the financial spigot will be turned off.
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