January 17, 2005, 19:54 Politics

Thirty thousand prime ministers alone!

Ilya Zhegulev The beginning of consideration of Viktor Yanukovych's complaint about the annulment of the re-vote does not bode well for him. The court excluded a number of key claims from the complaint and twice refused to disqualify the judge. However, Yushchenko also had a serious problem - Yulia Tymoshenko liked to solve issues with the help of the street.

Viktor Yanukovych is represented at the trial by sixteen people, including six deputies of the Verkhovna Rada and three Swiss lawyers. The defendants are five members of the Central Election Commission , including Andrei Magera and Ruslan Knyazevich, who acted as witnesses in the Supreme Court a month and a half ago, when Viktor Yushchenko filed an identical complaint about the results of the second round of the presidential election . Familiar faces are also present on Yushchenko’s side, these are Nikolai Katerynchuk (it was on his complaint that the Supreme Court canceled the results of the second round) and Yushchenko’s representative in the Central Election Commission, deputy Yuri Klyuchkovsky.

Let us remind you that on Friday Yanukovych’s headquarters filed the most extensive complaint in the history of Ukrainian jurisprudence with the Supreme Court: 621 volumes of materials and 233 videotapes with evidence of violations. The ex-candidate and ex-prime minister demands to cancel the decision of the Central Election Commission to recognize Viktor Yushchenko as the winner of the re-vote of the second round of elections and to call new presidential elections.

The Supreme Court accepted the complaint for consideration, but excluded several points from it, since Yanukovych’s complaint included demands on which decisions had already been made.

The court also returned all the videotapes to the headquarters, refusing to consider them as evidence. In response, Yanukovych accused the judges of bias and double standards. At the same time, the ex-prime minister said that he would not withdraw his complaint.

The meeting began with a petition from Yanukovych's lawyers to challenge judge Liliya Grigorieva. As stated by deputy Vladimir Zayets , by deciding to exclude part of the requirements from the applicant’s complaint, she violated procedural norms. However, after a short deliberation, the court rejected the petition.

Then the Supreme Court allowed Swiss lawyers to participate in the trial, despite the demand of the lawyers of Viktor Yushchenko’s headquarters not to allow them to appear in court. Now the work of the court will noticeably slow down: lawyers communicate with the court in French, the court answers them in Ukrainian, a translator works in both directions, and all this takes a lot of time. The Swiss immediately tried to take the initiative into their own hands and filed another petition to disqualify Judge Grigorieva, since, in their opinion, she was allegedly biased towards the conduct of this trial. The Supreme Court of Ukraine again refused.

After this, the indignant representative of Yanukovych, Taras Chornovil, decided to challenge the entire composition of the Judicial Chamber for Civil Cases of the Supreme Court.

He called the refusal to satisfy requests to disqualify judge Liliya Grigorieva, as well as Natalya Vitrenko’s refusal to involve her in the process as an interested party, groundless. According to him, “there are real circumstances indicating bias” in the chamber. The matter has not yet reached the consideration of the complaint on its merits.

While the Supreme Court decides the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, the Prosecutor General's Office continues to deal with his supporters from southeastern Ukraine, who threatened to secede. In the case of an encroachment on the territorial integrity of Ukraine, the Prosecutor General's Office has already summoned the former head of the state administration of the Kharkov region Evgeniy Kushnarev , the mayor of Odessa Ruslan Bodelan, the heads of the state administrations of the Lugansk and Donetsk regions Alexander Efremov and Anatoly Bliznyuk. And today, for three and a half hours, prosecutors talked with the head of the Donetsk Regional Council, Boris Kolesnikov .

As stated in the press service of the regional council, Kolesnikov is a witness in this case and, perhaps, the case will soon be closed, “since there is no fact of a crime and there is no reason to punish anyone.” After statements from the Prosecutor General's Office about opening criminal cases, the separatists made a sharp reverse move: on December 10, they temporarily suspended the holding of local referendums, and the referendum planned for January 9 on granting the Donetsk region the status of an independent entity within the federation was canceled by Kolesnikov himself.

However, it still cannot be said that everything has calmed down in Ukraine.

Despite the order of Viktor Yushchenko, his supporters from the tent city are not going to leave Khreshchatyk. An important person, called the “chief of security of the zero perimeter of the camp,” Viktor Borsuk, said that people intend to stay on Khreshchatyk until the inauguration. Many of them simply do not believe that Yushchenko’s signature on the statement released on January 14 is real. “Let Yushchenko personally come and tell us about this,” Borsuk demanded.

And here, in addition to the supporters of Yushchenko and Yanukovych, a new force has appeared in Ukraine. On Sunday, two thousand supporters of Yulia Tymoshenko held a rally in support of her appointment as prime minister.

Tymoshenko herself does not hide that she wants to become prime minister, and predicts the approval of her candidacy by the Verkhovna Rada. Businessman, deputy and deputy head of Yushchenko’s headquarters Petro Poroshenko , who said last night that he would not mind taking this post, does not hide his plans for this seat. , does not agree to any other portfolio other than the prime minister’s The “moral authority of the revolution”, socialist leader Alexander Moroz . This was reported by his associate and people's tribune Yuriy Lutsenko. In addition to these three contenders, there is one more - Yushchenko himself named the leader of the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs Anatoly Kinakh , who has also already been prime minister, as a possible candidate. Kinakh, like the three other contenders, actively supported Yushchenko throughout the Orange Revolution. Yushchenko, who won the election, had very little time left to finally decide on the head of government, and Tymoshenko’s supporters (and perhaps she herself), judging by recent events, decided to help Yushchenko make the right choice.