Ukraine hasn’t ousted all its pro-Russia politicians — for good reason

A Feb. 18, 2022, fistfight on Ukraine’s most popular political talk show punched through simmering internal tensions just six days before Russian President Vladimir Putin began his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When Nestor Shufrych, a member of the Ukrainian parliament in the pro-Russia Opposition Platform For Life (OPZZh) party, refused to call Putin a “murderer and a criminal,” his fellow panelists had had enough. Journalist Yuriy Butusov slugged Shufrych before the two squared up and tackled each other to the ground, on live TV, as former President Petro Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk looked on. Battered and bruised, Shufrych amazingly finished the show.

Perhaps more amazingly, after more than one year of the death, destruction and atrocities wrought by Russian forces in Ukraine, Shufrych and his pro-Russia cadres still sit in the Ukrainian parliament. That pro-Moscow lawmakers remain as members of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada while the country fights for its survival from Russian invaders is one of Ukraine’s least understood and most bizarre stories of the past year.

Paradoxically, Moscow-friendly lawmakers’ continued presence in parliament is an unexpected example of the strength of Ukraine’s democracy.

Understandably desperate to rid the government of potential Russian collaborators, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration so far has avoided the temptation to unilaterally strip pro-Russia MPs of their mandates. It would have been popular, though unconstitutional, to oust politicians widely seen as traitors from their official positions by presidential decree. Instead, authorities in Kyiv are applying a lighter touch to legally dismantle Russia’s longstanding fifth column in Ukrainian politics.

Perhaps Western observers shouldn’t be surprised that Shufrych and his ideological brethren are still present in Ukrainian politics. Kyiv’s pro-Russia camp may be generously described as a gaggle of political survivors — willing to regroup and rebrand as much as necessary to maintain political influence. Ukraine’s politics have changed massively since the 2013-14 EuroMaidan protests that ousted pro-Russia president Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian military began its war against Ukraine in Crimea and Donbas. And yet, Moscow-friendly political parties remain a loathsome but longstanding staple of the country’s political climate.

Before EuroMaidan, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions was genuinely popular, holding the most seats in parliament at the time. When Yanukovych eventually fled the country, the party morphed into the Opposition Bloc under the guidance of Paul Manafort — who later became Donald Trump’s presidential campaign manager — and held on to roughly 10 percent of seats in parliament. 

In 2019, Viktor Medvedchuk, the godfather of Putin’s daughter, co-founded OPZZh, a more hardline iteration of the Opposition Bloc, with pro-Russia politician Yuriy Boyko and oligarchs Vadym Rabynovych and Dmytro Firtash. OPZZh became the dominant pro-Russia party in Ukraine and built out a solid parliamentary faction in the 2019 parliamentary elections that won 43 of 423 seats.

When Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, many of OPZZh’s rank-and-file members, such as Shufrych, fled Ukraine to Europe and the Middle East. In April 2022, Ukrainian defense authorities suspended OPZZh on suspicion of treason and the party looked to be dead in the water. Pro-Russia political leaders certainly were — Rabinovych was among the first MPs to be stripped of his citizenship and then his parliamentary mandate. Authorities captured Medvedchuk trying to escape to Russia in April, exchanged him in a prisoner swap in September, and then stripped him and others of their status in January 2023.

While Shufrych himself was detained on suspicion of treason in March, he and his lesser-known colleagues stayed on as members of parliament. The paper trail documenting Medvedchuk’s treasonous activities in Ukraine was long, but the average pro-Russia MP hadn’t spent decades openly cavorting with Putin, as Medvedchuk had. Looking back, it appears authorities in Kyiv initially lacked the hard evidence to charge most of these pro-Russia MPs in the first months of the full-scale war.

Meanwhile, Boyko, Shufrych and company quietly rebranded themselves under the guise of two new nominally pro-West political parties: twenty-three MPs joined the Platform for Life and Peace (PZZhM) and 17 joined Restoration of Ukraine (VU), some of whom trickled back to Ukraine in the fall of 2022 and winter of 2023. Both parties are made up of former OPZZh MPs, who appear to have changed their tone; PZZhM says it consists of “pro-Ukrainian people’s deputies willing to work for protecting Ukraine, helping the people, and rebuilding our country.” The leaders of the VU claimed a new focus on supporting Ukrainian reconstruction.

While it’s difficult to tell how much these “new” parties’ politics actually has changed, much of their funding has dried up. Medvedchuk and his business partner, Taras Kozak, financed OPZZh and, in turn, the party had advocated openly pro-Moscow positions. With Moscow’s two top puppets sanctioned for treason, any MP found taking money from Medvedchuk and Kozak would be arrested and likely to lose their mandate. This has left the more moderate Boyko in charge of PZZhM, bereft of the huge resources the party once enjoyed and eager to secure any political friendships he can.

Even so, many Ukrainian MPs rightly take issue with their ex-OPZZh colleagues keeping their positions in parliament under the guise of new political stripes. In January, a lawmaker in Zelensky’s ruling Servant of the People (SN) faction started a petition to the Speaker of Parliament to unilaterally oust MPs who were elected under the now-banned OPZZh mandate, such as Shufrych. The move was loudly supported by Ukraine’s Western reform-minded Holos party and former president Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party. Interestingly, the petition created a small split in the dominant SN faction — more than 25 parliamentarians signed the petition, but party leadership opted to not sign it.

The petition eventually made it to Zelensky’s desk, who surprisingly refused to kick the pro-Russia MPs out of parliament. Zelensky pointed to Ukraine’s constitution, which states that an MP can lose their mandate only if they give up their parliamentary status voluntarily; are found guilty of a crime; are stripped of citizenship; refuse to represent their party in parliament; become incapacitated; or die. The remaining MPs met none of those conditions, so Zelensky sent the petition back to the Rada.

The effort to remove pro-Russia MPs from parliament briefly turned the tables in Ukrainian national politics. The pro-reform parties that so often lobbed accusations of authoritarianism at Zelensky for allegedly centralizing power found themselves asking the president to sidestep the constitution to oust colleagues widely regarded as traitors. And Zelensky, who indeed at times has moved to concentrate authority in a close circle of advisers, this time stood back and upheld the letter of the constitution — even as he himself stridently leads Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression.

Some commentators in Kyiv speculate that keeping PZZhM and VU lawmakers in parliament helps Zelensky’s allies in parliament. PZZhM and VU sit with SN in parliament and frequently abstain entirely from voting, diluting the proportion of votes against SN bills. But that theory looks implausible — Zelensky’s government recently ramped up criminal corruption investigations into pro-Russia MPs, leading to the resignation of two of VU’s co-leaders and putting the party on the brink of collapse. At Zelensky’s direction, Speaker of the Parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk also has worked to secure resignations from two former OPZZh MPs who had not sat in the Rada for months.

It appears that rather than allowing pro-Russia politics to fester in parliament, Ukrainian authorities are working to legally oust politicians who are friendly to Moscow. As their numbers dwindle, the remaining Moscow-friendly MPs likely will feel even more pressure to moderate their politics, lest they become further irrelevant.

Ukraine is fighting for its very existence in the face of Russia’s aggression. Yet it is possible that Ukraine is currently paying salaries to dozens of parliamentarians who later may be charged with treason for sabotaging their country.

While this may seem absurd, allowing pro-Russia politicians to keep their mandates for the time being is a hugely positive signal for Ukrainian democracy. It proves that rule of law, due process, and freedom of speech matter in Ukraine, no matter an individual’s political beliefs or treasonous activities. The alternative — cutting constitutional corners for political expediency — would cause long-term damage to the political institutions Ukraine has worked so hard to create and safeguard.

When Russia’s war in Ukraine ends, Ukrainian politics will still be hyper-competitive and political corruption will still exist. But the brutality of Russia’s full-scale invasion and Ukrainians’ collective defense of their country mean that it will be difficult for pro-Russia parties to win elections at any level. If Ukraine can properly consign Kremlin influence in its politics to the past, the country’s post-war democratic prospects look bright.

Andrew D’Anieri is assistant director at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Follow him on Twitter at @andrew_danieri.