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As the coronavirus attacks the Ukrainian economy, a $5.5 billion package of I.M.F. is delayed due to transplant considerations.
By Andrew E. Kramer
MOSCOW — A former prime minister of Ukraine said the country’s anti-corruption reforms are at risk of stalling just as the government has asked for a significant expansion in foreign aid to prop up the economy because of coronavirus shutdowns.
The Ukrainian government has already devoted itself largely to foreign aid to end Russia’s military intervention, a factor that has become the center of political trial hearings in the United States last fall after President Trump rejected U.S. aid. Now he’s asking for an investment because of the virus.
Much of Ukraine’s aid, a $5.5 billion package from the International Monetary Fund, is linked to the assembly’s anti-corruption criteria. They slipped, asking for help at a precarious time.
Oleksiy Honcharuk, the former prime minister, said in an interview that President Volodymyr Zelensky fired him and the maximum of his wardrobe earlier this month after he crossed the interests of a clique of ukrainian economy experts.
“Our dismissal is mostly linked to our systematic fight opposed to corruption,” Honcharuk said of his understanding of why he fired. “We interfere with many ongoing corruption schemes” and “not everyone is satisfied with that,” he said.
Zelensky, a former comedian, won a landslide victory in the presidential election just under a year ago after promising to break control of the oligarchs, the experts who ruled Ukraine’s politics and economy since the country declared independence in 1991.
The general public was noted as Ukraine’s most productive possibility in decades to eliminate countless schemes for theft of public funds. But Zelensky’s close ties to an influential oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, have raised suspicions that he would possibly be under pressure.
Honcharuk said Zelensky’s commitment to fighting corruption is now in doubt and that the president had been stressed to remove the government earlier this month due to the negative policy of his paintings on oligarch-owned television channels.
In one statement, Zelensky praised Honcharuk for his “zero tolerance for corruption,” but said he had not promoted the law well in Parliament or coordinated between departments, and that he had not prepared for the coronavirus pandemic.
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