For many years, oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, 67, was the main bridge between Vladimir Putin and Kiev’s politics. The businessman in the media and energy sectors, Ukraine’s 12th richest person according to Forbes, had – and still has – direct access to the Russian president thanks also to a personal relationship: the two are cronies.
Putin sponsored Medvedchuk’s youngest, Darina. He has been seen in the oligarch’s luxurious mansion and vice versa. What made this millionaire gain prominence was his pro-Moscow and anti-Western stance, increasingly rare in the Eastern European country, but central to the Russian leader’s agenda.
Had it been another time, Medvedchuk could be pointed out as one of the Kremlin’s main bets to take over a puppet government in Kiev — or, at least, a key post in the administration, as he has already done. Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, Putin’s friend is isolated, in the crosshairs of justice and seeing his party, the Opposition Platform, dehydrate with each election poll.
Medvedchuk has entered the crosshairs of what analysts have described as an attempt at Ukrainian deoligarchization promoted by Volodymyr Zelensky, elected as an outsider and who now presides over a country at the center of Europe’s most serious security crisis since World War II. The move would be linked more to diplomatic nods to US President Joe Biden than to a moral agenda.
The businessman has seen a series of setbacks come knocking on his door recently: in February 2021, he and his wife, Oksana, had their assets frozen for three years due to suspicions that they had taken advantage of the conflict in the Donbass region to profit by selling coal to Moscow. An oil pipeline was also nationalized, which according to Kiev would be connected to it — Medvedchuk denies it.
Three TV channels on the businessman’s network were also blocked, said Zelensky, to “fight the danger of Russian aggression in the information arena” and “protect national security.” Medvedchuk accuses the president of stifling press freedom.
Finally, in May, under suspicion that he financed separatist fighters and looted state resources from the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula, came the decree of house arrest. The oligarch was indicted on charges of treason.
The US responded to the sanctions. The American Embassy in Kiev said it was an “effort to protect sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Medvedchuk, by the way, has been under Washington sanctions since 2014 — Americans are banned from doing business with him and his money in the country has been frozen. At the time, the Obama administration accused him of instigating conflicts between nationalists and separatists in the Kherson region, now taken by Russian troops.
The oligarch, however, fled his home, a place designated for house arrest, as soon as the war broke out, the government said on the 27th. by nationalists who reject his pro-Russian agenda, but there has been no news of his whereabouts since. His social media is silent.
From the internet, by the way, it is possible to capture the subjects that Medvedchuk tries to insert in the public debate. On Twitter, a platform on which he describes himself only as a “politician” – he is a member of the Rada, the Parliament -, five issues are interspersed: requests for Zelensky’s resignation, the clamor for an early legislative election, the defense that the country move away from NATO, the western military alliance, and towards Russia and, finally, arguments in favor of the implementation of the Minsk Accords.
Medvedchuk has been close to Putin since the early 2000s, when he served as chief of staff to President Leonid Kuchma, the second elected leader of independent Ukraine. Putin, by then, was already in power in Russia. But the oligarch’s role in politics soared to another level more than a decade later, amid the fall of pro-Moscow leader Viktor Yushchenko and the war in Crimea.
Because of his ties to Putin, he served as a diplomatic liaison between Kiev and Moscow. He even served as the special envoy of Ukraine’s security service for humanitarian issues. From that period, he boasts of having freed more than 480 prisoners of war — the information could not be independently confirmed.
Hence Medvedchuk’s emphatic defense of the Minsk Accords, treaties aimed at a ceasefire for the 2014 crisis, but which never fully entered into force or ended tensions. “Implementation is an urgent matter, and I want to believe that the West’s public stance on their behalf is real. There is only one question: why is Zelensky not implementing this policy?” wrote the oligarch in a post in mid-February.
His party, the Opposition Platform, revamped in 2018 to run in the elections, also has the Minsk Accords at the center of its agenda. One caveat to the approach lies in the popular mood: in a Rating institute survey conducted in Ukraine in early February, 75% of respondents said that treaties need to be revised or permanently withdrawn from them. And only 11% said they knew the essence of the text well.
“The Minsk Accords are unpopular in Ukrainian society for fear that they could lead to an increase in Putin’s influence in politics,” says Vicente Ferraro, a master of political science at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “With the dwindling of pro-Russian forces in the [devido à s autoproclamadas repúblicas do Donbass]polarization diminished, and figures like Medvedchuk lost steam.”
The oligarch accuses Zelensky of inability to face the crisis and lack of political acumen. The Opposition Platform received 13% of the vote in 2019, winning 43 of the Rada’s 450 seats and becoming the biggest opposition force. In first place was the Servo do Povo, of the president, with 43% of the votes and 254 seats.
But the legend is losing strength. In August, it reached 17% of support, but polls in the pre-war weeks, in February, showed it with 8.5% of voting intentions, as the fourth political force – against 19% for the Servo do Povo leader.
The party even condemned the Russian invasion. A note published on the official website on Wednesday (2) reads: “The Opposition Platform shares with the people the terrible tragedy of military aggression, the perfidious invasion of our sovereign territory by Russian soldiers, with which our soldiers conquered shoulder to shoulder the largest victory over fascism in the Great Patriotic War”.
Medvedchuk often talks about the common history between Russians and Ukrainians. In an interview with the Financial Times in 2017, when asked if he shares with Putin the defense that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people”, he said he had already discussed this with the Kremlin leader. “I think we are two peoples, but friends and brothers.”
“That’s why our party is based on a firm and fundamental basis that we must re-establish relations with Russia,” he said in another interview, this one for TV UkrLive, a channel run by a supporter of his that was also closed by the government.
Putin’s Ukrainian friend was born in the Abanski district, which is now part of Russia’s territory. He acted as a lawyer for dissidents in the former Soviet Union — not on his own initiative, but because he was appointed by the regime. One such case, that of Vasil Stus, a Ukrainian poet who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and died in a forced labor camp, gained prominence.
Friends and biographers of Stus say Medvedchuk did not act to defend him, but to condemn him, siding with the prosecution. According to a report by the BBC’s Ukrainian-language service, a transcript of the hearing in which the writer was sentenced to ten years in the gulag has been preserved.
In it, the then lawyer says he considers the jury’s qualification of the poet’s actions correct. Medvedchuk denies that he acted to help in the conviction of the Ukrainian dissident.
