Ukraine’s Jewish President Targets its Jewish Oligarchs
Moving to strip citizenship from three powerful Jewish Ukrainian businessmen, Kyiv is entering a new era of politics
The following dispatch comes from Tablet’s Ukraine correspondent, Vladislav Davidzon. The complete archive of Davidzon’s reporting on the war in Ukraine can be found here.
The government of Ukraine, led by President Volodymyr Zelensky, has spent the past few months practically walking on water as far as the international press is concerned. But Kyiv is now catching serious flak after reports last week that three of the country’s most colorful businessmen, all of them Ukrainian Jews who are also involved in politics, would be stripped of their citizenship. Jewish organizations are left wondering why a Ukrainian president of Jewish descent is persecuting a trio of well-known Jewish figures in the midst of a war that Moscow claims to be fighting as a campaign of denazification. The underlying political realities may be more complex, but the optics, as they say, are not great.
The reports that Igor Kolomoisky, Hennadiy Korban, and Vadim Rabinovich—all prominent figures within Ukrainian politics—are due to be denaturalized are based on a grainy scan of an unsigned presidential decree published on the internet by the Ukrainian parliamentarian Serhiy Vlasenko. The document allegedly strips the three and several other Ukrainians of their citizenship. The government of Ukraine has yet to corroborate or deny the news, but in the case of Korban, Ukrainian media documented him being turned away from the border in late July after his passport was confiscated by border guards.
Quietly stripping political foes who have found themselves on the wrong side of the current government of their citizenship is a time-honored Ukrainian political tradition. Readers may recall the epic saga of former Georgian President Saakashvilli, who was brought into the Ukrainian government by his erstwhile friend President Petro Poroshenko and soon after stripped of his citizenship for having turned on his former ally. Up until now, however, the Zelensky administration has been less prone to using the tactic than previous governments.
Technically what is at issue is that all three of the businessmen hold Israeli citizenship, which is against the Ukrainian constitution—but then again, so is the selective stripping of a Ukrainian citizen of their passport.
Each of the three men is openly and proudly Jewish and is associated with Jewish philanthropy and social projects. Further, it should be noted that none of the three men are recognizably moral or likable people. All are singularly colorful and over-the-top characters, whom I have met and written about at length over the years for Tablet. None of them would last more than a second with their political or economic shenanigans in the context of a Western democracy or rule of law. Beyond those facts, however, it is not immediately obvious the three of them have much else in common.
Rabinovich is seen in Kyiv as very much being part of a pro-Russian opposition bloc that’s considered a fifth column. The party in which he was a senior leader, called The Opposition Platform – For Life, is now banned, with most pro-Russian members of the Ukrainian parliament having fled the country several days before the war began. His international rap sheet is long and colorful, including long stints in prison during Soviet times and accusations in a German newspaper of having once sold weapons to the Taliban. Rabinovich ran for president of Ukraine in 2014 to prove it was not an antisemitic country. However, he likely did not earn himself many fans in the presidential administration when he stood up early last year in the Ukrainian parliament to accuse Zelensky of being a fascist. “The face of fascism in our country has shown its true color: Green!” Rabinovich thundered in parliament, making a reference to Zelensky’s name, which shares a root with the Ukrainian word for green. “Our fathers and grandfathers, in their own time, they stopped fascism! Now it is we, their descendants, who will do the same! We will triumph! No Pasaran! Fascism will not pass!” he ranted to the raucous laughter of the assembled members of parliament last spring. Which is certainly reason enough to be stripped of one’s new citizenship, and with no impediment to casting him out of politics, the thinking in the Bankova must have been—why not?
When it comes to Korban, who is close with Kolomoisky and with the mayor of Dnipro, Borys Filatov, the case is much less florid and obvious. Korban seems to have fallen afoul of the presidential administration with his involvement in scheming against Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak. This has a U.S. dimension as well in the figure of Ukrainian-born U.S. Rep. Victoria Spartz, who is suspected of being aligned with Korban, has taken to publicly attacking Yermak, and has denounced the Ukrainian authorities for the corruption in the presidential administration. Spartz caused serious consternation in Ukrainian politics with her calls on the Biden administration to more carefully oversee the distribution of military aid. It is widely assumed in Ukrainian political circles that Korban and Filatov put her up to it and that the move to strip Korban of citizenship is a form of retaliation by the Zelensky administration.
Perhaps the strangest case is that of Korban’s ally and fellow businessman Kolomoisky, a previous wartime governor of Dnipro who more or less saved that region from being taken over by the Russians in 2014 and who was once one of the main backers of the Zelensky presidential campaign. Kolomoisky has spent the past several years being investigated by the FBI, with several cases opened for money laundering charges in U.S. states such as Ohio and Delaware. This, it seems, was enough to turn the former ally into a liability for Zelensky, and his people worked very hard for the first two years of their administration to keep Kolomoisky at arm’s length, to his great frustration. Having already been sanctioned by the United States, political insiders now speculate that the Americans are keen to extradite Kolomoisky and that his denaturalization makes him more vulnerable to such an outcome.
More broadly, the denaturalization of three internal opponents of the Zelensky government is part of a longer-term and somewhat disquieting process of the centralization of Ukrainian politics under the cover of wartime powers. The war has had the effect of radically limiting the power of Ukraine’s oligarchs for the first time in 30 years. Still, the Zelensky administration has seemingly gone after its internal opponents before the conclusion of the war—thus breaking the de facto wartime political consensus and an informal cease-fire that has reigned over Ukrainian political actors during the first 150 days of the war. While these three men are not sympathetic characters from the standpoint of the rule of law, their denaturalization does not augur well for the balance of democratic power in post-war Ukrainian politics.
Vladislav Davidzon is Tablet’s European culture correspondent and a Russian-American writer, translator, and critic. He is the Chief Editor of The Odessa Review and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and lives in Paris.