Starry Aspirant

The financial political practices of the Yanukovych era… In 2016 a series of articles appeared in the Ukrainian press offering a glimpse into the operation of a wide-ranging and expensive system of political payments run by the Party of Regions (PoR), the political organisation of Viktor Yanukovych, in the years leading up to and during his presidency in 2010-14. Originating in the “black ledger” (off-book accounts) of Yanukovych and his circle, the documents on which these articles were based had been handed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) by Viktor Trepak, a former deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service, allegedly in response to the blocking of his investigation into the financial crimes of the Yanukovych era (Kuznetsov, 2017; Sukhov, 2016). Supporting these accounts, in an interview from 2017, Taras Chornovil, who ran the presidential election campaign of Yanukovych in 2004, recounts that PoR practice of “paying for deputies from other parliamentary

Factions rise dominance from the late 1990s but remain institutionally weak In her book, Sarah Whitmore outlines the constitutive role of the Rada in the formation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, and the slow process of its institutionalisation in a wider political context in the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. By institutionalisation, she means the creation and observation of procedural norms that enhance organisational coherence and autonomy. In particular, Whitmore details the emergence of parliamentary standing committees and political factions—which are central to the investigation of this chapter—as the main organisational subdivisions for the allocation of parliamentary work. During this period, the parliamentary committees, dealing with the preparation, review and implementation of specialist legislation, were able to enhance authority as their expertise grew, as they became more representative of the composition of parliament, as well as locations for legislative deb