A screenshot taken from an ATIP cited in this *The Canada Files* investigation. Image credit: Aidan Jonah/Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files.

Written by: Aidan Jonah

The pre-Maidan coup times

In Peter Korotaev’s article for The Canada Files about Canada’s influence in Ukraine, Korotaev said: “The west’s desire to assert control over Ukraine’s court system is such a priority because plenty of Ukrainian judges have their own conception of Ukraine’s interests, which diverge sharply from that of the west.”

A legacy of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is the amount of communal or state-owned land which the Ukrainian people are the ultimate masters of. One may think that the wave of privatization that swept over former Eastern Bloc nations would’ve fully consumed Ukraine as well, but this is not the case. Naturally, capitalism in Ukraine saw privatization over several governments, but even coming into the 2010s, the West and Ukrainian capitalists had failed to obtain near absolute privatization of communal and state-owned land.

A Canadian aid program, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, and administered by the National Judicial Institute (NJI), began a project to ‘modernize’ elements of Ukraine’s legal system in 2012, while elected President Victor Yanukovych was still in power. Documents obtained by The Canada Files reveal that two previously unknown focuses of the project existed: to develop courses for Ukraine’s judge school which included sections on “property rights with a focus on Land Law and Statutory Interpretation” and to break down judicial resistance to privatizing communal and state-owned land.

The NJI admits openly in these documents, that it met between one to two times a month with a USAID funded group, the Fair, Accountable, Independent, and Responsible (FAIR) Judiciary Program, and had quarterly meetings with them “to exchange relevant project documentation and information, review candidate judge involvement, project progress, strategic planning plans and activities and address other coordination and implementation issues as they arise.”

The NJI had gripes with Ukrainian judges and their decisions on the “application of property laws,” claiming that “at the level of the judiciary, the application of property laws continues to be fragmented and inconsistent, and judges require substantive and skills-oriented education in the area of land and property rights, and interpretation and application of the current body of laws relating to this subject area.”

Going further, the NJI admits that it was seeking to ‘encourage’ judges to have an “emphasis on logic rather than intuitive interpretations of statutes (the latter of which has been the case in Ukraine)”. Since as Korotaev notes, “plenty of Ukrainian judges have their own conception of Ukraine’s interests, which diverge sharply from that of the west”, the West has worked to pressure judges to drop their conceptions of Ukraine’s interests which come from “intuitive interpretations of statues”, which have gotten in the way of land privatization.

The training that the NJI led the development of, proposed a course module for land law that explicitly backs up what this author stated above:

“Module 1: Acquisition of Rights to Land by Citizens and Legal Entities including production of the materials such as the Framework for Granting State-Owned and Communal Lands to Individuals and Legal Entities. “

One of the core focuses of this program, though the NJI would never admit it, was breaking down resistance to privatization of communal and state-owned land. Since even the NJI admitted that there was a risk that “Ukrainian judges reject all or some of the new ideas/approaches being introduced”, developing a course which would shape future Ukrainian judges to be sympathetic to the Western ideas about Ukrainian land law and privatization, would be an effective way to get around resistance from active judges.

The documents showcase the veracity of this idea:

“[Redacted] also suggested that, in outreach activities, we target young judges. Other judges in other regions have to be made aware of this practice. It is a rather small detail in the scheme of court processes and procedures, but it has the potential to yield great results and make a significant impact on caseflow, reduce the caseload and increase trust in the system.”

The NJI’s attitude towards the Ukrainian judges school, which it needed to follow through and teach the land law segments of courses the NJI was developing, can be summed up in this way: “You (Ukrainian judges school) are being led by us (Canada), we are in charge. The section on “Progress Towards Results During Reporting Period” makes this clear:

“The Canadian expert team drafted recommendations for the NSJ (the National School of Judges of Ukraine [NSJ]). Both Ukrainian partner will be required to confirm and to identify areas for improvement, gather improvement, gather institutional performance data and assess performance.”

The documents also hinted at a willingness to go after the Ukrainian government led by President Yanukovych, if it took steps to oppose the secretive push to open the door for a land privatization drive, stating that: “CIDA to work with other donors to businesses promote with appropriate Ukrainian government officials the necessity of building an independent judiciary”.

A post-Maidan Ukraine: The West’s privatization drive in progress

After the violent Maidan coup overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014, a Nazi-filled pro-Western government was installed into power by the US, with their preferred choice Arseniy Yatsenyuk conveniently becoming the first post-coup president.

The NJI noticed that there was significant distrust in the new Ukrainian government and the judiciary which they could shape, stating that “JEEG [the name of the program the NJI was in charge of] observes that public confidence [in the judiciary] is affected by the fall of the government and judicial system that was associated with it.”

The West was quick to take advantage of its coup in Ukraine, with the NJI cooperating with “the USAID-funded Agrolnvest project,” that was supporting development “of a manual on the history of land law[8] that will be utilized as a core resource for this [the NJI led] course”. The documents show that “The Manual is anticipated to be included as a resource in the piloting of the Land Law course at a regional branch of the NSJ in early 2015.” The long-term desire to privatize more Ukrainian land couldn’t be more clear.

The secretive efforts to enable a future privatization drive would pay off under a complaint Western puppet government of Ukraine, with the ProZorro project focused on streamlining purchases of communal and state-owned land being introduced in May 2014, only two months after the Maidan coup had succeeded. Korotaev notes that ProZorro was created by “George Soros’ Transparency International”, but takes 60 per cent of its funding from foreign affairs departments of Western nations including Canada. Prozorro wasn’t even controlled by the Ukrainian government until mid-2019, rather by Transparency International Ukraine.

Korotaev notes that in addition to communal and state-owned land, “ProZorro is also used to auction off agricultural land. Since this land is the collateral of bankrupt banks, it can be sold in large quantities without being impacted by Ukrainian restrictions on buying and selling land. ProZorro uses a peculiar mechanism in auctioning off this land.”

Prozorro’s stated purpose is to “that any business can have a clear process of pricing and transfer of state, municipal and big corporates’ ownership.” But the reality of the program is far different than what it claims to be. Korotaev noted that “Maksym Nefyodov, [former Ukrainian] deputy minister of economic development and trade, boasted that ProZorro is one of “many services already present in Ukraine to help Canadian сompanies do business here and thrive”.

Ukrainian journalist Roman Gubrienko found that “through ProZorro, prime plots of land are sold for far lower than the normal price.” Gubrienko noiced that extreme discounts for land were common, with the “average estimated price of each plot of land” being “valued at over 1 million hryvnias, while the actual selling price was only 80 000 to 100 000 hryvnias (around $3,000 to 4,000 USD).”

Prozorro mostly operates by ‘Dutch auction’, which works in this way: “The starting price of the lot during the entire auction is gradually reduced from 100 per cent to 20 per cent at certain intervals in automatic mode. The reduction will continue until one of the players ‘gets nervous’ and presses the ‘buy’ button.” The excuse for using this system is when “it is different to determine the minimum market price of the lot”, which Gubrienko denounces, and says was used to sell off “prime agricultural land close to the capital of Kyiv” for dirt cheap.

Korotaev explained that “Gubrienko’s research reveals that many of these dramatically discounted land deals went to affiliates of Soros’ business network, as well as to other western capitalists.”

Canada did its very best to ensure ProZorro’s use spread across Ukraine. A $19 million Canadian ‘aid’ project (Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance), lasting between 2015 and 2021, managed to get ProZorro implemented in 16 Ukrainian cities. Global Affairs Canada doesn’t like awareness of the program though, deleting the record of the program on CIDA’s search portal for aid projects soon after The Canada Files filed ATIP requests into the aid project, on August 17, 2022. Something they’d want to hide perhaps?

The reasoning around the long-term western plot to conduct a mass privatization drive of Ukrainian land, and the sneaky machinations of the Canadian judge training ‘aid’ program to target younger judges-in-training for complaint adjudicators of land law, was to overcome the ‘risk’ of Ukrainian judges being opposed to Western styling rulings around land law. That ‘risk’ is showcased by a 2020 court battle, explained by Korotaev:

“This battle in the court system has been particularly stark the fight to privatize Ukrainian agriculture. In late 2020, the constitutional court accepted an appeal by 48 Ukrainian parliamentarians to investigate whether the privatization of agricultural land pushed through by Zelensky was unconstitutional. They cited Ukraine’s constitution, which states that ‘Land is the main national wealth, which is under special concern of the State’. A representative of the constitutional court stated in an interview that the court could take the decision to recognize Zelensky’s privatization of land as unconstitutional. Regarding the constitutional court and the privatization of agricultural land, Zelensky’s minister of agricultural policy, Roman Leshchenko stated:

‘The Constitutional Court is not a problem. If the Constitutional Court cancels the law, I give you my word that the Verkhovna Rada will vote for it again. The reason is that the process is irreversible. The right to own land will come to be. ….we have the requirements of the European Court of Human Rights - the decision in the case of Zelenchuk and Tsyutsyura v. Ukraine, where the European organization requires Ukraine to ensure the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights regarding the right to own land by 7 million of our fellow citizens’

An impressive crystallization of the logic whereby capitalist reforms in Ukraine are ‘irreversible’. No matter what Ukraine’s constitutional court says, what Europe says about the right to own property is more important.”

The National Judicial Institute emphasized the need to be prepared to pressure the Ukrainian government to ensure judicial independence, back in 2012, and CIDA was tasked with this responsibility soon after the Maidan coup (though the risk of no judicial independence was removed from the risks section at this point, but still mentioned as a concern).

Yet, Canada didn’t care in the slightest about this example of the Ukrainian government’s mockery of its constitutional court, which faced another assault in 2020, after “the constitutional court began investigating whether the west’s ‘anti-corruption reforms’ (which are generally used to prevent Ukrainian state economic intervention and maintain neoliberalism) contradict Ukraine’s constitution”.

Korotaev explained that after this process began, “Zelensky officially asked parliament to give him the right to fire all of the constitutional judges. Unsurprisingly, the constitutional court described this as an attempt to stage an anti-constitutional coup. While his plan did not work at the time, throughout 2022 under cover of wartime most of the ‘problematic’ constitutional judges have since left – or fled – their posts, with Zelensky old enemy Aleksandr Tupitsky (the head of the constitutional court) declared under arrest in May 2022.”

Now constitutional judges are selected by “a committee of six juridicial experts: three of which are ‘independent experts’ (ie. domestic western lackeys), and the remaining are selected by the government, parliament, and other judges,” according to Korotaev.

Canada couldn’t care less about Ukrainians

Canada was greasing the wheels for a privatization drive all the way back in 2012, while elected Ukrainian President Yanukovych was still in office. Simply put, this privatization drive would’ve been combatted and likely crushed by Ukrainian judges who dared to put Ukraine’s interest and its constitution as top priority, as evidenced by the Ukrainian constitutional court’s resistance to land privatization and the Western imposed ‘anti-corruption reforms’ even in 2020, six years after the Maidan coup saw the imposition of a Western puppet government and puppet ‘civil society’.

Ukrainians were not desperate for privatization and complete Western control of their nation, but Canada still helped enable the Western coup in Ukraine, and has exploited Ukraine for maximum value, yet claims to be a friend of Ukraine. As Peter Korotaev explained, this is a bald-faced Canadian lie.

One has to ask the question, did the Western planning for the coup truly only begin in Fall 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a trade deal with the EU in favour of a stronger Russian offer that ensured the maintenance of lower energy costs for Ukrainian citizens? Or did this planning begin earlier into President Yanukovych’s term, with Canada’s ‘aid’ program working to influence Ukrainian judges’ interpretation of land law, being just one part of a plot to grease the wheels for desired Western changes made to Ukrainian law after a coup?

We don’t know at present, but frankly, the question should be asked.

ATIPs

Editor’s note: The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.
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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi "journalist" Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the "Uyghur genocide" vote in parliament to pass this February. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.

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