Minus Medvedchuk: Zelenskyi believes Ukraine’s de-oligarchization began

President Volodymyr Zelenskyi believes that Ukraine's de-oligarchization began with depriving Viktor Medvedchuk of the levers of influence, being the fellow sponsor of Russian President Vladimir Putin and a People's Deputy from the OPZZH.

This is stated in the president's column in "Focus."

"For the first time in many years, the number of oligarchs in Ukraine hasn't increased but decreased. Minus Medvedchuk. He was deprived of the opportunity to use media assets and state property to the detriment of the country.

Zelenskyi stressed Ukraine needed a true democracy, "which works in the interests of all citizens, not a handful of elected officials."

According to him, the richest Ukrainians now are "those who have managed to take full advantage of the opportunities we have had since the 1990s" and who have modeled the "rules of the game" for themselves.

"A state where there's such inequality definitely can not be comfortable and competitive," Zelenskyi said.

"The vast majority of Ukrainians didn't consider such a situation fair. This is what affected the results of the 2019 elections. The eloquent result with which one of the oligarchs lost then clearly demonstrates what society really expects," he wrote.

Now, Zelenskyi says, "with the help of legal instruments, Medvedchuk was deprived of the opportunity to use media assets and state property in order to openly beat the country and cause destructive damage to state security."

In this example, you can see what the status of an oligarch is. If such people are deprived of a concentrated media resource, when they no longer have opaque access to strategic assets and when there is no ' political clout' in Kyiv, they can take nothing more from the state, and can't weaken the state opposing our sovereignty," the president said.

"This is the meaning of our de-oligarchization policy. Ukraine will become truly competitive in the world if some 'special' citizens of our country – and not only ours – cannot be 'equal' to others and cannot appropriate anything by blackmailing the state," he added.