Last Sunday the executive branch blitz on Hromada ended in a party leader Pavlo Lazarenko's temporary disappearance and a meeting of the shadow government head Yuliya Tymoshenko with President Leonid Kuchma.
The latter meeting was initiated by Ms. Tymoshenko, Verkhovna Rada Budget Committee Chairperson, reports Interfax Ukraine. Ms. Tymoshenko told The Day that the President had asked for the meeting to discuss budget issues. On September 25, he met representatives of the Greens and called for Pavlo Lazarenko to be stripped of parliamentary immunity and handed over to law enforcement agencies, The Day learned from a source close to the Greens.
Meanwhile in France Mr. Lazarenko vanished after arriving with a parliamentary delegation to participate in a PACE session. However, on Monday the Hromada press service reported its party leader back in Ukraine, where he is expected to participate in today's session of Parliament. Mr. Lazarenko himself declared while still in Strasbourg that he would have to “disappoint all those hoping to solve the opposition problems by threats and compromising information.” Hromada, in turn, accused Rukh of yet another attempt to discredit opposition forces in Ukraine and organize “moral terror against party leaders.”
The plot thickened when NDP leader Anatoly Matviyenko made a statement about the Hromada leadership's “attempts to reach an understanding with NDP on cooperation provided everything they did together remained unannounced.”
The war of who could compromise whom basically served to divert attention from the question of what the Cabinet intended to do about the economic crisis. In this way the whole detective story seems to have been merely a simple public relations stunt by the executive. Nevertheless, it did not (and does not) lack plausibility.






