Honorary pension for Ukrainian elites

by Andrey Pertsev

The Kremlin is trying to incorporate Ukrainian politicians, security officials, and bureaucrats loyal to it into its power structure. Ukrainians Andriy Derkach and Dmytro Vorona have become members of the upper house of the Russian parliament. At the same time, the policy of the Russian authorities to incorporate Ukrainian elites has significantly changed since the annexation of Crimea. Initially, the focus was on influential regional groups that could potentially bring their respective regions into the Russian Federation. Now, the targets of integration are politicians and officials who had a hand in governing Ukraine as a whole. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the annexation of territories has taken place through their direct conquest, and the Kremlin aims to win over Ukrainian politicians and bureaucrats who are dissatisfied with the policies of the Ukrainian leadership.

New Senators

In September, Astrakhan Governor Igor Babushkin appointed former Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach as a senator from the region. Derkach had no connection to the Astrakhan region before his appointment – sources in the regional parliament admitted that they had never seen the politician. Russian official media, meanwhile, claimed that Andriy Derkach "resides" in Astrakhan and became a Russian citizen. The former Ukrainian deputy is the son of Leonid Derkach, who headed the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) from 1998 to 2001 and was considered close to former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. In 2020, while still a deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Andriy Derkach published recordings of negotiations between Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Western and Russian politicians. In 2021, the parliamentarian created a network of security companies in Ukraine, which were supposed to help the Russian army capture Ukrainian territories faster.

After the war began in 2022, Andriy Derkach fled Ukraine and was later accused of treason by Ukrainian authorities and stripped of his citizenship. Kremlin-loyal experts in major media do not hesitate to talk about Derkach’s specific contributions to Russia and call him worthy of a senator’s post. Astrakhan politicians called the appointment of the former Ukrainian parliamentarian a "state decision" – meaning a decision that was handed down to the regional authorities directly from the Kremlin. Andriy Derkach’s appointment to this position was not hindered even by the residency requirement that Russian law stipulates for senators. There are exceptions to this rule – it does not apply to Russian diplomats and military personnel, but Derkach is neither.

Former Ukrainian official Dmytro Vorona became a senator from the "Zaporizhzhia region" in 2023. Vorona was a functionary of the Party of Regions, which advocated for active cooperation with Russia, worked as a deputy minister in several Ukrainian departments, and headed the State Registration Service. After the 2013-2014 protests, Vorona lost his positions and moved to Crimea. There he integrated into the local nomenklatura, worked as a lawyer, and in 2020, after receiving Russian citizenship, headed the "Development Corporation" of Crimea. Russian media reported that Crimean administration head Sergey Aksyonov insisted on Vorona’s appointment as a senator.

It is evident that the Kremlin tries to incorporate Ukrainian politicians into the Russian power structure but changes its tactics depending on its current objectives. At different times, different people from different social groups become the frontmen of this promotion. The history of the "Ukrainian personnel elevator" says a lot about the Kremlin’s goals in interacting with Ukraine before the war and its objectives after the invasion began.

From the Party of Regions to the Crimean Reserve

Before Euromaidan and the annexation of Crimea, the Kremlin focused on promoting loyal politicians to top positions in Ukraine – Moscow’s support base became the Party of Regions, especially popular in Eastern Ukraine. Russian political technologists worked for this party, helping it win, and in return, the party advocated for closer integration with Russia. At the same time, in the public sphere, the "regionals" tried to distance themselves from cooperation with the Russian leadership, emphasizing that they stood for the interests of Ukraine and its people. Naturally, under such conditions, promoting Ukrainian politicians within Russia would have been completely unproductive. This tactic ultimately failed – after Euromaidan, pro-European forces came to power in Ukraine.

However, in a sense, interaction with the pro-Russian elite of Crimea and Sevastopol turned out to be successful for the Kremlin. The speaker of the Crimean parliament, “regional” Volodymyr Konstantinov, supported and facilitated the annexation of the region. At the same time, the territory administration was led by Sergey Aksyonov, the head of the openly pro-Russian party Unity. For ten years now, Konstantinov and Aksyonov’s group has been in power in Crimea – there are practically no outsiders in the republic’s leadership. Russian security services regularly initiate criminal cases against Crimean officials, but this does not affect the fate of the region's top leadership. For a long time, senators from the annexed republic were Olga Kovitidi and Sergey Tsekov, close to Aksyonov and Konstantinov. Former Crimean Prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya became a State Duma deputy. The Kremlin’s strategy was clear – it showed the Ukrainian elites, primarily from eastern regions (Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia), how their fate could turn out if they supported Russia’s annexation and relatively “peaceful” integration with Russia. The elite group that took the risk was supposedly able to gain full control over the region, and its representatives could get seats in the federal parliament.

The "anti-advertisement" of this policy was the hybrid war in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, where even pro-Russian elites from the Party of Regions were ousted by marginal rebels. In Sevastopol, where pro-Russian forces were represented not by cynical and corrupt "regionals" but by dedicated activists like politician Aleksey Chaly, who briefly became the "people’s mayor" of the city, the Russian authorities used a different tactic. The activists were quickly pushed into the city parliament, while the executive power was taken over by outsiders from Russia. A few years later, the inspirers of the "Russian Spring" in Sevastopol were completely removed from decision-making – because of their idealism, they didn’t fit well into the Russian power vertical. As is not hard to guess, this did not help promote the “Crimean model” of integration into Russia.

The Crimean scenario has become more like the exception rather than the rule, as confirmed by the Kremlin’s policy toward the territories annexed after the start of the big war. Their formal leaders, being locals, are surrounded by Russian officials. It is quite possible that soon the so-called "new territories" will be headed by people from mainland Russia – too much budgetary funding goes to support and restore these areas. And in line with Putin's power vertical, only people predictable for the Kremlin can manage large budgets. The annexed territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the Federation Council are represented by people unfamiliar with them. In Zaporizhzhia, this is the aforementioned Dmytro Vorona and former head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin; in Kherson, it is the former director of Khabarovsk Airport Konstantin Basyuk and a functionary of the All-Russian People’s Front Igor Kastyukevich. The so-called Luhansk People’s Republic is represented in the upper house of the Russian parliament by former local official Olga Bas and outsider Daria Lantratova, who worked in the federal United Russia. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) stands out, because its current senators are allies of the pro-Russian leader of the territory, Denis Pushilin – Olga Nikonorova and Alexander Voloshin.

The case of Crimea has shown the Kremlin the dead-end nature of the model of incorporating Ukrainian regional elites, which assumes that local influential groups should become the initiators of joining Russia. The republic itself is still tightly controlled by Konstantinov and Aksyonov’s groups, but the Crimean elites have still not been integrated into the federal power vertical. It seems that the Kremlin has already begun dismantling this management system. Olga Kovitidi and Sergey Tsekov lost their senatorial posts. Their ultra-patriotic course tired the Kremlin’s supervisors, and the seats were handed to chess player Sergey Karjakin, a supporter of the Kremlin, and Yuri Nimchenko, a participant in the war with Ukraine. The Crimea’s leadership did not even argue with the vertical about the senators. It is likely that officials from “mainland Russia”, whose behavior is predictable to the presidential administration and the federal government, will gradually begin to enter the region’s administration. The "Crimean showcase" did not attract Ukrainian regional elites, but some of them preferred to swear allegiance to Russia after its direct invasion. This is what the mayor of Kherson Volodymyr Saldo and Zaporizhzhia deputy Yevhen Balytskyi did, and they were rewarded with the positions of heads of territorial administrations. But in contrast to Crimea, the Kremlin immediately surrounded them with outsider overseers.

All this suggests that the Russian authorities no longer intend to attract the Ukrainian elite with integration models like the Crimean one in the hope of annexing new territories. Cynically speaking, the gun without kind words has proved more effective than kind words with a gun.

From Ukrainian Official to Russian Mayor

The initial "regional" approach did not envision the integration of Ukrainian politicians and officials into federal executive bodies (entry into the parliament was conditioned by regional representation). However, there has been one case of a Ukrainian being promoted to the regional level. A mid-level Ukrainian clerk Dmytro Trapeznikov began working in the administration of the self-proclaimed DPR in 2014. He headed the Department of Internal and External Policy in the position of Deputy Prime Minister. In 2016, he served as acting "Head of Government" for several months following the death of Alexander Zakharchenko.

As head of political management Trapeznikov actively interacted with the Kremlin's overseer of Donbas Vladislav Surkov, and after the power reshuffle in the DPR, Surkov secured Trapeznikov's appointment as the head of the city of Elista in the Republic of Kalmykia in 2019. However, this personnel decision immediately sparked protests, and in 2022, the head of the republic Batu Khasikov dismissed the unpopular Trapeznikov in order to boost his own ratings in the regional capital. For two years, Trapeznikov worked as Deputy Chair of the republic’s government until he was demoted to an advisor to Khasikov in 2024.

This exceptional case shows that the Kremlin never seriously considered transferring officials from the self-proclaimed and later annexed republics to Russian regions. Meanwhile, the reverse process is actively underway. Most of the key positions in the DPR administration are held by outsiders from mainland Russia, and the same can be said for the "governments" of the Russian-occupied territories of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

An Offer for Defectors

Dmytro Vorona and Andriy Derkach are examples of the kind of Ukrainian elite figures whom the Kremlin is happy to see and ready to integrate. These are representatives not of the regional but of the upper leadership of the country, familiar with influential groups and sensitive information about Ukraine's affairs. Such politicians can initiate scandals painful for the Ukrainian leadership (as Derkach did) and assist Russia in the war.

The fact that the Ukrainian government is at odds with many influential groups in the country may help the success of Russia's new "integration" direction. The example of Dmytro Vorona shows that more or less professional figures can even build a career. Unlike the Crimean zealots Kovitidi and Tsekov, who engaged in self-promotion and, generally, peculiar but public politics, Vorona immediately began working on legislative support for the integration of new territories. Gradually, he started representing federal legislative initiatives submitted by the Federation Council and conducting round tables with government and Kremlin officials.

The Kremlin may point to his example to the dissatisfied members of the Ukrainian Rada or mid-level officials: if you are willing to side with Russia, it is ready to accept you, include you into its hierarchy, and even promote you.

Russia’s human resources policy is aimed at undermining the Ukrainian elite during the war and even after it’s over. However, the range of positions offered by the Kremlin is rather limited. These are senatorial posts with high formal status but hardly any influence — seats in the Federation Council have long become a form of honorary retirement for federal and regional officials. The presidential administration of Russia sends signals that it is ready to offer this kind of retirement to Ukrainian collaborators.