Amid an unfolding controversy with the canceled overseas visit of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, three MPs from his party, European Solidarity, stated they were also denied travel to the USA for high-profile visits.
Ivanna Klympush Tsintsadze informed that she, along with colleagues Iryna Herashchenko, who co-chairs the European Solidarity Faction, and Mariya Ionova, who is vice president of the International Democratic Union – women, were denied a visit to the USA.
She published an announcement of an International Democratic Union event she will be unable to attend. Poroshenko was also to participate in the International Democratic Union Forum.
Herashchenko also published an invitation to travel to the USA from the International Democratic Union, which unites over 80 center-right political parties worldwide from over 60 countries.
Klympush-Tsintsadze claimed that they had confirmed meetings in Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, and think tanks and that the trip would be funded not by Ukrainian taxpayers. She said that no permit was granted for the trip, and therefore she and her colleagues would not be able to make it.
All officials and MPs of both sexes have to obtain special permits to travel due to martial law in Ukraine.
“The responsibility for the damage caused by the ban on opposition MPs’ foreign business trips lies entirely with those who make these insane decisions.
This is a systemic attack not on the European Solidarity, but on democracy, the balance of power and the rule of law. It’s a shame that the government is helping our enemies with arguments against us…” Tsintsadze wrote.
Herashchenko notes that a delegation of 30 Ukrainian MPs from President Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and four from the Voice Party are on a business trip to the USA, funded with taxpayer money. She said that their meetings were actually lower profile than the ones the European Solidarity had in stock and that her party would demand a report about how the Ukrainian delegation was formed.
Yesterday, on 1 December, European Solidarity leader and former President Petro Poroshenko was stopped at the border and denied an overseas business trip.
Ukraine’s Security Service claimed that Poroshenko’s visit carried the risk of a “Russian psy-op” exploiting a purported planned meeting of Poroshenko and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and that it sent a letter to that regard to Ukrainian institutions, based on which the Ukrainian ex-president’s trip was canceled.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko claims the travel ban is an “insane attack on unity” and precluded important meetings with international decision-makers to secure aid for Ukraine.
“The SBU has admitted that it is now deciding which MPs can and cannot go on foreign business trips to please Bankova,” Ms Herashchenko wrote. “We either join the EU and NATO with an independent and strong parliament, or we return to the USSR, where the SBU works for the government, discrediting opposition MPs.”
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