Yesterday, on January 22, the court imposed a pre-trial restraint on Valeriy Vesnianyi, mayor of Tulchyn, Vinnytsia Oblast, from the party of former Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman. The man is suspected of abusing his official position and causing damage to the city budget of almost three million hryvnias. The court sent Vesnianyi to 54 days in custody with the possibility of paying 800 thousand hryvnias in bail, UNN reports.
Valeriy Vesnianyi has been the permanent mayor of Tulchyn since 2006. In 2020, he ran for this position as a candidate of Groysman's Ukrainian Strategy (USG).
In May 2021, it formalized its relations with the political force of the former Prime Minister of Ukraine. At that time, it was in Tulchyn that the USG held its Grand Party Conference.
According to law enforcement, in the fall of 2021, without an auction, approval from the executive committee and the land commission of the city council, Vesnianyi, in fact, single-handedly granted 68 hectares of land for use to a local sugar factory.
Due to non-payment of rent for land use in accordance with regulatory calculations, Tulchyn's budget lost almost three million hryvnias.
Groysman did not react to the fact that in Vinnytsia region, the base of the USG, law enforcement officers suspect the mayor of this political force of abuse of office.
And it's not a given that he will, because this situation has an interesting background.
Last year, a scandal erupted throughout the Vinnytsia region when the secretary of the Tulchyn City Council, Vitaliy Chuba, allegedly organized a loud party on the anniversary of the rocket attack on Vinnytsia that killed 29 people.
Chuba was number one on the list of Groysman's Ukrainian Strategy in the 2020 local elections. And it was Vesnianyi who nominated him for the position of city council secretary.
And in September 2023, Vesnianyi initiated Chuba's resignation, which was supported by 30 of the 34 members of the Tulchyn City Council.
Following her husband, Iryna Chuba, the wife of the former secretary of state, lost her position as the head of Klebani.
Local media wrote at the time that Vesnianyi had long dreamed of getting rid of the Chubov family, and used the situation with the party as a convenient excuse.
If this is the case, Vitaliy and Iryna Chuby are probably happy that people in uniform have come to Vesniane.
However, all this political squabbling in a jar with spiders labeled "Groysman's Ukrainian Strategy" shows that the former prime minister's party is not doing too well in his native Vinnytsia region, to put it mildly.
Instead of justifying the huge credit of trust that Groysman's party received in the 2020 local elections, its local representatives are more busy fighting their political opponents and parasitizing on budget funds.
As a result, we have situations like the one in Bershad, where Groysman's majority in the city council, headed by the mayor, managed to jeopardize the start of the heating season. Serhiy Borzov, the head of the Regional Military District Administration, had to come to the city council session and personally control that the deputies allocated funds for the start of the heating season .
The situation in the Trostyanets community, which is trying to put under his total personal control, is also difficult.
It is hard to say how much Groysman is aware of what is happening inside and around his own party. But he definitely receives at least some minimal information, and yet he does nothing about it. It seems that Groysman is satisfied with the fact that his party subordinates are fighting among themselves, putting pressure on political opponents, and still manage to break the law.
The fact that all of this multiplies the rating of the USG by zero is a personal problem for the former Prime Minister of Ukraine and his political allies.
But those districts and settlements of Vinnytsia region where Hroisman's associates took full power in 2020 can safely cross out the years until the next local elections.
Well, the fact that law enforcement officers began to investigate the dealings of Groysman's associates is a good signal for the community of the region, and not so much for the former prime minister himself.