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Since the 2014 revolution, Ukrainian activists have set about using technology to prevent abuses of power – by building the worlds most transparent platform for government spending
t the gate of Mezhyhirya, the estate Viktor Yanukovych built with the money he stole from the people of Ukraine, a stall is selling rolls of toilet paper printed with the face of Vladimir Putin. Beside them are three large, flat, plastic loaves of bread, painted gold. Viktor Nestulia, director of innovation projects at Transparency International Ukraine, taps one with his finger. “When they came here after the revolution of dignity, they found a loaf made of solid gold, so this is a copy,” he says. “That’s what it is here. You will see.”
He’s not wrong. Inside Mezhyhirya, we pass a yacht pier, a shooting range, a boxing gym, an ostrich farm, a petting zoo, a man-made lake, a greenhouse complex, a helicopter pad, several fountains, at least five guest houses and a mansion where every surface drips with decorative gold (although minus the two-kilo ornamental bloomer, which was stolen in 2015). In the echoing concrete garage where Yanukovych kept his vintage cars and jeeps, I count 36.
Yet what makes the scene truly sickening is the fact that, until the former President – who rented the 140-hectare estate for 314 hryvnia, or roughly £10, an acre – fled to Russia on February 22, 2014, no-one knew any of this was here.
There were rumours, of course. Journalists interviewed staff and flew drones over the site. (To refute the claims, Yanukovych took friendly reporters into one of the guest houses and told them it was where he lived.) But nothing was ever confirmed, so when, after months of anti-corruption protests, Ukrainians finally saw Mezhyhirya for themselves, they were astonished. Crowds took the half-hour drive from Kiev to gawp at the luxuries their taxes had bought – although Yanukovych continued to deny this was what he had done. Interviewed by the BBC in 2015, he dismissed the idea as “political technology”. The ostriches, he claimed, “just lived there.”
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