Solomiia Bobrovska no longer hides her irritation toward the presidential administration. On Thursday, March 7, the member of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, expressed her frustration at not being allowed to leave the country, despite having been invited by the American embassy in Kyiv to travel to Washington for a 10-day working session in February. "I see these bans as an attempt to silence us in order to keep parliament out of key decisions," Bobrovska who is part of the opposition Holos ("Voice") party and a member of the Committee for National Security and Defense, told Le Monde. She said, "The government cannot tell parliament, which is a separate independent institution, what it should do; that's totally unconstitutional."
Her situation is not unique. In recent months, several lawmakers belonging to the opposition parties Holos and European Solidarity (of former president Petro Poroshenko) have publicly complained that they have not received the authorization required by the authorities to attend an international event as part of their duties since the start of the Russian invasion.
In power from 2014 to 2019 and now a member of parliament, Poroshenko even went so far as to send a letter, at the end of February, to the European commissioner for neighborhood and enlargement, Oliver Varhelyi, to contest the "misuse" of martial law and war with the aim, in his view, to "cleanse the political field from opposition and isolate it from international communication."
The former head of state, who maintains notoriously hostile relations with his successor, has himself not been allowed to leave the country on at least two occasions. The first time was in December 2023, when he was planning to travel to Poland and the United States. To justify the ban, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) cited the risk of "instrumentalization by the Russians" of a supposed meeting between Poroshenko and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been highly critical of Kyiv since the start of the war. The second time, in February 2024, he was unable to attend the Munich security conference. The Verkhovna Rada cited the "absence of relevant documents" on planned meetings between the former president and Western partners.
Commissioner Varhelyi's publication of Poroshenko's letter on X caused a scandal in the country, less because of the comment added by the Hungarian diplomat – "in a working democracy the opposition can't be restricted" – than because of Poroshenko's suggestion to raise the issue of political plurality "in the context of the forthcoming report of the European Commission and elaboration of the negotiating framework with Ukraine." Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine's deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, accused the former president of seeking to disrupt the process of Ukraine's integration into the European Union. On March 6 and 7, Poroshenko was nevertheless able to travel to Bucharest, Romania, for a congress of the European People's Party.
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