Who leads Ukraine's Supreme Court after the October 2021 vote?
A look back at the judicial election in Kyiv and the wider diplomatic tensions of the days around it.
Who would head Ukraine's highest court? By 23 October 2021 the question had an answer: on 22 October, Vsevolod Kniaziev was elected Head of the Supreme Court of Ukraine.
The vote placed a single figure at the top of the country's judicial system at a time when public institutions were under scrutiny. The election was the most significant institutional development in Ukrainian public life in the days leading up to 23 October 2021.
Tensions abroad
Beyond Ukraine's borders, the week brought sharper exchanges between Russia and the West. On 18 October 2021, Russia announced that it would suspend its mission to NATO in Brussels as early as 1 November. Moscow said the step responded to the expulsion of eight diplomats, accused of espionage, from the mission earlier that month. The NATO information bureau and military liaison in Moscow were also to be terminated.
On 19 October 2021, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it had raided the Washington, D.C. house of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin, who had been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2018.
A week in view
The three developments were separate, and nothing links them directly. Taken together, they show a week in which a domestic institutional appointment in Kyiv unfolded alongside a deterioration in diplomatic channels between Russia and NATO and continued American action against a sanctioned Russian businessman.
