Former president emphasizes: ‘Don’t allow Putin to destabilize us’
OTTAWA – Ukraine will regain Crimea, which is temporarily lost to Russia, but needs global support in its fight against Russian aggression in the Donbas, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told a recent international conference on foreign affairs and defense held in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“When Ukraine protect[ed its] territorial integrity and our sovereignty – and voluntarily gave up the third-biggest nuclear arsenal in the world and expected global solidarity to protect our territorial integrity, nobody stopped Russia, except Ukraine,” he said about the Russian war in eastern Ukraine, in which, he angrily noted, President Vladimir Putin has denied any involvement.
“Ukrainian people are fighting not only for our soil, but for freedom, for democracy, for rule of law – for the values which unite the whole world,” he underscored.
But as the former leader of a country in the global spotlight because of contact his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has had with U.S. President Donald Trump early in his new administration in Kyiv, Mr. Poroshenko’s plea for world unity with Ukraine had to compete with questions about his relationship with the Trump White House.
During the November 24 English-language question-and-answer session at the Halifax International Security Forum, the moderator asked Ukraine’s fifth president about meeting with President Trump’s then-cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani.
Halifax International Security Forum
Ukraine’s former President Petro Poroshenko with Canada’s Minister of Defense Harjit Sajjan.
“I met with Giuliani twice in my life. First, when he was mayor of New York – I admired him and wanted to learn from him how to manage probably the best city in the world – the best after Kyiv. And the second [time] was in October or November 2017,” said Mr. Poroshenko, the highest-profile speaker at the annual event hosted by Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan.
The 54-year-old former president explained that he and Mr. Giuliani discussed “solidarity” and increasing U.S. support in such areas as Ukraine’s financial sector and security sector, particularly in the area of digital security, following a massive cyberattack involving Russian-designed “NotPetya” malware that targeted Ukraine and resulted in disruption as serious as taking the radiation monitoring system at the Chornobyl nuclear-power plant offline.
Moderator Robin Shepherd, vice-president of the security forum, then asked Mr. Poroshenko whether Mr. Giuliani, President Trump’s attorney, sought anything in return – a not-so-veiled reference to the now-infamous July 25 quid-pro-quo Trump-Zelenskyy phone call that prompted the congressional impeachment proceedings against the U.S. president.
“Look, I [was] president of Ukraine,” replied Mr. Poroshenko, who held that post from June 7, 2014, to May 20, 2019. “Definitely, I cannot imagine this type of talks with me as president.”
Mr. Shepherd pressed on: Did Mr. Giuliani ask Mr. Poroshenko about former U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, or the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, on whose advisory board the younger Biden served?
“Definitely not – and it cannot be,” Mr. Poroshenko responded.
In early November, The Wall Street Journal reported that two of Mr. Giuliani’s associates – Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman – had asked Mr. Poroshenko to launch an investigation into the Bidens in exchange for a state visit to the U.S.
In Halifax, former President Poroshenko also spoke of his contact with President Trump.
U.S. Javelins for Ukraine
“I was very much impressed – my first meeting was in the White House and the president was well-briefed. We talked about the global cooperation and security sector, and support for [Ukraine’s] reform,” said Mr. Poroshenko, who also cited the Javelin anti-tank weapons Ukraine received from the Trump administration in April 2018 and which have been stored in a military warehouse and have yet to be used. But they’ve served a psychological purpose. The former president said the presence of Javelins on Ukrainian soil have resulted both in an end to Russian tanks appearing on the control line and a decrease in Ukrainian casualties.
“Just with this [Javelin] contract, we’ve saved a lot of Ukrainian lives,” said Mr. Poroshenko, who leads the European Solidarity party in Ukraine.
Acquiring the Javelins was also the result of a charm offensive and an “elaborate campaign” by then-President Poroshenko, which included “trade deals that were politically expedient for Mr. Trump, meetings with Mr. Giuliani, the freezing [by Mr. Poroshenko’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko] of potentially damaging criminal cases… relevant to the Mueller investigation, including an inquiry tracing millions of dollars that Ukrainian political figures paid to [former Trump campaign chairman] Paul Manafort,” reported The New York Times. “Mr. Poroshenko’s aides also scrambled to find ways to flatter the new American president – advising their boss to gush during his first telephone call with Mr. Trump about Tom Brady, the star New England Patriots quarterback whom Mr. Trump has long admired.”
According to The Times, “Mr. Poroshenko’s strategy yielded results. The Trump administration reversed an Obama-era moratorium on sales of lethal weapons that Ukraine sought for its fight against the separatists in the country’s east.”
Halifax forum moderator Mr. Shepherd indirectly raised the reversal with Mr. Poroshenko when he asked the former president, “You didn’t get any traction out of President [Barack] Obama in terms of military hardware, did you?”
Mr. Poroshenko’s reply: “Stop doing this – that we received something from Trump and did not receive something from Obama.”
Mr. Poroshenko said Ukraine received three tranches of loan guarantees (of up to $3 billion) from Barack Obama’s White House, beginning in 2014, which the former president said was “vital” for his country.
“When I started to be president, we had just $4,000 in our treasury – for the salary of doctors, for the salary of teachers, for the financing of [the] army,” he explained. “The country was absolutely bankrupt.”
However, Mr. Poroshenko said that within 18 months, Ukraine began its economic recovery and his government launched major reforms – “during the war” – covering various sectors, from health to education to pensions.
He added that Ukraine’s international partners, including the U.S. and Canada, praised him for conducting more reforms during the five years of his presidency than at any other time since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991.
“When I was elected president, Ukraine was in 153rd place in the rating [of countries with which to do] business by the World Bank,” Mr. Poroshenko boasted. “When I finished, [Ukraine] was in 64th place – the biggest progress any country demonstrated ever.”
Facebook/Petro Poroshenko
Ukraine’s former President Petro Poroshenko with Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, at the Halifax International Security Forum.
But he credited that performance to the support of both the Obama and Trump administrations, as well as the Republican and Democratic parties, singling out the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) for their show of solidarity when they joined him and Ukrainian marines on a forward combat post in the village of Shyrokyne in Donetsk on December 31, 2016.
Mr. Poroshenko also took no personal credit for the strong bipartisan support from both the U.S. and Canada – mentioning by name former Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, current Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his “fantastic” former Foreign Affairs Minister and now Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, “a Ukrainian-origin lady who [did] a lot to keep together the global solidarity for Ukraine.” He underscored that such moral backing was directed to the “Ukrainian people who are fighting not only for our soil, but for freedom, for democracy, for the rule of law – for the values which unite the whole world.”
Putin benefits from shift in focus
However, as Mr. Shepherd suggested, international attention on Ukraine is not on the ongoing conflict in the eastern part of the country, which has claimed more than 13,000 lives since the war between Kremlin-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops began in 2014 following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Rather, the focus is on Ukraine’s role in the impeachment process of President Trump.
The one person pleased with that shift in focus is Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Mr. Poroshenko.
“Who is interested that Ukraine appear not as an object of Russian aggression, which is the reason for implementation of sanctions against Russia? Now we switch attention to ‘Ukraine-gate.’ Who is interested in that? Ukraine? Definitely not. The United States? Definitely not. One person – who sits in the Kremlin.”
The former Ukrainian president’s message to the Halifax security forum was: “Don’t allow Putin to destabilize us.” His advice, based on what he said was his years of experience “in communication” with the Russian president was: “Please don’t trust Putin.”
Yet as the House Judiciary Committee began hearings on December 4 in the next phase of the impeachment proceedings against President Trump, the spotlight shines not on Ukraine’s struggle with Russia, but with the role its leadership may have in the process of removing Mr. Trump from office.
A day earlier, the House Intelligence Committee released its 300-page “Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” which concluded that President Trump used “the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election” – a “scheme [that] subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.”
“The President demanded that… [President] Zelenskyy, publicly announce investigations into a political rival that he apparently feared the most, former Vice-President Joe Biden, and into a discredited theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 presidential election,” the report read.
However, media attention is shifting to also examine the relationship between the Trump and Poroshenko administrations – and some Republican-driven claims that Mr. Poroshenko actively worked for Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election.
As The New York Times reported in early November, the White House saw its relationship with Ukraine “as a transactional one that could help Mr. Trump politically,” and “Mr. Poroshenko, so eager to gain favor as Russian-backed separatists were escalating a fight against the Ukrainian military, did his part to encourage this belief.”
The Times story went on to say: “He helped plant the seeds for Mr. Trump’s July quid pro quo request” to President Zelenskyy – “a request that prompted the impeachment inquiry into whether he manipulated American policy toward Ukraine for personal gain.”