KYIV – Presidential front-runner Volodymyr Zelensky continued to meet with mostly foreign stakeholders in semi-private meetings this week while his two closest competitors stayed on the campaign trail as the March 31 election draws near.
The unproven politician and showman met with the three biggest business associations in Kyiv during a two-hour meeting on March 18.
Flanked by ex-Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk, a former McKinsey consultant, and Aivaras Abromavicius, a former Ukraine economy minister from Lithuania, he discussed enterprise priorities and concerns that touched on taxation and government pressure on business.
“Now all law enforcement agencies – the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine], and even the Presidential Administration – are all trying to put pressure on business,” Mr. Zelensky, 41, said. “This is something we want to remove as much as possible. They shouldn’t even come near them [businesses].”
facebook.com / Petro Poroshenko
President Petro Poroshenko greets supporters in Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Square on March 17 before going on stage to address a crowd of thousands of people with First Lady Maryna Poroshenko.
He was incoherent on how to treat Ukraine’s so-called golden goose – the booming information technology industry that accounts for 4 percent of economic output – because most of the sector’s specialists are registered as self-employed and pay a minimal tax rate of 5 percent. He also didn’t provide a clear response on trade and the still murky energy industry – both areas that his platform vaguely addresses.
Aside from periodic performances in his “Vechirniy Kvartal” (Evening Quarter) skit show, Mr. Zelensky has eschewed the usual staging of political rallies and town hall meetings with voters. He has limited interaction with potential voters to social media where his main base of support lies among the age 18-35 demographic.
Instead, the 41-year-old Dnipropetrovsk Oblast native has used campaign time to meet with representatives of international financial institutions and the diplomatic community prior to this week’s meeting with the business community.
With less than two weeks left before election day, President Petro Poroshenko held a rally in Kyiv’s St. Michael Square on March 17 before heading to the western regions of Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytskyi.
Former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a current parliamentary faction head, campaigned over the weekend in the eastern regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk.
Thousands assembled in Kyiv amid live music as President Poroshenko and First Lady Maryna Poroshenko came on stage.
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Presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister and current parliamentary faction head, speaks to a supporter in Kharkiv Oblast on March 19 during a campaign tour of eastern Ukraine.
The incumbent cautioned that previous actions to disrupt his campaign stops could endanger the conduct of the election, referring to protests held by the right-wing party National Corps and its civic wing, National Squad. Both are led by National Deputy Andriy Biletsky, the former leader of the volunteer Azov Battalion. The U.S. State Department’s most recent report on human rights calls the National Corps a “hate group.”
“They are trying to convert campaigns [meant] to communicate with voters into a format for street disturbances. This is not even a dirty electoral technology. This is an attempt to jeopardize the very fact of holding elections, to thwart them,” Mr. Poroshenko said.
Starting on March 9, the National Corps has shadowed the president along the campaign trail to demand that authorities prosecute an alleged kickback scheme worth more than $9 million in the arms industry procurement system. It purportedly involves the president’s former longtime business partner’s son and saw military parts bought from Russia smuggled into Ukraine.
Violence had already broken out earlier this month in Kyiv and Cherkasy when the nationalist group clashed with police, injuring more than 20 officers. Most recently, on March 19, a fracas erupted in Ivano-Frankivsk when the right-wing group again clashed with police during the president’s stop there.
Mr. Biletsky’s two groups are also registered as election observers among 139 non-governmental organizations – 85 of which “have no experience in election observation,” according to a February 21 report released by Kyiv-based election watchdog Opora.
Also this week, three of Mr. Poroshenko’s flagship Roshen chocolate stores in Kyiv were set on fire.
In eastern Ukraine, Ms. Tymoshenko defended her position of not calling for the use of force to quell Russia’s invasion of Crimea in late February 2014, when she had attended a National Security and Defense Council meeting held in the aftermath of the Euro-Maidan Revolution.
“At the time that all began, Ukraine had no army and no international support,” Ms. Tymoshenko said in an exclusive interview with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service.
“If we had given in to the provocation that had been arranged – and we knew from foreign intelligence sources… that the… Kremlin was waiting for just one killed Crimean or one killed serviceman from the Black Sea Fleet to let loose Russian forces all along Ukraine’s border with the aggressor,” Ukraine would have lost two thirds of its territory, Ms. Tymoshenko told RFE/RL.
She also reiterated her stance to include the U.S. and Britain in the Donbas war peace process because the current Minsk agreement has been a failure “from day one,” while adding that the Donbas region “is a pride of the Ukrainian nation,” during a stop in the Donetsk Oblast city of Sloviansk.
Mr. Zelensky continues to lead the pack of 39 remaining candidates with 25 percent support among voters who say they have decided who they’ll vote for on March 31, according to the latest nationwide Rating Sociological Group poll conducted on March 9-15.
Ms. Tymoshenko is still in second with 19 percent of support, followed by Mr. Poroshenko with 18 percent.
Poroshenko-Putin feud is ‘personal’
Given that there has been “personal animosity between” the presidents of Ukraine and Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see anybody other than Mr. Poroshenko win the election, U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations Kurt Volker said in a March 18 conference call with journalists in Brussels.
“I think it is true – in fact, it’s not only true, it’s something that Russia itself has said – that they want to see Poroshenko defeated, and that’s simply a fact,” he added.
America expects the vote outcome to usher in a government that will “continue on a path of strengthening democratic institutions, strengthening reform, fighting corruption and insisting – defending its territory and insisting on the return of occupied territories to Ukrainian sovereignty,” Ambassador Volker said.
He continued: “We don’t take a position in the election. This is a democracy. You have candidates running. It’s an open contest, so who knows who’s going to win.”
Election results must be released no later than April 10, and if no one gets more than 50 percent, the runoff would be held on April 21.