KYIV – Assessing his first year in office, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko offered an uncharacteristically sober view in which he acknowledged disappointments with the government. He also stressed achievements, such as thwarting Russia’s attempts to split Ukraine.
The evaluations and political plans came in a June 4 address to the Verkhovna Rada and a June 5 press conference, both nearly a year after he was inaugurated president on June 7, 2014.
“I am often asked whether I’m satisfied with the work of the government. No. Am I satisfied with the work of the Verkhovna Rada? Also no, obviously. I’ll say more – I am dissatisfied with my own work,” Mr. Poroshenko said in his June 5 address to Parliament.
The president’s uncolored remarks – though part of a prepared speech – were a detour from his standard fare of crafted quotations assuring the public, as well as his bold claims that have often turned out to be contradictory or utterly unrealistic. Such claims include one, made when the Donbas war erupted, that the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) should be over in a matter of hours and another, voiced during his inauguration, that the government wouldn’t negotiate with the terrorists.
Though they were aimed at acknowledging and cooling public resentment, the president’s new attempts at candor didn’t impress everyone.
“When Petro Oleksiiovych reported before the public, I said in Parliament that people indeed like emotional speeches but they didn’t hear anything concrete along the lines of ‘I promised this and did it, I didn’t do that, here’s why and when I’ll do it’,” Serhii Taruta, a Donbas oligarch and former oblast administration head, told the gazeta.ua news site.
Regarding Crimea, President Poroshenko has repeatedly vowed that the peninsula would be returned to Ukrainian government control. Whether he said this out of a need to demonstrate the government’s firm resolve on the matter, or to satisfy the Western powers outraged by Russia’s illegal annexation, it’s apparent that Crimea won’t be under Ukrainian control for at least the next few years.
Indeed on June 5, Mr. Poroshenko confirmed that his government won’t be able to return Crimea to Ukrainian control for at least a year. He was responding to a reporter who asked him why he hadn’t mentioned that goal in his address to Parliament the prior day.
“If I didn’t pause in detail on the problems of returning Crimea, that only means that this task is excessively complicated and exceeded the timeframe of the address. The address’s horizon for planning is 12 months,” he said, while insisting, “Crimea remains our top priority.”
At the same time, he acknowledged the government has yet to prepare a strategy for returning Crimea – a document that he said is still being preparing by the National Security and Defense Council and “will be presented in the nearest future.” [As of the writing of this story, July 9, the strategy had yet to be presented.]
The government has also yet to impose sanctions against Russian citizens and legal entities for Crimea’s annexation. The list of sanctions has been submitted to the Cabinet of Ministers, he said, and applies to those who arranged the illegal referendum to support the annexation, as well as those acting to prevent aircraft and ships from landing in Crimea.
Meanwhile, government lawyers have prepared a package of complaints that will be filed for maritime arbitration at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he said. Earlier, he vowed to sue the Russian government for economic damage inflicted on Ukraine as a result of the annexation.
Economically, Ukrainian goods are entering Crimea as contraband, which political observers said is among the factors that have deterred a Russian attempt to create a land bridge across the Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts.
The Ukrainian government has stopped supplying water to Crimea, where some regions have only enough for drinking purposes, undermining this year’s farming season, reported the news.allcrimea.net news site. The government is still supplying electricity, but it has raised rates for Crimea, reported the Energy Ministry.
As his biggest success, Mr. Poroshenko pointed out to Parliament that the government succeeded in undermining the Russian government’s attempts to create a separatist Novorossiya state, encompassing the eight oblasts of southeastern Ukraine.
It was the project’s authors and promoters themselves who “put a giant gravestone” on Novorossiya, Mr. Poroshenko told Parliament. His press service had reported a week earlier that this was the biggest victory of the first year of his presidency.
“The Kremlin was counting on the bacilli planted by Russian intelligence services to provoke an epidemic of separatism in the eastern and southern oblasts, but that idea didn’t find support anywhere, including the Donbas,” he told the Verkhovna Rada. “Even in the temporarily occupied districts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the separatists are being kept in power only thanks to Russian bayonets.”
The war in the Donbas, which includes parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, has resulted in the deaths of 1,700 Ukrainian soldiers and 6,400 civilians since it began in April 2014, the president said. “I can’t not share that this was the hardest thing for me personally during the first year of my presidency,” Mr. Poroshenko said. “I wouldn’t wish the pain I endured on even the fiercest of my enemies.”
The president’s strategy in resolving the war is based on upholding the Minsk II peace accords signed in February – a document that is widely acknowledged as a failure as the Russian-backed terrorists continue to use heavy artillery to fire on Ukrainian targets on a daily basis.
At least 400 people have died in the Donbas since the signing of Minsk II, the under-secretary general for political affairs at the United Nations, Jeffrey Feltman, reported on June 5.
Ukraine’s volunteer battalions, led by the Right Sector coalition of nationalist forces, held a demonstration outside the Parliament and Cabinet buildings on July 3, calling upon the government to abandon the Minsk II accords and conduct a military offensive to retake control of the Donbas.
Yet the president indicated in his parliamentary address he has no interest in going on the offensive, insisting that Ukraine’s armed forces simply don’t have the ability to challenge the Russian-backed forces. The U.S. government confirmed as early as February that the Russian-backed terrorists have more armaments than some NATO member states.
“Despite the success in creating the armed forces, it’s necessary to recognize, that although we are at least equipped differently than a year ago, it’s still the minimal level of the state’s defense capability,” he explained.
These claims have been dismissed by volunteer battalion commanders, such as Mykola Kokhanivskyi of OUN, who insist they can defeat the terrorists and have repeatedly insisted the Minsk accords are a betrayal of Ukrainian national interests in holding them back from engaging in a military offensive.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government won’t renew official economic ties and social payments as part of its current partial blockade of the occupied territories of the Donbas until significant progress is made in achieving peace, Mr. Poroshenko told Parliament. Above all, that consists of restoring full control over the border with Russia and the removal of Russia forces, he said.
Otherwise, the residents of the occupied territory have no right to complain about the controls established along the conflict line, given that they can travel to Ukrainian-held territory to receive their pensions and humanitarian aid, which are “maximally accessible.”
“As an inalienable part of Ukraine, the Donbas is ready to be helped by not only us, but all our foreign friends,” he told Parliament. “But they’ll invest money in renewed infrastructure only when they are convinced that everything built today won’t be ruined by a full-scale Russian invasion tomorrow. The Donbas would have already forgotten about that war as a bad dream if Moscow would have wanted peace as much as Kyiv.”
This policy has also drawn criticism from those arguing that traveling outside the occupied territory for social payments isn’t as easy as the president claims.
Meanwhile, the checkpoints restricting trade merely feeds the trade in contraband that enriches a few intermediaries, who get to charge higher prices, at the expense of the general public.
“If there’s a war with Russia, then the people on the occupied territory are hostages,” Mr. Taruta told gazeta.ua. “And if they’re hostages, then the job of all the institutions of Ukrainian government is to help them to the fullest extent.”
Politicians aligned with Mr. Poroshenko, such as Yurii Lutsenko, head of the Poroshenko Bloc’s parliamentary faction, have even proposed imposing a full economic blockade on the Donbas region, which is drawing fiercer opposition.
“People brought to starvation and zombified by information will lose all trust in the Ukrainian government and will think that it wants to destroy them,” Mr. Taruta told the gordonua.com news site in an interview published on July 1. “Then the single source of income will be serving the terrorists, and there can be 300,000 to 400,000 such fighters. Russia will give them arms and ammunition to fight against Ukrainian soldiers – using other Ukrainian hands – and destroy other parts of our territory.”
The Ukrainian government will never allow a referendum on whether the occupied territories should separate from Ukraine, Mr. Poroshenko said. What he would consider is a national referendum to determine the form of self-governance that the occupied territories would have as part of the Ukrainian state.
Yet the Russian-backed terrorists said they aren’t interested in either referendum, having adopted the Russian government’s recently reversed policy of wanting to remain within the Ukrainian state rather than separating.
A little less than a month after the president’s address to Parliament, the Donetsk People’s Republic set elections for local government seats on October 18, drawing condemnation from Mr. Poroshenko as “exceptionally irresponsible and having ruinous consequences for the process of de-escalating tensions.” In doing so, DPR leaders blamed Mr. Poroshenko for not consulting them in preparing his bill that set specific conditions for elections in the occupied territories.
The leaders of the Luhansk People’s Republic were unfazed by those comments, setting their elections for November 1.
In the meantime, the government is fully complying with the Minsk II accords signed in February, a fact the world has observed, the president insisted.
“Even before using arms in Maryinka, we informed the OSCE [Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe] and our partners, held a press conference, contacted the Joint Center for Coordination and Monitoring, and only after all that did we bring our arms into Maryinka,” he told the press conference, referring to the most recent flare-up in the war in early June.
The Russian government is also attempting to destabilize Ukraine by fomenting domestic opposition movements, such as a “third maidan.”
“Russian aggression is striking at the quality of life of Ukrainians, exhausting the economy, and the enemy isn’t hiding its plans to convert the dissatisfaction of tired and exhausted Ukrainians into destabilizing the situation in our country,” the president noted.
Mr. Poroshenko acknowledged poor conditions at the Desna training base about 47 miles outside Kyiv, but said contributions from the wealthy are being used to improve them.
At the same time, he insisted at his June 5 press conference that the conditions in the army aren’t as bad as they’re being portrayed in the mass media. “Please, don’t paint a horrible picture,” he said. “Let’s improve the situation together. The situation isn’t horrible there, and it’s improving every day.”
As an example, he cited the Yavoriv training base in the Lviv Oblast, where Ukrainian soldiers eat the same quality of food as their American instructors. Beforehand, Mr. Poroshenko said, a Ukrainian soldier’s meal was valued at 77 cents, while an American’s meal was $22.
Mr. Poroshenko acknowledged ongoing corruption at the checkpoints to the occupied territories, but insisted there were efforts to combat it, pointing to dismissals of corrupt border officials.
Ukraine’s armed forces must remain on guard for a possible full-scale Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory, the president said. A “colossal threat” also remains of wide-scale fighting conducted by Russian-backed forces, which currently include 14 battalion-tactical groups with more than 9,000 soldiers on Ukrainian territory.
At the same time, he stressed his policy of not imposing martial law, which would allow for forbidding elections, censoring the press, restricting movement, imposing curfews and calling a national military draft.
“We cherish our democracy because we believe in it and because it’s our value,” he told Parliament. “Ukraine can exist only as a democracy, otherwise we’re gone. An authoritarian Ukraine won’t have the world’s support and will lose one of the key distinctions from Russia and will become its booty.”
As for NATO, Mr. Poroshenko was entirely sober in his assessment to Parliament that many member states “aren’t leaning right now to open the doors.”
“That’s the truth that I have to tell the country now finally, without diplomatic vagaries,” he said. “Honored deputies, we don’t intend to look to Moscow on this issue. We will approach it strictly from the position of the Ukrainian people. But ignoring the opinion of our [Western] partners will be very complicated.”
The Ukrainian government in 2014 canceled its non-military bloc status imposed by Viktor Yanukovych and in May of this year approved a national security strategy document “that sets as its goal membership in NATO,” he said.
“All that we intend to do in the defense sphere will be unified under NATO standards,” he noted. “And our task is the full achievement of all necessary criteria for admission, which, by the way, coincides to a large extent with the criteria for EU admission.”