KYIV – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko saw his options narrow this week as he seeks to resolve Ukraine’s deepening political crises, namely the war in the Donbas and the formation of a new coalition government.
His position has gotten so limited that he is considering appointing political players once considered to be off limits for key posts. Donbas oligarchs Rinat Akhmetov and Yurii Boiko are now candidates for governing positions in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk.
Also this week, Radical Party chief Oleh Liashko emerged as the president’s most viable partner in forming a new coalition after the Samopomich party announced strict demands for supporting a new prime minister. A populist known for his publicity stunts and provocations, Mr. Liashko reportedly wants to become the chair of Parliament.
“It will be exceptionally difficult to emerge out of this crisis. In order to resolve such problems, the president should have the political will without private desires and interests,” said Mykhailo Basarab, a Kyiv political consultant.
The new tactics to find peace in the Donbas come as Western governments are reportedly losing patience with Ukraine and its failure to organize local elections in the occupied territories, reported journalist Serhiy Rakhmanin on the dt.ua news site, citing anonymous sources in an article published on March 12.
They have gone to the extent of setting new deadlines for the Ukrainian government. Legislation for local elections in the Donbas must be prepared and approved by the Verkhovna Rada by the end of March, and the elections must be held by the end of June, the report said. Failure to hold the elections could result in the European Union dropping its sanctions against Russia and Russian officials in June or in December.
“This is supposed to be Kyiv’s punishment for failing to fulfill the Minsk agreements,” the report said. “European leaders aren’t much concerned that Moscow isn’t fulfilling them either. From a formal point of view, the main violator is Ukraine.”
Elections in the Donbas are a highly unpopular idea and widely viewed as impossible to conduct legitimately in the current state of affairs, which was confirmed by numerous key officials this week.
Heorhii Tuka, the head of the Luhansk regional military-civil administration of the Ukrainian government, said that up to 75 percent of the population of occupied Luhansk favors pro-Ukrainian policies but is afraid of expressing its sympathies under current conditions, the segodnya.ua news site reported on March 15.
“I think that before holding elections, a time-out is needed to return the populations of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions to a normal understanding of things,” he said, suggesting that they be held only in five years. “Secondly, these regions need to be removed from under the uncontrollable administration of ‘the fathers of the Donbas’.”
Then, on March 16, Central Election Commission Deputy Chair Andrii Mahera told the Channel 5 television network that he doubts elections could be held in June 2017, let alone in June of this year. He was backed by the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, a non-governmental organization, which said it would take at least five years for the region to become stable enough for a vote.
The other unpopular proposal – allowing Messrs. Akhmetov and Boiko to take charge in the occupied Donbas – also originated with Europeans politicians, who first floated the idea in July-August 2015, Roman Bezsmertnyi, a Ukrainian diplomat involved in the Minsk talks, told RFE/RL on March 15.
Mr. Akhmetov, the biggest oligarch in the Donbas and the owner of Ukraine’s largest electric and steel companies, is widely believed to be cooperating with the self-proclaimed governments, who have left much of his assets undamaged and functioning.
He was also the biggest financer of the defunct Party of Regions, along with Messrs. Boiko and oligarch Dmytro Firtash.
Mr. Boiko is unpopular for his numerous corruption scandals throughout the years, which are alleged to have cost the Ukrainian government hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum, along with Mr. Firtash. He currently leads the Opposition Bloc, which is the Russian-oriented faction in the Verkhovna Rada.
“If the government gives the region under Akhmetov’s control, the question arises of what did we sacrifice so many lives for,” said Sergei Garmash, the chief editor of ostro.org, a leading independent Donbas news site. “It would be absurd if we give the Donbas to those same people who brought it to this war.”
The Presidential Administration confirmed with the pravda.com.ua news site on March 12 that its officials had conducted talks with the two oligarchs to consider the proposal, which was reportedly supported by Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin trusts Mr. Boiko, but not Mr. Akhmetov, whose “trust has been undermined by his ‘not ours, not yours’ position, as well as the positive feedback from Victoria Nuland about the Ukrainian oligarch during the summer visit of Secretary of State [John] Kerry to Sochi,” the dt.ua report said.
Incidentally, those most vocal in their opposition are the head of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, and the head of the Luhansk People’s Republic, Igor Plotnitsky, both of whom would be replaced.
“He will be immediately arrested upon an attempt to cross the border of the Luhansk People’s Republic for two reasons,” Mr. Plotnitsky said of Mr. Boiko, as reported by the republic’s official website.
“Firstly, as an accomplice of the Kyiv punishers and supporter of the Anti-Terrorist Operation and the genocide of our people,” he said. “And secondly, as an accomplice for the Ukrainian oligarch [Serhii] Kurchenko, whose presence, and that of those associated with him, is forbidden on our territory.”
The proposal has been called the “Medvedchuk plan,” referring to Mr. Putin’s representative in Ukraine. It’s truly a Kremlin plan with entirely different aims, Vitaly Portnikov, a Kyiv political commentator for the Espreso television network, wrote on his Facebook page on March 13.
“Putin is not planning to appoint anyone,” he wrote. “The Kremlin views it as necessary to preserve Zakharchenko and Plotnitsky, and cancel the sanctions ‘under full control.’ The idea of new appointments is a trap that would demonstrate that Kyiv is ready for separate agreements with Moscow beyond Minsk and to make Europeans negative towards Ukraine. And don’t think that Bankova [the street where the Presidential Administration is located] doesn’t understand that.”
Mr. Akhmetov on March 12 issued a statement declining to comment on rumors, yet insisting that he is willing to take any steps to stop the war in the Donbas. Mr. Boiko confirmed that he’s negotiating with the government “to help implement the Minsk accords, end the conflict and return the uncontrolled territories and people there to Ukraine.”
Yet there’s no plan of how to install these oligarchs into power and what they would do afterwards, said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta Center for Applied Political Research in Kyiv.
“The true problem is not even in the personalities of these transition figures, but their statuses,” he said. “What are they going to lead? It’s absolutely unacceptable for Ukraine to preserve after elections in the Donbas – even if they occur – two separatist republics, and moreover, their re-integration into the structure of our country.”
As much a vexing question for the president is forming the new coalition government after the previous coalition was abandoned in mid-February by the Samopomich and Batkivshchyna factions, both of which stand to make big gains if early parliamentary elections were held.
A poll conducted in February by Kyiv’s Gorshenin Institute showed Samopomich would finish in first and Batkivshchyna in second, while another poll – conducted between February 23 and March 8 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology – revealed they would finish in fourth and first place, respectively.
Andriy Sadovyi, the founder and head of the Samopomich party, arrived at the Presidential Administration on March 14 to meet with Mr. Poroshenko, who offered him support as a candidate for prime minister. With his political star rising, Mr. Sadovyi duly declined. He received the highest rating of any Ukrainian politician in Gorshenin’s February poll.
“Everything can’t be dumped on Samopomich,” he said. “They have done who-knows-what, the country is in trouble, and now Samopomich – rescue the situation!”
Not only won’t Samopomich join the coalition, but it refused to support the president’s effort to muster enough votes to elect a new prime minister (which would not require Samopomich to be a member of the parliamentary coalition).
Before a March 14 meeting with the president and parliamentary faction heads, Samopomich Parliamentary Faction Chair Oleh Bereziuk told reporters that his faction would not support any candidate for prime minister until the president leads the effort to appoint a new procurator general, reformat the Central Election Commission and approve open-list voting for the next parliamentary vote.
With these actions, Samopomich buried any chance of a technocratic government that could have been created without divvying up posts among parties and oligarchs, Yuriy Lutsenko, the parliamentary faction head of the Poroshenko Bloc, told the Rada the next day.
This technocratic government was highly anticipated by Western experts on Ukraine, who hoped it would be led by Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who demonstrated her leadership ability when executing the $15 billion debt operation with Ukraine’s creditors and preparing the 2016 budget in line with International Monetary Fund requirements.
Without Samopomich and Batkivshchyna to form any government (technocratic or political), President Poroshenko’s most viable choice is to form the new coalition with just the Poroshenko Bloc, the People’s Front and Oleh Liashko’s Radical Party, Mr. Basarab said.
Though Mr. Liashko is unlikely to become Parliament chair as part of this coalition, he could gain an influential Cabinet post, as well as several lucrative positions for his fellow party members, he said.
“The most important thing is to renew the stable work of the parliamentary coalition. He has little choice but to reformat Yatsenyuk’s Cabinet and preserve it until the fall, when early elections are possible,” Mr. Basarab said.
The formation of a new coalition is critical in order for Ukraine to receive the next IMF tranche worth $1.7 billion, which will be accompanied by other Western financing, experts have said. The IMF made clear in a March 3 statement that “it needs more clarity with the government and the coalition.”
Dismissing the Verkhovna Rada and calling early elections is the worst option for Mr. Poroshenko, not only because it would delay the next IMF tranche by at least five months, but it would also devastate his support in Parliament.
His Poroshenko Bloc would get 10 percent in elections, compared to 16 percent for the Samopomich party, 14 percent for the Batkivshchyna party led by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, 13 percent for the Russian-oriented Opposition Bloc and 12.5 percent for the Radical Party, according to the Gorshenin Institute poll of 2,000 respondents, which was conducted on February 8-17.
Currently, the Poroshenko Bloc is the biggest faction in Parliament.
“The situation has spun beyond his [Mr. Poroshenko’s] control since other political forces have joined the opposition, including Tymoshenko, [Mikheil] Saakashvili and Samopomich, all with their own goals,” Mr. Basarab said.