VIENNA - Ukrainian businessman Dmytro Firtash has said that he met with presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko and UDAR Party leader Vitali Klitschko on the eve of the presidential election in May 2014, and that the meeting was his idea and aimed to prevent the presidency of Yulia Tymoshenko.
“The main thing that we got [from the meeting] what we wanted: Poroshenko is the president, Klitschko has become the mayor (of Kyiv),” Firtash told a court in Vienna on April 30 at a hearing of his extradition to the United States.
Details of the meeting are confidential, he said.
The businessman said he has been a long-time opponent of Tymoshenko and thinks she only seeks power, from which Ukraine will sustain losses. The first major loss will be the natural gas market, he said. “The second time we lost Crimea,” Firtash said.
Ukraine losing Crimea is the fault of the political force represented by Tymoshenko, current Ukrainian premier Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and former acting president and current National Security Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov, he said.
Hopefully, “there will be an inquiry into how Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and Acting President Turchynov gave Crimea away,” he said.
