Jaresko says letter from Finance Ministry to US official is fake

Ukrainian Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko has said a letter purportedly from her to Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, was “poorly faked.”

“The Russian Internet is sharing a poorly faked Finance Ministry letter asking the United States to help postpone the Dutch referendum,” Jaresko wrote on her Twitter account on March 28. “I call on the Netherlands to vote on April 6.”

Jaresko posted a picture of the letter on Twitter, along with comments in Ukrainian and English. In the post, she denied being its author. Moreover, she noted errors in the letter’s formatting, style and grammar.

“Poor English,” she wrote with a pink highlighter on a copy of the letter.

The letter contains a request that the United States help Ukraine postpone an April 6 referendum in the Netherlands, which was called after a Dutch anti-EU citizens’ group attracted 427,000 signatures to an online petition asking the Dutch government to reconsider its ratification of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement.

The agreement sets up a free trade regime between the EU and Ukraine, and also contains provisions encouraging democratic, governance and economic reforms in Ukraine. It was signed on March 21, 2014, and ratified by the Ukrainian and EU parliaments on Sept. 16, 2014. The agreed free trade regime came into effect on Jan. 1, 2016.

However, all 28 EU states have to ratify the agreement for it to come fully into force. The full ratification of the agreement by the Dutch government was stalled by the calling of the referendum.

Russia has strongly opposed the Ukraine-EU agreement. The suspension of work to finalize the treaty in November 2013 by the Ukrainian government led to mass public protests in Kyiv, which in turn caused former pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych to abandon office and flee the country to Russia in February 2014.

Finance Ministry Press Secretary Daryna Marchak told the Kyiv Post that Jaresko would neither guess who had faked the letter, nor why.

“The letter came to our attention when journalists started asking us to comment on it,” Marchak said in a telephone interview with the Kyiv Post on March 29. “This is a fake (for certain), but we do not want to speculate about it.”