The Kyiv Post’s eight-part Oligarch Watch series kicks off in today’s edition on page 1 with a look at the nation’s most powerful member of this elite club: President Petro Poroshenko.
Poroshenko is obviously more subtle, more flexible and more intelligent than Viktor Yanukovych, his artless, rigid and crassly corrupt predecessor.
And unlike Yanukovych, he is more susceptible to pressure from the West and civil society and has not yet succeeded in building an authoritarian regime.
But yet at the same time, he is actually more dangerous than Yanukovych.
Society saw Yanukovych for what he really was: an uncouth kleptocrat with dictatorial tendencies – a petty thief who stole control of Europe’s biggest country, just to rip it off and bleed it dry.
Poroshenko is different. He is much better at public relations and at pretending to be someone he is not.
By engaging in Western-style, reformist rhetoric and appointing some reformers to state jobs, Poroshenko has created a smokescreen that obscures his actual intentions.
He has managed to fool the West into giving him financial aid and promising to cancel visas with the European Union. At the same time, his cronies are destroying the very reforms that he is boasting about to the West, as he himself monopolizes power.
And at least Yanukovych never had the gall to cast himself as a patriot.
Poroshenko is using pseudo-patriotic rhetoric to attack his opponents and entrench his power, spreading the false idea that whoever criticizes a wartime president is working for Ukraine’s enemy, Russia.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s allies have been discrediting his critics by launching well-orchestrated smear campaigns, casting them as unpatriotic or corrupt.
Poroshenko himself has fended off a scandal over his British Virgin Islands offshore firm by rubbishing the journalists who broke it, and he has distracted society’s attention from the alleged corruption of his allies by criticizing reform-minded politicians.
That’s why Poroshenko poses a threat: a clever enemy of reform is more dangerous than a stupid one.
The only way to fight such an enemy is to call his bluff.
That, we will do.
