This week brought us one of the worst-ever manifestations of the dangerously chaotic hiring policy of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his office.
Vitold Fokin, the first prime minister of Ukraine, who at 87 was brought back from retirement to join the Ukrainian delegation in the Minsk negotiations for peace in the Donbas, was hastily dismissed from it on Sept. 30.
The reason was the astounding statement that Fokin made after a little over a month at the delegation. He claimed that he doesn’t “see any proof that there is a war between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbas.”
That’s a statement right from the Kremlin’s textbook, and it’s shocking to hear it come from the Ukrainian side of the negotiation.
Of course, if Fokin kept an eye on the news in the past six years, he would have known that there is plenty of evidence of Russia’s intervention in the Donbas, where its war killed over 13,000 people since 2014. It’s been sending there its regular troops, as well as controlling local militants and supplying them with weapons.
Fokin was fired from the delegation. Good riddance.
But that doesn’t leave us comforted. Fokin wasn’t the problem, he was a symptom.
Fokin lived most of his life as a Soviet official. He spent one year as the prime minister of independent Ukraine 30 years ago and all but retired ever since. That’s not a CV that makes him an attractive candidate for any government job, let alone for the position of a negotiator with Russia.
How is it that a war denier with poor credentials was hired to perform one of the most crucial roles in today’s Ukraine — that of a peace negotiator?
President Zelensky’s office said they were “unpleasantly surprised” to learn about Fokin’s statement.
Here’s a crazy idea: Maybe, in the future, they should actually interview people before putting them in charge of stopping the war.
Unfortunately, as we know, Fokin was hired because his granddaughter, a pop singer, recommended him to Andriy Yermak, head of Zelensky’s office and her old friend.
That’s not a proper way to recruit people for top state positions, to say the least. And yet, this seems to be the preferred way for Zelensky and his team. Either the president surrounds himself with old friends who he thinks he can trust rather than finding people with the right skills and integrity or he is consciously playing a fool for the Kremlin.
This approach is a grave mistake on Zelensky’s part that will cost us as a country dearly, as the example of Fokin proved. The war is no joke and lives are on the line.
