But for me, the acid test for President Petro Porshenko is whether he becomes the first president in Ukraine’s independent history to act in the national interest, rather than in his self-interest — as Leonid Kravchuk, Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych did.
All four of his predecessors are responsible for the weakened state institutions, the endemic corruption and the cynical exploitation of separatist impulses. They were not deserving of the Ukrainian people, in my estimation.
Poroshenko could change all that, but to do so, he will have to rebel against the system of crony capitalism that made him a billionaire. A lot of people are skeptical. Let’s hope he finds the moral strength to do so.
Everyone has their own litmus tests — for some it’s whether he sells off his businesses to avoid conflicts of interest. For others it’s whether he cleans up the rancid public procurement system or gas industry. I agree with them all.
But mine is simpler: Poroshenko should let prosecutors go ahead and put Kuchma on trial for ordering the Sept. 16, 2000 murder of journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who was killed to send a message to everyone else that free speech and public criticism of a president will not be tolerated.
All evidence in the last nearly 14 years points to Kuchma as having ordered the crime. Prosecutors have said as much. He claims he is innocent.
There is only one fair way to find out: Put him on trial and let the evidence come out publicly in a fair, judicial hearing. The charges have been blocked for political reasons. And, for political reasons, the trial must go ahead if Ukraine is to ever start coming to grips with a sorry past so it can move forward to a brighter future.
The mere act of putting Kuchma on trial will signal to everyone in Ukraine that business as usual is over and that no one is above the law, especially when it comes to murder.
Poroshenko needs to go a step further and become the first president to end political control of the nation’s judges, prosecutors and police and to install a true citizen-jury system. Jurors may get the verdicts wrong from time to time, but, as the axiom goes, it is better to let a guilty person go free than to imprison an innocent person. And there’s no better judge, in the final analysis, than your fellow citizens.
My personal experience with Petro Poroshenko is very limited, even though I have been the chief editor of the Kyiv Post for six years. We follow each other in social media. The couple of direct contacts that I have had were positive. He gave a keynote speech at the first Kyiv Post Tiger Conference in 2012, sharing the headline position with then-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. I also talked with him a bit at last Sept. 16’s anniversary commemoration of Gongadze’s murder on Independence Square.
Both times he made positive impressions for his intelligence, empathy and good judgment.
I had no idea at the time, of course, that Ukraine would experience a revolution, that Yanukovych would flee, that Russia would seize Crimea and start a war in eastern Ukraine and that Poroshenko would be elected president on May 25. At the time, I remember thinking that Yanukovych could be in power for a very long time to come, but even then I — and many people in Ukraine — could not fathom how, since the extent of the corruption of his administration was quite well-known, even then.
So until I see Kuchma stand trial, I will remain skeptical about whether the new president is willing to be Ukraine’s first chief executive to put national interests above his own.
Here’s the only picture I know about of myself and Poroshenko at the Gongadze memorial:
Here is the Ukrainska Pravda link to video of the event
Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner can be reached at [email protected]
