President Petro Poroshenko needs to leave the country more often (besides during his half-million dollar secret winter vacations to the Maldives). He becomes a new man when he is out of Ukraine, one unrecognizable from the president most know at home.
At home, Poroshenko is the king of the corrupt and kleptocratic oligarchy, obstructing and thwarting attempts by the long-suffering Ukrainian people at justice or a decent standard of living, a persecutor of his political foes and anti-corruption activists.
The helplessness and disappointment he has deepened have prompted millions of Ukrainians to flee abroad for any chance of a normal life. But since most major Ukrainian news media are controlled by fellow oligarchs who he’s protected from criminal investigations or sweetened with business favors, he enjoys favorable coverage. He thinks that keeping the oligarchy happy will help him get re-elected in March 2019. Only Ukrainians know for sure, but I don’t think his chances are good, based on his performance since taking office on June 7, 2014.
But abroad, as his delusional performance showed at the just-completed World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Poroshenko magically transforms into a democratic hero — in his own mind, at least. He is the one, by his telling, who is leading the fight against corruption in Ukraine. In his mind, he single-handedly created and encouraged new anti-corruption institutions. He’s the man who created an entirely new, clean, competent Supreme Court that is now trusted by Ukrainians and delivering justice
Abroad, this self-styled democratic hero is so confident of his leadership of Ukraine that he predicts that the European Union will, by 2021, welcome Ukraine as one of its potential members. Besides the fact that all the 2020 deadlines keep creeping ahead, the E.U. is not even close to giving Ukraine a membership perspective.
Here’s a point-by-point rebuttal of Poroshenko’s untruths on a panel with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
A panel discussion at the Jan. 23-26 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, featured President Petro Poroshenko and the presidents of Poland and Lithuania.
Poroshenko: “I’m organizing the fighting against corruption in Ukraine…because fighting against corruption is priority of my presidential policy. It’s me who created the independent anti-corruption institutions — the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which is effectively functioning with other institutions and delivering the first very promising results; and these are supported by our international and inside the country.”
Facts: Poroshenko has done everything to obstruct the creation of an independent judicial system because he wants to decide who goes to prison and who doesn’t. For years, he clung to the corrupt Viktor Shokin as his general prosecutor, only to replace him with the equally inept and even more politically subservient Yuriy Lutsenko, who is attacking anti-corruption activists rather than investigating big fraud and murder cases. Besides Lutsenko, the other old corrupt law enforcement institutions, including the Security Service of Ukraine and the Interior Ministry, have done their utmost to attack, subvert and weaken the new anti-corruption institutions, which are poorly staffed compared to the regular police, prosecutors and courts. The result is natural: There are no convictions of anybody for the grand-scale corruption that looted the nation of $40 billion — equivalent to one-year’s state budget and 40 percent of the annual gross domestic product — since the start of the decade. No big murders are solved. Nothing.
Poroshenko: “We provided judicial reform with the full reloading of the Supreme Court and court system in Ukraine. And on 22nd of December, I initiated in the parliament a new anti-corruption court as a finishing structure for the independent anti-corruption system.”
Facts: Nobody — well only 1 percent of people, perhaps — trusts the courts in Ukraine. The new Supreme Court includes too many discredited judges, some of them complicit in politically motivated rulings and corruption. And we’re not talking about a few — we’re talking about at least 25 out of the 111 judges named. The lower courts are still a mess. Judges seem unable to deliver any kind of speedy and swift justice unless they’re ruling on cases of political persecution. Poroshenko spent most of his presidency fighting against an independent anti-corruption court, only to reverse course late last year when international partners gave him no other choice. He belatedly introduced a badly flawed piece of legislation on the Friday before Christmas. With his faction in parliament, the largest group of lawmakers, he will manage to stall or weaken the legislation for the rest of the year.
To say that Poroshenko is living in a fairytale world is too kind.
He’s not being truthful, sad to say, and many are complicit in his lies because they want to tout a rosy version of Ukraine that does not exist. Those going along with the story are protecting their investments or their access to Poroshenko or both.
The only people he’s fooling are those who don’t know what is happening in Ukraine. Unfortunately, as Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky recently pointed out in an op-ed, some of those foolish foreigners are working for governments, international organizations or in business. Many others, including the Atlantic Council’s Diane Francis, know quite well what is really happening.
Poroshenko may yet win re-election, but the chances are growing that Ukrainians will turn to someone even worse, potentially, because this Ukrainian president has cynically betrayed the promise of the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove out his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014, and is showing no signs of changing course before he faces voters again in March 2019.
If he loses, he has only himself to blame. Most Ukrainians I know, and I know many after 10 years of living in this nation, are fed up with him. The rest of the world will catch up soon, after realizing his promises and actions don’t match up, no matter how many trips abroad he takes to tell fanciful tales.
