Let’s be honest — we all were sure that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would be a rock-solid electoral base for President Petro Poroshenko.
He claims Ukraine’s intense military buildup amid Russia’s war in Donbas since 2014 to be one of the major successes of his five-year presidency. His carefully cultivated image as a strong wartime leader is reflected in his campaign slogan “Army! Language! Faith!”
Poroshenko sees himself as a father of a resurrected Ukrainian military, and, together with swarms of sympathetic bloggers and commentators, he expected that Ukrainian men and women in uniform would give him all of their votes on March 31. Given that all of the military top brass also lauded the president, effectively participating in Poroshenko’s campaign, it’s little wonder he thought he had ordinary soldiers’ votes in his pocket.
The voting results from the war zone of Donbas, however, turned out to be a harsh wake-up call for the president.
Out of all 79 special polling stations functioning for the military deployed to the war zone, Poroshenko won in only 40, gaining a mere 37.6 percent of the total of 34,000 votes. Almost the same amount of votes went to his bitter rival Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the presidential race’s surprise winner at the national level. Zelenskiy won at the other 39 poling stations, gaining 36.4 percent, losing to the president by only around 400 votes.
In short, the incumbent commander-in-chief was almost beaten by a comedian with no political experience. Considering how focused the Poroshenko campaign has been on the military, this was a hell of a humiliation.
So far, no one at the official level has commented on this, but one can imagine what kind of conversation there may already have been between Poroshenko and Chief of the General Staff Viktor Muzhenko, who openly endorsed the president during the campaign.
However, with a closer look, there is nothing surprising about Zelenskiy’s seemingly unexpected success with the military. The army does not exist in a vacuum — it is Ukrainian society in microcosm, and soldiers read the news too.
They have seen the investigation by the Bihus.Info project on large-scale smuggling of used and defective military hardware from Russia, and its sale to Ukrainian defense companies at inflated prices. They know that Oleh Hladkovskiy, Poroshenko’s long-time business partner, a high-profile appointee of the president to the National Defense and Security Council and a top defense contractor, was involved in the case, and that the plotters are thought to have embezzled millions of dollars from the defense budget.
And many old campaigners from 2014 and 2015 still can’t come to terms with the fact that the massacres of Ilovaisk and Debaltseve have not been properly investigated, and not one top general has been held responsible for bungling battles in which hundreds, if not thousands, of their brothers-in-arms were first abandoned by their command, and then slaughtered by regular Russian forces.
Many paratroopers might want to know why General Viktor Nazarov, sentenced to seven years in prison for negligence that led to the downing of an Iliushin Il-76 military transport in June 2014 and the death of 49 soldiers and airmen, has been appealing against his sentence for years, and continues to serve.
Others see that the army, which declares it will adopt NATO standards by late 2020, is still enmeshed in old Soviet-style bureaucracy and chaos. Officers commanding soldiers in the war zone are also fighting heaps of useless paperwork in their dugouts, buying paper and printer ink for their own money, and telling bitter jokes about the “UPA” — “the Ukrainian Paper Army.”
Looking at all the red-tape, pen-pushers and bean-counters in the military high command, ordinary soldiers clearly understand that this system is installed and maintained by those appointed because to their total loyalty to Poroshenko.
Soldiers and officers are even reluctant to leave their front-line trenches in the Donbas for leave behind the lines — because of what awaits at army camps, such as the ill-fated Shyrokiy Lan training ground, where old tents were set up amid knee-deep mud and snow melt in springtime — despite millions being allocated annually to build new barracks and dormitories.
Many soldiers have families. The government does not provide free housing, while military housing benefit covers no more than half of the rent of an average apartment. As of early 2018, up to 46,300 families of soldiers were in the queue for housing. The government promised to build 184 dormitories by 2019 at a cost of Hr 2.3 billion ($85 million), but journalists viewing some of the buildings have found nothing but naked brick walls.
Meanwhile, soldiers’ families and friends in the rear pay huge electricity bills formed using the Rotterdam Plus pricing scheme, which brings massive profits to oligarch Rinat Akmetov.
Tens of thousands of career soldiers are leaving the Armed Forces for civilian life, weary of the Soviet-style disorder and social issues that have been left unresolved for years. Nearly 30,000 did so in 2018 alone, according to official figures. The government, under the patronage of Poroshenko, tries to hold on to them by increasing their pay time after time, but this mostly attracts only “zarobitchany” (“migrant workers”), who join the army only to earn more or less decent pay, but who have no intention of building long careers in the military.
On television, soldiers and officers see pro-Russian agents of influence such as Yuriy Boyko and Viktor Medvedchuk enjoying themselves in Ukraine, not being prosecuted by law enforcing agencies, driving the Kremlin’s agenda in the media space, and even making open trips to Moscow to meet with the Russian leadership.
In front of them, there’s the front line in the Donbas that has been frozen for years, with absolutely no end to the war in sight, and a Ukrainian leadership that appears to have no clear or realistic strategies.
So as happened at the national level, where Zelenskiy secured an impressive victory with over 30 percent against almost 16 percent for Poroshenko, soldiers have hit the president with a protest vote.
It was not enough for Poroshenko to be pictured in camouflage next to soldiers in full combat gear and old Soviet military hardware. It was not enough to start providing more or less decent personal equipment, clothing, and food. And it was not enough to blithely claim the Ukrainian army was being successfully rebuilt under an effective wartime leader.
The soldiers on the ground see the true situation well. Poroshenko has likely already lost the battle for their support in the second round.
