“Army” might be one of the three pillars of President Petro Poroshenko’s election campaign slogan, along with “Language” and “Faith,” but the candidate himself isn’t winning huge support from the military.
His rival, comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who won the first round of presidential election on March 31 and will meet Poroshenko in the runoff on April 21, is close on Poroshenko’s heels in the race for the presidency along the Donbas front line. With 99,89 percent of the ballots processed by the country’s Central Electoral Commission by noon on April 3, Poroshenko appears to have won in only 40 out of 79 special military polling stations in the war zone. The president was just 413 votes ahead: he got 12,836 votes of the military in the war zone, and Zelenskiy – 12,423 votes.
That’s a blow for the incumbent president and commander-in-chief, who had expected strong support among Ukraine’s large military electorate — especially as nationwide Zelenskiy took a commanding lead in the March 31 first round of the election, wining more than 30 percent of the vote compared to Poroshenko’s 15.9 percent.
Out of slightly over 34,000 military personnel voting on Election Day, only 37.6 percent favored the incumbent president, while 36.4 percent cast their votes for Zelenskiy, giving him victory in the remaining 39 war zone polling stations.
In several of the military precincts Poroshenko won by only a razor-thin margin, with totals like 216 versus 200 — the result in one of the military polling stations located in key front-line city of Volnovakha right between Russian-occupied Donetsk and the Ukrainian-controlled port city of Mariupol.
In some other locations, Zelenskiy was the clear victor with totals like 108 to 44 (at a polling station in the city of Bakhmut).
Only soldiers were allowed to vote at the 79 polling stations created by the Central Electoral Commission in mid-March for the military in the war zone.
Although Poroshenko is technically the winner among the armed forces, the strong showing of Zelenskiy, a comedy star and the unexpected leader of the presidential race, indicates that the incumbent president is in serious trouble.
In the five years since taking power in the summer 2014 at the peak of Russia’s invasion in the Donbas, Poroshenko has highlighted the recovery and buildup of the military that has occurred under his leadership. Ukraine’s Armed Forces, neglected and underfunded for decades prior to 2014, have under Poroshenko enjoyed record-high budgets, which have skyrocketed from $69 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion in 2019.
Other than that, the total number of active duty service personnel in the Armed Forces was increased to nearly 250,000, the limit imposed by the national legislation, and a corps of nearly 180,000 reserve troops was also created.
Poroshenko and his entourage claim the credit for the resurrection of the Ukrainian military, previously hollowed out by post-Soviet cuts and sales of its hardware abroad. In the past few years, Poroshenko has publicly claimed Ukraine now has “one of the most powerful armies in Europe.”
Under Poroshenko, the whole defense and security sector commenced a program of modernization with the goal of gaining full compatibility with NATO requirements by late 2020 and then to seek full membership of the 29-nation defense alliance.
Poroshenko has exploited the image of a strong wartime leader at the start of the presidential electoral campaign of 2018-2019, with widespread media coverage of him wearing camouflage among soldiers in full combat gear or next to military vehicles, including in the Donbas war zone.
Poroshenko’s main campaign slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” put the military first, ahead of the other emotive issues of the status of the Ukrainian language and the regaining of the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Moscow.
The Armed Forces command, headed by Chief of General Staff Viktor Muzhenko, Poroshenko’s loyal ally, provided the president with broad support in public. General Muzhenko personally endorsed Poroshenko on Jan. 30, urging military personnel to reelect their current commander-in-chief.
“Don’t believe those who promise easy answers, a swift peace… They are only wrapping the war in a parcel and sending it to our children and grandchildren. It is we who must see this to the end,” Muzhenko said.
The president also hoped to gain popularity in the military through the occasional increases in their monthly pay. On March 2, less than a month before Election Day, Poroshenko, while visiting the Donbas war zone, announced an increase in the bonus payments to front-line soldiers from Hr 10,000 ($370) to Hr 12,000 ($440) per month. Those deployed to the second line of defense would get an additional Hr 5,500 ($200), up from Hr 4,500 ($165), the president said.
Still, the president has faced constant criticisms during his term in office over failures to reform Ukraine’s Soviet-style military, and the lack of career prospects for soldiers and officers, as well as very poor conditions of service and social benefits for personnel and their families.
Unresolved social issues, according to the Defense Ministry, led to nearly 30,000 contract soldiers, including those with a huge amount of valuable combat experience, leaving the military in 2018 alone for a better life out of the army.
And Poroshenko and the top military command still face severe criticism over their alleged failure to ensure there was a proper investigation into the disastrous battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltseve, in which hundreds of Ukrainian fighters were slaughtered by Russian-led forces, including Russian regular army units, in 2014-2015.
Critics believe the military disasters were partially due to the incompetence of Ukraine’s top commanding officers, none of whom have been held to account. Other than that, Poroshenko has been heavily criticized for signing the Minsk Agreements of August 2014 and February 2015, which have effectively frozen the war into a grueling, low-level trench conflict along a 450-kilometer front line — with no end in sight.
The dark legacy of 2014-2015 has made Poroshenko generally unpopular among old campaigners of the early days of Russia’s war, especially among the former fighters of the numerous volunteer battalions set up to help defend the country at a time when the regular army could field no more than 6,000 troops.
But the worst damage to Poroshenko’s popularity was probably dealt by numerous corruption scandals in defense sector, time after time involving the president’s close entourage and appointees, but with no high-profile officials ever going to jail.
In particular, the Deputy Defense Minister Lieutenant General Oleh Pavlovskiy was arrested by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau Agency on a charge of embezzling Hr 149 million ($5.4 million) of budget funds allocated for procurement of fuel for the Armed Forces. Yet just two weeks later a court released the general, and the case came to nothing.
In March, just days before Election Day, Poroshenko took a heavy blow as Bihus.Info, an award-winning TV investigative journalism project, aired allegations that top defense and security officials from the president’s closest circle were involved in large-scale embezzlement, smuggling used or obsolete military hardware from Russia and selling it to Ukrainian defense companies at inflated prices.
The scheme particularly involved Oleh Hladkovskiy, Poroshenko’s long-time friend and business-partner, whom he had appointed as a deputy head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.
The ensuing scandal led to Hladkovskiy’s dismissal by Poroshenko, but so far none of the scheme’s alleged participants have been officially charged.
