Petro Poroshenko: ‘What Zelensky is doing is no different from Russia'

Times

a day ago

President Zelensky is seeking to 'remove any competitor from the political landscape' and rule Ukraine with an iron fist, a former president has said.
Petro Poroshenko, a political rival to Zelensky, accused him of 'authoritarianism' after the government sanctioned him this year, potentially preventing him from standing in an election.
'Why is he doing this? Because he hates me on a biological, chemical level,' Poroshenko said in an interview with The Times. 'And, frankly speaking, I also do not like Zelensky. But never during the war have I done anything that is hostile towards him.
'I am an elected person. I have the second-biggest faction in parliament. And he thinks that he has the power not to allow me to go to the parliamentary assembly? … You are simply violating the constitution. And there is absolutely no difference [in what he is doing] from Russia.'
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Although the Kremlin's autocratic hold over Russian society is a far cry from Ukraine's diverse and rambunctious political system, there are growing concerns about the concentration of power around Zelensky, which his ­supporters say is a consequence of the situation the country finds itself in.
Poroshenko, who was president from 2014 to 2019, insisted that he did not wish to criticise Zelensky but merely to offer him advice.
It is difficult, however, to distinguish between the two as the former president enumerates the 'very bad mistakes' made by his successor — the 'catastrophe' of the Oval Office meeting with President Trump in March, for example, or the creeping 'authoritarianism' of Zelensky's rule that he says threatens to undermine democracy.
'Learn from the experience of Bibi,' Poroshenko urged, referring to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who successfully persuaded Trump to take part last month in strikes against Iran's nuclear programme.
Zelensky, by contrast, has struggled to maintain the mercurial US leader's support in bringing an end to the war with Russia, which Poroshenko believes is down to a lack of clear objectives in Ukraine's negotiations with the White House and its inability to handle Trump's desire for praise. Netanyahu, he suggests, won Trump's support in Iran after only allowing him to take the credit for negotiating a brief ceasefire in Gaza.
There is little love lost between the fifth and sixth presidents of Ukraine. A lasting animosity was engendered on the 2019 election campaign trail, during which the pair traded barbs in a series of increasingly irate debates. Zelensky, a man whose political experience had hitherto consisted of playing a fictional president in a television programme, went on to win the election resoundingly.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, however, as Russian tanks rumbled across the Ukrainian border, the two foes met in Kyiv and made a truce.
Three years on, that alliance has fractured. In February, the government imposed sanctions on Poroshenko, preventing him from accessing his bank accounts, travelling abroad or attending parliamentary sessions. State security services said that the sanctions were based on allegations of threats to national security, which Poroshenko denies.
Having largely refrained from criticising the government since the invasion, now he is speaking out to tell Zelensky: 'I am not your enemy.'
'I am shoulder to shoulder with you,' he said. 'Not because I don't have any complaints against you — that [will come] later on, after the end of the war. But now unity is the key factor for our success.'
Poro­shenko, 59, who is worth $1.8 billion according to Forbes, made a ­fortune from chocolate before entering politics. Elected in 2014 after the ­Maidan revolution that ousted his pro-Kremlin predecessor, he is widely credited with rebuilding the Ukrainian armed forces after the annexation of Crimea and onset of the war in Donbas.
Hanging on the wall of his office — alongside Ukrainian military regalia and a painting of Putin in handcuffs — is a memento of another of his successes in office: a certificate, signed in 2018 by Mike Pompeo, then Trump's secretary of state, vowing that the US would not recognise Russia's claim to Crimea.
It is diplomatic coups such as this, as well as his success in convincing Trump in 2017 to supply Ukraine with lethal weapons, that Poroshenko believes give him some authority in his criticisms of Zelensky's dealings with the American president.
There is, he claims, a 'serious communication problem' between the two diplomatic teams, at the heart of which is the Americans' distrust of Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Zelensky, and Oksana Markarova, the ambassador to Washington, who angered the Republicans before the American election by organising an event to which only Democrats were invited.
The result was the disastrous meeting in the Oval Office, when Trump and JD Vance, Trump's vice-president, berated the Ukrainian leader before the world in a meeting that Zelensky had not been adequately prepared for, Poroshenko said. However, Trump said that a meeting with Zelensky at the Nato summit last week 'couldn't have been nicer'.
Poroshenko has sought to make connections with Trump's team directly, last visiting Washington in February, when he met US officials and attended the National Prayer Breakfast, at which Trump made a speech.
Sanctions now prevent him from travelling abroad, and also hamper his support for the Ukrainian military, to which he says he has donated $200 million in the past three years.
According to Poroshenko, the purpose of the sanctions is to prevent him from running in a presidential election, a possibility that has been raised for this year during talks of ceasefire.
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An election had been due last year, but has been delayed under martial law imposed in 2022. Because of the logistics of holding an election in wartime, most people oppose the idea — Poroshenko among them. But he believes that his sanctioning is evidence of the government's preparation for a vote for which it is seeking to clear the field and allow ­Zelensky to run virtually unopposed — a claim the president's team denies.
Even if ­Poroshenko does stand, his odds of a victory are long. Many Ukrainians are yet to forgive the corruption and economic stagnation that marred his time in office, and polling consistently shows the former president in third place, roughly 20 points behind Zelensky and General Valerii Zaluzhny, the former top military commander who is now serving as ambassador to Britain. The general's war record has won him admiration in Ukraine, but he has shown no interest in standing for election.
In any case, Poroshenko says, his sanctioning should be a warning to every potential candidate. 'Today ­Poroshenko, tomorrow Zaluzhny, [the] day after tomorrow anybody,' he said. 'This is authoritarianism.'
For all that Poroshenko wishes to present himself as a figure of unity in a time of national crisis, rising illiberalism is a charge he is willing to give full throat to, citing clampdowns on the freedom of press and of public activists, and pressure on businesses. In this, he runs the risk of playing into the hands of both the Kremlin and US isolationists, who have used the postponement of elections to attack Zelensky.
Among those who agree with Poroshenko is Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv and a former world champion boxer, whose hulking frame arrived through the door of Poroshenko's office as The Times was leaving.
Klitschko, who is said to harbour presidential ambitions of his own, has also criticised Zelensky for a series of recent police raids at his mayoral office and investigations into his staff. 'I said once that it smells of authoritarianism in our country,' he told The Times in May. 'Now it stinks.'
Asked whether he and Klitschko were ­working together in preparation for a presidential campaign, Poroshenko said that they were not but added portentously that more and more people were becoming critical of the president's conduct. 'Zelensky should listen to that, because if you are closed from the people that can have the effect of a steaming pot,' he said.
Whether it will boil over remains to be seen.