Just over 3 weeks remain until the 2019 Ukrainian presidential elections are supposed to take place, and Petro Poroshenko finds himself between a rock and a hard place. His “Tomos” trick has failed miserably – his approval rating hasn’t changed, his martial law false flag was successfully neutralised by his western curators, and now his Nazi titushki are facing tough resistance from Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the analytical column below the well-known Ukrainian analyst Rostislav Ishchenko connects many pre-election dots and comes to the conclusion that Petro has lost control over his electoral campaign.
Petro Poroshenko, during his pre-election “meetings with the people”, either slaps a young girl, yanks off another girl’s hat, grabs a man’s nose, or explains to miners that if they didn’t see the repayment of their wage arrears, then they aren’t even miners. And it’s possible to understand him.
Despite his fake approval rating, there can’t be any talk not only about any victory in the election, but even about the entrance of the incumbent president into the second round. A stake on force is also if not completely trumped, then counterbalanced by Avakov with a solid margin. He already directly accused the SBU of protecting the pro-poroshenko nazis from “C14”, and militants from “National Corpus” showed combat readiness on the streets of Kiev and other cities of the country. Poroshenko indeed faces a choice: capitulation without any guarantees of his personal security, or unleashing a civil war without special hope for a victory in it. Keeping a stable mentality in such a situation is not easy.
But it is not only Poroshenko who lost adequacy. Without any need, to the detriment of the interests of the state and his current president, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Klimkin keeps makes provocative statements concerning the Russian Black Sea fleet. During the last week alone he managed to threaten it several times with NATO ships, to promise to establish Ukrainian-Georgian naval cooperation in order to counter the Russian fleet, and to declare that the Black Sea is not a pool for “the impudent manoeuvres of the Russian Naval Forces”, but a “space for interaction and values”.
In this quote the most beautiful thing is mentioning that the sea is a “space of values”. When there is talk about the common values of the EU, values of Maidan, or even some specific “Ukrainian values”, it is clear that it concerns certain common views inherent in a certain community of people. But the sea as a “space of values” is nothing more than mere verbiage. If it is about the water area, then only fishes can have “common values” there. But if Klimkin simply unsuccessfully expressed himself and meant coastal states, then about a third of the coastline of the Black Sea accounts for Russia and its ally Abkhazia, which Klimkin obviously has no “common values” with.
I.e., like in the case with Poroshenko, who in public says a certain set of words that have little to do with reality and takes offence when reality shows its lack of correspondence with the image created by him, Klimkin voices an incantation learned by him since the time of the fight for “EU association”, using the fashionable-in-Europe term “values” in relation to everything. Especially since Kiev can’t brag about any other achievements besides abstract “values”.
Or rather, he can brag. For example, Prime Minister Groisman stated that as a result of the reforms proceeding since 2015, Ukraine, which was at the beginning of 2014 (i.e., on the eve of the coup) “an impoverished country with big debts”, literally rose and blossomed. At the same time, he noted the especially outstanding achievements in medicine, energy, the banking sector, road construction, and also reforming the army and police. I understand that any government should promote themselves, especially during the pre-election period, but, taking into account how the population of Ukraine “loves” the unconstitutional (and, nevertheless, constant) Acting Minister of Healthcare Suprun, how many videos were posted on social networks by unfortunate drivers showing the full collapse of the road network (including the main highways), and how many times household gas prices grew, it would be possible to find less sensitive and sharp topics for a statement about “achievements”. He could’ve at least talked about a growth of nominal wages. Of course, its purchasing power fell in reality, but after all, it is better to have more hryvnia in the wallet than less, even if it is expressed in dollars.
As a result, the statement of the Prime Minister had the opposite effect to what he expected.
The admiral Tenyukh, who was the Minister of Defence in the first post-putsch government of Yatsenyuk (still before the new regime was legalised via early presidential and parliamentary elections), suddenly remembered that in 2014 he personally gave the order to the Crimean group of Ukrainian troops to use weapons against the local militia and Russian army, but these orders were ignored, and 10,000 (from 12,000) servicemen of the Ukrainian Navy immediately switched to the Russian side.
The statement of the admiral contradicts the official legend, according to which units and divisions of Ukrainian troops “heroically resisted”, and only the unreadiness of Kiev to give the order to open fire stopped them from holding onto the peninsula. By the way, a special place in this legend was given to the “heroic fight” of the Ukrainian Navy, which nearly defeated the Russian fleet, and only a Russian ship sinking on a waterway of the Donuzlav stopped them from achieving a clear and unconditional victory.
Question: why did Tenyukh publish his “memoirs” right now? This doesn’t at all improve either the international or internal position of the regime, and it gives Tenyukh the reputation of a warmonger who only by miracle didn’t manage to realise his plans. Taking into account the fact that at that moment he represented the regime that seized power during the coup and didn’t have the time to be legalised, charges of war crimes can be brought to him.
The only logical explanation of the actions of Tenyukh is the desire to show his eagerness to fight and readiness for everything. And this puts one on guard.
Poroshenko completely lost control over himself, his mental state causes serious fears. Key representatives of the regime, its internal (Groisman) and external (Klimkin) people, trying to promote “achievements”, bear frank nonsense, which also speaks about a loss of communication with reality. Structures under the control of the Minister of Internal Affairs obviously counteract the attempts of the president to hold onto power in more or less legitimate way (having forced everyone to agree to falsify the elections). In turn, the Prosecutor-General’s Office and SBU try to discredit and demoralise the police.
And at this time, from the jar with spiders ready to gobble each other up, a voice of a half-forgotten admiral sounds, reminding that he was nearly the only who in 2014 was ready to fight against anyone – either against Crimeans or against Russia. Taking into account that Tenyukh was ready to do anything in exchange for having the position of the Minister of Defence in the government of putshists, his sudden exit from the shadow with very specific memoirs looks ominous. After all, Poroshenko is now in an even worst position than Yatsenyuk and Turchynov were in 2014. In order to hold onto power he needs to launch an internal war or provoke a serious conflict in Donbass, which can entail another defeat for the Ukrainian army.
Will Poltorak and Muzhenko be resolute enough to give the order in such a situation to either use weapons against Avakov’s Ministry of Internal Affairs or for the organisation of a large-scale provocation in Donbass, in the Kerch Strait, or somewhere else (once again to justify the forceful suppression of Poroshenko’s opponents)? After all, they weren’t employed to be at war, their specialisation is embezzling the military budget (ensuring a cut for the president). But Tenyukh in 2014 ran into war.
Perhaps, of course, all of this is a mere coincidence. But even coincidences turn into a reality if they correspond to someone’s interests.
Copyright © 2022. All Rights Reserved.