Ukraine, politics: Poroshenko returns home to face a treason charge, Jan 2022

(for the EIU)

In mid-January Petro Poroshenko returned to Ukraine to face possible arrest on a charge of treason. In the event, however, a Kyiv court postponed its decision on whether to place him in pre-trial detention.

The former president is accused of funding a terrorist organisation, owing to his role in helping to organise the purchase of coal from separatist-held areas of the Donbas at the height of the armed conflict there in 2014-15. This is just one of a series of actions taken against Poroshenko, and other established figures within the Ukrainian elite, by the authorities under the current president, Volodymyr Zelenskyi, most recently under the rubric of “de-oligarchisation”. 

Though soundly beaten by Zelenskyi in the presidential campaign of 2019, Poroshenko ran on a more “nationalist” platform, with a slogan of “Army, language, faith”. This aimed to draw on his success in containing the spread of Russia’s “Novorossiya” military project to parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, creating thereby a breathing space in which to rebuild of the Ukrainian army, following many years of underfunding. Arguably, this was the main achievement of the Poroshenko presidency. More recently, as Poroshenko and his party, European Solidarity, have begun to rise in the polls, the ratings of Zelenskyi and his Servant of the People organisation have been on a broad declining trend. 

The political rationale behind the accusation of treason against Poroshenko therefore seems to be to try to take some of the “patriotic” sheen off his political image by attempting to associate him with Viktor Medvedchuk, widely viewed in Ukraine as a “pro-Russian” politician and a key local link to Russian leaders.

Placed under house arrest last year, Medvedchuk has also been charged with treason. This followed the publication of his telephone conversations, reportedly recorded by Ukrainian special services, with figures in charge of Russian policy on the Donbas, as well as with local "separatist" leaders there, about organising the purchase of supplies of anthracite, the form of coal most suitable for use in Ukrainian thermal-power plants.     

While the transformation of Ukraine’s governance institutions remains a vital reform goal for Ukraine over the longer term, the “anti-oligarch” actions of the Zelenskyi team so far have been too narrowly focused on short-term political gains against domestic rivals for it yet to be considered to be working in this direction. At the same time, many commentators have questioned the wisdom of pursuing such a case against a former Ukrainian president just as the military threat from Russia's military build-up along the border has reached its highest level since 2015, when a show of domestic political unity might be more appropriate.