Poroshenko, Petro
Poroshenko, Petro [Порошенко, Петро], b. 26 September 1965 in Bolhrad, Odesa оblast. Fifth President of Ukraine (2014–19), businessman, banker, party leader, politician. Having graduated from the Faculty of International Relations and International Law at Kyiv University, he became by the end of the 1990s a director of several financial and industrial firms including an automobile factory and a shipyard constructing gunboats, and also a bank chairman. He was best known as head of the Ukrprominvest foodstuffs firm which included the Roshen confectionery factories—hence his nickname ‘the chocolate king.’
Poroshenko entered politics in 1998, winning election to the Supreme Council of Ukraine in a single-member district (SMD) in his home region in Vinnytsia oblast. In the Council he joined the United Social Democratic Party (SDPU[O]), a party of oligarchs led by Viktor Medvedchuk. Two years later, he created his own political party under the label of Solidarity. In 2001 he became deputy leader of Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions being in fact a co-founder. But in 2002, having folded his Solidarity party into Viktor Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine electoral alliance, he was elected in district no. 12 of Vinnytsia oblast winning nearly half of the votes against 17 contenders. He supported Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution, the only oligarch to do so. He was Yushchenko’s campaign manager and his television station Channel 5, acquired in 2003, promoted Yushchenko’s candidacy. The political flexibility demonstrated up to that point in his career testified to his pragmatism and adaptability as well as to his ambition.
Following Viktor Yushchenko’s eventual victory, he expected to be rewarded with the prime ministership, but that post went to Yuliia Tymoshenko. By way of compensation Poroshenko was appointed secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (RNBOU), of which he had already been a member. Poroshenko accordingly resigned his seat in the Supreme Council of Ukraine. This allocation of offices did not, however, work out smoothly since Tymoshenko and Poroshenko thereafter engaged in public feuding that gave an impression of Ukraine having two governments—one in the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, the other in the RNBOU that expanded its scope even into foreign affairs far beyond its constitutional mandate. Yushchenko responded by firing both of them in 2005. Following the 2006 Supreme Council elections Poroshenko missed out being speaker and did not run in 2007.
During his time in the Supreme Council of Ukraine, Poroshenko served on the banking and finance committee. Simultaneously, he was on the board of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) in 1999–2004. In October 2009 Poroshenko was appointed foreign minister and restored to the RNBOU. In this post he promoted the integration of Ukraine into the European Union (EU) and advocated a mutually respectful and beneficial relationship—a pragmatic orientation given the location of one of his own chocolate factories in Lipetsk, Russian Federation.
Notwithstanding his previous ties to Viktor Yushchenko, Poroshenko was appointed minister of economic development and trade by President Viktor Yanukovych in March 2013. Following the Supreme Council elections in October that year, where he won a SMD seat as an independent, Poroshenko was dismissed from his ministerial post. He continued his advocacy of Ukraine’s integration into Europe while at the same time retaining good foreign and economic relations with the Russian Federation, its major trading and strategic partner. He also served on the Ukraine-EU parliamentary cooperation committee. Not coincidentally, in July 2013 the Russian Federation imposed a ban on Poroshenko’s Roshen factories supplying confectionery products claiming they failed to comply with quality standards. Russia’s imposition of an economic blockade on Ukraine in response to the pending EU-Ukraine Association Agreement was part of the lead-up to the Euromaidan Revolution in Kyiv in the winter of 2013–14.
Poroshenko participated actively in the uprising which toppled President Viktor Yanukovych, helping the injured and arrested—protesters and police alike. His Channel 5 broadcast live the protests from Independence Square. This was done at great risk to his own business empire. It earned him considerable respect as well as many enemies—the Russian Federation closed down his factory in Lipetsk claiming it violated trademark regulations.
On 29 March 2014, Poroshenko announced his candidacy for President of Ukraine declaring unequivocally he would steer the country out of Moscow’s orbit and into Europe’s—a move he saw as long overdue. He received the backing of Vitalii Klychko, leader of the UDAR party, hitherto a contender for the presidential office himself. Warning that Ukraine was in grave danger from the Russian Federation’s military threat and from domestic economic meltdown, he called for new and effective security guarantees replacing the Budapest Memorandum which had failed to prevent Russia’s invasion of the Crimea. His pragmatism, business sense, international experience, and lack of identification with any single political party made him a front-runner from the start of the campaign.
Accordingly, on 28 May 2014, out of a field of 21 candidates, Poroshenko won the presidential election. He garnered 54.7 percent of the vote thus winning on the first ballot, the first ever President of Ukraine to do so. Yuliia Tymoshenko came second with 12.8 percent. In his inaugural address on 7 June, Poroshenko promised to end the war in the Donbas by offering the rebels a peace plan, to decentralize power, to guarantee respecting the Russian language, employment, and investment. He declared the Crimea Ukrainian and rejected any questioning of Ukraine’s territorial integrity or of federalism. He affirmed for Ukraine its European choice and future. He claimed that Ukraine’s security must be strengthened which would entail reequipping the Armed Forces of Ukraine and ending reliance on the Budapest Agreement. He claimed that, internally, political corruption had to be eliminated; externally, relations with the Russian Federation needed to be normalized.
Many obstacles stood in the way of realizing his initial resolutions and promises. In June 2014, Poroshenko announced a unilateral ceasefire as prelude to his peace plan, but this was rejected by both the Donbas rebels and Moscow. Instead, anticipating loss of the Donbas, the Russian Federation sent in regular army troops (ostensibly on vacation) along with tanks and equipment (trucked in as ‘humanitarian aid’) to reinforce the insurgents. Following a meeting in August between Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin, agreement on a ceasefire was reached the following month in Minsk. This was broken by the Russian Federation almost immediately, which led to reconvening of talks in February 2015 regarding a second version of an agreement which was clearly unfavorable to Ukraine, hence unimplementable. The war in the Donbas continued throughout Poroshenko’s term of office.
Pre-term elections to the Supreme Council of Ukraine were held on 26 October 2014, and the results were not overwhelmingly favorable for President Poroshenko. His party, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc (Blok Petra Poroshenka—BPP) won 21.8 percent of the PR vote for 63 seats, and actually came second to Arsenii Yatseniuk’s Popular Front (Narodnyi Front—NF) with 22.1 percent and 64 seats. The BPP outdid its closest competitor by picking up an additional 64 SMD seats (as opposed to 18 for NF) for a plurality of 127, still far short of a majority. A coalition had to be formed. Voter turnout was unusually low at 52.4 percent, not a great endorsement of the post-Euromaidan order. After Yatseniuk became prime minister there ensued a two-year-long behind the scenes battle waged by the president for his ouster and replacement ultimately by Poroshenko’s ally, Volodymyr Groisman.
Under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and domestic NGOs, Poroshenko reluctantly introduced a major step toward eliminating political corruprion with the creation of three anticorruption bodies—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (NAZK), and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAP). The payoff was the granting of visa-free travel to Europe for the Ukrainian public. He soon allowed informal politics to undermine the independence and effectiveness of these agencies, while none of his heads of the Prosecutor General’s Office ever launched a single case of political corruption against a high government official, but rather protected them from prosecution. After Poroshenko pushed through the candidacy of the unqualified (no legal training) Yurii Lutsenko on 12 May 2016, it became clear the prosecutor general’s assignment was to prosecute the president’s political foes while protecting his friends. His reform of the National Police of Ukraine was never completed but stalled because of institutional inertia. Poroshenko himself never divested himself of his many business portfolios but placed them in a blind trust. His business empire consisted of over one hundred companies; his estimated capital stood at nearly a billion US dollars while he had declared his wealth in 2015 as being $2.4 million US. He was exposed in the Panama Papers as having moved some of his wealth offshore following the pattern of other oligarchs. None of this deterred him from claiming to be Ukraine’s principal political corruption fighter.
Poroshenko’s tenure as president of Ukraine was marked by an effort to accumulate power, to struggle against the excessive power of the oligarchs, to govern by responding to momentary crises rather than by being driven by long-range vision, and to keep his ruling coalition intact. He nevertheless succeeded in signing the Association Agreement with the EU, enacting the so-called decommunization laws, reaffirming Ukraine’s objectives of joining the EU and NATO, restoring the readiness of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for war with the Russian Federation, and obtaining the tomos from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople for the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine independent of the Russian Orthodox church. Canada’s Operation Unifier helped restore the capability of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Poroshenko survived numerous scandals and calls for his resignation, as well as challenges from former allies, such as Mikheil Saakashvili and the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky—the latter by nationalizing Kolomoisky’s Privatbank. He also launched the long-overdue processes of judicial reform (see Court system) and abolition of parliamentary immunity.
He traveled abroad often, seeking support for Ukraine’s economy and its conflict in the Donbas, which remained unresolved. He attended the D-Day commemoration in France in early June 2014. At the end of the month he traveled to Brussels where he signed the DCFTA’s economic provisions. Its political components had already been approved by the Ukrainian government in March; the entire Association Agreement was ratified by the Supreme Council of Ukraine and the European Parliament in September. In August he met Vladimir Putin in Minsk for talks, and in September addressed a joint session of the US Congress in Washington, DC. He also visited Canada where he addressed a joint sitting of Parliament in Ottawa and visited Edmonton, an outpost of the Ukrainian diaspora. In October, he attended an EU-Asia summit in Milan where a tentative gas deal with the Russian Federation was reached. In 2015 President Poroshenko went to Davos in January for the World Economic Forum, Minsk in February, the United Nations General Assembly in New York in September, and Paris in October for the Normandy Format talks involving France, Germany, Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. When he visited Washington, DC, in June 2017, President Donald Trump told him to his face that Ukraine was a corrupt country and the Crimea was actually Russian. Eventually, though, Trump released 210 Javelins along with other weapons for Ukraine’s defence.
Hoping to duplicate the feat of Leonid Kuchma Poroshenko began planning his re-election in 2017, highlighting his three principal achievements: the tomos, visa-free travel to the EU, and reform of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Indeed, his campaign slogan was Armiia, Mova, Vira (‘Army, Language, Faith’), emphasizing issues of identity over economic or other concerns. Such a conservative tone stood in contrast to his motto in 2014: ‘Living in a New Way.’ He asked voters for a mandate to make Ukraine’s sovereignty and Euroatlantic integration irreversible and to complete the building of a strong state, promising to apply for full EU and NATO membership no later than 2024.
In the presidential elections of 2019, where 39 contenders’ names were on the first ballot, Poroshenko obtained 16 percent of the vote. He was in second place behind Volodymyr Zelensky who had 30 percent. On the second ballot, Zelensky took an unprecedented 73 percent to Poroshenko’s 24 percent. Analysts attributed the devastating loss to his neglect of the cost of living and poverty, failure to end the war in the Donbas, protecting his friends from prosecution for political corruption, his rhetoric of patriotism and fear, and the popularity of his opponent, Zelensky, who stood for change. Held in a sports stadium the sole public debate of the entire campaign between the two principal contenders did not go well for the incumbent.
In advance of the coming parliamentary elections, Poroshenko’s political party in May 2019 changed its name to Yevropeiska Solidarnist (European Solidarity). The rebranding was intended to revive the party and its fortunes following the disastrous presidential results. Those elections, held in July 2019, produced a majority of 254 seats—itself an unprecedented event—for one party, Zelensky’s Sluha Narodu (Servant of the People). The Opozytsiina platforma (Opposition Platform), a remnant of the discredited Party of Regions, came second with 44 seats. Poroshenko’s European Solidarity came third with only 27 (a loss of 100 seats). In the PR half of the ballot European Solidarity fared even less favorably with the Ukrainian electorate, garnering 8.1 percent of the vote for fourth place, behind Yuliia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party with 8.2 percent; Zelensky’s Servant of the People prevailed with 43.2 percent.
Following the passage of Zelensky’s anti-oligarch law, Poroshenko in November 2021 sold his shares in two television channels—Priamyi (Direct) and Channel Five—so as not to be entrapped by its provisions. Ownership passed to a media holding company, Vilna media (Free Media). He did not want to be considered an oligarch. This did not save him from political harassment by the Zelensky administration in what appeared to be an ongoing vendetta.
Leading one of four tiny opposition parties in the Supreme Council of Ukraine, by no means a challenge to the ruling Servant of the People party, Poroshenko was immediately implicated in nearly twenty criminal cases and was called out for interviews about them with prosecutors. In December 2020, he was charged with high treason. At its heart the treason charge stemmed from an incident in 2014 in which Poroshenko in league with Viktor Medvedchuk sold coal to the Ukrainian government obtained from rebel-held mines in the Donbas. Thus the rebels were being paid by the state for their insurrection against the state. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, appealed to the Ukrainian government not to arrest or imprison the former president of Ukraine which would constitute an untimely threat to Ukraine’s democracy. Nevertheless, an arrest warrant was issued at the end of 2021, but in January 2022 the court released Poroshenko on his own recognizance with certain conditions.
On the outbreak of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion and total war against Ukraine in February 2022, Poroshenko denounced Vladimir Putin as a madman killer and put his own efforts into supporting the country’s defence. As a practical gesture, he made it customary on his birthday to donate non-lethal equipment to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In the European Parliament he presented a security strategy for Ukraine through the European People’s Party caucus. In April 2024, he announced plans to run for President of Ukraine after the war’s end.
Poroshenko’s activities as a businessman and ambitions as politician were severely restricted with the sanctions imposed on him by President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025. These included an asset freeze, a ban on trading, halting withdrawal of capital, and revocation of state awards. He was not to leave the country. Poroshenko responded with an appeal to the Supreme Court of Ukraine. Reacting to the energy scandal which erupted in November 2025 involving political corruption among Zelensky’s closest associates, Poroshenko’s European Solidarity caucus disrupted the work of the Supreme Council and called for the government’s dismissal. Poroshenko himself called for creation of a government of national unity combining all factions. The sanctions decree included Ihor Kolomoisky and Viktor Medvedchuk, thus putting Poroshenko in the same category as Ukraine’s most notorious oligarchs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Bohdan Harasymiw
[This article was written in 2026.]