Recently, Russian President Putin signed an order on the evening of the 21st to recognize the "Donetsk People's Republic" and "Lugans People's Republic" established by civilian armed forces in eastern Ukraine.
Since then, the situation between Ukraine and Russia, which has been deeply resentful, has become increasingly tense.
On February 24, Putin authorized special military operations in the Baston region of Ukraine, and the two sides are fighting fiercely, and the current security risks in Ukraine have risen sharply.
Whatever the outcome, it is a great tragedy for the devastated Ukraine and its people.
How did Ukraine fall from being the world's third-largest weapon power after the collapse of the Soviet Union? This is inseparable from the absurd governing policy of successive Ukrainian presidents.
The biggest culprits who really pushed Ukraine into the abyss now are Peter Alexievich Poroshenko, ukraine's fifth president.
After leaving office, the famous "candy king" was also charged with treason, embezzlement, and confiscated a large amount of property.
And where does the future of this former president go?
Poroshenko
01, the road to politics
Poroshenko was born in 1965 in Odessa, an important port city in southern Ukraine, to a Jewish father and a Russian mother, and chose to follow his mother's surname in order to avoid discrimination because of his Jewish status.
Interested in the complex international situation before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poroshenko was admitted to the Department of International Relations at Kiev State University, a prestigious Ukrainian university.
While at school, at a dance, Poroshenko met his wife, Anatolyevna, who was born into a high-ranking Ukrainian family.
At first, the wife's mother was very opposed to the love, but the opposition of relatives and the estrangement during military service did not hinder their feelings, but made them more and more intimate, and after Poroshenko retired from the army, the two entered the palace of marriage.
Poroshenko's beginnings in business were evident during his studies, and he began to try to start many new businesses while he was in school, such as the popular film and television DVDs at that time, but this was once considered contraband by the Soviet government in that era.
In 1989 Poroshenko graduated from Kiev State University.
In the last century, the Soviet Union, which had been dominated by heavy industry in the 1980s, was relatively backward in light industries such as food, and the people could rarely taste delicious candy.
The business-minded Poroshenko noticed a lucrative business gap, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine's trade contacts with the West became increasingly frequent, during which time many commercial oligarchs followed the trend and made staggering profits.
Poroshenko began to import a variety of sweets and other foods from all over Europe, which was loved by the Ukrainian people, and for a time the business was very hot, and he also accumulated a huge wealth in a short period of time.
As the industry continued to expand, in 1996 it united a number of confectionery production plants in Kiev, Russia, Hungary and created Rusheng Company, one of the largest confectionery manufacturers in Europe, and he was also known as the king of chocolate.
Based on the rich capital accumulated in the confectionery industry, Poroshenko began to get involved in other industries, and has invested in shipbuilding, journalism and other industries, and its operation is also very successful.
After Ukraine's second president, Kuchma, won the 1994 presidential election, began to speed up ukraine's privatization reform process in order to prevent Ukraine's economy from collapsing.
Kuchma
In the midst of constant privatization, oligarchic interest groups have also grown in influence, sometimes even overshadowing the government.
During this period, more and more oligarchs in Ukraine entered the political arena, and these oligarchs began to enter the parliamentary elections and even began to run for the presidency.
During this period, in addition to Poroshenko's successful entry into parliament, oligarchs such as Tymoshenko, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych entered the core position of the Ukrainian government.
Just like Tymoshenko's nepotism with Lazarenko, Poroshenko's political career is also full of bribes, anti-eye and other dog blood dramas.
He used his rich fortune and the power of his wife's father to constantly open the way for his political career, and Poroshenko also established a good relationship with then-President Kuchma because of his business contacts.
In 1998, with the help of President Kuchma, Poroshenko joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, and that year he was elected to parliament for the first time.
Over the next two years, in the midst of constant wandering, Poroshenko also established his own small party in parliament, the Unity Party.
Seeing that a series of policies promulgated by Kuchma after 2000 had aroused strong dissatisfaction among the Ukrainian people, Poroshenko left the Social Democratic Party and threw himself into the camp of Yushchenko, Kuchma's biggest rival at that time.
In 2004 Poroshenko provided a large amount of money to fund Yushchenko's Launch of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, but in that year's bipartisan struggle, Yanukovych of the Kuchma clique won, but the population was not satisfied with the outcome.
Yushchenko
Large numbers of Ukrainians began to protest, demanding re-elections, and under pressure the authorities began a second general election the following year. This time, Yushchenko lived up to expectations.
Poroshenko, who successfully took sides, also got a higher position, and was successively appointed by Yushchenko as the secretary of the National Security and Defense Commission and the foreign minister of Ukraine.
Poroshenko, who has made a big splash in politics, has not neglected his wealth accumulation in the business world, and his business has grown, and when he was elected president in 2014, he was already ranked sixth in Ukraine's rich list with a value of up to $1.3 billion.
According to the latest data, Poroshenko's personal wealth has reached $1.6 billion in 2021, which is only his public wealth.
In 2014, on the basis of the Unity Party, Poroshenko united with other parties to form the Poroshenko Union and participated in the Ukrainian presidential election in May.
On May 25 of that year, Poroshenko won the election with a huge advantage of 54% of the vote, far outpacing its competitors.
02, fall into the abyss
How did Ukraine fall to the ground? This is inseparable from the presidents of Ukraine.
In November 2004, Ukraine's pro-Western opposition leader Yushchenko launched the Orange Revolution to overthrow the current pro-Russian government.
Later, Yushchenko took office as president, and in order to curry favor with his constituents, he announced that he would set aside 80% of the government's budget as a benefit in 2005 to the people, raising the salary and pension of the whole people.
Before the Orange Revolution, Ukraine's GDP growth rate was 12.11%, but a year after the new government took office, the growth rate slowed rapidly, and by 2005 GDP growth was only 3%.
In order to save the prospects of economic development in Ukraine and to earn more foreign exchange, the government had to do everything possible to promote economic growth, and the most famous ones are the pornography industry and the surrogacy industry.
Even in 2006, the Ukrainian government changed the law to criminalize prostitution, only to make it a misconduct, even if caught by the police, only need to pay a fine of dozens of yuan and be fine.
After the law change, the Ukrainian industry has also become increasingly rampant and lawless. Due to the low price, a large number of European and American guests came to Ukraine, and it was completely reduced to the largest red light district in Europe and Asia.
According to relevant United Nations survey reports, there must be one Ukrainian for every four European sex workers.
Ukraine has the highest rate of HIV infection in the entire European continent, with an astonishing number of people infected more than 1% of its nearly 50 million population.
On February 22, 2014, ukraine's second Orange Revolution was successful, and President Yanukovych was forced to step down, and in February he was announced by parliament to remove him from the presidency.
In the 2014 general election, Poroshenko was elected as the fifth prime minister of Ukraine without suspense.
At the beginning of his term of office, the Ukrainian people still had great hopes for Poroshenko, the president, but his series of actions after coming to power were greatly disappointed.
President Petro Poroshenko' decision to better inspire and comfort supporters who marched through the streets during the revolution was absurd for all of Ukraine's "Golden Eagle" special police forces to kneel down and apologize to the audience.
By insulting swatten swatten officers, the legitimacy and legitimacy of the new government's ascension to power were enhanced, but the Golden Eagle Special Forces could not bear such hurtful self-esteem and went en masse to the pro-Russian Crimea region.
On March 17, 2014, crimea held a referendum to apply for membership in Russia, which was subsequently approved by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and the representative of the former elite Ukrainian unit, the Golden Eagle Special Police Force, swore allegiance to Russia, an elite force that was pushed into the camp of others because of the government's stupid decisions.
"Golden Eagle" special police force
Poroshenko, who has just taken office, faces a huge mess in addition to the thorny Crimean problem, and armed conflicts between the pro-Russian Donetsk and Lugantsk in the Eastern Region have erupted against the Government of Kiev.
When he first took office, Poroshenko was still shouting: "I can get Rid of Russia and get rid of these messes in three months." ”
But what he did not expect was that in July 2014, the army he sent had already suffered a major blow, not only failing to fight the rebellion, but also losing to the Wudong region with Russian aid, and losing the war.
The Minsk Agreement could only be signed with Russia, and since then, the Ukrainian government has completely lost its de facto control over the two regions.
On the diplomatic front, the indecisive Poroshenko, while not wanting to offend Russia's huge economy, is desperately trying to put accession to the European Union and NATO on the agenda.
The Ukrainian government first voted through parliament to get Ukraine to abandon its non-alignment policy, and on June 27, 2014, Ukraine signed a free trade and political cooperation agreement with the European Union, which also represented a restart of the process of Ukraine's accession to the European Union.
Because Poroshenko's pro-European behavior once angered Russia, Russia repeatedly warned Ukraine that doing so would turn things into an uncontrollable situation.
But Poroshenko stubbornly believes that Ukraine is about to join the European Union and NATO and will be sheltered by NATO members.
While Poroshenko pushed for drastic economic and political reforms in Ukraine during his time in power, what did this bring to Ukraine?
In 2015, Poroshenko passed a bill that legally privatized 268 industries owned by Ukraine, which also led to the beginning of a new round of frenzied division of state-owned assets by Ukrainian oligarchs, and also monopolized the lifeblood of Ukraine's economy.
This year, under Poroshenko's leadership, Ukraine's economy also collapsed rapidly, and the growth rate reached negative growth, with a growth rate of -9.7%.
The country's economic development has become more and more stagnant, while Poroshenko's own pockets have become more and more inflated, rising from the sixth place in the national rich list to the third place when he took office.
Ukraine has no funds and no foreign exchange, how can the economy develop?
In order to regroup Ukraine's economy, the government has advocated encouraging Ukrainian girls to engage in the illegal surrogacy industry and give birth to children for customers in other countries of the world who need to have children, so as to earn foreign exchange and stimulate Ukraine's economic development.
In 2016, the surrogacy industry in Ukraine developed rapidly. In addition to surrogacy, the Ukrainian government has also begun to sell off the military-industrial technicians left in Ukraine at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which is really sad.
But this approach is not a sustainable one, and a country cannot continue to develop in this way.
Poroshenko began to soar domestic energy prices, and for a while, Ukraine was rapidly inflating, the poverty rate of the Ukrainian people suddenly soared, and many Ukrainian people's lives had reached a point where they were struggling to maintain.
In the past few years of Poroshenko's administration, Ukraine has shown no signs of getting better, its economic development has lagged behind, and the contradictions between Russia and Ukraine have intensified.
Poroshenko is plagued by scandals, and he even dreamed of re-election as president in 2019, and his image has already fallen to the bottom in the hearts of Ukrainians, with a support rating of only 26.3%.
His opponent, Zelenskiy, the current president of Ukraine, won with 73 percent support.
Zelenskiy
03, facing liquidation
In the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election, Poroshenko defeated Zelenskiy.
Zelenskiy immediately after taking office began to liquidate Poroshenko, not to liquidate, once the investigation has always been anti-Russian Poroshenko, actually has secret business dealings with Russia.
Moreover, according to the investigation of multiple departments, Poroshenko also traded coal with his own pro-Russian armed forces, sought a large amount of huge wealth, and embezzled a large number of state assets.
At a time when more and more Ukrainians are struggling to survive, the former president has been exposed to embezzle more than $8 billion.
The Ukrainian judiciary has frozen all of Poroshenko's corporate shares, real estate and deposits in Ukraine, and has issued arrest warrants for Poroshenko himself.
Poroshenko will certainly not admit to these charges, but he must accept these trials in accordance with the law.
Poroshenko previously traveled to Poland, but on January 17, 2022 Poroshenko returned to Ukraine to go to court trial and could face up to 15 years in prison if his charges are confirmed.
Recently, the situation between Russia and Ukraine has become increasingly tense, according to Ukrainian media reports, the top 100 richest people in the Forbes Ukraine rich list in 2021, only four are still in China.
It is not that they do not want to leave, but that they have been imprisoned and their passports confiscated for reasons such as suspected violations of the law.
Even more astonishing is the fact that Poroshenko's family, when they left Ukraine in recent days, dispatched a convoy of cash trucks with the cash assets owned by Poroshenko to transfer them abroad.
With the intensification of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, under the infiltration and continuous influence of many forces, it still takes a long time for the Ukrainian issue to be completely resolved, and it is hoped that the Ukrainian people can live a peaceful and stable life at an early date.
bibliography:
- Baidu Encyclopedia entry: Peter Alexievich Poroshenko
- The Paper: Putin: Willing to provide political asylum to former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko accused of treason