Petro Poroshenko
Petro Oleksiiovych Poroshenko[a] (born 26 September 1965) is a Ukrainian oligarch[8][9] and politician who served as the fifth president of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019.
"Poroshenko" redirects here. For other uses, see Poroshenko (surname).
Petro Poroshenko
- Yulia Tymoshenko
- Oleksandr Turchynov (acting)
European Solidarity, No. 1
Vinnytsia Oblast, No. 12[1]
- Vinnytsia Oblast, No. 12[2] (2002–2006)
- Our Ukraine Bloc, No. 33[3] (2006–2007)
26 September 1965
Bolhrad, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
European Solidarity (2019–present)
4, including Oleksii
Kozyn, Kyiv Oblast
- Soviet Union
- Ukraine
- 1984–1986 (Soviet Union)[7]
- 2022–present (Ukraine)
Poroshenko served as the minister of foreign affairs from 2009 to 2010, and as the minister of trade and economic development in 2012. From 2007 until 2012, he headed the Council of Ukraine's National Bank. He was elected president in 2014.
During his presidency, Poroshenko led the country through the first phase of the war in Donbas, pushing the Russian separatist forces into the Donbas Region. He began the process of integration with the European Union by signing the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement. Poroshenko's domestic policy promoted the Ukrainian language, nationalism, inclusive capitalism, decommunization, and administrative decentralization. In 2018, Poroshenko helped create the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, separating Ukrainian churches from the Moscow Patriarchate. His presidency was distilled into a three-word slogan, employed by both supporters and opponents: armiia, mova, vira (English: military, language, faith).[10] As a candidate for a second term in 2019, Poroshenko was defeated by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Poroshenko is a people's deputy of the Verkhovna Rada and leader of the European Solidarity party. Outside government, Poroshenko has been a prominent Ukrainian oligarch with a lucrative career in acquiring and building assets. His most recognized brands are Roshen, a large-scale confectionery company which has earned him the nickname of "Chocolate King", and his TV news channel 5 kanal, which he was forced to sell to comply with anti-oligarch legislation in November 2021.[11] He is considered an oligarch due to the scale of his business holdings in manufacturing, agriculture and finance, his political influence from several stints in government prior to his presidency, and his ownership of an influential mass-media outlet.[12]
Early life and education[edit]
Petro Poroshenko was born on 26 September 1965, into an ethnic Ukrainian family in Bolhrad, a primarily Bulgarian town in Ukraine's southwestern Odesa Oblast. Poroshenko's father, Oleksiy Poroshenko (1936–2020),[13] was an engineer and later government official who managed multiple factories in the Ukrainian SSR. Little is known about his mother, Yevhenia Serhiyivna Hryhorchuk (1937–2004), but a Ukrainian newspaper said she was an accountant, who taught at a vocational and technical school of accounting.[14] He also spent his childhood and youth in Tighina (Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, now known as Bender and under de facto control of the unrecognized breakaway state Transnistria),[15][16] where his father Oleksii was heading a machine building plant[15] and where he learned Romanian.[17]
In his youth, Poroshenko practiced judo and sambo, and was a Candidate for Master of Sport of the USSR.[18] Despite good grades, he was not awarded the normal gold medal at graduation, and on his report card he was given a "C" for his behavior.[19] After getting into a fight with four Soviet Army cadets at the military commissariat, he was sent to army service in the distant Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic.[19]
In 1989, Poroshenko graduated, having begun studying in 1982, with a degree in economics from the international relations and law department (subsequently the Institute of International Relations) at the Kyiv University.[20] At this university he was friends with Mikheil Saakashvili who he would appoint as Governor of the Odesa Oblast (region) in May 2015 and who is a former President of Georgia.[21]
In 1984, Poroshenko married a medical student, Maryna Perevedentseva (born 1962).[18] Their first son, Oleksiy, was born in 1985 (his three other children were born in 2000 and 2001).[18]
From 1989 to 1992, Poroshenko was an assistant at the university's international economic relations department.[18] While still a student, he founded a legal advisory firm mediating the negotiation of contracts in foreign trade, and then he undertook the negotiations himself, starting to supply cocoa beans to the Soviet chocolate industry in 1991.[18] At the same time, he was deputy director of the 'Republic' Union of Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs, and the CEO "Exchange House Ukraine".[18]
Poroshenko's brother, Mykhailo, older by eight years, died in a 1997 car crash under mysterious circumstances.[22]
Early political career[edit]
Poroshenko first won a seat in the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament) in 1998 for the 12th single-mandate constituency. He was initially a member of the United Social Democratic Party of Ukraine (SDPU), the party led by Viktor Medvedchuk and loyal to president Leonid Kuchma at the time.[18] Poroshenko left SDPU(o) in 2000 to create an independent left-of-center faction and then a party, naming it Party of Ukraine's Solidarity (PSU).[18][34] In 2001 Poroshenko was instrumental in creating the Party of Regions, also loyal to Kuchma; the Party of Ukraine's Solidarity having merged into the Party of Regions, Poroshenko launched a new party with a similar name, the party "Solidarity.[35]