10 June 2014
Petro Poroshenko was inaugurated as Ukraine’s fifth president at a June 7 ceremony in Kyiv that was attended by 56 foreign delegations, including U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, EU Council President Herman von Rompuy, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka and Swiss President and OSCE Chair Didier Burkhalter. . An evening reception was attended by the nation’s biggest billionaire oligarchs, including Rinat Akhmetov, Victor Pinchuk and Igor Kolomoisky.
In his inaugural address, Poroshenko identified his priorities as signing the free trade area of the EU Association Agreement this month, ending the warfare in the Donbas region, offering amnesty to terrorists surrendering their arms, holding early parliamentary elections and maintaining Ukraine’s lawful claim to Crimea. He called for a new international agreement to replace the 1994 Budapest Memorandum that was violated by the Russian government when it occupied and annexed Crimea. Ukraine will remain a unitary state, Poroshenko said, rejecting the Russian government’s proposals for federalization.
Zenon Zawada: The signing of the EU Association Agreement is a given, at this point. We will be able to positively assess Poroshenko’s performance in the first months of his presidency by the first week of September if he has accomplished at least three of the following five tasks: (1) significantly reducing or ending the armed conflict in Donbas, (2) organizing early parliamentary elections in which open lists of candidates replace closed lists, (3) moving parliament to approve a legislative package of reforms that transfers more executive, (4) a legislative package of reforms that deregulates business on the national level, and (5) a legislative package of reforms that makes the nation’s biggest holding companies responsible for a greater share of the tax burden.
If Poroshenko doesn’t produce significant governing and economic reforms by the end of the summer, he faces opposition not only from pro-Russian forces, which will have licked their wounds and reorganized by then, but also an impatient EuroMaidan civic movement that won’t tolerate business as usual by Ukraine’s oligarchy.