From our correspondent
how – â € Don’t call it a counterattack, it will be A generalized attack from several points to recover what is ours ». when? Not weeks, but days. Hours”. Â «I’m sorry for the Pope, a wonderful person whom I respect, but we have better mediators than him».
Petro Poroshenko, the fifth Ukrainian president whom Zelensky defeated in 2019, has just walked out of a meeting with suppliers of military software that he, a billionaire businessman, plans to donate to soldiers at the front. Â “I’ve already spent $70 million out of my own pocket: trucks, generators, helmets, heavy machine guns, armored robots to get the wounded out of the line of fire, even Iveco APCs. I may run out of money, but I’m not running away from my homeland. When the Russians invaded us last year, I called Zelensky. I told him: I am not leaving, so you cannot leave because you will be ruined politically. But from now on, I know that I am no longer the leader of the opposition, I am just a soldier like you.”
Poroshenko, you signed the Minsk agreements after the invasion of Donbass in 2014. They were supposed to bring peace and never implemented until the new war in 2022. I repent?
â € Not even in a dream. With the Minsk agreements, we bought time. Do you know how many battalions I had north of Kiev when I became chief? zero. What about the state budget? Below zero. What about working tanks? pennies The Minsk agreements provided for the exit of the Russian invaders, the return of prisoners, and a series of measures that Putin did not implement..
But you didn’t do your part in the election either.
Minsk went bankrupt, but it was still profitable. Immediately after signing up, I invited NATO instructors and bought weapons and vehicles. During my presidency, we built an army. So in 2022, when Putin invaded us again, we had 150,000 men ready to resist him. President Biden is the one who canceled the sanctions that prevented us from giving up arms, and we must always remember that, but we are the ones who built a human shield for the resistance. I never thought I would agree with a dictator like Belarusian Lukashenko, but I do. Lukashenko said two days ago: Our worst mistake is not to destroy Ukraine in 2014, and it did not have weapons, money and an alliance to help it. With Minsk I bought time and now we have weapons, money and allies..
Is it true that he negotiated the cession of Mariupol?
“I never negotiated for a finger from Ukraine. Former Chancellor Merkel always repeated Putin’s promise to withdraw troops. Liar. June 7, 2014 Mariupol was occupied, Kramatorsk was occupied. All Donbass was occupied. The first thing I did as president was to reorganize the army. So we won back half of Donbass. However, all this is not important because Putin was thinking only of his imperial dream. He wanted to rebuild what he calls Novorossiya from Kharkiv to Odessa. The rest of Ukraine could have been taken by the Poles. It will never stop. And it will not stop without us entering NATO.
Are defense guarantees insufficient without active NATO membership?
“On February 24, 2022, I called the signatories of the Budapest Memorandum by which we gave up Soviet nuclear warheads in exchange for territorial safety guarantees. The Russian invasion of 2022 fell under exactly that deal, but nobody got involved. Guarantees are not enough.
What scenarios for peace do you see?
 «In short, three: victory, the Israeli solution, and the Afghan solution. The first is simple: we expel the Russian army and Putin loses power. The second is supported by many who tell us we are tired of war, and you will defend yourselves as Israel does, and now you have plenty of weapons. The problem is that we do not have nuclear power against the Palestinians. Third: abandon us as Afghanistan did. Possible, but at this point Putin will come to you too.
“Freelance social media evangelist. Organizer. Certified student. Music maven.”
