Petro Poroshenko

Petro Poroshenko: The Chocolate King's War

On 25 May 2014 Ukrainians elected a president in a country that had just lost Crimea and was losing control of two more provinces. Turnout in Donetsk was roughly 3 percent and in Luhansk about 10 percent, because armed separatists prevented people from voting. Petro Poroshenko won outright in the first round with 54.7 percent — 9.8 million votes, against 12.8 percent for Yulia Tymoshenko — and became the first Ukrainian president since independence to take office in the middle of a war. He was a confectionery billionaire known nationally as the Chocolate King, and the analysts at Poland's Centre for Eastern Studies read his mandate precisely: it reflected public confidence in his crisis-management ability rather than any enthusiasm for his politics.

Bolhrad to Roshen

Poroshenko was born on 26 September 1965 in Bolhrad, in Ukraine's far south-west. He took a degree in economics at Kyiv University and went into business in the chaotic years after the Soviet collapse, when the country's industrial assets were changing hands and fortunes were made by people who understood both markets and the state.

The company that defined him was Roshen, the confectionery manufacturer he founded in 1996, which grew into one of the largest sweet-makers in the region and made him one of the richest people in Ukraine. The Roshen holding extended into the automotive sector, and by 2014 his fortune was estimated at $1.5–2 billion. In 2003 he acquired Channel 5, a television station that would become one of the most politically influential outlets in the country — a combination of wealth, manufacturing and media that placed him firmly among the oligarchs who dominated post-Soviet Ukrainian politics.

Two Revolutions

He entered parliament in 1998 and moved between parties before attaching himself to Viktor Yushchenko. During the Orange Revolution of 2004, Channel 5 was one of the few broadcasters covering the protests sympathetically, and Poroshenko emerged as a significant backer of the movement — a role that established him as a pro-European figure without ever making him a mass politician.

Office followed in pieces: foreign minister from 2009 to 2010 under Yushchenko, then, unusually for a man of his associations, minister of trade and economic development in 2012 under Viktor Yanukovych. When the Euromaidan protests began in late 2013, Poroshenko supported them. Yanukovych fled in February 2014; Russia annexed Crimea in March; the snap election came in May.

The Presidency

Poroshenko organised his term around three words — military, language, faith — and the record on each is concrete.

On the military, he presided over the reconstruction of Ukrainian armed forces that had been hollowed out to the point of near-uselessness in early 2014, a rebuilding whose importance became fully visible only in 2022. On Europe, he signed the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement, the document whose rejection had triggered Euromaidan in the first place, and secured visa-free travel to the European Union for Ukrainian citizens — the single most tangible benefit any Ukrainian government has delivered to ordinary people from the European relationship. On faith, he pushed successfully for the creation of an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, a change with consequences that were as much geopolitical as theological.

The failures were equally clear. The war in the Donbas did not end; it froze into an attritional conflict that consumed his entire term. Anti-corruption progress was limited, despite the creation of a dedicated anti-corruption bureau — and Poroshenko's own position was complicated by the appearance of his offshore arrangements in the Paradise Papers. He had pledged to sell his business assets on taking office and the disposal was, at best, partial. For a president elected on a promise to break the oligarchic system, being an oligarch was a structural problem no amount of legislation could solve.

After Office

In 2019 he was defeated heavily by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a television comedian with no political record — a result widely read as a verdict on the corruption question rather than on his war leadership. The OSW analysts' 2014 warning that his high public support might drop off quickly proved accurate.

The years that followed brought treason accusations and the seizure of property, proceedings his supporters characterise as politically motivated and his opponents as overdue; the matter remains contested and unresolved. He stayed in politics, leading his party in parliament. After Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 he remained in Ukraine and donated military equipment, while at times facing legal restrictions on travelling abroad.

Why Petro Is Called a Genius

The word attached to Poroshenko is used for commercial and political calculation rather than intellect, and the evidence for it is real but narrow.

The commercial case is the strongest. He built Roshen from nothing in the mid-1990s into a manufacturer of continental scale, in an environment where property rights were uncertain, the state was predatory, and most fortunes were extracted from privatised Soviet assets rather than built. Roshen was a genuine operating business making a product people bought, which distinguishes it from a good deal of post-Soviet wealth. Acquiring Channel 5 in 2003 showed a related instinct: he understood before most of his peers that in Ukraine media ownership was political capital, and it paid off during the Orange Revolution.

The political case rests on timing. He read the moment in 2014 more accurately than any rival, presenting himself as the manager a frightened country wanted rather than the revolutionary it had just produced, and won outright in the first round — something no Ukrainian presidential candidate had managed in that manner. The delivery of the Association Agreement, visa-free travel and the church's autocephaly in a single term is a substantial legislative and diplomatic record for a president fighting a war.

The counter-case is that none of this is intellectual distinction, and that his term's central failures were not accidents. The Donbas war did not end. Corruption was not broken, and Poroshenko was himself part of the system he was elected to dismantle — a contradiction Ukrainian voters resolved decisively in 2019. His post-presidential legal position remains disputed, and any assessment written now is necessarily provisional. "Shrewd" is the word the record best supports; "genius" is a stretch that his admirers make and his opponents easily rebut.

Legacy

Poroshenko's term will most likely be judged on the parts of it that mattered later rather than the parts that dominated the news at the time: an army rebuilt, a European legal relationship signed, and a church separated from Moscow. Ukraine's ability to fight after February 2022 rested partly on decisions taken between 2014 and 2019. Whether that outweighs the anti-corruption failure that ended his presidency is a question Ukrainians are still arguing about, and one no biographer can settle for them.

Achievements

• Order of Merit (Ukraine), 3rd class
• Order of Merit (Ukraine), 2nd class
• Educated at Institute of International Relations of Taras Ševčenko National University of Kjiv
• Worked as businessperson, politician and diplomat