President Petro Poroshenko proclaimed reforms yesterday spanning all aspects of life to make strife-torn Ukraine fit for European Union membership, warning his people that without reform they would face a future “alone with Russia”.
He also defended his plan to end a war with pro-Russian separatists that has killed more than 3,000 people and said he would meet again soon with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the pivotal player in a geopolitical tussle between Russia and the West over Ukraine’s future reminiscent of the old Cold War.
Kiev and Western governments say it was direct Russian military intervention that tipped the battlefield balance in favour of rebels in eastern Ukraine and forced Poroshenko to call a ceasefire on September 5 after big losses by government forces.
Ukraine’s President warns people that without reform they will face future ‘alone with Russia
Russia, which opposes the pro-Western course of leadership in its fellow ex-Soviet republic, denies its troops have taken part in the war or provided arms to the rebels despite what Western governments and Kiev say is incontrovertible proof.
Poroshenko sought yesterday to fix his people’s attention on joining the European mainstream despite fierce Russian opposition. He laid out an ambitious reform package to enable Ukraine to apply in 2020 for accession to the 28-member EU.
Russia also steadfastly opposes Ukraine, a nation of some 46 million people, ever joining Nato. Both the 28-nation EU and Nato have said they have no plans to offer membership to Kiev.
The proposed reform package, Poroshenko said, would touch all walks of life and particularly aim to root out the endemic corruption that has warped Ukrainian public life since independence in 1991 and peaked under Poroshenko’s ousted predecessor, the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych.
Decentralisation and stronger law enforcement would also be important ingredients of the reform drive, he said.
“The whole state machine is geared today towards corrupt interests. Reform today cannot overcome the bureaucrats,” Poroshenko told a news conference in the capital Kiev.
Resisting reform, he implied, would only play into the hands of Russia, Ukraine’s key supplier of energy which threatened Kiev with retaliatory trade measures if it enacted a political and trade pact with the EU. Parliament ratified it on September 16.