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Petro Poroshenko

President of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019

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During his presidency, Poroshenko led the country through the first phase of the war in Donbas, recovering most of the Donbas Region from the Russian separatist forces. In September 2014 and February 2015, Poroshenko would sign the Minsk Agreements effectively freezing the frontlines and greatly reducing casualties in the ongoing war. He also began the process of re-building the Ukrainian military which was largely dismantled during Yanukovych's presidency, a re-militarization which would continue under Zelenskyy's presidency. A staunch proponent of Ukraine's EU ascension, Poroshenko began the process of integration with the European Union by signing the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement in June 2014. He also signed a visa-free travel agreement with the European Union in June 2017, and re-oriented national trade towards the EU.

In terms of domestic policy, Poroshenko 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). 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 (Ukraine's unicameral parliament) and leader of the European Solidarity party. Outside government, Poroshenko has been a prominent Ukrainian oligarch with a 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. 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.

In opinion polling conducted since he left office, Poroshenko is considered an above average Ukrainian President.

Early life and education

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), was born in the village of Safiany near Izmail, which at the time belonged to Romania, and worked as an engineer and later a government official who managed multiple factories in the Ukrainian SSR. According to Poroshenko, his father's family stemmed from the Danube Cossacks. 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. Poroshenko 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), where his father Oleksii was heading a machine building plant and where he learned Romanian.

In his youth, Poroshenko practiced judo and sambo, and was a Candidate for Master of Sport of the USSR. 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. 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.

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. At this university he was friends with Mikheil Saakashvili, whom he would appoint as Governor of the Odesa Oblast (region) in May 2015, and who is a former president of Georgia.

In 1984, Poroshenko married a medical student, Maryna Perevedentseva (born 1962). Their first son, Oleksiy, was born in 1985 (his three other children were born in 2000 and 2001).

From 1989 to 1992, Poroshenko was an assistant at the university's international economic relations department. 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. At the same time, he was deputy director of the 'Republic' Union of Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs, and the CEO of "Exchange House Ukraine".

Poroshenko's brother, Mykhailo, older by eight years, died in a 1997 car crash under mysterious circumstances.

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