As international attention focused on the crash, the government in Kiev ground to a standstill. Svoboda and UDAR withdrew their support from the ruling coalition, and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, frustrated at the pace of legislative action, announced his resignation. Parliament ultimately rejected Yatsenyuk’s resignation after agreeing to his proposed budget amendments, but Poroshenko proceeded with a call for early elections to be held in October 2014. In the east, the area under separatist control continued to recede, as the Ukrainian military steadily advanced on the rebel strongholds of Donetsk and Luhansk. Although Russia continued to deny involvement in the conflict, in August Moscow confirmed that a squad of Russian paratroopers had been captured while inside Ukraine. After Ukrainian authorities released video interviews of the prisoners, Russian military officials stated that the soldiers had accidentally crossed the border.
Mirny, UkraineA bar provides the only light in a neighbourhood of Mirny, Ukraine, after months of heavy fighting between government forces and rebels led to electricity shortages in the Luhansk region in October 2014.Sergey Ponomarev—The New York Times/Redux
Putin, Vladimir; Lukashenka, Alyaksandr; Poroshenko, PetroBelarusian Pres. Alyaksandr Lukashenka (centre) hosting a meeting between Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin (left) and Ukrainian Pres. Petro Poroshenko (right) in Minsk, Belarus, in an effort to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, August 26, 2014. Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP ImagesUkrainian government troops experienced a sharp reversal of fortunes in late August, when rebel forces opened a new front in the south, taking the city of Novoazovs’k and threatening the key port of Mariupol. Poroshenko flatly declared that Russian forces had entered Ukraine, and NATO analysts estimated that more than 1,000 Russian troops were actively participating in the conflict. On September 5 the governments of Ukraine and Russia met with separatist leaders in Minsk, Belarus, and agreed to a cease-fire that temporarily slowed, but did not stop, the violence. With an eye on the future, Poroshenko proposed a series of political and economic reforms that were designed to prepare Ukraine to apply for EU membership in 2020. Poroshenko’s mandate received approval from voters on October 26, when pro-Western parties triumphed in snap parliamentary elections.
On November 2 separatists held local elections in Donetsk and Luhansk in violation of the Minsk cease-fire agreement. Ukrainian and Western authorities dismissed the results, which predictably favoured separatist candidates, and, although Russia initially stated that it would recognize the elections, it later walked back those comments, saying that it would “respect” them instead. Poroshenko responded by vowing to rescind an agreement that would have granted additional autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. By year’s end, fighting had reached its previous levels. In January 2015 the United Nations estimated that more than 5,000 people had been killed since the beginning of hostilities. By that point the cease-fire agreement had been largely discarded by both sides. Although the Russian economy had been pushed into recession by a combination of Western sanctions and low oil prices, advanced Russian military equipment continued to appear in eastern Ukraine, as a separatist offensive pushed back government forces. In late January rebels occupied the fiercely contested Donetsk airport—little more than a ruin after months of heavy fighting—and they intensified efforts to capture the government-held town of Debaltseve. Hundreds were killed in the shelling of civilian areas in the conflict zone, including at least 30 in a separatist rocket attack on Mariupol, and world leaders pressed for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
On February 12, 2015, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany agreed on a 12-point peace plan that proposed, among other things, the cessation of fighting, the withdrawal of heavy weapons, the release of prisoners, and the removal of foreign troops from Ukrainian territory. The tenuous peace held, and heavy weapons were pulled back by both sides in early September 2015. Frequent violations of the truce left over 9,000 dead and more than 20,000 wounded by year’s end, however. Citing research from Russian human rights groups, Ukrainian authorities estimated that over 2,000 Russian troops had been killed since the beginning of fighting in April 2014. Russian officials continued to deny any involvement in the conflict, and in May 2015 Putin signed a decree banning the release of information about the deaths of Russian soldiers during “special operations.”
Ukraine crisisWorld leaders meeting in Minsk, Belarus, to discuss the terms of a cease-fire in the conflict in eastern Ukraine, February 11, 2015. From left to right: Belarusian Pres. Alyaksandr Lukashenka, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French Pres. François Hollande, and Ukrainian Pres. Petro Poroshenko.Alexander Zemlianichenko, Pool/AP Images
As the situation in the east settled into a frozen conflict, Ukrainians grew impatient with the pace of political and economic reform. Although the Poroshenko administration had promised transparency and a renewed effort to stamp out endemic corruption, it could claim few real successes. In May 2015 Poroshenko tapped former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to serve as governor of the Odessa region, but Saakashvili soon encountered resistance from Kiev as a tug-of-war developed between anti-corruption crusaders and politicians aligned with the country’s oligarchs. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk narrowly survived a vote of no confidence in February 2016, and he resigned in April of that year. Poroshenko quickly moved to install his ally Volodymyr Groysman as prime minister, but he was dogged by revelations about his use of offshore tax shelters during his tenure as president. A leak of documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca unveiled a money-laundering and tax-evasion operation of breathtaking scope, implicating dozens of public figures and politicians from around the globe. Poroshenko denied any wrongdoing and stated that he had fully complied with the law.
Poroshenko’s public approval rating sagged into the single digits approaching the 2019 presidential election, but a pair of events in late 2018 boosted his popularity. In November 2018 Russian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait fired on Ukrainian ships and seized both the ships and their crews. Poroshenko declared martial law in 10 regions, the first time such a step had been taken since Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. Ukraine also appealed to the United Nations, and the General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution that called on Russia to withdraw its forces from Crimea and to end its occupation of Ukrainian territory. Russia ignored the resolution and continued to expand its military presence in Crimea, but the clash seemed to legitimize Poroshenko’s reelection campaign slogan, “Army, language, faith.”
The third of those pillars would be the focus of Poroshenko’s major pre-election policy initiative—namely, the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Orthodox churches of Ukraine had been under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate since the 17th century, but in December 2018 Poroshenko and Orthodox leaders announced a break with Moscow. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I formally granted the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephalous (independent) status in January 2019; by this point, the Russian Orthodox Church had already severed ties with Constantinople and the ecumenical patriarchate in protest.
The election of Volodymyr Zelensky
In spite of Poroshenko’s efforts to direct the public conversation in the months leading to the March 2019 presidential election, official corruption and the economy remained voters’ key concerns. The race had initially appeared to be a replay of the 2014 contest between Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, but the candidacy of television personality and political novice Volodymyr Zelensky shattered the established order. Zelensky had portrayed the president of Ukraine in a popular situation comedy, and he leveraged his massive online following into a serious campaign against official corruption.