Kiev should urgently reinforce the frontline in Donbass, which lacks both fortifications and supplies, former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has said.
Poroshenko, who was president from June 2014 to May 2019, visited the town of Pokrovsk on Thursday with a shipment of drones for Ukrainian army units stationed there.
“Of course, Kursk is very important. Of course, other directions are very important. But I can say that the fate of these months is being decided in Pokrovsk today,” Poroshenko said. “And everything depends on whether our military will be supplied or not.”
Earlier this month, the government in Kiev sent a task force made up of several battalions across the border into Russia’s Kursk Region, with the alleged intent to force Moscow to divert reserves to that front. Instead, Russian forces have pushed hard towards Pokrovsk, a rail and road junction that is the key to Ukraine’s presence in Donbass.
Poroshenko criticized both Kiev and the local authorities for failing to build trenches and obstacles. Russians must be stopped “tens of kilometers from Pokrovsk,” the former head of state insisted, with the help of fortifications “which have not been built.”
As of Thursday evening, Russian troops were in Selidovo, about 18km southeast of Pokrovsk, and had knocked the Ukrainians out of Karlovka, a major stronghold on the southern flank of their salient.
Poroshenko is currently the head of European Solidarity (ES), a small opposition party with 27 seats in the 450-member national legislature, the Verkhovna Rada. He led a party delegation to Pokrovsk to deliver supplies collected by volunteers to Ukrainian troops holding the town.
The former president and his party said they had delivered over 800 attack drones and a dozen surveillance models to several units at the frontline, along with all-terrain vehicles for evacuating the wounded, tires for their transport trucks, and several electronic warfare systems.
Poroshenko has criticized the current government and parliament as too slow and inefficient, pointing out that it took “five long years” to pass a law banning the “Russian church” – the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church – and urging the creation of a “government of national unity” that would include all factions, including his own.
The former chocolate baron was elected president in 2014, several months after the US-backed coup in Kiev, which triggered the conflict in Donbass.
Two months into his presidency, he authorized an attack by Ukrainian armed forces on the city of Donetsk, which ended in them being surrounded and destroyed at Ilovaysk. That disaster, in August 2014, compelled Kiev’s backers in the West to back the first Minsk Agreement – which they later acknowledged was a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for war against Russia.