Regime Change "Success": Ukrainian President Less Popular than US ousted …
Two weeks ago, we noted – with some amusement – that Ukraine has defaulted to Russia on a $3 billion obligation. To be sure, the move wasn’t unexpected.
“I have a feeling that they will not pay us back because they are crooks,” Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev said previously.
Here, in a nutshell, is what happened.
Back in 2013, Putin bought a $3 billion eurobond from Kyiv’s Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych. As Reuters noted at the time,
“Kyiv needed cash to cover its external funding gap, while the central
bank’s currency reserves are depleted by efforts to support the hryvnia
and repay foreign debt.”
The deal was closed in December of that year. Two months (nearly to
the day) later, Yanukovich was run out of Ukraine by protesters
supported by the US and, most notably, by John McCain.
Later, as part of a deal to restructure
some $18 billion in debt, the Petro Poroshenko (Yanukovych’s successor)
government struck a deal with creditors including T. Rowe and Franklin
Templeton that will see creditors take a 20% haircut on the way to
improving Ukraine’s debt sustainability. Kyiv offered Putin the same
deal. Indignant at the prospect of having to take a 20% loss on money
loaned to a friendly government but now owed by a country with which
Moscow is effectively at war, The Kremlin refused. Ukraine defaulted.
We retell that story in order to provide some context for the following poll from Gallup which shows that incredibly, Poroshenko is now less popular than Yanukovych before he was ousted.
From Gallup:
Despite signs last year that Ukraine’s then-new president
was starting to rebuild Ukrainians’ trust in their leadership,
President Petro Poroshenko is now less popular than his predecessor
Viktor Yanukovych was before he was ousted. After more than a
year in office, 17% of Ukrainians approve of the job that Poroshenko is
doing. This approval rating is down sharply from 47% a few months after
his election in May 2014.
Poroshenko’s low approval rating largely reflects Ukrainians’
disenchantment with their leadership, which many feel has failed to
deliver on what protesters demanded when they took to the streets two
years ago. Since the Maidan revolution, Ukraine’s economy has been in
shambles, the Crimea region joined Russia and fighting between Ukrainian
forces and pro-Russian separatists in the country’s East has claimed
more than 9,000 lives.
Poroshenko is not popular in any region of Ukraine.
As low as Poroshenko’s approval rating is, fewer Ukrainians have
faith in their national government, which many have criticized for its
slow pace of reform. Ukrainians’ trust in their national
government arguably did not have much room to fall, but the 8% who
express confidence in their government is only one-third of what it was
in 2014 (24%). It is also one of the lowest trust levels Gallup has recorded in Ukraine since 2006.
Just another US foreign policy, regime change success story…
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