Former Donetsk oblast Governor Serhiy Taruta said late on Oct. 10 that his successor did not fully understand the functions of a governor and that it would be hard for him to understand the complex nature of the region.
Taruta was dismissed by President Petro Poroshenko as
governor on Oct. 10 following his criticism of Poroshenko’s peace plan for
Donbas and the publication of a letter in which Taruta lambasted Russian
President Vladimir Putin. He was replaced as governor by General Oleksandr
Kikhtenko.
Taruta said at a news briefing that Kikhtenko had
initially thought that the position of governor was mostly military in nature.
“I explained to him that the position of governor is
not a military one, that it includes economic and social issues,” he said. “That
made him think a lot.”
Taruta also said that Kikhtenko knew little about
Donbas.
“We used to work 17 hours a day but for him even 24
hours won’t be enough,” he said. “…Donbas is a very complex organism. It
becomes allergic and gets coagulation very fast.”
Another problem is that, unlike Mariupol-born Taruta,
Kikhtenko, who is from the Kharkiv oblast, is an outsider.
“In Donbas outsiders have always been disliked,”
Taruta said.
He said that he had first met Kikhtenko during the
Euromaidan revolution and then consulted with him during the annexation of
Crimea in March.
Taruta said that Kikhtenko was knowledgeable in the
field of law enforcement, since he used to be the head of the Interior
Ministry’s Internal Troops, now known as the National Guard.
He urged Kikhtenko to keep Taruta’s administrative
team and to make sure that everything good that was done under the previous
administration would not be lost.
“Without us little would be left of Donbas, Mariupol
would be gone,” he said, referring to his administration’s efforts to defend
Ukrainian-controlled areas, including Mariupol, from separatists and to expand
them.
Taruta said that he had been planning to carry out
reforms and find a successor himself before September but Poroshenko did it first.
He also said he did not know whether his dismissal had
been caused by Poroshenko’s intention to create his own government team or by
the fact that he had been “inconvenient” for Poroshenko and Prime Minister
Arseny Yatsenyuk.
“I’ve never been silent and never will be,” Taruta
said.
He said that he had had bad relations with Yatsenyuk
and a part of his Cabinet during his gubernatorial term.
“Last time I spoke to Yatsenuk by phone in May,” he
said. “He has been ignoring me.”
Commenting on his stint as governor, Taruta said that
he and his team realized too late that the pro-Russian unrest was not a protest
movement but a Kremlin-orchestrated “special operation.”
“Initially a resection surgery was necessary but now
only chemotherapy will help,” Taruta said, referring to the pro-Russian
insurgency.
Outlining his views on the current military situation
in eastern Ukraine, Taruta said Poroshenko’s peace plan had bogged down not
because of separatists’ efforts to derail the Sept. 5 ceasefire agreement
between Ukraine, Russia and separatists.
“There are enough arguments and forces to make
everyone follow the rules,” he said, implying that it was the Kremlin, not
separatists, who had derailed the ceasefire deal.
He also said he was “sad” after talking to OSCE
observers, saying that they were not eager to monitor the ceasefire
implementation, and compared the current situation in Donbas to Abkhazia, where
Russian troops and separatists used a ceasefire to take over more territory.
Kyiv
Post staff writer Oleg Sukhov can be reached at [email protected].
