Two recent disasters in Ukrainian foreign policy reflect badly on the competence of President Petro Poroshenko and Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. As members of the Viktor Yushchenko camp, they welcomed Viktor Yanukovych’s election as president in 2010 over Yulia Tymoshenko and both of them had no moral objections to serving in Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov governments in which Poroshenko was minister for trade and economic development while Klimkin was deputy foreign minister.

Poroshenko-Klimkin’s first strategic blunder was for Ukraine to vote on Dec. 23 for United Nations Security Council 2334 demanding an end to Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. The U.S. abstained rather than vetoed the resolution allowing it be adopted. Since then Israel has threatened to retaliate against the 14 countries who voted and abstained in the vote.

Although we may personally agree with criticism of Israeli policy this does not mean that this should influence the manner in which presidents and officials conduct a country’s foreign policy because it has ramifications on Ukraine’s national security. Israel and the Jewish lobby are very influential and Ukraine needs allies in its war with Russia. The Jewish community in Ukraine has been a strong supporter of the Euromaidan and its defence of the country’s territorial integrity in the face of Russian aggression.

The U.S. abstention had no impact upon President Barack Obama because he is leaving office. Ukraine voting along with the U.S. will though have ramifications for Poroshenko who remains in power under the new U.S. President Donald Trump.

The vote also puts Ukraine on the wrong side of history as incoming President Trump severely criticized U.S. support for the vote against Israel.

This takes us to the second foreign policy blunder of not being impartial in the U.S. presidential elections and backing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Responsibility for the strategic blunder lies with Poroshenko-Klimkin and Ukraine’s unqualified ambassador to the U.S., Valery Chaly, who is out of his depth in Washington D.C. because of its importance as a world capital and because he is not a professional diplomat (http://gazeta.ua/blog/49127/ukrayina-poglyad-iz-vashingtona).

Ambassador Chaly played down the likelihood of Trump winning the Republican Party nomination and after he did do so he continued to play down the likelihood of Trump’s election victory. The British referendum result should have been a wake-up call that opinion polls cannot be trusted and that the unthinkable was now possible because people with anti-establishment views were coming out to vote who did not usually do so.

At the very least Poroshenko-Klimkin-Chaly should have adopted a neutral stance after weighing at different scenarios for the election outcome.

In the end, the Russian operation to elect Trump was determined and successfully led by President Vladimir Putin while the Ukrainian operation to elect Hillary Clinton was weak, poorly led, lacked resources, full of contradictions and failed.

An investigation by Politico stated:

“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” (http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446).

This strategic blunder will directly impact upon Ukraine’s national security because Ukraine will have poor relations with President Trump. He has said NATO is “obsolete,” wants to do a deal with Putin over sanctions and may be ready to agree to a “Yalta 2” with Putin that would place Ukraine, Georgia and other post-Soviet republics within Russia’s “privileged zone of interests.”

Since Trump’s election, Poroshenko has signed a contract for $50,000 a month with the well known lobbying BGR Group “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.” Sam Patten will be their representative in Kyiv (http://officeofsampatten.com/about/). I am the only expert who has studied two decades of Ukrainian hiring of lobbyists and political consultants and oligarch funding of think tanks in Washington D.C. The huge amounts paid for these services have been a waste of Ukrainian resources as they do not bring any concrete benefits to Ukraine.

These two examples of Ukrainian foreign policy strategic blunders are not untypical of Poroshenko’s personalized approach to Ukraine’s national security. His approach to the Minsk process has been catastrophic from day one and today the Minsk Accords are in a dead end.

The Ukrainian president made two strategic blunders that have important ramifications for Ukrainian national security:

  1. Poroshenko should have refused to attend the Minsk talks unless all the countries participated who provided security guarantees to Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Great Britain and the USA should have been members of the negotiations! Without them Germany and France sometimes worked with Putin to pressure Ukraine.
  2. Poroshenko did not insist that the subject of the Crimea be included alongside the Donbas in the Minsk negotiations. The result is that the Crimea is not raised in any negotiated documents leaving open the possibility that Europe and the US will eventually recognize the territory as “Russian” – as extreme right European nationalist populists like Marine Le Pen are already saying Europe should do.

But, importantly, why did Poroshenko even agree to Minsk becoming the place to hold peace negotiations? President Alexander Lukashenka is a Russian satrap, Belarus is a member of Commonwealth of Independent States security structures and the Eurasian Economic Union. Therefore, Belarus is not a neutral country. Could Poroshenko not have insisted on Switzerland where his favorite city of Davos is located and where he always has cordial discussions with oligarch Viktor Pinchuk (at least until he wrote the op-ed calling for Ukraine’s capitulation)?