Professor Petras said he was confident that, with the situation in Ukraine’s southeast now stabilizing, “we are going to get a federal state in the process and the extremists in Kiev will have a difficult time mobilizing international support and any kind of major military operation.”
President Poroshenko is very vulnerable and weak. Discontent with the economic conditions for the majority of people in Kiev is increasingly hostile and he has no domestic foundations to sustain his rule, Petras noted.
“The question is who will replace him… Poroshenko doesn’t really know what he wants because he is failing on all sides: he is attacking Russia… he hasn’t been able to put together a development strategy to get out of the recession; he doesn’t have strong military support. I think Poroshenko will stay on by default, not because he is a strong president, not because he has a viable foreign policy, but because no one else is around that can actually implement an alternative program,” James Petras said in conclusion.
