Your trusted source

Press TV has interviewed James Jatras to talk about the newly elected president in Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko.

Press TV: Now, when the newly elected president spoke, it was hoped that his olive branch is going to see at least deescalate tensions within the eastern sections of Ukraine. However, we are seeing a massive push right now by the ground and air forces. What do you make of it?

Jatras: This is a very disturbing sign. Mr. Poroshenko has a very stark choice ahead of him. He either has to decide whether he will follow through the path of the interim administration in trying to crush the self-defense forces in the east by force, which I think is a terrible tragic and inhuman mistake that cannot succeed in any case, or he can try to negotiate with people. Now of course, he was just elected yesterday. I don’t think he is actually in control of anything. However, his comments today referring to the people in the Donetsk and Lugansk republics as pirates is not reassuring.

Press TV: So what can this president do in the coming days and weeks to ease the tensions in eastern Ukraine? Let’s not forget that the people in Donetsk and Lugansk want to stand by the results of the referendums that were carried out.

Jatras: That’s correct. Mr. Poroshenko has a kind of mandate from the center and the Western part of the country, not so much from east, from the south, where people were either not able to go to vote and in many cases, did not want to go to these elections they did not recognize as being valid. If he wants to put Ukraine back together again, he’s got to do it by treating these people in the east as his countrymen that he is willing to compromise with them on the structure of Ukraine, centralized, federalized, a neutral status for Ukraine and so forth, and he’s not given any indications that he wants to do that. But then, on the other hand, we have this kind of escalation of violence which is completely contradictory to that. He cannot do both, he must decide.

Press TV: Is this new president even independent enough to take those steps considering we do know that he owes his election victory to an interim government that was as many point out, placed by the West and backed by the West and also when the presence of foreign forces private security firms on Ukrainian soil is created a lot of concern?

Jatras: That’s a very good question. And there are some real questions about how much authority he actually has, which remember that he is working under the restoration of the 2004 constitution where he has far less power than President [Viktor] Yanukovych did.

Who knows if he even controls these forces even after he is installed as president and to whom he has to sign off and take instructions in order to be moved into this position? I don’t know if he’s really his own man and what he intends to do with the mandate that he has.