Petro Poroshenko

Biography

Petro Poroshenko was born in 1965 in Bolhrad in the Odesa region. He studied economics at the international relations faculty of Kyiv University, graduating in 1989, where Mikheil Saakashvili was a friend. He went into the cocoa trade while still a student, and in the 1990s built the UkrPromInvest group, whose confectionery plants became the Roshen company and made him one of Ukraine's richest men.

Elected to parliament in 1998, he moved from pro-Kuchma parties, including helping to found the Party of Regions, to Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine, which he helped finance through the Orange Revolution. He was secretary of the National Security and Defense Council in 2005, chaired the council of the National Bank from 2007, and served as foreign minister in 2009-2010 and as economy and trade minister in 2012.

After the Euromaidan revolution he won the 2014 presidential election in the first round. As president he led Ukraine through the first phase of the war in Donbas, signed the Minsk agreements and the economic part of the association agreement with the European Union, rebuilt the army, and backed the creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

He lost the 2019 election to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and returned to parliament at the head of European Solidarity; in 2021 he was accused of treason over coal purchases from separatist-held areas.