Poroshenko and Zelenskyy spoke in raised voices, Ukrainska Pravda reports

During the first meeting in many years between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his predecessor and opponent in the previous election, MP Petro Poroshenko, on 26 May, the politicians spoke in raised voices and exchanged accusations. Ukrainska Pravda's sources said Poroshenko was left with "a strange feeling of emptiness" after the meeting.

Source: UP article Budanov, Arakhamiia or Fedorov: who could become Zelenskyy's new pillar of support, English translation to be available soon

Details: On 26 May, Poroshenko waited for Zelenskyy on the third floor of the President's Office on Bankova Street. His meeting with Zelenskyy did not begin for a long time. He waited almost an hour. All the other faction leaders had already had their audience with the president.

Davyd Arakhamiia, leader of the president's faction in the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament), and Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, reportedly communicated with Poroshenko in advance and tried to set a certain framework for the future conversation.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources said, however, that Poroshenko came to the Office of the President with printouts of various memes and other social media materials and began complaining that Zelenskyy and his circle were systematically discrediting him.

For a few seconds, everyone on our side was speechless," one witness from the government team said.

Quote: "The words for a response came quickly: within moments, the conversation shifted to raised voices and to the only irreplaceable form of the enemy's cultural presence – Russian obscenities.

The president [Zelenskyy] was outraged that Poroshenko was trying to present himself as a victim when, in his view, the fifth president's 'Porokhobots' [Poroshenko supporters] behaved no less aggressively online and cost 'millions of dollars'.

At the very least, Zelenskyy believed, Poroshenko had no moral right to reproach him over something like that."

More details: Zelenskyy, in turn, raised concerns about Poroshenko's support for potential rivals to the current government, above all Ukraine's ambassador to London, Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

At that point, Poroshenko had to choose his words carefully and responded that if the entire state machine and all available government resources were being used against him, there was nothing surprising about him seeking help from anyone capable of challenging the current authorities.

Ukrainska Pravda's sources said that despite the difficult start, the meeting gradually became somewhat constructive.

At certain moments, the sources said, it resembled a conversation between people who might be able to step over their mutual dislike and try to do something together for the state.

Poroshenko did not even raise the issue of sanctions against him directly, although he did mention that they are hindering his work.

"The position was simple: if we agree now on some model of cooperation, then the sanctions issue will eventually fall away by itself. If there are no agreements, then any requests will make no sense at all," a source from Poshenko's team said.

After the meeting ended, Poroshenko, like Ukrainska Pravda's sources from the teams of Yuliia Tymoshenko and Dmytro Razumkov, leader of Smart Politics, an inter-factional association, was left with a strange feeling of emptiness.

"No one agreed on anything. No one asked for anything, not even what we were ready to offer. There were no concrete decisions or proposals," a lawmaker from Razumkov's group told Ukrainska Pravda.

Zelenskyy's team explained that this format was a deliberate decision: to ask for nothing and promise nothing.

One member of Zelenskyy's team said "this first meeting was needed for something else entirely. We could not offer anything because we had different considerations".

Background:

• On 26 May, Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a series of separate meetings with leaders of parliamentary factions and groups, rather than a single large meeting as had been expected. It was announced that these meetings will be held regularly from now on and that "the dialogue will become permanent".
• Following the meeting, Poroshenko said on Facebook that he and Zelenskyy had agreed to hold such meetings regularly.
• Iryna Herashchenko, an MP from the European Solidarity parliamentary faction, said that during the meeting with Zelenskyy, Poroshenko discussed key issues on the state agenda and "asked for nothing".
• In February 2025, it was reported that the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine imposed sanctions on Petro Poroshenko.

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