What Poroshenko's departure and Russia's demands signalled in December 2021
A look back at a day when a domestic legal dispute in Kyiv unfolded alongside Moscow's demands on NATO and continued fighting in Donbas.
What was happening in and around Ukraine on 19 December 2021? The days leading up to it brought a domestic legal dispute, a set of Russian demands on NATO and fresh casualties on the front line.
A summons and a departure
On 18 December 2021, former Ukrainian President and oligarch Petro Poroshenko left the country on what was described as a pre-planned diplomatic tour of Turkey and Poland. His departure came after the National Bureau of Investigation attempted to issue a summons over charges of abetting terrorism. The Bureau also claimed that Poroshenko had been involved in looting national resources from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
Moscow's list
On 17 December, Russia demanded that NATO end all military activity in Eastern Europe and never admit Ukraine. It said it wanted a legally binding guarantee against further eastward expansion of the alliance. Its other demands included a Russian veto on Ukrainian membership, the removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe and the withdrawal of multinational NATO battalions from Poland and the Baltics.
A senior U.S. official said that Washington was prepared to discuss Russia's proposals with its NATO allies. The same official added that some points in the documents were ones the Russians knew would be unacceptable.
Fighting continued
Also on 17 December, a Ukrainian soldier was killed and another injured near Mariupol, after pro-Russian separatist forces targeted Ukrainian positions with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.
Why the sequence matters
Taken together, these reports show a country handling a politically charged investigation of a former president while its security future was being argued in demands addressed to NATO, and while its soldiers were still being killed in Donbas. The reports link none of these developments causally, and it would be wrong to assert such a link. Each, however, formed part of the public picture in Ukraine as 19 December 2021 began.
