Do we like them?

Do we like Petro Poroshenko?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Backed LGBTQ+ job protections and funded the army heavily, set against treason charges he denies and murky offshore and Hungary-money questions.

Poroshenko was born in the Odesa region and grew up in Vinnytsia, where he built the Roshen confectionery empire and the nickname 'chocolate king'. He bankrolled the Orange Revolution, drifted through several governments (including Moscow-friendly ones, Al Jazeera noted), and won the presidency in 2014. In 2019 he lost to Zelensky by roughly 73 per cent to 24.

The big stoush is the coal case. In December 2021 prosecutors charged him with treason, alleging he helped arrange coal purchases from Russian-controlled parts of Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 and 2015. He denies it and calls it political persecution; it carries up to 15 years if he were ever convicted, and no verdict turned up in what we could read. A separate 2020 abuse-of-power charge, also unresolved in our sources, sits alongside it.

Money questions follow him too. The 2016 Panama Papers showed an offshore company set up to move his confectionery business, which he denied was wrongdoing. In 2023 his asset declarations showed about a million dollars from Hungary's finance ministry, which his party said was interest on investments that fund the army; the SBU had earlier stopped a planned trip to meet Orban.

Lately he is the opposition's loudest voice. After Zelensky's government sanctioned him in early 2025, he called it 'unconstitutional' and said the country was drifting towards dictatorship, while also saying elections can't be held under martial law and pointing at Putin as the real dictator. In May 2026 he was in Zagreb pushing for EU accession talks to open, and in July the Supreme Court rejected his sanctions suit.

The real good stuff is the army. His foundation reported spending UAH 5.6 billion on military aid since the full-scale invasion, including tens of thousands of FPV drones, trucks and armoured vehicles to more than 200 units. That's his own figure, mostly from family funds, but it's a serious record.

So: nothing hateful, one real policy win for LGBTQ+ people and one wobble, plus a lot of practical help for a country under attack. Against that sit a treason case he denies and offshore and Hungary questions he explains away. Whether the sanctions are a vendetta or a fair call depends on whom you believe.