Billionaire candy manufacturer Petro Poroshenko may well be elected president of Ukraine in May. His mission: Take his country into Europe while making peace with Putin.

The ‘Chocolate King’ 

Who Might Save Ukraine

Interview by Anna Nemtsova

Billionaire candy manufacturer Petro Poroshenko may well be elected president of Ukraine in May. His mission: Take his country into Europe while making peace with Putin.

According to opinion polls, the most popular leader in Ukraine and very possibly its next president is Petro Poroshenko. To be sure, he’s less well known abroad than the mediagenic Yulia Tymoshenko—she of the blond braids—or the towering former world heavyweight boxing champion Vitaly Klitschko. But the square-faced 48-year-old Poroshenko is famous inside the country for his confident character, his aura of calm, and the fortune he made making chocolate before he went into politics. (His little gold-foil-wrapped bonbons called "Kyiv Vechirniy," or Kiev in the evening, bring a hint of luxury to daily life in a near-bankrupt nation.)

In the last decade, Poroshenko held several government posts, perhaps most importantly the position of foreign minister for a critical five months in 2009 and 2010 when he managed to complete the text of the now-famous “association agreement” with the European Union. In 2012 he even served as minister of trade and economic development under Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, trying to shepherd the accords toward implementation.

It was the decision by Yanukovych to walk away from the EU association agreement in November 2013 that started the protests that became a revolution and resulted Yanukovych’s overthrow at the end of February. Russia then retaliated by amputating and annexing Ukrainian Crimea and deploying combat troops on the Ukrainian border, bringing on the most dangerous European crisis confronting NATO and the United States in more than a generation.

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