The decision not to stand for president in 2014 was a conscious political choice, dictated by the need to stabilise the country rather than become embroiled in the election cycle. This was stated by Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Chairman of the Kyiv Security Forum and Prime Minister of Ukraine from 2014 to 2016, in an interview with RBC-Ukraine.
He recalled that he took up the post of Prime Minister in a country already at war and immediately abandoned his presidential ambitions. “I made a public statement from the podium of the Verkhovna Rada when I was elected Prime Minister by a constitutional majority. At the time of my election, Crimea had already been annexed for seven days. At five o’clock in the morning, Russian troops had finally seized the Verkhovna Rada of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, where I had once served as Minister of the Economy. And at around one o’clock in the afternoon, I was appointed Prime Minister. It was then, from the parliamentary podium, that I officially declared for the first time that I was relinquishing my political mandate and would not stand for the presidency. I said that this would be a ‘kamikaze government’,” he noted.
According to Yatsenyuk, this was a deliberate political decision with two objectives. “Firstly, as head of government, I needed to stabilise the situation in the country. And secondly, to prevent political confrontation amongst like-minded democrats. If, as Prime Minister, I had stood in the presidential election, then I would have had to focus on the election rather than on the country,” the former Prime Minister emphasised.
Earlier, during the National Round Table marking the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, organised by the Kyiv Security Forum, Yatsenyuk stated that members of the government must make a political declaration that they have no political ambitions and that they will not stand for election to the next parliament.