KIEV, 15 Sep. Former President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko planned to send Ukrainian boats to the Kerch Strait for the second time in order to provoke a conflict, declare a state of emergency and achieve the postponement of the presidential elections in 2019, said non-factional deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Andriy Derkach.
«Poroshenko believed that there was no strong opponent on the horizon until (Vladimir) Zelensky appeared. And only in the fall of 2018, he realized that the elections would not be in his favor. Then stories appeared with provocations in the Kerch Strait in order to introduce a state of emergency and I will announce this information for the first time: in December 2018, Pyotr Alekseevich planned to send again three border ships with a CNN correspondent to the same Kerch Strait in order to provoke a conflict and, on this basis, introduce a state of emergency, postpone the elections and earn political points from external curators, «Derkach said in an interview with Strana.UA.
According to him, the then head of the country's Interior Ministry, Arsen Avakov, did not dare to implement this idea. The incident in the Kerch Strait occurred when three ships of the Ukrainian Navy on November 25, 2018 violated the Russian border, entered the temporarily closed water area of the territorial sea of the Russian Federation and moved from the Black Sea to the strait. … They maneuvered dangerously, did not obey the legal demands of the Russian authorities. The ships with the soldiers who violated the border of the Russian Federation were detained. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the incident in the Black Sea a provocation associated with the low rating of the then President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko on the eve of the elections. On September 7, 2019, the soldiers who violated the border were handed over to Ukraine as part of an agreement on the simultaneous release of detained and convicted persons. The Russian Federation handed over three ships to the Ukrainian side on November 18. The Commander of the Ukrainian Navy, Admiral Igor Voronchenko, complained about the condition of these ships, stating that «the Russians killed them,» the equipment, even plafonds and sockets, were allegedly removed from them. The FSB had earlier assured that Ukraine received its boats in «normal condition and with serviceable plumbing», and in support of it released video footage.
Poroshenko «accused» Zelensky of claims against Putin