President Petro Poroshenko is meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday to ask them to ramp up pressure on Russia, but he will probably face a lot of unpleasant questions about the slow pace of the many reforms he promised, including a clampdown on corruption.
Ordinary Ukrainians are even less happy about this, of course.
They accuse politicians of failing to fulfill many of their promises, dragging their feet on fighting corruption and making Ukraine a truly democratic state.
“Gas and electricity prices are going up, just like everything else… The big shots are filling their pockets and just couldn’t care less about the people,” a saleswoman told Christof Franzen in Borispol, a town not far from Kiev.
“With the economy contracting a whole 15 percent compared to last year, the government is saving on everything to meet the stringent demands by the country’s foreign creditors. Inflation is high and the war in Donbass is eating up millions of francs each day. Small wonder that public support for the president and, especially the parliament, has hit the depths,” Franzen wrote.
Valery Pekar, a businessman and civil activist, blames the growing public discontent on representatives of the Yanukovich administration many of whom still call the shots in regional and city administrations.
There are no signs of any serious protest action coming up any time soon though, as many people are still hoping to sit out the crisis and are waiting for a better future, Christof Franzen wrote in conclusion.
