i definitely didn’t want to be in the same organization with them, never, but it means that when vashka told me this, i mean, with such youthful enthusiasm that i know something that no one knows, well, that is, we know, we know the three of us, the gorbachevs, vashko and i, can you imagine what an incredible epiphany, i ran to stanislav gurenko, with whom i am on good terms, profiting from absolutely, i would say, diametrically opposed political views, and i say to him: stanislav ivanovich. and volodymyr antonovych will run for the position of deputy general secretary of the central committee of the cpsu. stanislav ivanovych says, he turned white, well, because he understood what it means when the head of the verkhovna rada of ukraine flees ukraine a few months after his election. ugh. and also on the day, on the days when the verkhovna rada of ukraine discussed the declaration on the sovereignty of ukraine. the congress of the cpsu, and this session took place.

at the same time, during the congress of the cpsu, the verkhovna rada of ukraine approved a declaration on the state sovereignty of ukraine in the absence of all party leaders. they were at the party congress. ot. and i say to him: stanislav ivanovich, and you will run for office chairman of the verkhovna rada? well, this is a logical question. and he tells me. already one was swamped. and what happened? i think i should stay with the party. perform my duties as the first secretary of the central committee, you and i spoke after my election to the first central committee, you were the first journalist with whom i spoke, and i promised that i would lead the communist party of ukraine, i would not run for office, but you will you go to kyiv in such a situation, he says, how can i go to kyiv, there is a congress of the communist party in moscow, how can i leave congress, i'm a communist, you don't understand, you don't understand, you're not a communist, well, i think, well, if you're such an idiot. excuse me, then i

went on, i went on and after a few minutes i met leonid makarovich, kravchuk and i say, leonid makarovich, i have some interesting news for you, what news, says makarovich, i say, well, first of all, volodymyr antonovych will be the deputy of the general central committee of the cpsu, he is leaving ukraine. leonid makarovich did not turn white, he turned red, i would say, from such a certain enthusiasm. i tell him, you know, such an unfortunate situation, he says: yes, it’s an unfortunate situation for the party, he was the second central committee at the time, it’s a problem, and you know, i say, leonid makarovich, and stanislav ivanovich gurenko will not run for the position of chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, he tells me where you are from you know, they didn't talk, they had such a relationship, they didn't communicate, gurenko and gravchuk, by the way, the first and the second didn't communicate, practically a lot. there was communication, how do you

know, well, i saw somewhere a few minutes ago, i asked him if he would go to kyiv, or if he would to bog down, but that means this is his decision, he wants to stay in the party, he is a communist, vitaliy, you are not a communist, you do not understand, this whole mess is starting, well, you are not a communist, i say leonid makarovich, maybe you will go to kyiv, to kyiv, says leonid makarovych, you are not a communist, vitaly, how can a communist leave the party congress, well, i went to those, too. unlike stanislav ivanovich, who told me everything correctly and remained at the congress, leonid makarovich, i think, flew to kyiv the very next day and was elected chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, and if bstanislav gurenko was elected chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, imagine this situation, on august 24, 1991, in the chair of the chairman of the verkhovna rada of ukraine, not leonid koravchuk, but stanislav. i am not sure that we

would have adopted the act of independence, that it would have appeared at all, but there would have been a confrontation, there would have been a struggle, ugh, moscow tried to move gurenko, yeltsin would hardly want gurenko to remain at the head of ukraine, so that he would believe that gurenko would apply for some higher positions in moscow, that is, anything could be there, and this the day when the three of me ran between them to find out how it would end, and i hope that... i told lenyud makarovich the right vector of movement, so i think that it was just a stellar time, but in any case this is what you described, very specific manifestations of what is called a political miracle, such was the political will or sovereign will of the ukrainian people, it is extremely important, yes, but a lot of things could depend on some personnel decisions, personnel appointments, look, what an illustration , mikhail gorbachev demanded from the first sectarians of the central committee of the party of the union republics. for them to run for the position

of president or chairman of the verkhovna rada and to leave the positions of first secretaries of the charter of the union, how many people do you think fulfilled this assignment of his? nobody, no, one, volodymyr ivashko, he was the first central committee, he was elected chairman of the verkhovna rada and he resigned from the position of the first central committee. i generally thought it was complete hardware idiocy. nazarbayev, karimov, niyazov, all remained in their positions as party leaders, because there was real power, vertical. and it was hard to give her away this vertical gurenko, and as a result everything was like this. and look, here are the first elections, the second elections and so on, for example, a change of a whole day. well, we can talk for a long time about the days of 1991, in general, about the days of kravchuk, about the resignation of kravchuk, but the key story is when kuchma appeared, i would also like to just in the present day, the day of independence, so kuchma in fact, he was one of the creators of what

was called the ukrainian sovereign state bureaucratic apparatus, that is, he passed the law on civil service, he started to write out the so-called ranks to officials, he began to build... good, not good, for his own benefit and so on, well, but special services, that is , he tried to create his own ukrainian kazakhstan, that is how we will formulate this matter, where he succeeded until the end, we , maybe we don't understand, but maybe, well, that's why kuchma himself managed to stop the russian appetite, of course not him, but horbulin, marchuk, and so on, that is, to stop the russian creeping expansion to the south, primarily about crimea. but not only about crimea, that is, it somehow managed to do so block this story, here is kuchma, he is still alive, yes, he is a dark angel of light, an angel, or just a humble director, burdened with colossal powers, colossal responsibility, covered by agents, for example, well, if we are talking about the old

deka, the old jerk and so on , father, and who found out that he was an agent while working as a deputy. and so on and so on, i.e. he was taxed, but he tried to build, maybe autocratic, but ukraine, so he might have hoped to rule forever until 2030, for example, i don't i'm sure he hoped to rule forever, to be honest, but he was going to continue his rule there at some point, i ca n't have a two-minute answer, we 'll have a break in literally two minutes, but until this break, i have. .. to say that i really, i followed the appearance of leonid kuchma, because i met leonid kuchma, just, i think, there a couple of days after leonid kuchmo was appointed as the prime minister of ukraine, and here i have to say , that leonid kuchma was needed by

leonid kravchuk simply because leonid kravchuk, precisely because he was a party ideologue, he didn't understand anything about economics at all, but like gorbachev, well, he didn't understand economics at all, and he was the only one that he understood. at the time of kuchma's appointment, the fact that the first prime minister of already independent ukraine, vytold fukin, also did not understand anything in the new economy, and by the way, when tol fokin appeared again on the political scene as masha fokin's grandfather, right , that's right, here is a member of this delegation at the negotiations, at the negotiations in minsk saw that he was a completely soviet person who remained soviet, imagine what he was like in 1900... in 91-93, he was such a soviet official-intellectual who liked to read books and talk about culture, but on it is a great pity, he did not know the economy as such, that is, the modern economy, let’s say the gaidar-chuys economy, with which it was necessary to coexist, and

leonid kravchuk at some point came to the conclusion that he needed some kind of person capable of organizing a reformist government , who will not give in to russian ambitions, because there was... a fear that russia would take over the ukrainian economy. we will now take a break for just a few minutes and then we will continue about kuchma. an unusual look at the news. good health, ladies and gentlemen, my name is mykola veresin, sharp presentation of facts and competent opinions. for example, if mykola veresen had done so, he would have gone to prison. a special view on events in ukraine, so there is no need. to say that the fish rots from the head, no, not from the head, and beyond it, then who is in favor china, me, my heart hurts, all this in an informational marathon with mykola veresny, saturday 17:10, sunday 18:15 at espresso. events, events that are happening right now and

affect our lives. of course, the news feed reports on them. however, it was not enough to know what was happening. it is necessary to understand. antin borkovskyi and the invitation. experts soberly assess events, analyze them, modeling our future. every saturday at 13:10 with a repeat on sunday at 10:10. studio zahid with anton borkovsky. we continue the saturday polyclub on the espresso antsin tv channel borkovskii vitaly portnikov, we are talking about the foundation, the basements of our ukrainian independence in various political and not only political dimensions, an extremely informative conversation, just a couple of minutes ago vitaly told, well, literally, a secret. so that means kuchma became the prime minister from here

, there is also an interesting moment when kravchuk appointed him as prime minister, it was implied that kuchma would become yegor gaidar's partner and the first kuchma knew about it, he was ready , of course he and gaidar were for it i would have known gaidar said, i was very, very skeptical of vitold, i once met together with gaidar and the heads of the administration. russian president sergei filatov, vitold fokin at the vnukov-2 airport, and gaidar said so skeptically there that the current leaders of ukraine are not capable of carrying out any real reforms, and we need someone with whom we can talk about reforms, with they could not talk about reforms to fokkin. fokin is the former head of the state plan of the ukrainian ssr, for gaidar this was already a characteristic, he simply understood that this is not a person of the post-soviet soviet economy, but kuchma , the director of the plant, is completely different. man, but what actually happened: kuchma was supposed to become yehor gaidar's partner, but he became

viktor chornomrydan's partner. because during this time , gaidar left his post, acting as the head of the government of the russian federation, and viktor chornomyrdin became the head of the government of the russian federation, and there suddenly incredible prospects opened up for leonid kuchma, he and viktor chornomyrdin are simply the same. this director, this director, this married to a russian woman, this one is married to ukraine. that is, in fact, such soviet directors, this one respects this one, this one respects that one, they quickly got along, chornomyrdin opened kuchma’s door to boris yeltsin, and everything was clear there too, yeltsin really could withstand a long feast, leonid kravchuk was a complete stranger to him, here all that yeltsin loved, there was hunting, vodka, sauna, that's all, well, kravchuk was different, he was a party ideologist, he... to be a partner of oleksandr yakovlev, let's say, an adviser gorbachev, kuchma and yeltsin could

afford to solve global issues in this way, of course, it was very important there to be able to drink as much as the master drinks and not to fall with his face under the table, and by the way, i have to say that not being the prime minister of ukraine, but of course a journalist, i trained, because when i interviewed islam karimov, let's say, it was a bottle. cognac for one person, and you imagine that you are sitting across from the president of the country and you, the problem here is not that you you will fall on your face, and the problem is that you can say something that you will later regret for years, if you manage to regret it, that is, it was this kind of control, which, by the way , weaned me from alcohol, because i stopped getting drunk, it it was just such a psychological shock that after all these interviews, i... after that, i don't use alcohol for years, because i know that it doesn't affect me, i'm

just the appearance of alcohol, i have to be like a head this soldier, but kuchma and yeltsin could still relax with chornomyrdin, and they quickly saw that this a much better figure than, say, leonid kravchuk, who began to build a kind of sovereign ukraine there, who, from their point of view , simply led them around. because he began to introduce his own currency, build his own army, left the cis joint command, did a lot of things that they did not agree on in the bialowieza pushcha, that is, he began to build a real state, they did not want that, neither yeltsin nor chornomyrden, they wanted this union of countries, and therefore by and large they decided to support leonid kuchma when he was 1994, kuchma was the head of ukraine at that time. union of entrepreneurs and industrialists, kravchuk never found a prime minister

who could be a reformer. at that time , vitaliy masol, the last prime minister of soviet ukraine, headed the ukrainian government. that is why kravchuk completely lost these economic ones, that is, to appoint masol after kuchma - it was an absolute disaster, if kravchuk thought on a large scale, economically, he had a whole wagon of reformers, i would say. and why wasn't there a power scenario, well, why there was no force scenario, so we understand what from what side, from the side of the russians, why didn't they do what they did, for example, against georgia, so we understand? that they saw a prospect in the fact that it was possible to negotiate with those pro-communist or neo-communist elites, well, because there was the master kuchma , it was easier to negotiate with him, were they not ready to fight with such a large system, well, one thing is like georgia, it is smaller there, one thing is to support civil wars in central asia, and

the second one is moldova with transnistria, yes, and the second thing is the force open scenario that they... went to in 2014, and why do you think that they did not prepare, they did prepare, in georgia, they didn't they fought with georgia, they fought for control over abkhazia, south ossetia, in ukraine they needed crimea and the black sea fleet, and they were preparing, the election of mishkov was a preparation for a force scenario, so mishkov appointed yevhen saburov, a citizen of russia, as the prime minister of crimea , mishkov appointed viktor minyan, a citizen of russia, a person connected with the special services and obviously imprisoned . not a power scenario by the head of the administration of the president of crimea. i have known viktor vinin since 1988. he was a people's deputy of the ussr from the komsomol. he had nothing to do with ukraine and crimea. therefore, when i saw him in the administration of the president of crimea, i immediately understood what was going on. that is, they were preparing this scenario of

secession of crimea. what happened in 2000 14 14, back in 1990. the second, but did not go for it, because they decided that they were getting ukraine, they acted in parallel, with on the one hand, they were preparing the secession of crimea, on the other hand, they were preparing the overthrow of leonid kravchuk. kravchuk went to early presidential and parliamentary elections. if he had won the presidential elections, i think that crimea would have seceded after these elections. but he lost the election. i saw with my own eyes a scene that was quite telling for me. on the day when it became known that kravchuk lost the presidential election of ukraine. i was at the reception that the then french ambassador in kyiv gave in a ukrainian house. and that's not enough to be an acceptance that, from the point of view

of kryvchuk's team, celebrated his re-election for a second term. and it turned out that it was. acceptance of kravchuk's defeat, and the entourage of the new ukrainian president, leonid kuchna, i.e. dmytro tabachnyk and some of his cronies, came to this acceptance for the first time in an official capacity. everyone understood that dmytro tabachnyk becomes almost the second man of ukraine in this situation. but, strangely enough, viktor minin, the head of president mishkov's administration, was at this reception. so viktor minin communicated with dmytro tabachnyk, as a... subordinate, since i knew both of them, ugh, and viktor minyan was generally, let's say, a good friend of mine at the time, i was the first journalist who even interviewed him as a people's deputy of the soviet union, such things do not get stuck, as you understand, when you are a young person, tominin did not hide from me that he absolutely, that is , someone there, conditionally speaking, i say conditionally, well

, but someone there minin was already ready to cut tasks in the right in the hands of someone... the certificate of the president of ukraine, minin was the main one there the figure of netabachnik, and i will also remind you of the people who were in kuchma's headquarters at that time, this is konstantin zatulin, yes, the head of the institute of cis countries, a people's deputy of the russian federation, this is vyacheslav yegrunov, also a supporter of such an imperial democratic russia, a people's deputy of the russian federation. kuchma's biggest ally among russian politicians, in addition to chornomiroval of the russian union of entrepreneurs and industrialists, arkady volsky is also a person connected to the special services, the former commandant of nagorno- karabakh, and these people are quite serious about this treated, they treated the idea of ​​restoring

the joint industrial complex of ukraine and russia, it was the idea of ​​kuchma and volsky, and when i wrote... i wrote an article in both moscow and kyiv that it is impossible because the ties are broken, because the market economy, because this simply cannot happen, then kuchma and volskyi made statements in which they said that i am an agent of someone, a ukrainian nationalist, and that i am undermining the stability and friendship of the two peoples, i am i remember well, it was a joint conference dedicated to my humble person, here is the key issue, i.e. they have their appointed people to the highest political office, who had a direct influence on the first persons... of the state, and this applies not only to ukraine, but to our environment, that is, we are also talking about belarus, and we are talking after all, about russia, lukashenko on the day that kuchma also won the elections, that's the key story, why they didn't... start certain preparatory processes that would end, for example, with the introduction of russian occupiers, for example, into certain populated areas, or crimea, or

the deployment of these or other force things, well , look, they sincerely believed that they and kuchma would agree on everything, and that's why they started preparing this big agreement. kuchma, when he entered the office of the president of ukraine, he was and he is, he is a very intelligent person, i would say dangerous. i would never wish anyone to be leonid kuchma's enemy, from the point of view of his reaction to the fact that he, how he treats his enemies in general, but he is very intelligent, shrewd, shrewd, well, after all, he is the director of a huge defense plant , he has manners, she there is still, how to say, pretending that he is a simpleton, ugh, but he has never been one in his life, he just played this favorite, successfully or unsuccessfully, at different periods of his life. the ukrainian political way of fooling around fooling around, and everyone thought very often that it was pure coin. i remember when leonid kuchma first came to this hotel

of the former central committee of the cpsu in moscow, as the prime minister of ukraine. and he comes and there is a group of journalists who run to him with microphones, and then leni danilovich looks at them and says: listen, where are you here toilet, says leni danilovich. and everyone tells me, oh, you have such a prime minister, and i'm already with them. talked, i know he's not that kind of prime minister, i just understand that he didn't want to answer any questions, and he decided to show them that he's like, well , i'm like that, he's not like that, it's a huge the problem of all people who communicated with kuchma is to think that he is like that, he is not like that, and this, by the way, is the problem of tabachnyk, to think that he is like that, but then, in addition to tabachnyk, there was also medvedchuk, yes, but still kuchma succeeded somehow slip out of full control, but i don’t know if he wanted to appoint...

players from the point of view of preventing the seizure of crimea, then horbul and marchuk, of course , he began to create balances, tabachnik, razumkov, horbulin, tabachnik from these balances in the end the rest flew out, he simply kicked out the whole moscow hop company of all these hidden people, they got nothing, and in the end, in a few years, he had such a yeltsin regime, and i think that ... everything would have worked that way, so that this regime, it was based on his personal relationship with yeltsin and chornomyrdin, but in 1999 there was a disaster, ugh, chornomyrdin

lost power, his best friend, yeltsin left politics at the end of 1999, and kuchma had to work with putin for the last four years, and putin hated him. hate, because for him kuchma was the embodiment of this yeltsenism. he saw that kuchma was building ukraine absolutely for himself, not for him, and for putin, ukraine was a mistake that kuchma had built such a system in which you can't even get into crimea, because there is a vertical, huh, but in fact, the authoritarian vertical, he tried to break it, you remember, yes, yes, and putin, as soon as he became president, he began to act against kuchma. by means of their favorite special operations, this is chain mail, this is the promotion of all these things that moscow took advantage of

after the melnichenko films, and they really began to impose medvedchuk on him, as a person who can be an intermediary between him and kermel, because he himself is not it can mean with them, well, they wanted to appoint the same medvedchuk as kuchma's successor, and... and medvedchuk too, and kuchma understood this, kuchma felt this, and he did, well, he tried to nullify medvedchuk's influence on himself, i think that he tried to use medvedchuk and medvedchuk's ambitions in the very model of a parliamentary-presidential republic, the idea was very simple: if vitsya becomes my heir and i there will be nothing to catch and you will have nothing to catch, and by the way , this is what happened when president yanukovych. became president in the 10th year, which was due to the influence of medvedchuk, nothing, that is why we need a parliamentary-presidential republic, we there we will share the influence, even if he becomes president, we will isolate him, let's say, i sneeze,

some of my people... she will be the prime minister, you will be, uh, the speaker of the parliament, he will be the queen of donetsk there, here in why there was an idea, and medvedchuk tried to explain this idea to vladimir putin and dmitry medvedev in the fourth year of 2000, and they sent him, he spoke on his own behalf, on behalf of kuchma, they agreed with kuchma on this, it was a joint approach, but putin and the medvedevs were told that they don't... need any parliamentary presidential republic, that yanukovych should simply become kuchma's heir, because they knew that yanukovych was a much more controlled figure for them, and then a group of deputies did not vote for the project of a parliamentary-presidential republic, a group of deputies from yanukovych, our ukraine yuvchenko supported this project, but there were several people there, if you look at all these surnames, you can see that most of them are now in the city

of heroes of moscow, andriy derkach. he voted against, being a representative of this whole the elites, i.e. putin, medvedev and yanukovych failed kuchma's idea of ​​a parliamentary presidential republic and we returned to it only as a result of the first maidan, so kuchma in this regard was always in such a situation of fighting putin for his own. preservation, and he tried to use his connections with the yeltsin family, he believed that they had some influence and would help him, maybe you remember that when the yeltsin center was opened in yekaterinburg, putin, medvedev and kuchma were there , kuchma was invited as precisely as a friend of yeltsin's family, already after yeltsin's death, but their influence decreased, and even more so they could not actually do anything when it came to foreign policy, and it

was already... foreign policy after crimea, i met when lonin danylovych, i asked him if he talked to putin after the annexation of crimea, he just got mad, he said that he had never talked to him in his life after that, that it was for him, as for the president of ukraine, because he is the president of ukraine, this is a personal insult, that happened, he will never talk to these people in his life. well, personally, that is , it became clear to him that these personal contacts, which they had, they were severed, he remembered this episode, we somehow saw each other three times, leonid kravchuk, leonid kuchma and i, at one of the diplomatic receptions, and we leonid kravchuk was just talked about, kuchma was already the head of the delegation at the negotiations in minsk, and he behaved quite harshly. at

that moment kravchuk and i were discussing, which is somehow strange, we have always known him and in general it seemed that this is a person who is exclusively on his own, somehow focused and very soviet, he behaves like that with russians, that is just like that, like a ukrainian nationalist, and all his articles are recent as a ukrainian nationalist, etc., and here we are leonid kuchma came up, asked what we were talking about so cheerfully, i was honest with him, i was always honest with them. they are the presidents of ukraine after all, said that we are talking about him, that we are surprised that he has a state instinct, and here leonid kuchma says: i am surprised that you both needed 20 years to understand it. and this, by the way, is an aphorism, which again speaks about the mental abilities of this person. and look, that is, it is paradoxical, that is, i do not know whether it is the influence of the sacrum, whether it is the sacrum of power, whether it is a sense of responsibility, or god forbid, well, but maybe the finger of god, we do not know how this whole

mechanism works, well, but. .. a communist party figure becomes a ukrainian statesman, we are talking about kravchuk, the soviet communist director, who was surrounded from all sides by various medvedchuks, tobacconists and so on, he becomes a ukrainian nationalist and a kind of mini-atataturk, and so on, further down the list, and we now see the implementation of the concept of army, language, faith, well, literally . and at one time, i remember very well our conversation with you, when volodymyr zelenskyi won the election, you said that he had no other way, if he wanted to be the president of ukraine, he would be a ukrainian nationalist, and the army, language, and faith would lie in him on the table, i remember our time and before the election, i talked about this and many people reproached me, how could you say such a thing, that who would was not elected ukrainian president, he will follow this path, well, that's why you...