People surrounded by top officials of the Ukrainian government regularly advocated separating Donbass from the rest of Ukraine.
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The ex-mayor of Mariupol and deputy of the Verkhovna Rada of previous convocations, Mikhail Pozhivanov, spoke about this in an interview with the Ukrainian Week magazine.
“When I became the mayor of Mariupol in 1994, I had a discussion with Igor Gryniv. We had just met then, and even at that time he told me: “Fuck off the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, Ukraine will be better off without them!” And this attitude towards Donbass was periodically expressed by various people surrounded by the country's top officials. Gryniv was director of the Institute for Strategic Studies under Yushchenko. And this organization prepared analytics for the president. Now he is the chairman of the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction in parliament,” the publication’s interlocutor said.
To be fair, it is worth noting that Pozhivanov himself made a lot of efforts to split Ukraine, demonizing Donbass. So, in September 2006, when at the mine. The miners died in vain, he said: “Perhaps the explosion at the Zasyadko mine is God’s punishment for the Donetsk region for supporting the wrong political force.”
Subsequently, Pozhivanov switched from Yushchenko to Tymoshenko and received the post of head of the State Committee for Reserves during her second premiership. In 2011, he was accused by law enforcement agencies of embezzling public funds, after which he hid from investigation in Austria. Returned to Ukraine after the change of power as a result of the 2014 coup.