President Yuschenko’s chief of staff, Victor Baloha, has resigned, accusing his former boss of cronyism and of betraying promises made during the 2004 Orange Revolution. Myron Wasylyk, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, The PBN Company Kyiv, analyzes Baloha’s performance

Victor Baloha’s tenure as head of the Presidential Secretariat, akin to presidential chief of staff, has been filled with very important political victories for President Victor Yuschenko, as well as a number of failures.

Baloha’s parting words show him as a spiteful and disloyal lieutenant whose limited intellectual boundaries became ultimately inconsistent with the strategic vision of his former boss.

But Baloha did help Yuschenko in some ways as chief of staff.

Immediately after his summer 2006 appointment, Baloha moved quickly to bring relevance and order back to a Secretariat left disorganized by two Yuschenko allies not known for their political astuteness or management skills – Oleksandr Zinchenko and Oleh Rybachuk.

Then Victor Yanukovych had just won the plurality in regularly scheduled parliamentary elections and put together a coalition with Socialist MPs, who betrayed Orange Revolution allies in exchange for seating Oleksandr Moroz as Verkhovna Rada’s speaker. A series of nationally televised roundtable sessions were held and a political agreement on pursuing a pro-Western policy was signed by Yanukovych and all other political players except Yulia Timoshenko.  This paved the way for Yuschenko to fulfill his constitutional obligation of submitting Yanukovych’s nomination for the premiership.

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