Ever since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022, the former comedian and current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been seen in the West as a symbol of resistance to the out-sized aggression of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Yet Ukrainians themselves are now beginning to show signs of discontent with Zelenskyy, whose elected mandate expired more than a year ago.
Taking to the streets of Ukraine’s capital city Kyiv this week, ordinary citizens are speaking out against what they see as worrying signs of democratic backsliding by a government whose major claim to legitimacy and global support has been as an apparent contrast to Russian autocracy.
“Cancel 12414 immediately!” reads a sign held by Martina Boguslavets on a central Kyiv street on Thursday, referring to a recent law Zelenskyy’s party “Servant of the People” rammed through the Verkhovna Rada, or parliament, this week allowing it to seize control of the independent anti-corruption commission NABU.
It’s not just Kyiv – in the southern port city of Odesa, eastern/central city Dnipropetrovsk, and western city of Lviv, protestors including active duty soldiers are speaking out against against a character of government for which they haven’t been fighting, they say.
“This is the logical culmination of tightening the screws at home. The new narrative is simple: You’re either with Zelenskyy or you’re a Russian agent,” a former minister in Zelenskyy’s government told POLITICO-Europe, speaking on the basis of anonymity out of concern for his own safety.
Earlier this week, Ukraine’s state security service, or SBU, raided the offices of NABU, the anti-corruption agency, seizing files and computers. Popular conjecture suggests this is because NABU had collected incriminating evidence of Zelenskyy’s government, which he re-shuffled last week, naming a new prime minister and rep-assigning her predecessor to head the defense ministry.
Throughout Ukraine’s three decades of independence, significant power has been concentrated in the hand of the presidency, which appoints governors throughout the country’s regions and has the power to dissolve parliament and call new elections.
Historically, the president’s chief-of-staff has been a powerful figure, though usually remaining behind the curtains of the executive’s headquarters on Bankova street. Zelenskyy’s chief-of-staff, Andrey Yermak, has bucked that trend, opting for a more conspicuous profile.
On his social media accounts, Yermak has increasingly been portraying himself in imagery that suggests it is he who is in fact running the country which, in a practical sense, may be the case, many are now saying.
On Thursday, the Financial Times published a full-length feature on Yermak essentially concluding that the polarizing and self-aggrandizing aide is now as powerful as Zelenskyy himself, if not more so.
Corruption in Ukraine has been a persistent issue. The American government played a major role in urging Zelenskyy’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, to set up the NABU, which has now effectively been neutered.
Former U.S. president and then vice-president Joe Biden famously flew to Kyiv in 2016 and demanded that country’s prosecutor general who was investigating the company on whose board his son Hunter sat be fired in an awkward linkage of corruption between the countries.
Biden even bragged about his insistence that prosector general Victor Shokin be fired or he’d withhold more than $1 billion in U.S. assistance. Over the course of his later term as U.S. president – and in response to Russia’s invasion – American support to Ukraine swelled to well over $130 billion. How these funds have been spent remains somewhat opaque.
Poroshenko, in turn, was swept into power after massive street protests in the so-called “Revolution of Peoples’ Dignity” from 2013-14, which was targeting his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, who back-tracked on Ukraine’s European Union accession deal, signing a quicker cash alternative with Moscow.
Zelenskyy’s government has been expanding its reach into other areas of Ukrainian life as well. Last year, it rammed through parliament legislation effectively banning the millennium-old Ukrainian Orthodox Church in a move that forced millions of parishioners to join the state-sponsored Orthodox Church of Ukrainian. The long-standing historical sect had, Zelenskyy’s government insisted, been infiltrated with Russian agents.
Independent media has also been increasingly under attack in the country as the war grinds into through fourth year. According to the international press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontiers, the status of the free press has become grim as authorities directly or indirectly control most media outlets. Hundreds of attacks on reporters have been documented last year alone.
Elected in 2018 as a popular reaction to public discontent with perceptions about Poroshenko’s corruption, the actor best known for playing a Mr. Smith-like president in a television comedy series has a five year term in office that expired last year. Because of the war, he instituted martial law and delayed new elections. But this week has shown that public patience with his administration is wearing thin.
Meanwhile, the American press has been relatively silent when it comes to questioning Zelenskyy’s leadership. The flare-up in the Oval Office when he visited Washington in late February this year was the first instance of a Western leader not treating the Ukrainian president like a proverbial sacred cow. While that led to a brief strengthening of his public support back at home, now that may be softening.
In 2004 and 2014, Ukrainian public protests in the streets of Kyiv have led to changes of political power. To the extent these appear to happen every ten years, Ukraine current president – adored as a trendy totem abroad – may be soon overdue for a wake-up call back at home.
