Zelensky’s War (Part II)

Up until the period of Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” Zelensky was a fairly unremarkable, if rather poor politician. Apart from his dramatic election win on the back of his TV show and a brief honeymoon period, he faced deadlock, a party that wouldn’t obey him, and a domestic agenda that went nowhere. The only successes he could count, however, were his political witch hunts under the pretext of national security. But that, too, ran into problems when he took on the big fish oligarchs with links to nationalist militias. Much easier to get tar and feather Medvedchuk as a traitor in public than Poroshenko.

However, this period of nationalist witch hunting set the tone for Zelensky’s administration and became his go-to tactic. Even as his popularity waned leading up to the SMO, he was still attempting to imprison Poroshenko for treason so as to remove him from electoral contention. It just looked unlikely to succeed because he did not have the full command of the state and public opinion to make it happen.

Thus, it is my contention that Zelensky’s own interests have to be considered in the leadup to this war. Without the Russian intervention, his wild accusations of treason were wearing thin and unconvincing to the public. He was staring at an election loss to Poroshenko, who would have had no mercy on him. So when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz came to Ukraine in February with a peace proposal for the neutrality of Ukraine, in a bit of last ditch diplomacy, Zelensky told him to **** off, that he wasn’t doing any deals. The unspoken subtext – he needed this war.

All of a sudden, with the Russian intervention, he found himself in the role of a wartime president, and he relished in his emergency powers, the way that he could ban his opposition completely and have people imprisoned and killed without too many questions. Many of his measures starting from the very first days in the war were designed to heighten the level of hysteria and paranoia, for instance the mass distribution of weapons and encouraging private citizens to hunt for spies and saboteurs. All of a sudden, treason accusations had a gravity like never before. Ukrainian society, which had been prepared for years through nationalist ideologization, took to this easily, and Zelensky’s approval ratings soared.

It is true that most leaders in wartime can count on a certain increase in public approval, but in the case of Zelensky, the wartime bump was more than dramatic. He went from a deeply unpopular figure, widely regarded as an incompetent buffoon, to the sole figure in Ukrainian politics, with the dictatorial powers to match. That’s a night and day reversal, but this extraordinary reversal perhaps is the result of the climate of hysteria finally validating Zelensky calling everyone a traitor. Because now the people too saw Russian demons behind every rock and shadow – and were now given weapons and a license to kill.

The collapse of the first cycle of talks between Ukraine and Russia happened precisely because of Zelensky’s sabotage. First by assassinating one of his own negotiators – under, naturally, grounds of treason – and then by introducing all these impossible conditions such as the return of Crimea, referendums to be held in Donbass AFTER the withdraw of Russian forces to pre-2014 borders, and the like. All these terms to make any treaty with Russia a non-starter. He never seriously negotiated because for Zelensky, the biggest threat to himself would be the end of the conflict, when he would have to surrender his emergency powers that had solved so many problems for him.

Author Sneska