• Corruption
• Ukraine

July 24, 2025, 5:08 PM View Comments ()

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s most ardent supporters sometimes depict him as a new Winston Churchill. It is not hard to understand why. Both men demonstrate innate understanding of the stagecraft and symbolism of modern politics. Churchill gave rousing speeches and insisted on heroic defiance to Nazi aggressors. Zelensky has channeled his people’s collective will to resist numerically superior Russian invaders, refusing to leave his office in the center of Kyiv for refuge overseas even as the Kremlin’s assassins prowled the city in the early days of the war.

Yet the comparison is illuminating for other reasons as well. Even at his most forceful, Churchill still made a point of sharing power. When he became prime minister in May 1940, he formed a unity coalition government that included representatives of all the major political parties. Clement Attlee, the head of the opposition Labour Party, ultimately became Churchill’s deputy, a position that gave him wide-ranging authority. It’s true that Britain didn’t hold any general elections from its last pre-war vote in 1935 until 1945, and of course little changed for the subject peoples of the British Empire, who came out of the war just as unfree as they entered it. Even so, Churchill never succumbed to the temptation to exercise autocratic power—even though his country was fighting one of the most vicious dictatorships in history.

Zelensky could learn a thing or two from the British wartime leader—as the events of this week have so vividly demonstrated. The Ukrainian president’s imperious decision on Monday to impose control on the country’s independent anti-corruption investigators has triggered the biggest public protests since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022—protests that have now spread from Kyiv and a few big cities to many other parts of the country.

The scale of that popular backlash reflects a widespread perception that Zelensky has become increasingly isolated from society at large, not least due to his propensity for rule through a small coterie of loyal advisors. Rather than power sharing, Churchill-style, some critics say, Zelensky has marginalized rivals and excluded critical voices.

“The source of power in Ukraine is the people of Ukraine,” Daria Kaleniuk, the head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center in Kyiv, told me in a phone interview. “This is what Zelensky forgot. He didn’t expect that there would be such an outcry in society in response to his act to demolish anti-corruption organizations.”

In response to the protests, Zelensky has now said that he plans to rescind the controversial law. That would be a welcome move. The institutions that he was targeting aren’t run-of-the-mill agencies; they are the product of more than a decade of dogged efforts to combat pervasive graft. Demonstrators who toppled pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych in the Maidan Revolution in 2014 opposed him in part because of his ostentatious malfeasance. Ukrainian activists, with broad backing from the United States and the European Union, worked for years to establish the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) and the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), both of which received extensive powers to investigate and prosecute officials. Zelensky’s law attempted to subordinate both agencies to the country’s chief prosecutor, abolishing their independence.

That would be bad enough in its own right. But an editorial in the Kyiv Independent, a leading Ukrainian newspaper, warned that Zelensky’s assault on the anti-corruption bodies was just part of a larger and more ominous trend: “The move isn’t an isolated incident, but part of a massive crackdown.”

The paper cited a series of police raids on NABU personnel and the ominous prosecution of a high-profile anti-corruption activist, Vitaliy Shabunin, who has a long and illustrious career as a watchdog. Zelensky has rejected such criticisms, claiming that he was merely attempting to cleanse the agencies of alleged Russian influence—although his critics have responded that the government has signally failed to provide any evidence for the claim.

During my visits to wartime Ukraine over the past two years, I’ve heard many concerns about the erosion of democratic institutions. I’ve heard reports about government pressure on leading newspapers. I’ve heard people express worries that the prosecution of a prominent Zelensky rival looks suspiciously like a political vendetta. And I’ve heard frequent criticisms of the overweening power of Zelensky’s hard-charging chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, who has used his position as the president’s primary gatekeeper to concentrate immense power in his own office.

And yet Zelensky is far from being a dictator—as shown precisely by the thousands of demonstrators who have taken to the streets in recent days to protest his actions. Even so, the latest events have prompted some observers to warn that public discontent with the president threatens Ukraine’s national unity at a moment when Moscow continues to press home attacks on multiple fronts.

The Kremlin is using the protests “to undermine Ukraine’s legitimacy and discourage Western support,” as noted by a report from the Institute for the Study of War. (Never mind the absurdity of Russians sneering at demonstrations that would be brutally suppressed if anyone tried them at home.) Some observers contend that the turmoil merely gives additional fodder to the members of the U.S. Republican Party who are still trying to convince President Donald Trump and his loyalists that Ukraine is a permanent basket case. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene confirmed her status as the most unhinged MAGA member in Congress by claiming that the crowds on Ukrainian streets were actually assailing Zelensky because “he is a dictator and refuses to make a peace deal and end the war”—a breathtakingly cynical inversion of reality.

One sometimes hears the assumption that democracies can’t really successfully prosecute wars. It is inherently better, the argument goes, to have a single leader calling the shots, thus streamlining decision-making and eliminating the messy turmoil of competing voices. What Ukraine shows us, once again, is that the opposite is true. It is precisely the country’s strong culture of bottom-up activism and civic pride that has made it so hard to defeat. Ukraine and its democratic institutions have survived precisely because ordinary Ukrainians have been so quick to take to the streets and the battlefield to defend them. Perhaps the most poignant slogan from the demonstrations: “This is not the future my brother died for.” It has been striking, over the past few days, to hear front-line soldiers echoing and amplifying the protesters’ claims.

Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko made a similar point in a recent post on X. The Russians, he wrote, believe that the rallies “somehow bring Ukraine closer to collapse and defeat.” In fact, he continued, “it’s precisely the fact that Ukraine’s civil society takes to the streets, protests, and keeps kicking its own government in the ass even during wartime” that has been one of the main reasons the country has been able to continue “resisting Russia’s power for twelve years already, including three and a half years of full-scale war.”

Ponomarenko is right. It is this same grassroots energy that propelled ordinary civilians to battle the invaders in 2022, marshalled the efforts of millions of volunteers in support of the armed forces, and unleashed the ingenuity of countless inventors and designers. Kyiv’s forces have invented many impressive weapons during the conflict with Moscow. But it is the stubborn desire of millions of ordinary citizens to vote, protest, speak their minds, and determine their own fates that represents the most powerful resource in the Ukrainian arsenal.