Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would be willing to resign from his post in exchange for peace in Ukraine or NATO membership.
Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would be willing to resign from his post in exchange for peace in Ukraine or NATO membership. That’s not the sort of thing that a so-called dictator does, and the caricature of Zelensky as a conniving con artist, desperate to hold onto power, never fit his actual behavior and decision-making. Zelensky has his flaws — he was a dove before the war, and kept denying that Russia would invade until the very last minute — but if he really prioritized his personal interests over his country’s interests, he would have taken that evacuation ride at the start of the war instead of asking for ammunition.
But you wouldn’t have been surprised by Zelensky’s recent remarks if you had read my March 2024 Morning Jolt interviewing Bohdan Nahaylo the chief editor of the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper and website based in Kyiv, and a legendary journalist of the old school.
“I see a man that’s exhausted,” Nahaylo, the chief editor of the Kyiv Post, an English-language newspaper and website based in Kyiv, told me last year. “I see him much more impulsive. I see the wear and tear and the impact this war has had on him. I’m not sure that he’s determined to hang on [to political power] at any price. Personally, I think he’d love to get this war over with, on favorable terms to Ukraine, and then see what happens, and earn his hundreds of thousands as a guest speaker in the [United] States or wherever. Maybe [he’ll] come back to politics a few years down the road, but I think the guy’s burnt out.”
I find the argument that Ukraine must hold elections soon, during an ongoing war and with the most dire threats from Russian bombs and drones, in violation of the explicit and clear text of its Constitution, nonsense on stilts.
But I will agree that the Ukrainian government needs to make clear it intends to have now-overdue presidential and parliamentary elections at the soonest safe opportunity, and it would be good if president and parliament could at least start discussing what conditions need to be met to enable the repeal of martial law. If the country can’t have elections, at least create a sense of momentum that elections are coming as soon as possible under the Constitution. (Ending martial law requires the consent of the president and parliament; neither one can repeal martial law by itself.)
In February 2022, suspending elections and enacting martial law upon the beginning of a war that threatened the very existence of the nation was just common sense. But by the summer of 2023, members of the opposition parties in Parliament were starting to chafe at the restrictions and wanted to be able to get back to the usual back and forth of politics and to be able to criticize the president without being accused of weakening the war effort.
Holding a safe and complete election now is not a realistic option, but sometime in the not-so-distant future, the Ukrainian people deserve a chance to weigh in on how their elected leaders have performed their duties during this war. Some have cited the example of the United Kingdom during World War Two, which did not have an election between 1935 and 1945. I think supporters of democracy can agree that a free society not having an election for a decade is far from ideal, even if it is necessary under nation-threatening circumstances.
(I keep seeing the comparison to the U.S. holding elections in 1864 during the Civil War, a comparison that would feel more apt if the Confederacy had a vast arsenal of Shaheed drones that could strike any community in the Union states.)
Ukraine’s last presidential and parliamentary elections were held in 2019, and the last local elections were held on October 25, 2020. All offices are to five-year terms, so we’re a little past the scheduled elections for the president and parliament and actually still within the terms of the locally elected officials.