The Long War #50

Zelensky the dictator & Talking about Crimea

Hello everyone, yet another departure from the newsletter’s usual format, as I wanted to highlight and comment (in length) just two stories I’ve come across recently that touch on important and very current issues. One is about the threat of an authoritarian slide in Ukraine. The other is a call to “rethink” Crimea, 11 years after the Russian annexation, and as Washington pressures Ukraine to officially accept and recognize the 2014 land grab.

Democracy under threat

First up is a widely commented piece from The Economist published last week with an eye-catching headline: “Power is being monopolised in Ukraine”.

Quick recap of the story’s thesis: in Ukraine, the three-year-long war has led to political power being increasingly concentrated into the hands of Volodymyr Zelensky and his closest advisors. Criticism of the president has become near impossible; Zelensky has openly targeted his main opponent, president Petro Poroshenko, freezing his assets and branding him a “threat to national security”; the threat of military mobilization is being used to silence civil society activists; A handful of people close to Zelensky now concentrate most powers, and anyone deemed too independent is fired; Critical media is also seen as a threat. The author concludes by describing these events as a “move towards authoritarian rule”, raising the specter of a Zelensky dictatorship.

I have a couple of problems with this story.

The first problem is that almost all of the (real) issues the story looks at feel a lot more like standard Ukrainian politics rather than a new trend fueled by the war. A powerful head of the president’s office, harassment of civil society activists, loyalty being favored over competence in ministerial appointments… none of this is good, quite obviously, but all of this was already happening long before the Russian invasion. Even Petro Poroshenko’s troubles, which are indeed hard to see as anything other than politically motivated, are nothing new: I’ve been in Ukraine long enough to remember seeing Poroshenko address supporters immediately after leaving the Pechersk district court.

It was June 2020, Poroshenko was facing a possible pre-trial arrest as a suspect in a criminal case that most Western embassies saw as politically motivated, and the former president was hyping up the crowd, saying he was the target of political repression and warning of an authoritarian Zelensky (I still have a picture of one of his supporter raising a sign with the silhouette of Poroshenko facing the combined silhouettes of Zelensky and Putin—it was a different time). It’s also worth mentioning that this kind of pressure has been almost exclusively targeted at Poroshenko, and is likely explained at least in good part by the personal enmity between Zelensky and Poroshenko.

Rescue teams continue search operations hours after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv on April 24 // Picture: Fabrice Deprez

Again, none of this is innocuous, but none of this is new. At the same time, the piece does not focus on what is actually new: the hollowing out of institutions caused by the wartime power vertical. Andriy Yermak is powerful and influential, sure—Kuchma’s head of the presidential administration Dimitry Tabachnyk was so powerful and influential the term “Dimakratiya” (a pun on “democracy” and “Dima”, the diminutive for Dimitry) was coined to describe Ukrainian politics at his time. The difference is that a lot of the alternative centers of powers that existed at the time have been severely weakened, with Zelensky demanding a more streamlined chain of decision that often circumvent traditional institutions (most obvious example of this is when it comes to foreign policy, where Yermak has sidelined the ministry of foreign affairs as much as possible). The Economist’s story does point out that “independent” ministers have long been sent packing—people with their own fiefdoms, resources or political bases who, in pre-war Ukraine, would have been able to balance out or even challenge the presidential influence. The process arguably started under Zelensky before the invasion, but the war definitely sustained it beyond what would have been possible otherwise.

But, incredibly, the piece barely mentions the parliament. The Rada’s authority, influence and competence have utterly nosedived in the past three years, something increasingly worrying as there are many elements of the ongoing peace negotiations that may require the parliament’s involvement. This is maybe the biggest impact the war has had on Ukraine’s political process, as MPs who entered the political scene with little experience in 2019 are now utterly exhausted and, for many of them, unable or unwilling to do their job. The parliament has very little independence, despite Zelensky’s majority being more shaky than ever.

The conclusion of the story is where the biggest problem lies. Ukraine, it argues, is “mov[ing] towards more authoritarian rule” as a consequence of “Volodymyr Zelensky’s increasing monopoly of power”. But Ukraine still has an influential civil society (that, I can attest, has zero qualms criticising Zelensky) and a broader society that still largely supports democratic institutions. There also remains a whole bunch of powerful political and business players who would be happy to present a united front against the threat of an authoritarian Zelensky.

This doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to worry about when it comes to Ukraine’s democracy. There is, frankly, a lot to worry about, a lot more than is discussed here or in the Economist piece. But I can’t help but think that the piece misses the point of the real threat to Ukraine’s democratic system, particularly in a post-war scenario: not dictatorship, but turmoil. Not an authoritarian Zelensky, but a dysfunctional state unable to deal with the avalanche of new issues that would inevitably follow a cessation of hostilities.

The Crimean mirage

The second piece I wanted to highlight is a Substack post by Ukrainian political analyst Anton Shekhovtsov: “Rethinking Crimea”. As Trump repeats demands that Ukraine accept the de jure recognition of the Russian annexation of Crimea, Anton Shekhovtsov takes a step back and asks: what does Crimea mean for Ukraine?

Rethinking Crimea

When I first started working in Ukraine, around 2016-17, I couldn’t help but puzzle over the way society had been reacting to the annexation of Crimea. There was, I felt at the time, a distinct absence of any real discussion and self-reflection about the long-term trends that ultimately led to Moscow’s annexation of the peninsula.

This wasn't about accepting the 2014 Russian 'referendum' as anything other than a farcical imitation of democracy. But even this did not answer the question: how was Russia able to seize Crimea so easily? There was, it seemed to me at the time, a palpable unwillingness to grapple with that question, and it was often swept away with explanations that weren’t wrong per se, but failed to address the deeper issues. People mentioned the fragility of the Ukrainian state at the time of the annexation, or how Washington had urged Kyiv not to fight back for fear of escalation.

This didn’t explain how, after nearly a quarter-century of Ukrainian rule, Russia could take control of the region with such limited local resistance. At the time of the annexation (things were different a year before, and they would be a year after), a significant part of the Crimean population either supported or was indifferent to the idea of joining Russia, in an apparent testament to the failure—or the absence—of a nation building project.

The obvious answer to why this wasn’t addressed more is that it was an uncomfortable discussion, one that required recognizing that more than a tiny minority of people supported Russia in Crimea, and one that involved looking critically at what Ukraine did and did not do in the two decades before the Russian annexation.

Maybe this was made even more difficult by the bitter irony that the annexation of Crimea is when, in Ukraine, the peninsula truly stepped out of the shadows as a distinctly Ukrainian place. Crimean Tatars went from being largely ignored to being celebrated, Crimeans who had fled the Russian occupation shared their experience about life in a region that was, until then, seen by most Ukrainians as a vacation destination first and foremost. Ukraine discovered Crimea after it had already lost it.

What makes Anton Shekhovtsov’s piece so valuable then is that it does tackle all these thorny issues in a succinct (you could probably write several books on this one topic) and honest manner. Shekhovtsov lays down the post-Soviet history of a Crimean peninsula left in its own separate dimension, largely ignored by both Ukrainian national-democrats and pro-Russian forces.

Ukrainian pro-Russian political forces viewed Crimea merely as a reservoir of “easy votes” – citizens in Crimea and Sevastopol consistently supported them in all types of elections. […] For their part, Ukrainian national-democrats – who envisioned Ukraine as a largely ethnoculturally homogeneous state – simply did not know what to do with 1.5 million ethnic Russians and hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Crimea and Sevastopol. Crimea was not part of their mental map of Ukraine – if such a map even existed.

Shekhovtsov also looks at the way the Crimean issue has been handled by the post-2014 Ukrainian State and the place of Crimea—the actual place, with its people, not just the geographical entity—within the current Ukrainian national project.

However, none of Kyiv’s efforts aimed at de-occupying Crimea has ever addressed the most obvious and fundamental challenge: even if we momentarily set aside the fact that Crimea is controlled by Russia – and that Russia is unlikely to ever relinquish the peninsula – ethnic Russians remain the majority in both Crimea and Sevastopol. How does this reality fit into the political imagination of Ukrainian national-democrats? Where exactly does Crimea belong within their vision of the Ukrainian national project?

It’s an important discussion just in the context of Crimea, but I’d argue it’s one that goes way beyond the annexed peninsula. It’s really about what Ukraine should be, and what it wants to be.