by Gordon Hahn at Russian & Eurasian Politics
Introduction
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zeleneksiy appears to be at the end of the line politically and perhaps biologically. Portraying himself as a fighter for peace, anti-corruption, and full democratization when he ran for and won the presidency in 2019, he proceeded to lead the country into war, further corruption, and de-republicanization (authoritarianization). On both a personal and global level this is high tragedy. A superb comedian and actor stars in a television fictional series as the president of Ukraine, rises in popularity, wins the country’s presidency on a peace platform, and leads the country into a catastrophic, easily avoidable war that threatens the survival of his country and himself. The unreality of Ukraine refracts in our century of simulacra and disinformation through this icon moved from the television screen to real life politics, and the tragedy of it all is sold as a heroic triumph on the road to universal democracy, peace, and brotherhood. In the real world, however, there is a rub. The country is historically divided along every conceivable line (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, ideological, economic, and social), an almost accidental state cobbled together by communists but claimed by hapless republicans and determined ultra-nationalists. Thus, Zelenskiy becomes president of a fundamentally divided country further riven by schism as a result of two ‘revolutions’ – really revolts – and a civil war compounded by foreign (Russian) intervention.
Zelenskiy’s emergence and victory are as surreal as the Maidan regime of which he assumed leadership. Born in a neofascist false flag terrorist snipers’ massacre on 20 February 2014, the West and the champion of global republicanism, the United States, hailed the bloody terrorist attack as a peaceful, democratic revolution. To be sure, there were ‘democrats’ (i.e., republicans; few democrats exist anywhere) and ‘grandmothers and children’ on the Maidan, as one American fomenter of war put it, but they were too far and few among the mass of demonstrators on the Maidan to preclude the neofascists and their false flag snipers’ operation. The Maidan in fact was led and easily infiltrated by a phalanx of corruptionaires, ultra-nationalists, and neo-fascists such as Petro Poroshenko, Andreij Parubiy, Oleh Tyagnybok, Andreij Biletskiy, Dmitro Yarosho, and many more of this ilk.
By the time Zelenskiy came to the political scene, the communist-manufactured state of Ukraine and its Maidan regime had been ruled for some five years by a network of oligarchic, ultranationalist and neofascist elements knighted by the West as yet another ‘beacon of democracy’ in the post-Soviet space. Zelenskiy, who had been a political nobody in 2014 and fictional television personality during the Maidan regime’s first years under Poroshenko (no less a corrupt oligarch than Viktor Yanukovych the Maidan revolt had vanquished), assumed power with no political experience—his name coming ironically from the Russian and Ukrainian root ‘zelen’ for the word ‘green.’ Consistent with our simulacra century in which nothing is as it seems or is said to be, the great hope for Ukrainian republicanism was a creature of a corrupt and criminal oligarch, Ihor Kolomoiskiy, banned from entering the US by the Justice Department because of suspicions that, among other things, he was behind the murder of a leader of Ukraine’s Jewish community. Again ironically, Zelenskiy and Kolomoiskiy are both Jews. More ironically still, Volodomyr Zelenskiy would become the symbolic foil to the West’s ‘totalitarian’ nemesis and supposed ‘Hitler of today’, a man, who, like his father, possesses the same first name as Zelenskiy—the president of Russia, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
Upon Zelenskiy’s election, I thought that there was risk but also promise for Ukraine:
“The victory of television comedic actor and producer, President-elect Volodomyr Zelenskii, over the increasingly ultra-nationalist oligarch, outgoing President Petro Poroshenko, marked a rejection by a slim Ukrainian majority in the western regions of the oligarchic element in the Weimar Maidan oligarchic-ultranationalist hybrid regime. In the country’s southeast it represents a full rejection of both the regime’s oligarchic element and its increasingly active and vocal ultra-nationalist and neofascist element in the regime. The presidential election has been a positive process that opens the way for a possible but far from certain way out of Maidan Ukraine’s dead end. However, the election in and of itself is not a turn towards a better Ukraine. That turn can now only just begin, and there is no guarantee of its success. To the contrary, there are powerful oligarchic and ideologically extremist forces who lost in the election and who face the prospect of a similar defeat in September’s Rada elections and who will do everything possible to retain power and their positions in the bureaucracy, the siloviki departments, and the economy.
“…The Maidan regime — now on the verge of being the new opposition…
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