Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has framed it as “the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy.”
But Russia has never listed Ukraine’s democracy as a reason for its war. It has never been concerned with Ukraine’s choice of system of government; it has been concerned with that government’s choice to pursue NATO membership and to become a heavily weaponized anti-Russian bridgehead on its border. Moscow’s concerns have not been political concerns, but security concerns.
As Paul Robinson says in his new book, Russia’s World Order: How Civilizationism Explains the Conflict with the West, “Russia has shown itself to be consistently indifferent to other states’ political systems, being far more concerned with whether those states are friendly than with what sort of regime they have…. Russian leaders have never expressed a dislike of democracy per se, merely a dislike of the foreign policy pursued by the democratic states of the West.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it may have been Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, more than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who has waged a battle against Ukraine’s democracy.
Leading up to the 2023 NATO summit, then U.S. President Joe Biden said, “Ukraine isn’t ready for NATO membership.” Prominent among the reasons was the need for reforms, including “political reforms,” and key to those political reforms was “democratization.”
With NATO membership never really on the horizon, Ukraine’s problems with democracy have become a serious impediment to European Union membership.
The autocratic charge is not new. It has dogged Zelensky since the first days of the war, when he banned opposition political parties and consolidated media and restricted freedom of speech. As early as October 2023, the former minister of internal affairs and former prosecutor general of Ukraine Yuriy Lutsenko was accusing Zelensky of ruling “as a sole decision-making autocrat” who “makes decisions alone.”
In March 2022, only weeks into the war, Zelensky signed a law that formally banned 11 opposition political parties, including the Opposition Platform for Life party that was once the second-largest party in the Ukrainian parliament. Though the case has been made that the parties were sympathetic to Russia, the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko of Freie University in Berlin undermines that defense by pointing out that “practically every leader and sponsor of these parties with any real influence in Ukraine condemned Russia’s invasion, and such people are now contributing to Ukraine’s defense.” Rather than helping the war effort, the ban helped Zelensky to remove parties who would defend the cultural rights of ethnic Russian in Ukraine and to consolidate his hold on power.
The undemocratic move removed a party that was gaining in popularity and passing Zelensky’s party in some polls. The same may be said for the exiling of the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhny, the person most quickly passing Zelensky in the polls, to the Ukrainian embassy in London. In February of this year, Ukraine’s former President Petro Poroshenko, a major declared challenger to Zelensky, was charged with high treason and had sanctions imposed on him that effectively bar him for running against Zelensky when the next elections finally happen.
Zelensky has orchestrated similar restrictions on media and freedom of speech. From the start of the war, “the people of Ukraine have had access,” the New York Times reports, “to a single source of television news.” That single source, Telemarathon United News, was enacted by a presidential decree on March 19, 2022 and unified all information onto a single channel.
That consolidation has raised democratic concerns. The Times reports that “journalists and groups monitoring press freedoms are raising alarms over what they say are increasing restrictions and pressures on the media in Ukraine under the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky.” Yuriy Lutsenko, the same ex-official who first raised concerns about Zelensky’s growing autocracy, says that “freedom of speech and freedom of the press are very seriously limited.”
A March 2023 law extended the censorship powers of a body appointed by the president and parliament to print and online media. Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island, told The American Conservative that the council “now has the authority to review the content of all Ukrainian media, prohibit content it deems a threat to the nation, and issue mandatory directives to media outlets.”
The restrictive measures so challenging to democracy have extended to religious freedom and language rights. Recently, the undemocratic activity of Zelensky’s government has also taken the form of investigating journalists, activists and opposition politicians. Under the cover of martial law, Zelensky has even replaced some democratically elected officials, including mayors, with military administrators.
But the most damaging blow of all may have come from Zelensky’s signing of draft law number 12414 intro law. The law, which has sent thousands of protestors into the streets, ends the independence of two of Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies. The new law places Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies under the control of Ukraine’s prosecutor general, who is appointed by the president. That places all the power of agencies to investigate government corruption under the control of the government.
The law is a blow to Ukraine’s EU aspirations. Corruption is a serious problem in Ukraine and reining it in is a key requirement for Ukraine to be considered for membership. The formation of these bodies was central to addressing that goal. The National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, one of the two weakened agencies, was created under the pressure of the U.S. in 2015 with the assistance and technical support of the FBI. Its creation was a condition for Western financial support when the conflict in Crimea and the Donbas originally began with Russia in 2014.
But the agency apparently got too close to Zelensky when it asserted its rights and independence and began investigating top ministers and senior officials in the Zelensky government. “When investigations began—for the first time in Ukraine’s history—that dealt with sitting high-ranking officials, it was obvious that this immediately became uncomfortable, specifically for the government in power,” Artem Sytnyk, the first head of the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine, said.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has warned that the new direction taken by Zelensky could be an impediment to Ukraine joining the European Union: “The respect for the rule of law and the fight against corruption are core elements of the European Union. As a candidate country, Ukraine is expected to uphold these standards fully. There cannot be a compromise.”
Ukraine’s EU campaign was already running out of steam and in jeopardy. Richard Sakwa, emeritus professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, told TAC in a recent correspondence that “a growing number of member states are growing uncomfortable with the idea of Ukraine’s membership in the European Union.”
The most apparent uncomfortable state is Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orban has recently promised to “do everything” to prevent Ukraine from joining the EU. But Ukraine’s longtime EU ambassador, Olha Stefanishyna, has said that it is not only Hungary that has concerns about Ukraine joining the EU. Public support in some other countries, including the Czech Republic, is low. And Poland’s new president, Karol Nawrocki, has also promised to block Ukraine’s accession to the EU.
The first round of formal negotiations on Ukraine’s accession were supposed to take place on July 18. They never did. Stefanishyna says the EU is “not currently prepared to take the decisions” that Ukraine had hoped for.
Subscribe Today
Get daily emails in your inbox
But the recent law has made Ukraine’s case even more difficult to make. In response to the passage of Zelensky’s new law, the EU has now said it will withhold €1.5 billion, or $1.7 billion, from a fund that is intended to help nonmilitary rebuilding of Ukraine from war damage and that is dependent on Kiev’s achieving certain standards of good governance, including reining in corruption. The rebuke is one of the first signs that Ukraine’s staunch European allies are willing to criticize and punish it during the war.
Faced with street protests that Zelensky has not seen since the war began and with the rebuke from the EU, Zelensky gave in and submitted a new bill to restore the independence of the two agencies. But the concession may have come too late. Zelensky’s clear legislative display of intent has sent waves of concern through Europe about the sincerity of his commitment to anticorruption reform and to democracy.
Zelensky’s past actions have called into question his desire to commit to battle against autocracy under the banner of democracy. But his most recent autocratic action has alarmed his European supporters and further jeopardized Ukraine’s hopes of joining the West as a member of the European Union.
