A Tale of Two Presidents
Being a Western media hero is quite different from being an actual hero
For most Western observers, Ukraine is one of the new states that have appeared on the European map after the disintegration of the USSR in 1991. It is also perceived as the most corrupt state in Eastern Europe.
The founders of the new state were two former communist party apparatchiks, Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma. The Leonids ruled Ukraine for 13 years starting from 1991. In 2004 Viktor Yanukovich - who was prime minister at the time - made his first bid for the country’s presidency and Kiev experienced its first “colour” uprising, dubbed the Orange Revolution.
Born in 1950 of Polish, Belarusian and Russian heritage, Viktor Yanukovich was at that time a seasoned politician hailing from the Donetsk region. His 2004 bid for the country’s presidency failed after popular protests led to a second presidential ballot which was won by Viktor Yushchenko, who ended up running the country until 2010.
Although initially declared the formal winner of the 2004 presidential contest, Yanukovich resigned as prime minister under pressure from the street and conceded electoral defeat in order to prevent political violence:
“I didn’t want mothers to lose their children and wives [ to lose] their husbands. I didn’t want their bodies to flow down the Dnipro from Kiev. I didn’t want to assume power through bloodshed.”
As boss of the Party of Regions, Yanukovich continued his political career and participated in the 2010 presidential elections, competing against Yulia Timoshenko. He won fair and square, with the OSCE observers qualifying those elections as an “impressive display of democracy” as well as free of serious fraud.
Initially at least, Yanukovich was in favour of EU integration, but against NATO membership, claiming that neutrality was the only real option for Ukraine. On that issue he declared that his country would join neither NATO nor the CSTO, and he supported the creation of a new European collective security system, as championed by Russia and France at the time.
In 2012 he announced pension and welfare reforms worth $2 billion. His administration also raised the minimum wage. All in all, these measures angered the IMF, which suspended its loans to Ukraine.
At the same time, Yanukovich took steps to solve the issue of the Russian Black Sea fleet from Sevastopol and championed the 2010 Ukrainian-Russian Naval Base for national gas treaty. The treaty extended the lease of Russian facilities in Crimea - part of the 1997 Black Sea fleet partition treaty between the two countries - until 2042, in exchange for a multi-year discounted contract of Russian natural gas for Ukraine. (Russia terminated the treaty on March 21, 2014 after the annexation of Crimea).
In 2012 Yanukovich promoted a new law on regional languages, which entitled any language spoken by a minority of at least 10 percent of the population to be declared as an official language within that area. After the Maidan uprising, the parliament decided to abolish the law on regional languages by making Ukrainian the only official language of the land.
By 2014, the Yanukovich presidency became deeply unpopular with the pro-EU Ukrainians, although it wished to create a free-trade zone and a visa-free regime with the EU as soon as possible.
Yanukovich’s stance on visa-free travel within the EU and his declarations about joining the bloc meant - according to The Economist - that he was “seen in Moscow as a traitor”.
Popular dissatisfaction with Yanukovich’s rule grew because of the widespread corruption of his ministers and also because he promoted people originating from the Donbas region in government, in the police and in the judiciary. Moreover, the Yanukovich family grew very rich by buying private or public businesses at very low prices, at the same time pressuring other businesses to pay 30 percent of their profits in “contributions”.
Yanukovich’s undoing, however, was the free trade association with the EU. In 2013, the parliament voted in favour of that agreement, but the trade war started by Russia determined Yanukovich to suddenly declare he was pulling out of it. To sweeten the blow, Russia offered Ukraine a $15 billion-dollar deal, eclipsing the terms offered by the EU or the IMF.
During the winter of 2013-2014 the Maidan protests erupted, culminating with the death of a hundred people, protesters and police. Although he was later accused by subsequent Ukrainian governments of being responsible for those deaths, Interpol refused to put Yanukovich on the most wanted list for them. As he did in 2004, Yanukovich chose to avoid further bloodshed, preferring to flee the capital instead.
Compared to Yanukovich, Volodymyr Zelensky is a different political animal altogether. Born in 1978 in Krivoy Rog in Central Ukraine, by the 2000’s he deemed his law degree useless and decided to pursue an acting career. His production company created the Servant of the People series, in which Zelensky played a fictional Ukrainian president. In 2018, the employees of his production company registered a political party with the same name. Subsequently, Zelensky announced his candidacy for the 2019 presidential elections, which he won.
During the electoral campaign, he promised to heal the divisions of the country and to end the guerrilla warfare in the Donbas. He failed on both counts, not before trying to convince the ultranationalists in his camp to stop the fighting and the shelling of the Donbas “rebels”.
Although he tried to tackle corruption, Zelensky was widely seen in Ukraine as the man of Kolomoisky, an oligarch who owned several radio and television stations, of which one aired the “Servant of the People” series. He did have talks with Vladimir Putin, which went nowhere.
It is fair to say that Zelensky had no previous political experience and, in a very short time, he became the instrument of Kiev ultranationalists, who believed that supporting a president of Jewish descent would help Ukraine access Western money much more easily. His lack of experience would have required to surround himself with more seasoned politicians. Instead, Zelensky appointed in key positions within the government people he used to work with in his production company, which made matters even worse. By 2020, he appointed two other Jewish politicians as prime minister and defence minister. According to The New York Times, this made Ukraine the “state with the biggest concentration of Jewish leaders outside Israel”.
By 2021, his administration’s insistence that Ukraine abandon its neutrality and join NATO instead seriously antagonised Moscow, which started mobilising troops at the border. To be sure, Russia’s initial objective was not that of invading Ukraine, but rather of applying pressure on Kiev in order to give up its NATO membership aspirations. Zelensky and his team refused and tried to convince Western allies that Putin wouldn’t dare invade, despite the sabre-rattling.
When the invasion eventually took place on February 24th, 2022, Zelensky made the biggest error of his political career. He refused an American offer to assist him to take refuge and establish a government in exile. “I need ammunition, I don’t need a ride” was his unwise reply, a phrase which now adorns the trains getting into and out of Kiev.
The invasion provided Zelensky the irresistible opportunity to play the role of his life, that of the embattled wartime leader. Naturally, his military experience was even poorer than his political one and, during the last 3 years, he made a series of controversial strategic decisions that enraged professional military men - like Zaluzhny - around him. Western leaders, however, humoured Zelensky and offered unlimited help, provided he convinced the Ukrainians to fight and hopefully defeat the Russians.
Ukraine has never been a prosperous and functional state before Zelensky, and will probably not become one after him. This does not mean, however, that its citizens deserved to bear a fully fledged war with Russia and die in their hundreds of thousands.
And here lies the chief difference between the two presidents whom I have briefly described above.
While Yanukovich, despite his many shortcomings, avoided spilling Ukrainian blood at all costs, Zelensky has no qualms in sending soldiers to die on the front or see millions of his people homeless and errant. Quite on the contrary, for reasons that could be better explained by social psychiatry, Zelensky insists on sending even more people to their death.
Regardless of the superhero image created by the media in the West, the last true living patriot in Ukraine is not him. It was Yanukovich. Far from being a true hero, Zelensky will most probably go down in Ukrainian history as a cursed president who has brought death and destruction upon his country quite unnecessarily.
If he really loved Ukraine and its people, Zelensky would have admitted his limits and bowed out when told in 2022, in a noble and rational gesture that would have saved lives and prevented carnage and destruction.
The fact that Ukraine would have been far better off without him since 2022 is by now painfully clear.