Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky faces possible ouster

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shall be ousted this year – having alienated allies domestically and abroad (the military, the far-right, and the West), he is seen by many Ukrainians as a “traitor to the nation”, and thus getting rid of him will, after all, be a good thing. So says Ukraine’s exiled opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk, in a January 10 column. Previously, he had stated Zelensky “gambled away Ukraine”, took advantage of “Nazi ideology”, and has overestimated the West’s will to support his country. Such rhetoric is to be expected from someone like Medvedchuk (who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin), right? He is not a lone voice, though, and the political camp he is part of should be taken seriously.

Medvedchuk is not a very familiar name except to Ukrainians and to analysts. Who is this man? An “oligarch” (as Eastern European multimillionaires and billionaires are often described in the West), this lawyer and businessman, running under the “Opposition Platform — For Life” (OPZZh) party banner, was elected as People’s Deputy of Ukraine on 29 August 2019. That same year, the OPZZh party won 43 seats in Parliament – and came second in the elections. Its program? Undoing the controversial “de-communization” and “Ukrainization” policies, and renegotiating the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement, while reviving trade with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of 9 post-soviet states (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Moldava). Moreover, it called for the “neutrality of Ukraine in the political-military sphere and [its] non-participation in any military-political alliances.”

The OPZZh party was thus yet another example of a political tradition in Ukraine that, until 2014 (the year of the ultra-nationalist Maidan revolution), was part of a “large camp”, according to Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies (Freie Universität Berlin). This camp has been labeled “pro-Russian”, marginalized and finally banned (Ukraine has suspended no less than 11 political parties – the entire left and opposition), and in fact, comprises a number of “sovereigntist, state-developmentalist, anti-Western, illiberal, populist, left-wing, and many other” stances, writes Ishchenko. It has traditionally called “for closer integration with Russia-led international institutions rather than with those in the Euro-Atlantic sphere.”

When Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine started in February 2022, the OPZZh condemned it. In April, Ukrainian defense authorities suspended the party on suspicion of treason. That same month, Medvedchuk was arrested. In September 2022, members of Ukraine’s National Guard, including the infamously far-right Special Operations Detachment Azov (also known as the Azov Regiment) were liberated from captivity in a prisoners swap between Moscow and Kyiv. They were exchanged for no other than Viktor Medvedchuk. In January 2023, Kyiv stripped him of his Ukrainian citizenship.

As I wrote before, Ukraine today has a minority rights issue and a civil rights problem, as it relegates Russian speakers “to permanent second-class status”, according to Nicolai N. Petro, who was a US Fulbright scholar in Ukraine in 2013-2014. Quoting prominent Ukrainians such as philosopher Sergei Datsyuk and Oleksiy Arestovich (former presidential advisor to Zelensky), Nicolai N. Petro, in his opinion piece for Foreign Policy, elaborates on how “freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and minority rights” are all areas of concern in the country, all of them “deeply intertwined with the issue of minority rights, specifically with the treatment of the country’s largest minority, Russophile Ukrainians—those who identify themselves with Russian heritage, be it through language, culture, history, or religion.”

So much has been written and said about NATO’s expansion being the key factor that triggered Moscow’s decision to launch its military campaign on February 2022 – that context and aspect needs to be acknowledged. But there is also another factor for instability in Ukraine, namely the way post-Maidan “ukrainization” policies have alienated the “pro-Russian” and Russian speaking population. This civil rights and domestic policy issue directly impacts matters related to foreign policy. One should keep all of that in mind whenever one sees the “pro-Russian” label being used to discredit Zelensky’s critics – whatever faults such dissents may have, many of them nonetheless represent a popular point of view in the country, especially in the eastern part of it, and they have valid points.

Back to Medvedchuk’s points (on Zelensky having alienated allies domestically and abroad), one could hardly disagree. Last month, for instance, the Ukrainian President suddenly called-off a high-profile briefing with US senators. There is an impasse amid the Americans about any future funding of the Eastern European country.

As for the domestic sphere, Konstantin Skorkin, an expert on Ukrainian politics writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s website, comments on how the military in that country is increasingly involved in politics, and how this worsens “the risks of Ukraine’s internal destabilization”. Although Zelensky is “already talking about the threat of a third Maidan” (which, the Ukrainian president alleges, could be “plotted” by Moscow), the real risk, argues Skorkin, lies in “discord among Ukrainians themselves”, with a real “specter of civil strife”. There is no longer unity among the Ukrainian political and military elite, the “most dangerous fault line” being “personified by President Volodymyr Zelensky and Commander in Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny”. As I’ve written, Pulitzer winner journalist Seymour Hersh reported that aforementioned General Valery Zaluzhny of Ukraine is supposedly directly negotiating a peace deal with Russian general Valery Gerasimov, “with or without Volodymyr Zelensky.”

All things considered, Viktor Medvedchuk’s warning about a possible overthrow of Zelensky merits some attention. It has been reported Washington itself could be interested in “getting rid” of Zelensky, as it has been pressuring for elections in Ukraine. It remains to be seen whether such a hypothetical scenario could in fact bring about an even more complicated situation: the US-led West, after all, has funded, supported and white-washed far-right violent extremism and even neo-Nazism in that country for years. Thus, with Zelensky out, even worse problems could surface – even after the end of the current conflict. The “Russian question” in Ukraine will simply not go away until it is properly addressed and the concerns and interests of that population taken into consideration.