From hero to zero

When western leaders realised that Zelensky isn't a corruption-fighting democrat

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, in February 2022, Volodymyr Zelensky has been elevated to the status of a hero King, pure in thought and deed, interested only in saving humble Ukraine from the onrushing hordes of Russian Orcs. Like Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, but short, thin-skinned and with a gravelly voice.

Zelensky has been completely immune from criticism in the west, with allegations dismissed and labelled as Kremlin talking points, and accusers called out as Quislings.

Yet, in an instant, that illusion has been shattered.

For the first time since February 2022, Zelensky has been revealed as no different from every President of Ukraine since the country gained independence in August 1991; corrupt and authoritarian.

This comes as no surprise to most realists, but offers a devastating blow to the neo-liberal true-believers who invested their reputations and cash into defeating Russia.

This week, President Zelensky signed a law that stripped two important anti-corruption bodies – the National Anti-Courrption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) of their independence, making them report to the Prosecutor General, who he appointed.

In the face of widespread protest, Zelensky has been forced to backtrack, although it is not year clear what the new arrangements will be, or when they will be implemented, and the Verkhovna Rada has started its summer recess.

Let’s be clear, corruption is and has been a totemic issue in Ukraine, right back to the onset of the Maidan protests in late 2013 and, of course, before that. During my visits to Ukraine, while posted to Russia, it was clear that young people saw tackling corruption as a top priority for the government. This formed part of their desire for Ukraine to move towards European Union membership and for their country to integrate into a community more clearly governed by democracy and the rule of law.

Whether they might consider the European Union to be democratic today, as unelected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen centralises ever more powers, is another question. But that European and anti-corruption aspiration was real back in 2013.

Yet scant progress has been made in tackling corruption since that time. In February 2015, one year after the height of the Maidan protests, the British Guardian newspaper published a long piece entitled ‘Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Europe’. The Ukrainian Prime Minister, Arseny Yatseniuk, who had been personally selected by Victoria Nuland at the U.S. State Department, was forced to resign in April 2016 in the face of allegations of widespread corruption within his government.

In 2021, the European Court of Auditors produced a report entitled Reducing Grand Corruption in Ukraine: several EU initiatives, but still insufficient results. It defined Grand Corruption as ‘the abuse of high-level power that benefits the few, and causes serious and widespread harm to individuals and society’.

In January 2023, an article in the Hill remarked on the need to defeat corruption as Ukraine’s ‘other enemy’. Shortly after that article, a piece, again in the Guardian, discussed the challenges faced by the Head of Ukraine’s National Agency for Corruption Prevention (NACP), which works closely with the now de-clawed NABU and SAPO.

That report in particular talked about specific examples of corruption in President Zelensky’s inner circle. Occasionally, Zelensky has purged his cabinet, to show his commitment to governmental reform, for example, sacking his former Defence Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, in the face of widespread accusations that the Ukrainian Defence Ministry was siphoning off foreign donations on an industrial scale.

But the occasional show trial has never taken the whiff away that Zelensky’s administration is every bit as corrupt as those that preceded it.

This stripping of powers from NABU and SAPO took place as those organisations were closing in with investigations against senior members of the Zelensky administration. Zelensky has spoken about the need to deal with Russian influence, but most people have seen through that smoke screen.

Zelensky was voted into office in 2019 on a platform to eradicate corruption in Ukraine. He has not done so.

And, as I have pointed out often, war has held back real steps to address the problem.

Indeed, war has turbo-charged corruption to a new and more disgusting level. Money for infrastructure projects has been siphoned off, weapons’ orders have been falsified with officials skimming the profits. You’ll see as many hypercars tooling round Kyiv as might be witnessed at the Monaco Grand Prix. Want to get out of enlistment? We can make an arrangement for the right money. Need to cross the border? Just hand over the cash.

This has prompted the mother of all holy shit moments, in which European politicians are quickly waking up to the fact that their hero, Zelensky, is just a flawed human like everyone else. Although, from my personal experience, it is impossible that British and European governmental agencies would not be aware of the huge graft within the Ukrainian state.

Having held up the ‘nothing to see here’ signs for so long, our political leaders may now be starting to worry about how they will account for and continue to justify the billions that western nations are pumping into Ukraine. Two thirds of Ukrainian state expenditure is effectively paid for by us, non-Ukrainian citizens, through the donations of western governments.

And yet Ukraine has become more corrupt.

Zelensky has extended the war to cling to personal power. And now it appears that he is undermining independent anti-corruption agencies, in part to prevent them from finding the skeletons in the closets.

More broadly, Zelensky has clamped down on those who oppose his increasingly authoritarian rule, sanctioning former President Petro Poroshenko for ‘high treason’ in February and high-profile former adviser and critic, Oleksiy Arestovych on 1 May. The sanctions impose assets freezes, revocation of state awards, trade restrictions and a ban on using media distribution within Ukraine. These moves appear intended to expropriate the money of oppositionists and prevent them from having a say and receiving a hearing by the voters of Ukraine.

So far this year, over 80 Ukrainian individuals and a similar number of entities have been sanctioned in this way. How many more will follow the same path after this legislative putsch on the anti-corruption bodies?

This was always going to happen in Ukraine. Realism requires an honest and sceptical view of the human condition that sees people for who they really are. Politics is a deeply corrupting business and no-one is immune from the temptation. Neo-liberals who could never conceive of the possibility of this happening with Zelensky are simply naïve.

The challenge, politically for leaders in Europe, is to explain this to their own voters and not appear like they have been duped.

War against Russia has been held aloft by slogans such as supporting the good guys against the bad guys. European citizens haven’t had to die to fight the war. But they have been made poorer. And now our warrior in chief Zelensky appears at least as bad as the Russians, if not worse.

I suspect the support for the continued European funding of a proxy war in Ukraine will now start to bleed away. The longer-term parliamentary consequences for mainstream political parties in Europe could be even more devastating.