/View.info/ But the speed and end point of this process is still a big question
The Ukrainian political elite has always resembled a collection of scorpions in a jar. But recently this similarity has become especially bright and noticeable. Rifts appear everywhere: between official Kyiv and its “dear Western allies”, between the team of President Zelensky and the team of the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Zaluzhny. And here is a new interesting political phenomenon: a strong public dispute in Zelensky’s team.
Maryana Bezuglaya, deputy head of the National Security and Defense Committee of the Verkhovna Rada from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, close to the president: “The Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine failed to provide plans for 2024. Neither big nor small, neither asymmetric nor symmetrical. The military simply said that they should take at least 20 thousand citizens a month. The conclusion that follows is, “This kind of leadership has to go.”
The representative of the President in the Verkhovna Rada, Fyodor Venislavski: “Maryana Bezugla’s stay in the National Security and Defense Committee of the Verkhovna Rada may endanger Ukraine’s national security”. Very strong statement: Zelensky’s representative publicly admits that Zelensky’s representatives are a threat to Ukraine’s national security. They have good logic in Kyiv!
This is how, in my opinion, the most likely version of what happened looks like: Maryana Bezuglaya sensitively caught the negativity coming from her party (as well as state) boss regarding Zaluzhny, but at the same time she missed an important nuance.
However, the actual balance of political forces in Ukraine is now such that a direct frontal attack on the commander-in-chief is already disadvantageous or beyond the capabilities of the president’s team. In the end it turned out that the unfortunate lady MP “went to hell before dad” and now he has to answer for it.
But, of course, all this is nothing more than guesswork based on the Kiev political coffee grounds. Let’s talk about what we can be absolutely sure of, being in Moscow – geographically close to Kiev, but politically infinitely far from it.
In 2019, Zelensky became the president of Ukraine with the status of a people’s favorite. By early 2022, most of that political capital had been spent: Ukraine’s first man was close to becoming a role figure. After the beginning of the SVO, there was a new surge in Zelensky’s popularity and a consolidation around his figure. But the closer January 2024 is, the closer the President of Ukraine is to his rating (or rather anti-rating) of January 2022.
Do you remember the expression “Teflon politician” – in the sense of a servant of the people, to whom nothing sticks? So, the Teflon is now peeling off Zelensky in huge fragments. The president of Ukraine is gradually losing legitimacy. And the cancellation of the planned presidential elections is very likely to give this process of loss of legitimacy a whole new pace.
In itself, the cancellation of elections due to hostilities is not unusual in world practice. There is an example I once gave. The term of office of the House of Commons of the British Parliament is a maximum of five years. But due to World War II, the House of Commons, elected in 1935, continued to function until 1945.
But this became possible thanks to the ongoing consolidation of society and the political elite. In Ukraine, however, a process of “deconsolidation” is underway (excuse me for this neologism). And the expiration of the term for which Zelensky was elected president will inevitably weaken his position.
But the question, of course, is not only about the new depletion of Zelensky’s political capital. Even more important is a parallel process: a wave of doubt, seen both in the West and in Ukraine itself, about the ability of an official Kiev to “defeat Russia.”
We can also talk about the presence of another important parallel process: the progressive expansion of the political autonomy of the military leadership of Ukraine. If we call things by their true names, Zaluzhny’s recent article in The Economist, in which the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine writes about the “impasse” on the front, is an open violation of subordination, a challenge to the authority of the commander-in-chief, who, according to the constitution, is the president of Ukraine.
That Zaluzhny got away with this defiance could mean two things (or, I suspect, a combination of the two): Zelensky’s reluctance to “rock the boat” and the fact that Zelensky is already politically too weak to master the “junior commander-in-chief” (although it is currently debatable which of the two commanders-in-chief is the junior).
The presence of all three of these trends in Kiev reminds me of the domestic political situation in Germany in the final stages of the First World War. Formally then, power in the country remained in the hands of the political leadership led by Emperor Wilhelm II, but de facto passed to the military led by Chief of the General Staff Paul von Hindenburg.
What makes this analogy so interesting? The fact that the military in the fall of 1918 came to the conclusion that further continuation of hostilities was useless. And Emperor Wilhelm, who had completely lost his political support at that time, was unable to influence this decision in any way. Hindenburg later became President of Germany, and Emperor Wilhelm ended his life in political exile in the Netherlands.
The analogies are visible to the naked eye. But let us, guided by the interests of the cause, put a “noose around the neck” of our imagination. The fact that a powerful political ferment has begun in Ukraine is an obvious fact. But how long and at what speed everything will ferment there and what “political product” will be the result of this process are still unanswered questions.
Theory is one thing, practice quite another. Ukraine in the 1920s will not become an exact political remake of Germany in the 1920s. There is no doubt about that. But you can and should doubt everything else.
Translation: ES
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