Volodymyr Zelensky Couldn't Have Prevented Russia's Unprovoked Invasion
A recent essay in Harper's magazine titled "The Tragedy of Volodymyr Zelensky" raises serious questions about the Ukrainian president's pre-war record in office. The essay's author, Michael C. Desch, a professor of political science at Notre Dame, gets his argument almost half right.
Desch correctly points out that, after a fairly successful first year allowed Zelensky, the 36-year-old technocratic prime minister to begin implementing the promised reforms that the Ukrainian television star turned commander-in-chief ran on in 2019, a shake-up in the president's staff reversed what little progress had been made:
"Another sign that Zelensky was not going to clean out Ukraine's Augean stables came in March 2020, when he fired the prime minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk, whose anticorruption efforts were creating waves," Desch rightly notes.
Zelensky was not the first Ukrainian president to squander his mandate for reform. Viktor Yushchenko, who came to office in 2005 on the Orange Revolution's wave of optimism, received only 5.45 percent of the first round of voting in 2010. Petro Poroshenko, who in 2014 was elected in the first round following the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, made it to the second round of voting in 2019 only to lose to Zelensky in a landslide, 73 percent to 24 percent.
Prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it appeared as if Zelensky's presidency was headed in the same direction. Just over one month before Vladimir Putin's unprovoked attack, the Kyiv Institute of Sociology reported that only 30 percent of Ukrainians wanted to see Zelensky run for a second term in 2024, and that only 23 percent were prepared to vote for him.
The half Desch gets wrong—the big half—involves Zelensky's relationship with Russia, particularly his inability to find a peaceful solution to the Donbas conflict. While Zelensky did come into office seeking an end to Russia's hybrid war in eastern Ukraine, his main obstacle was not, as the Notre Dame professor suggests, the "Ukrainian far right," but the Kremlin leadership. Zelensky actually successfully implemented new rules of engagement that significantly reduced casualties on both sides. These changes were politically popular, which is exactly why they were unacceptable to Moscow.
Desch nevertheless attempts to bolster his argument with the assertion that "Russia also seemed amenable to negotiations," a conclusion that only appears true if one takes Vladimir Putin at his word while ignoring his deeds, which included continuing to offer direct support to the so-called "separatists" of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk "People's Republics," all the while denying Moscow's role in propping them up.
In the end, Desch's conclusion that Ukraine under Zelensky somehow "squandered its chance to avoid the current conflict" relies on a total disregard for Russia's actions in the runup to February 24, 2022, when the Kremlin leadership seemed to go out of its way in order to avoid offering any sort of ultimatum that might actually run the risk of resulting in a peace deal.
Given that context, Desch's idea that, "If Zelensky could have stood down his domestic opponents, particularly in the honeymoon period after his 2019 victory, perhaps he would not have had to stand up to the Russians in February 2022," can only seem true if one accepts multiple false narratives put out by Kremlin propaganda both before and after the start of its unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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