Russian President Vladimir Putin hoped that the 2019 presidential election in Ukraine will recon-figure Ukraine’s politics in a way that would make the country’s leadership more susceptible to the Kremlin’s wishes.
But a year after the political reset in Ukraine, it’s clear that not much has changed in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
Putin’s main problem today is that he has no impact on the Ukrainian government’s agenda. All of the Kremlin’s efforts — the multimillion-dollar injections into the political campaign of Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s personal friend and Ukraine’s leading pro-Kremlin politician, and the allocation of assets in Russia for him to make money, allegedly to invest in Ukrainian politics and media — all of it turned into a burst bubble. Medvedchuk’s party 44-member Opposition Platform For Life is not part of the ruling coalition, its draft laws don’t make it to the parliamentary agenda, and Medvedchuk can’t influence Ukraine’s political institutions.
Russia’s plan
Why is it so? The answer is very simple: The reason is Ukraine’s mono-coalition, the ruling 248-member Servant of the People party. It allows President Volodymyr Zelensky to make decisions in parliament with-out taking any other opinions into account. And while this is a concern from the point of view of traditional democracy, the mono-coalition is also the worst enemy of the Russian president and his satellites.
It has put Medvedchuk on the sidelines of Ukraine’s political life and in the back row of the parliament’s session hall. There, sitting under the press balcony, Medvedchuk is planning a revenge that would strip Zelensky of his independence.
Medvedchuk’s goal for the nearest future is to reshuffle the administration so that it becomes dependent on him. This task is in line with the Kremlin’s desire to make Zelensky a politically dependent player, driving him into a narrow corridor of actions that benefit Russia.
To achieve this, pro-Russian politicians throw their forces at creating an artificial clash of ideologies in Ukraine. In recent years, they have created a full-fledged infrastructure for the turn of Ukraine’s geopolitical vector back towards Russia. This infrastructure includes a network of TV channels (112, NewsOne, ZIK, as well as Nash channel and partly 1+1), YouTube channels, Tele-gram channels, and websites.
They raised an entire choir of “talking heads,” so-called experts, whose names were unknown to the public even a couple of years ago, and revived some notorious personalities from the past such as former President Viktor Yanukovych’s spokeswoman Anna Herman, former Party of Regions lawmaker Olena Bondarenko or ex-Transport Minister Yevhen Chervonenko.
These little-known “experts” and discredited politicians move from one Medvedchuk’s channel to another and change the role from studio guest to host, from expert to politician. The critics are also selected to fit the scenario — they are either extreme nationalists or their equally discredited opponents who are ready to engage in arguments and further split the audience on the sensitive topics of language, European integration, LGBT rights, religious preferences, or cooperation with the International Monetary Fund. They promote the narrative about “agents of the West” as the cause of all Ukraine’s problems and ephemeral interference in the country’s politics from abroad.
Mono-coalition
There’s a purpose behind all this. This is done not only to preserve the oligarchic status quo, but the bigger goal is to form a strong anti-Western sentiment in that part of society that sympathizes with Zelensky. We can already see a shift of preferences in the electoral core of the incumbent president. In the polls, the support for pro-Russian forces is slowly rising, while Zelensky’s is fall-ing. They’re chipping off his base.
In case the mono-coalition in parliament disappears and the new coalition needs to be formed, it will make it impossible for Zelensky to team up with pro-Western forces, which are branded as the so-called “sorosyata,” or minions of investor and philanthropist George Soros.
The Kremlin hopes that the mono-coalition would vanish after local elections that are scheduled for October. Pro-Russian forces are trying to turn them into a kind of a referendum to test people’s trust for Zelensky.
Due to falling ratings, the ruling Servant of the People party risks not forming a majority in any of the local councils. Moreover, in Zelensky’s electoral support base in the southern and eastern regions, they may even lose the first place to Medvedchuk’s party, the Opposition Platform.
Snap elections?
After the local elections, which will be interpreted through Medvedchuk’s media as a failure for the Servant of the People, the Kremlin’s political faction will try to break up the mono-majority and impose the Opposition Platform For Life as a coalition partner, operating on the results of the vote for the local councils in southern and eastern Ukraine.
In case Zelensky rejects such an alliance, they will move on to plan B and try to destabilize the political situation calling for a snap parliamentary election, after which the Servant of the People will lose some of their seats and won’t be able to form a mono-majority in the Verkhovna Rada.
Then, there is another issue: Who might be a possible coalition partner for the Servant of the People? There is a plan in the works, according to which Zelensky will be pushed to form an alliance with the Opposition Platform For Life.
Medvedchuk’s goal is to skillfully manipulate Zelensky’ electorate in its base regions in the south and east of Ukraine, and make Zelensky drift into a more pro-Russian agenda. In case Zelensky doesn’t get involved in such a game, they will try to turn the Servant of the People into a donor of votes for the Opposition Platform For Life and their junior project, the Shariy Party of blogger Anatoliy Shariy.
In other words, Zelensky is dangerous to Putin as a “universal” president, in whom people from every part of the stratified Ukrainian society see values close to their own. Some expect him to bring justice and end the war, others want libertarian reforms, yet others hope for a new language consensus in Ukraine.
This broad agenda combined with the reputation of “a common man who came to power” makes Zelensky practically invulnerable, capable of uniting society around universal values and minimizing the divisions that the Kremlin has always played.
This is what pro-Russian forces in Ukraine seek to end by pushing Zelensky to choose between the pro-Western and pro-Russian agendas.
In essence, Medvedchuk wants to force Zelensky to answer the question: Are you serving your core voter from the eastern and southern regions of Ukraine that brought you to power, or are you backing the so-called pro-Western “sorosyata,” many of whom did not vote for you?
Threat of Anti-Maidan
At the same time, the Kremlin’s menu for Ukraine contains a more extreme plan: Through orchestrating political conflicts, make the society demand Zelensky’s resignation.
In this scenario, an important role is assigned to the party of Anatoliy Shariy, a pro-Kremlin YouTube blogger whose goal is to appeal to the issues that are sensitive for Zelensky’s core electorate.
In recent weeks, Shariy’s newborn party has started arranging street protests. They want to be seen as a political force capable of gathering a large protest, a “Maidan”, which in essence will be an “Anti-Maidan” in its values.
Then, it’s a self-powering process — the more active the pro-Russian forces are, the more active the nationalists are. Their activities, in turn, give extra fuel for the pro-Russian forces. Together, they rock the entire political ship between the polar extremes, and provoke destabilization.
At the end of this scenario there may be a long-term protest with the aim of forcing Zelensky to announce a snap parliamentary election, which will deprive Zelensky of the monopoly and play into the hands of Medvedchuk, or even force Zelensky to consider resignation.
Ukraine had already seen this playing out 20 years ago when the tragic death of journalist Georgy Gongadze caused widespread protests, partial loss of legitimacy by then-President Leonid Kuchma, who set up the pro-Western government of Viktor Yushchenko.
At the end of the day, that tragedy benefitted Kremlin, who backed Kuchma and strengthened the Russian influence in Ukraine.
The only way around these scenarios for both Ukrainians and their Western partners is to keep a cool head and understand what Ukraine’s enemy in Moscow is trying to achieve.
Sergii Leshchenko is a Kyiv Post columnist, investigative journalist, and former member of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
