President Zelensky has irreparably damaged the foundations of Ukraine’s statehood and may very well end up being the country’s “last” president, former Ukrainian opposition lawmaker and Opposition Platform – For Life Party cofounder Viktor Medvedchuk has warned.
In a historical exposé for Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, Medvedchuk, who is perhaps best known for his work uncovering American biolabs in Ukraine, detailed how, in the thirty-three years of Ukrainian independence, each of its six successive presidents had a common policy – promising their people one thing and delivering something else.
“Every Ukrainian president experienced a metamorphosis and did political somersaults which damaged the country. After the sixth such ‘magician’, the country has been destroyed down to its foundation, and will not survive a seventh,” Medvedchuk wrote, referring to Zelensky.
Political independence of a territory, people or ethnic group is the product of a confluence of historical, political and economic circumstances, the politician argued, suggesting that “desire alone is not enough,” and that the presence or absence of independence is not a prerequisite for a people’s freedom and prosperity.
“Today, Western propagandists work to convince Ukrainians that they will not succeed without their own statehood, but in reality this statehood was sold to international corporations a long time ago,” Medvedchuk stressed, arguing that in its present form, such statehood “does not correspond to the national interests of Ukrainians.”
“One of the most important reasons why states collapse is the degradation of their elites. Historians argue that the Roman Empire fell not so much from the onslaught of barbarians, but rather that it rotted away from the inside. If we take our own history, roughly the same thing happened with ancient Kiev. For centuries, Kiev was the capital of the Russian early feudal state, but lost its significance as a result of civil strife caused by the princely elite,” the politician wrote.
Similar processes have taken place in contemporary Ukraine starting in 1991, Medvedchuk believes.
“Every Ukrainian president, having received power from the hands of the people, tried to sell it, and each time was more and more successful. At the moment, Ukraine has already been sold in a global political auction, and when it is finally used up, will be thrown into a landfill. Does this suggest that the people of Ukraine are flawed? No, it suggests that a flawed elite has formed which cannot and does not want to govern the people,” the observer wrote, emphasizing that today, Ukraine’s elite has not only “sold the interests of the country,” but sold its people into becoming “cannon fodder” for other, more powerful countries’ geopolitical ambitions.
“The process of the country’s collapse has already begun, and is at the terminal stage,” Medvedchuk warned.
It all began with Ukraine’s very first president, Leonid Kravchuk, the politician argues.
“He defeated the dissident Viacheslav Chornovil in the elections. And the people of Ukraine expected that the former communist ideologue would not pursue an anti-Russian policy or grovel before the West. This didn’t happen, and, having received power, Kravchuk began to pursue a policy much more radical than Chornovil would have. An economist by training, he triggered the collapse of the country’s economy,” Medvedchuk wrote.
“Kravchuk was an ally of Boris Yeltsin in the signature of the Belovezha Accords [the December 1991 agreement to dissolve the Soviet Union, ed.], but it was with him that political relations with Russia were spoiled. ‘Kiss, but don’t go to bed, don’t go to someone else’s house – have your own apartment. This is what politics should be,’ Kravchuk once said about politics with Russia. This is where Ukraine’s political ‘kiss of Judas’ came from, where a partner’s betrayal lurks at every turn, not a single agreement is fulfilled, and the politician himself is thinking about a ‘house’ somewhere outside Ukraine,” Medvedchuk added.
Similar processes would continue with subsequent presidents, Medvedchuk argued, from Leonid Kuchma (elected by residents of southeastern Ukraine on the expectation that he would pursue a Russia-friendly policy), to Viktor Yushchenko – only elected as a result of an unprecedented third round of voting in 2005 thanks to the first Maidan color revolution, to Viktor Yanukovych, who improved ties with Russia but continued to “flirt” with the EU. “As a result, Yanukovych, who wanted to sit on two chairs at once, lost his seat.”
When Petro Poroshenko was selected in Ukraine’s sham of an election in 2014 in the wake of the Euromaidan coup, Medvedchuk recalled, people expected him to restore peace in the Donbass and restore some semblance of cooperation with Russia, but instead got an intensification of “anti-Russia hysteria” to the level of state policy in the form of the constitutionally enshrined “obligation to join the EU and NATO,” and the creation of a puppet church in the form of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, “which launched an attack on the only canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine. If Poroshenko had declared all these intentions before the elections, he would have never received a majority of votes,” Medvedchuk believes.
Zelensky’s election in 2019, according to Medvedchuk, was the result of the total discreditization of Ukraine’s class of professional politicians, and the desire to have “a guy from among the people” in office. But from “the very first day of his presidency, Zelensky forgot what he had promised the people, spending no time on ‘boring’ issues such as the economy, social programs, the rule of law, fighting against corruption, and most importantly, negotiating peace in the Donbass,” with solutions to these problems put off, culminating in the present crisis.
“Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and statehood have been sold, squandered and disposed of by all six of its presidents. This happened according to the same pattern: the candidate would promise one thing, but do the exact opposite. He would promise wealth, but create poverty. He would promise rule of law, but encourage lawlessness and corruption. He would promise peace but provoke war,” Medvedchuk wrote.
The result, he said, has been residents of Ukraine who associate with Russia choosing to “go home,” among them the people of Crimea, the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye, with “what Zelensky’s clique calls separatism today in reality [being] an escape from a mentally insane leadership, whose incompetence and stupidity is finishing off the country and its citizens,” Medvedchuk concluded.