Candace Rondeaux
It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for Ukraine’s president. The content of Volodymyr Zelensky’s now-infamous July 25th call with U.S. President Donald Trump will doubtless be picked over ad nauseum as the impeachment inquiry against Trump gets underway in Congress. Nor is history likely to forget how the release of a partial, reconstructed transcript of a single phone call between Trump and Zelensky triggered a constitutional crisis in the world’s most powerful country.
Zelensky’s obsequious tone, his cloying requests to Trump for Javelin anti-tank missiles and his disparaging remarks about Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, have severely damaged Zelensky’s political credibility at a time when he needs it most. The comedian who was elected president in April will likely have to work overtime to convince Ukrainians, as well as allies in Europe and Washington, that he is in thrall to no one and is prepared to defend what is arguably the most fragile democracy on the European continent.
It will be a lot tougher for Zelensky, though, since everybody in Washington suddenly seems to be looking for a new angle on how to exploit Ukraine’s rampant corruption. Trump has said openly and repeatedly that he wants Ukrainian authorities to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of his leading challengers for reelection. Trump said as much this week and so did Trump’s personal lawyer, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. By his own admission, Giuliani declared on CNN last week that he pressed Ukrainian authorities to investigate the appointment of Biden’s son Hunter to the board of a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma Holdings.
Now Zelensky has 538 members of Congress to contend with, too. During the testimony of the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Thursday, Republicans appeared determined to defend Trump against charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. They did so, in part, by insisting that the president had done nothing wrong when he pressured Zelensky to dig up as much dirt as he could on Trump’s Democratic rivals, past and present, as well as anyone in Ukraine who might have helped them. The Democratic-led House of Representatives will no doubt press Zelensky’s administration to produce any available evidence that the White House directed Giuliani to pressure Ukrainian officials to investigate anyone involved in the release of embarrassing information about Trump’s disgraced 2016 presidential campaign manager, Paul Manafort.
Despite notching a major political win after cutting a prisoner swap deal with Russia earlier this month and starting to reopen talks with President Vladimir Putin about resolving the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, Zelensky finds himself in the unenviable position of looking vulnerable to outside manipulation. He was already struggling with renewed allegations that he is in the pocket of Ihor Kolymoisky, one of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs.
Zelensky’s unctuous prattling on the call about all the lessons he learned from Trump about how to run a successful political campaign just made things look worse. Zelensky’s claim that, like Trump, he too wants to “drain the swamp” of corruption in his country would be laughable if it weren’t so sad for the 44 million Ukrainians who are counting on Zelensky to do better than the long line of kleptocrats who preceded him in office.
Zelensky finds himself in the unenviable position of looking vulnerable to outside manipulation.Indeed, if anybody had told the former comedian that he would land in the middle of one of the biggest American political scandals in recent history, he probably would have thought it was a joke. But Ukraine, and its head of state, are now in a very tight spot. Taking up the mantle of national anti-corruption crusader in a country that Transparency International ranks as the second-most corrupt in Europe, after Russia, is hard enough as it is. It is even harder when two of the world’s biggest bullies—Putin and Trump—threaten your country if you fail to cooperate with their extortionate requests for “favors.”
Even as Zelensky all but begged Trump on the phone to quickly dispatch the military aid Congress had already authorized—and the Pentagon had reviewed—it appeared that Russian-backed separatists were intensifying attacks on Ukrainian military positions. Whether the Kremlin was somehow behind the recent escalation of hostilities or not, it certainly won’t hurt Putin’s negotiating position to demonstrate to Zelensky the costs of continuing to tangle with Russia.
Yet Zelensky has already done more in his six months in office to rebuild Ukraine’s democratic promise than his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, did in his five tumultuous years in power, showing that the housecleaning he promised will not be a once-over. Soon after his inauguration, Zelensky said he wanted a whole new team in the chief prosecutor’s office. The controversial but well-connected prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, who for years ranked as Ukraine’s top law enforcement officer despite having few qualifications, was then replaced in August.
In another hopeful sign that Zelensky gets the connection between good governance, political legitimacy and territorial control, he also took special pains soon after taking office to fire half a dozen local administrators in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, a move that is likely to raise anxieties for the black market smugglers and Russian-backed separatists in the region who have long profited from local government corruption and incompetence. While many observers, myself included, were skeptical of a presidential candidate who seemed to prize social media over policy substance, Zelensky demonstrated a measure of political fortitude in the first few months of his presidency.
But that unfortunately did not necessarily carry over into international affairs. Zelensky’s clumsy attempt to pass a lustration law in June that would purge former Poroshenko holdovers en masse drew immediate criticism from the same G-7 forum he needs to woo for Ukraine to make a successful bid to join the European Union. Zelensky could have easily recovered from this relatively small stumble had he opted for a less polarizing approach to dealing with the problem of corruption. Starting off with the nuclear option, when a clever guerilla-style campaign was needed to gain the upper hand over rivals, has cost Zelensky dearly. His embroilment in Trump’s latest and biggest scandal only exacerbates his domestic vulnerabilities.
Nevertheless, despite all the challenges Zelensky faces, he can still count on the many defenders of Ukraine on both sides of the aisle in Congress, even after the death of Sen. John McCain, who had been one of Ukraine’s most vocal champions. Congressional drama over impeachment aside, the majority of Democrats and Republicans understand what’s at stake for Ukraine if the current White House crisis metastasizes into an all-consuming crisis of legitimacy for Zelensky. A weak head of state in charge of a country vulnerable to even more Russian aggression, at a time when the United States is internally riven by a constitutional crisis and suffering frayed relations with the EU, is a recipe for disaster. Let’s hope everyone over on Capitol Hill remembers how much is at stake.
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