“Dysfunction Sidelines Ukraine’s Parliament as Governing Force,” is the title of an article published this week by The New York Times in one of the few political critiques that has appeared in the Western press recently. It took two years after the Russian invasion for the grace period of absence of political comments on the Ukrainian authorities to be broken, although always partially and only temporarily. It was the news that included Vitali Klitschko’s words against what he perceived as authoritarian drift that opened the door. Like the current information, that news also lacked the contextualization that politics requires, and it was left unmentioned that the criticism of the mayor of Kiev and the measures by which the protesters were part of a confrontation that went back almost to the beginnings of the presidency of Zelensky. The origin of the rivalry lies in the struggle for power and control of the resources of the State between the two protagonists. What is more, the attempt to Zelensky snatch administratively, the mayor of Kiev Klitschko, a man with powerful connections and political contacts, especially in Germany, is one of the examples that show that the authoritarian drift of Volodymyr Zelensky is not justified in the wartime situation today, but that precedes it in several years to the military intervention of Russia.

As then, the information currently provided by The New York Times also lacks the context that would be expected in a world-renowned media outlet. The search for immediacy at the expense of depth, the lack of interest in the situation in Ukraine beyond the war scenario or the attempt not to excessively bother an allied government that does not hesitate to describe any minimally critical comment as Russian propaganda seriously undermines the information that the public is receiving. Hence, an article that questions the political performance of the party that President Zelensky represents, since 2022 exalted as a war hero and the man who has united Ukraine, is both an exception and insignificant information to understand the political context; internal war.

“Under martial law, with the country at war, no elections are possible to replace members who switched jobs, joined the army, fled the country or quit. The Parliament regularly gathers with more than 10 percent of its lawmakers absent. Though legally obliged to attend hearings when summoned, ministers sometimes do not show up, without repercussions,” writes The New York Times as all the contextualization it considers necessary to describe the current situation. Monitoring the political news in Ukraine since February 2022 gives a very different image to the simple absenteeism of deputies and ministerial representatives and shows a Rada absolutely empty of content and whose work has been taken away, one could even say usurped, by the Office of the President, which also holds executive power. Absolutely inoperative, the Ukrainian Parliament continues to be a scene of personal confrontations and political spectacles, generally before empty benches, deputies who try unsuccessfully to resign from their positions and a bulk of elected representatives, which occur only in the House to ratify decisions previously adopted. This is what happened during the adoption of the law on mobilization, in which the photographs of the moments of the debate on the amendments, with the empty room, had little to do with the day of the vote.

“President Volodymyr Zelensky’s party, once a political juggernaut, has in effect lost its majority by unraveling into factions,” explains The New York Times, giving Servant of the People a status it never really had. The president’s party, like the Poroshenko Bloc, was always a personalist formation created by and for the figure of its leader. The press also seems to have forgotten what was written about the party and its leader when it emerged, practically from nowhere and at the hands of oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, in 2019. “The Servants – all of them newcomers to the political front line – affirm that will reset the country from the scourge of corruption. The income of the second-poorest nation in Europe will increase. They will introduce a more honest type of politics. But critics point to the team’s inexperience and a rapprochement with political enemies that, they say, is not entirely out of step with 1917,” wrote Oliver Carroll in The Independent after the Jewish leader’s victory with a mention of the year of the October Revolution which, in a country already dominated by the nationalist right, had clear anti-Semitic overtones of the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.

“The overall picture, said Volodymyr Fesenko, a Ukrainian political analyst, is of a Parliament sidelined during the war and slipping from its once powerful role in Ukrainian democracy,” insists The New York Times, again extolling a role and democratic credentials far superior to those that the Rada has shown in the last decade. To begin with, it was Parliament that wanted to give a democratic appearance to the irregular change of Government that had occurred in the capital on February 24, 2014. Even despite the pressure to which the deputies of Viktor’s party were subjected Yanukovych and the latent threat of violence from the extreme right, the pro-Maidan parties did not obtain the necessary votes for the motion of censure, plagued by irregularities, to reach the votes necessary to make effective the dismissal of the democratically elected president in an election validated by international institutions. And throughout the years of war in Donbass, the Rada became the theater of personal ambitions, political rivalries and the demonization of opposition options.

The Rada, that once democratically powerful place, was the place where an Orthodox priest purified the seats that had been occupied during the previous legislature by the communist parliamentary group. It happened in 2014, when the Communist Party of Ukraine could no longer stand in the elections. That same year, its historical leader, Petro Symonenko, was attacked by other deputies when, from the rostrum, he tried to finish a parliamentary intervention.

The war has facilitated the work that the three branches – executive, legislative and judicial, if there was ever an effective separation between them – carried out during the previous eight years to eliminate any non-nationalist political option. Demonized and discredited, the Party of Regions fractured into several political groups that, under the cover of Rinat Akhmetov, formed minor political parties with a limited presence in Parliament. One of them, the Opposition Platform for Life, split from the Opposition Bloc, rose to overtake Volodymyr Zelensky’s party in voting intention for the legislative elections that should be held this year. It was then that the political powers began to put judicial pressure on their leader, Viktor Medvedchuk, detained under house arrest for a politically fabricated case of coal trading with the People’s Republics and in which Petro Poroshenko was also accused, although he without restrictive measures of their freedom. The Russian invasion put Medvedchuk and his group in the target: their leader was arrested, accused of all sorts of crimes, publicly humiliated and then handed over to Russia as a prisoner of war, while other deputies were deprived by decree, certificate obtained thanks to the votes of the people.

Now, either through ignorance of the reality of day-to-day, disinterest or laziness, media such as The New York Times are often surprised by the lack of unity in the party of the president, the defections – historically abundant in the political parties of Ukraine – and the measures that Volodymyr Zelensky holds a majority. “Instead, the party has formed a strange bedfellows political partnership with the remnants of a party called Opposition Bloc that was officially disbanded in 2022 for ties to Russia. Together, they have passed legislation to expand the draft, critically important for Ukraine’s war effort, and to shape oversight of agencies and rules intended to safeguard foreign aid,” explains the average American without giving importance to the fact that the president dissolved the political groups and withdrew proceedings of deputies by decree. “Critics of this alliance say it has weakened the independence of Parliament because the former pro-Russian politicians are at risk of prosecution for treason and hardly able to provide effective oversight,” he admits finally, without ever describing that these are not empty threats but of acts that have already been used against other political groups.

Dysfunctional Politics (original)