The news that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has banned eleven opposition parties – including the pro-Russian ‘Opposition – Platform For Life’ which holds 44 seats in the 450-member Ukrainian parliament and has spoken out against the Russian invasion – may be the embattled leader’s first major mistake in the month since Putin launched his brutal invasion.
Zelensky coupled the decree suspending the activities of the parties, decided on by Ukraine’s national defence and security council, with a ban on private TV stations – merging them all into a single state-run TV channel. And that could be his second big error. For Ukraine’s strongest card – the unique selling point that has drawn such sympathy and support from almost the entire democratic world – has been the fact that, in stark contrast to Putin’s repressive Russian state, it is – or was – a free country.
That means that it holds real elections, has a diverse media, and allows politicians critical of the government to get their views heard. All things that we take for granted but which have already disappeared or are fast vanishing in Putin’s prison state. That difference drew a dramatic line between the society that the majority of Ukrainians wished to live in, and the big bad neighbour from hell next door. Tragically, Zelensky’s two moves fatally blur that line.
Zelensky’s motives for his move are obvious. He fears – with considerable justification – that the banned parties, especially the ‘Platform for Life’ – which is the largest opposition party – form a Trojan Horse within the walls of Ukraine that undermine the country’s remarkable fighting spirit and will to resist the invader. This is scarcely surprising. The Platform’s leader, a 67-year-old oligarch named Viktor Medvedchuk, is a pal of Putin whom he has described as ‘a close personal friend’. So close, that the Russian leader is reputed to be the godfather of Medvedchuk’s daughter. In May last year, because of his pro-Russian stance, Medvedchuk was charged with treason and placed under house arrest. Within four days of the February invasion he vanished from his home and his current whereabouts are unknown.
Ukraine is not the first democracy to have suspended democratic norms in time of war. In Britain during World War Two, those thought to be potential fifth columnists – ‘the enemy within’ – were given short shrift. Hundreds of German and Italians living here – many of them Jews or exiles who had fled from fascism – were interned on the Isle of Man after Winston Churchill gave the order to ‘collar the lot’ in 1940 when the country was threatened with imminent invasion.
-----------------------
- Continue to read HERE
