Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress recently, seeking additional financial support for the Ukrainian government in its war with Russia. One comment in his speech stood out to us. “Your money is not charity. It is an investment in the global security and Democracy that we handle in the most responsible way,” House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, echoed that comment, saying “the fight for Ukraine is the fight for Democracy itself”
Is this really about democracy? If so, Mr. Zelensky sure has a funny way of showing it, for many of his actions are antithetical to the basic tenets of a democracy. To paraphrase the infamous quote from the Vietnam War (see headline above), Zelensky might as well be saying: we had to destroy democracy in order to save it. In the past year, President Zelensky has done the following.
He is trying to ban all religions with ties to Russia. The measure will target millions of Ukrainians who identify as Russian Orthodox. He is acting to eliminate all religious organizations affiliated with Russia from operating in Ukraine. He said “it was necessary to purge the church in order to preserve the country’s spiritual independence.”
He ordered a series of recent raids by Kiev’s intelligence on Orthodox churches which remain connected with the Moscow Patriarchate. Claiming they have been acting as operatives for the Kremlin, he instructed his security forces to further target Russian Orthodox parishes, and he denounced the Ukrainian people continuing to attend the parishes as failing to overcome “the temptation of evil.”
Although he provided little evidence, he sanctioned the ten top clerics of the Orthodox Church, suggesting they threatened "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine." Their assets have been seized, and they are subject to a ban on a range of economic and legal activities as well as a de facto travel ban.
Despite the large number of people who speak Russian in the Ukraine, books and music by post-Soviet artists have been banned, and print media must be published in the Ukrainian language.
He has closed all TV news stations and a number of online portals that were critical of the government. These shutdowns and closures were not carried out by court order as required by law. Incredibly, this censorship has spread beyond the Ukraine borders. In April 2021, YouTube also removed the accounts of these TV channels under pressure from the Ukrainian government.
He has suspended the activities of eleven opposition political parties in Ukraine's parliament, while accusing the opposition parties of colluding with Russia and trying to divide Ukrainians.
He charged Victor Medyedchuk the leader of the leading opposition party Platform for Life, with treason, and put him under house arrest.
Do these actions align with Speaker Pelosi’s fight for democracy?” Obviously not. However, perhaps we should be giving President Zelensky a little break. After all, the US Constitution guarantees that “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Habeas corpus is the power of a judge to demand the government show cause for putting someone in jail. In other words, habeas corpus is what prevents the government from arresting people who have not committed crimes and locking them up.
President Abraham Lincoln utilized this exception and suspended the writ of habeus corpus during the Civil War, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used an executive order to force the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Will President Zelensky be like those two great American Presidents and restore democratic norms and values after the Ukraine war ends? Who really knows? The Ukraine is a notoriously corrupt country, and it has very little in the way of support for democracy in its history.
Nonetheless, there is more to this war than just a fight for democracy in the Ukraine - a democracy that does not really exist right now. There is a terrible cost, not only in terms of the dollars being spent, but also in human terms, that is horrendous. We’ll address that in our next article.
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