Good News: Ukrainians Reject U.S. Puppet Poroshenko

One can infer from the lack of coverage in "the newspaper of record" that yesterday's outcome of the presidential election in Ukraine (see "Ukraine Election: Volodymyr Zelensky, TV Comedian, Trounces President" by Andrew Higgins and Iuliia Mendel) is unwelcome in Washington, D.C.

Why? Lev Golinkin explains in The Nation (see "Ukraine’s Upcoming Election Pits a Deeply Unpopular President Against a TV Comedian"):

Thus far, Western media have focused on the “Isn’t this quirky?” aspect of an untested comedian about to become the leader of Ukraine. But there’s nothing quirky about it.

For millions of Ukrainian citizens mired in economic corruption, this election is anything but funny. Millions of rational people would rather take their chances with an untested comedian than the US-backed Poroshenko. That staggering decision behooves us to pay attention.

For the past five years, Ukraine played a central role in US foreign policy. Washington vigorously supported the 2013–14 Maidan uprising that ousted Viktor Yanukovych and brought Poroshenko to power. A bipartisan Who’s Who of Washington powerbrokers, including Senator John McCainand Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, hustled into Kiev to cheer on the uprising.

Five years later, the majority of Ukrainians are overwhelmingly rejecting that choice.

Indeed, it’s hard to consider this election as anything other than a referendum on not only Poroshenko’s presidency, but the entire US-backed Maidan project.

Higgins and Mendel report the extent of Poroshenko's overwhelming rejection:

KIEV, Ukraine — The comedian Volodymyr Zelensky won a landslide victory in Ukraine’s presidential election, according to official results with nearly all of the votes counted, making a comic actor with no experience in government or the military the commander in chief of a country that has been at war with Russian proxies for over five years.

With more than 95 percent of ballots cast on Sunday counted, Mr. Zelensky had won 73.17 percent of the vote, compared with just 24.5 percent for Petro O. Poroshenko, Ukraine’s incumbent president. Mr. Zelensky triumphed in every region, except for the area around the city of Lviv, a center of Ukrainian culture and nationalism in the west of the country.

Ukraine’s central election commission said that final official results might not be ready until April 30 because of the upcoming Orthodox Easter holidays.

Mr. Zelensky’s victory will give Ukraine its first Jewish leader and deliver a stinging rebuke to a political and business establishment represented by Mr. Poroshenko, a billionaire candy tycoon who campaigned on the nationalist slogan “Army, language, faith.”

Besides the issue of the systemic corruption of the oligarchy the presidential election was also a referendum on language. Zelensky speaks Russian not Ukrainian. A reader of The Times would be completely unaware of this because the few stories and opinion pieces devoted to the election made no mention of it.

A good story published by Politico at the end of March explains:

The usage of Ukrainian has boomed since the revolution, with a new law dictating that all schooling after the fifth grade onward must be in Ukrainian. Russian, meanwhile, has been demonized by some on the right as the “language of the enemy.”

Last year, overzealous city councilors from Ukraine’s western city of Lviv went as far as to ban Russian-language culture and media altogether — a move that occasioned a sharp rebuke from the country’s Western diplomatic community. “The Lviv [region] ban as formulated is narrow-minded, discriminatory and just plain dumb,” the Canadian ambassador to Ukraine, Roman Waschuk, tweeted at the time.

The ban was an outlier, but it struck the wrong tone in the country’s east and south, where Russian is still the predominant language. (The anti-government protests that preceded the war in the Donbas were set off by news that Ukraine’s parliament was considering repealing the status of Russian as a regional language).

A recent media law mandating Russian-language outlets to translate their content into Ukrainian has also ruffled feathers — and driven some sites out of business.

The coup in Kiev five years ago kicked off a great deal of turbulence in international affairs. Maybe the rejection of Poroshenko, Washington's man, is a favorable omen for our politics ahead.