Dear Editor:
In Bohdan Nahaylo’s news analysis “After one year, is Zelenskyy running out of steam?” (May 3), there is no mystery. Mr. Zelenskyy shares with both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump a serious flaw that is common to democracies and revolutions. All three are products of social frustrations, anxieties and upheavals that are apt to bring to the fore inexperienced (though often well-meaning) leaders who greatly overstate their abilities to bring change and improvement, and who fail to understand the complexities and difficulties they would face.
Stable societies with strong and well-established systems of checks and balances as well as powerful, trusted, and professional government institutions can withstand erratic and inexperienced elected leaders for extended periods because they continue along an established course with only minor “corrections.” But Ukraine has neither strong systems of checks and balances nor trusted and professional government institutions. Inexperienced and unqualified elected leaders find themselves having to tame a “bucking bronco” though they may not even know how to mount a horse.
Mr. Zelenskyy is a Grade B actor with no experience or knowledge of the institutions he promised he would direct and manage; no idea of how he would bring constructive change; no trusted and experienced team of knowledgeable “game changers”; and only a shallow, sophomoric “vision” of where he wants to lead the country. Yet, he was the runaway choice of Ukraine’s immature and corrupt system of “democracy.” Having voted for a phantasmagoria created in the studios of Ukraine’s most reviled and predatory oligarch, what exactly did his supporters expect? It is what it is.
But history frequently comes up with surprises, and, unlikely though it may seem, Mr. Zelenskyy may still surprise all of us. First and foremost, he must recognize that he truly is alone in office and break free from the comfort of long-time friends and associates, or cunning manipulators and political patrons like Ihor Kolomoisky. He must recognize that Ukraine’s citizens are his only friends, and that Ukraine’s real enemy is the system of oligarchic and criminal control of Ukraine’s politics and economy. He must do all in his power to throttle that system by bringing into his government honest, fearless and experienced professionals like Gen. Ihor Smeshko. Ukrainians, for their part, must be ready to support him when he is doing the right thing and rally against him – even by way of a third Maidan – when he is going in the wrong direction.
Unfortunately, Ukraine’s future is heavily tied to President Zelenskyy’s hubris, and Ukrainians must now live with the consequences of their feckless choice.
George Woloshyn,
Cross Junction, Va.