Establishment Media Turns On Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

After Years Of Whitewashing Him As A Hero Of Democracy, Establishment Media Is Finally Admitting Volodymyr Zelensky Is A Dictator.

After years of whitewashing him as a hero of democracy, establishment media outlets are finally admitting that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy is turning the country into a dictatorship.

A new article in the Financial Times writes, “Anti-corruption raids on prominent Ukrainian figures and moves to favour loyalists in senior positions have led to accusations that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government is sliding into authoritarianism”.

The outlet went on to note that “Zelenskyy and his top aides face allegations from politicians, activists and diplomats that they are using extraordinary powers granted under martial law to sideline critics, muzzle civil society leaders and consolidate control.”

Citing the most recent example, the Financial Times noted that “masked, heavily armed officers from Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) forced their way into the home of prominent anti-corruption campaigner Vitaliy Shabunin in Kharkiv last Friday, seizing phones, laptops and tablets.”

Reporting on another recent example of Zelensky’s authoritarianism, the outlet reported that “SBI investigators and armed agents raided the home of former infrastructure minister Oleksandr Kubrakov in Kyiv, taking his mobile and other devices”.

It noted that “Shabunin and Kubrakov labelled the raids as politically motivated, adding that the SBI had presented no court-issued warrants and would not allow time for their lawyers to be present for the searches”.

Vitaliy Shabunin even told the paper, “Zelenskyy is using my case to send a message to two groups that could pose a threat to him. The message is this: if I can go after Shabunin publicly — under the scrutiny of the media and despite public support — then I can go after any one of you”.

Another Ukrainian MP named Oleksandra Ustinova was quoted in the piece saying, “This is a straight-up, Russian-style scenario of dividing society, which could lead to protests in the streets”.

It also noted that Zelensky has been placing sanctions on any of his potential political opponents, noting that he placed “sanctions against several prominent politicians, including former president Petro Poroshenko, who lost a re-election campaign to Zelenskyy in 2019 and has been a staunch critic since.”

The outlet also reported that Zelensky rejected an independently selected head for the Economic Security Bureau of Ukraine while installing a loyalist as the prime minister (the Ukrainian equivalent to vice president) of the country. The outlet wrote:

Earlier this month, Zelenskyy’s cabinet opted not to appoint Oleksandr Tsyvinsky, a detective with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (Nabu), to lead the Economic Security Bureau, which investigates economic crimes. Tsyvinsky had been independently selected, but the cabinet claimed he was “not suitable”.

Anastasia Radina, an MP from Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and head of parliament’s anti-corruption committee, said the government had “no authority” to reject Tsyvinsky and the move did “not comply with the law”.

Also this month, the president nominated first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko to lead his cabinet, replacing long-serving premier Denys Shmyhal. Svyrydenko is considered a close ally of Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff. Svyrydenko was approved by parliament on Thursday, making her Ukraine’s new prime minister.

The outlet even quoted mainstream Ukrainian outlets calling out Zelensky’s authoritarian slide with Ukrainian Truth, which the Financial Times said was “Ukraine’s most-read online news outlet,” writing “Taking advantage of the war, Zelenskyy is making his first, yet confident, steps towards corrupt authoritarianism,” and Kyiv Independent writing “A crackdown on the country’s most famous anti-corruption crusader can’t be happening without at least the silent approval from President Zelenskyy, if not active permission,”.

Another article from the mainstream British Magazine “The Spectator” wrote a similar article on Zelensky titled “Ukrainians have lost faith in Zelensky”.

The article noted that “The Kyiv government is racked by corruption scandals and purges, public faith in their future and in their leaders is tanking, and pressure to make peace at almost any price is growing.”

A “former senior official in Zelensky’s administration” even told the magazine, “If the war continues soon there will be no Ukraine left to fight for,” saying that Zelensky is “prolonging the war to hold on to power”.

It also quoted the “once-staunch pro-Zelensky cheerleaders Mariia Berlinska, head of the Aerial Reconnaissance Support Centre, a prominent Ukrainian volunteer movement,” saying, “we are hanging over the abyss, Ukraine is an expendable pawn in an American game”.

The outlet noted that 47 percent of Ukrainians believe “Ukraine will be a depopulated country with a ruined economy” and 70 percent believe “their leaders are using the war to enrich themselves”.

A former Ukrainian cabinet minister was even quoted in the article saying, “Ukraine has two enemies, two Vladimirs: Zelensky and Putin, Putin is destroying Ukraine from [the] outside, but Zelensky is destroying it from within by destroying its will to fight and its morale. Human rights are being trampled on, there is pressure against political opponents, rich and influential people who could support opposition are being expropriated and opposition media is silenced. And the irony is that this Putinification of Ukraine is being funded by the West”.

The outlet noted that Zelensky has used the Bureau of Economic Security to "prosecute Zelensky’s political opponents” and that “more than 5,000 Ukrainians have come under sanctions and had their property frozen”.

It noted that “The measure, first invented to prevent Russia-connected politicians, media groups and oligarchs from influencing Ukrainian politics, is now widely used to silence opponents of the regime, say critics, as well as to police the media”.

The outlet also noted that “While many argue it’s unfeasible to hold elections in wartime, there is frustration that Zelensky has exiled key potential opponents and imprisoned and sanctioned others.”

The opposition MP Oleksiy Goncharenko was quoted saying, “In May 1940 Churchill invited the leader of the opposition Attlee to be his deputy and united all of parliament in one government, Zelensky has done the opposite, he is holding on to power by all means possible”.

Goncharenko has also previously “compared Zelensky to Kim Jong-un and Ukraine to North Korea.”

The Spectator also covered Ukraine's brutal draft, writing “Ukraine’s social media is filled with daily videos of men being bundled into vans by recruitment officers, sometimes at gunpoint. Yet many of those forcibly recruited seem to have little desire to fight.”

It also noted that many have fled Ukraine to not be drafted and forced to fight in the proxy war, writing “In the first six months of this year, Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office reported that it had opened 107,672 new criminal cases for desertion. Since 2022 some 230,804 such criminal cases have been instigated, suggesting that more soldiers have deserted the Ukrainian army than there are fighting men in today’s British, French and German armies combined.”

A former Zelensky cabinet minister said to the magazine, “All of the political elite understands that Ukraine needs a new system of government to stabilise [the] situation, People want to stop living in fear. But instead of asking how to help a transition of power in Ukraine, the EU is closing its eyes”.

Blaming The Proxy.

While these articles finally tell the truth about the situation on the ground in Ukraine, they gloss over the real culprit, NATO and the West.

One of the first blows to Ukrainian democracy came in 2014, when the United States helped overthrow the country's democratically elected government led by Viktor Yanukovych and installed a puppet leader.

Since then, NATO has controlled Ukrainian politics and political policy. As Ukrainian political scientist Konstantin Bondarenko noted , “The West, however, did not want a Ukrainian president who pursued a multi-vector foreign policy; the West needed Ukraine to be anti-Russia, with clear opposition between Kyiv and Moscow. Yanukovych was open to broad cooperation with the West, but he was not willing to confront Russia and China. The West could not accept this ambivalence. The West needed a Ukraine charged for confrontation and even war against Russia, a Ukraine it could use as a tool in the fight against Russia.”

The West also helped mainstream the political far-right in Ukraine.

After the coup, Foreign Policy magazine wrote, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s current government — and the protesters who brought it to power — are, indeed, fascists.”

Channel 4 news in the UK reported at the time that , “the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum”.

Reporting on the cabinet positions held by far-right figures, the outlet wrote:

The man facing down Putin’s aggression as secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council is Andriy Parubiy.

Parubiy was the founder of the Social National Party of Ukraine, a fascist party styled on Hitler’s Nazis, with membership restricted to ethnic Ukrainians.

Overseeing the armed forces alongside Parubiy as the Deputy Secretary of National Security is Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of the Right Sector – a group of hardline nationalist streetfighters, who previously boasted they were ready for armed struggle to free Ukraine.

Inside Right Sector was an alliance of hardline nationalist groups including Patriot of Ukraine and the paramilitary group UNA-UNSO, who have fought against Russian troops in Chechnya and Moldova. Their members paraded in balaclavas and wore uniforms bearing far-right insignia, including the wolfsangel.

The new Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych is a member of the far-right Svoboda party, which the World Jewish Congress called on the EU to consider banning last year along with Greece’s Golden Dawn.

The party, which has long called for a “national revolution” in Ukraine, has endured a long march from relative obscurity in the early 90s. Their declaration that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” has raised fears for the safety of the country’s Jewish population.

Svoboda now controls the ecology and agricultural ministry with Andriy Mokhnyk, the deputy head of Svoboda, running ecology and Ihor Shvaika as agriculture minister.

When Zelensky was elected in 2019, he campaigned on a platform of implementing the Minsk Accords, a peace deal that would have ended the fighting that erupted in Eastern Ukraine after the 2014 coup.

However, the U.S. had other plans. As Konstantin Bondarenko noted, before his election U.S. Deputy Secretary of State David Hale met with Zelensky and noted that Zelensky “was clearly told about the U.S.’s interests in Ukraine and the need to follow the rules set by the American authorities in Ukraine after Maidan: cooperation with the IMF, continuing the confrontation with Russia, sabotaging the Minsk agreements, and protecting the interests of transnational corporations, among other things.”

Once elected, Zelensky was threatened by U.S.-backed far-right forces in the Ukrainian military against ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, and the West sided with the far right over Zelensky.

The West also pressured Zelensky to reject a peace deal that would have ended the war as early as April of 2022.

During the peace talks in April of 2022 between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul, the Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi who took part in the negotiations said that “we were very close to ending our war with some peaceful settlement” and that Putin, “tried to do everything possible to conclude [an] agreement with Ukraine and really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement.” He also noted that the two sides “managed to find a very real compromise”.

Boris Johnson, however, at the behest of the collective West, flew to Ukraine and told Zelensky that “even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they (the West) are not”.

He told him that the “position of the collective West” was “that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined and that there was a chance to press him.”

Because Zelensky was allowing the West to use Ukraine to fight Russia, the West ran an intentional PR campaign to cover up his growing authoritarianism.

As Konstantin Bondarenko documents, in the West:

Time magazine named Zelensky “Person of the Year.” Bookstores were filled with books about Zelensky in every language under the sun. Comics appeared with Zelensky as the main character. Zelensky was portrayed as a positive hero fighting a “refined evil”—Putin. Hollywood was considering making a film about Zelensky. Small figurines of Zelensky were sold in souvenir shops in Europe and the U.S., and they sold out very quickly. Zelensky became an element of pop culture. Zelensky appeared at the 64th annual Grammy Awards. He spoke at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022. He spoke at the opening of the Berlin Film Festival in February 2022. Sean Penn came to Ukraine and gave his Oscar statuette to Zelensky.

Meanwhile, as Bondarenko noted, the real Zelensky “turned into a morose dictator and despot, a fanatic ready to imprison all dissenters and suspects, while also sending all Ukrainian citizens to the frontlines.”

While the West will now put all of the blame on Ukraine turning to dictatorship on the proxy, the real cause is NATO, which brought the far-right to power in Ukraine, prolonged the war which paved the way for the authoritarian power grab, and covered up growing signs of authoritarianism for proxy war propaganda value.

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