Volodymyr Zelensky faced the United States Senate and Congress on Tuesday. Ukraine’s president had to appear via videoconference in two closed-door sessions to inform U.S. lawmakers of the need to immediately adopt a new package of economic and military aid for his country. Zelensky did not report to the meetings without making a statement. The reason for this, as the American press speculates, is the opposition confirmed on Tuesday morning by the Republican Party to support the aid package proposed by the White House.
“We are at war and things can change,” said Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov on Fox News, explaining Zelensky’s absence. But the Ukrainian president never misses an opportunity to speak out in international forums, especially when it comes to addressing the congressmen and senators of his largest ally besides the European Union. The president’s reaction was interpreted primarily as a sign of nervousness in the face of growing difficulties on the international stage and in the war.
Umerov visited Washington this week with Zelensky’s right-hand man, Andrii Yermak. The latter explained in Voice of America that if the item of 61,000 million dollars (56,500 million euros) that President Joe Biden requested from Congress for Ukraine is not approved “as soon as possible,” “it is very likely that that “We cannot continue to liberate our territory and lose the war.”
The White House warned last week that funding to support Ukraine would only remain until the end of this year. The Republican Party, skeptical of the multimillion-dollar amounts being transferred to Ukraine, is demanding that an extraordinary investment to further fortify the border with Mexico be added along with Biden’s requested security allocation for Kiev, Israel and Taiwan . The Democrats do not accept this request and time passes in favor of the Russian invader.
Mikola Bieliskov, a researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies – dependent on the Ukrainian presidency – emphasized on his social networks on December 4 that the Republican blockade questions the veracity of the rhetoric of Ukraine’s allies, saying that they are “going along with the Time”. “This is necessary.” Ukrainian authorities are optimistic about an agreement between the Republicans and the White House, but sources close to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry confirm to EL PAÍS that what happened is a warning of the dark clouds that have loomed in the year could emerge in 2024, especially during the tensions that will accompany the US presidential election campaign.
Kiev’s foreign problems do not end in the United States. The European Union will hold the summit this December that will formalize the start of Ukraine’s accession negotiations to the EU. A threat is planned, Viktor Orbán. The Hungarian prime minister, close to Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical interests, has insisted he will block the start of negotiations if Ukraine’s Hungarian minority is not granted more autonomy.
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The situation on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that the problems will get worse. The Financial Times newspaper reported on December 3 that EU member states could not agree on approving a 50 billion euro budget for Ukraine. This also coincides with border blockades on the transport of Ukrainian goods and agricultural products by Poland and Slovakia because they consider their low costs as unfair competition.
political struggle
Stagnation on the front lines, with no sign that Ukraine can advance militarily in 2024 due to Russia’s resource superiority, is fueling a new state of unrest in the country. Political hostilities erupted this week. Vitali Klitschko, mayor of Kiev, last week accused Zelensky of running the country following Putin’s example. “We will no longer be different from Russia, where everything depends on a person’s mood,” the Kiev mayor said in the weekly newspaper Der Spiegel. Klichkó criticized the president for not adequately preparing the country for warnings of a possible Russian invasion in 2022, and also for excessive accumulation of power to the detriment of parliament and the government. Alexei Goncharenko, the most visible face of the opposition European Solidarity party, emphasized the same, adding that the president’s office controls most of the media.
Umerov confirmed on Fox that Klichkó’s words marked “the beginning of the political season.” But it’s not just the capital’s mayor’s statements that have shaken Ukraine’s political life in recent days. The government denied Petro Poroshenko, Zelensky’s predecessor in the presidency of Ukraine and founder of European Solidarity, permission to travel to Hungary to meet with Orbán. Martial law in Ukraine prevents men between the ages of 18 and 65 from leaving the country, and Poroshenko is 58. According to his party, the former president wanted to talk to Orbán about his opposition to Ukraine’s accession to the EU. Poroshenko was unable to cross the border last Friday because the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) refused permission on the grounds that Russia would use him for its propaganda.
A spokesman for Orbán told the press that his government “does not want to play any role in President Zelensky’s political infighting.” European Solidarity responded by criticizing the authorities for granting many more exit permits to MPs from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party.
Clash with Zaluzhni
Polls suggest that the stalemate in the war conflict is weakening morale in society, especially among those who do not want to be involved in a war that will last for many years. Although he remains the highest-rated politician, trust in Zelensky’s management is declining. The one who maintains high esteem among citizens is Valeri Zaluzhni, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who is viewed much better in demographic terms than the president, according to a poll published in December by The Economist. The poor relationship between the two main leaders of the warring country is already an open secret. The Pravda newspaper published a detailed report this week focusing on the differences that exist between them, particularly over Yermak’s demands that Zaluzhni not have a public presence and the president’s unilateral decisions on military appointments . Pravda assures that in his meetings with high-ranking US military commanders, Zaluzhni Zelensky has even openly criticized what the president knows, which has distanced him even further.
Last summer, the presidential office sparked a debate in the media about the advisability of holding parliamentary and presidential elections. The first should be convened this fall and the second in March 2024. The constitution prohibits holding elections during martial law, but both he and Zelensky’s team suggested that legal reform was possible that would create space for holding elections. There has been pressure from the United States to hold the votes from the two major parties, but a majority of Ukrainians oppose them because of the difficulty of organizing with security guarantees and opportunities for the opposition.
The beneficiary of an election would, in principle, be Zelensky, who still enjoys strong support, especially without a public debate and without an opposition that had so far avoided breaking unity during the war. But the president himself admitted in November that he considered the election call very unlikely due to the organizational difficulties it would entail while Russia occupies part of the territory and carries out attacks across the country. His wife, Olena Zelenska, told The Economist last week that she did not want her husband to run in new elections because she wanted a return to family normality.
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