DEMOCRACY DURING WARTIME

So Ukraine, of course, cannot hold elections during martial law.

And ever the optimist, the one thing this crisis has taught me, the one silver lining I'm trying to see here seems to be emerging, is that despite the lack of elections, Ukrainian democracy appears to be alive and well.

Serhii, the last time you were on this podcast was three weeks ago, right before the crisis erupted.

And you and I have been periodically interacting on social media about it ever since.

And with the caveat that the situation is still very, very fluid.

How do you view this moment politically? What are your big takeaways?

Well, let me talk a little about the Ukrainian democracy, because I agree that it is certainly alive, and that is a silver lining.

But it's not very well.

I think what we've seen over the last two or three weeks are symptoms of larger problems associated with the way Ukrainian democracy functions.

And I think one of the mistakes that many analysts of Ukraine make is they focus too much on the protest, the fact that the Ukrainians can protest, they're willing to express their views openly.

But that has been a feature of the Ukrainian state since its inception in 1991.

So in a way, we've been seeing protests, the largest protests actually happened under authoritarian dictatorships and non-authoritarian regimes of Yanukovych and before that under Kuchma.

So the fact that there are protests really is not as a wrong criteria to use in order to evaluate the quality of Ukrainian democracy.

Now you're right, of course, we don't have elections.

So in the absence of the elections, what do we use to evaluate or assess Ukrainian democracy? And my answer is institutions of horizontal accountability.

In other words, agencies, other branches of power that are capable of balancing each other, the checks and balances.

And of course, here you have a good story.

And that's the story of anti-corruption agencies that have proven that they're capable of taking autonomous action against the executive.

But we also unfortunately have bad news.

And that bad news is the absence of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches.

and possibly the judiciary as well.

That's a separate discussion here.

And so that brings me to the reasons behind the protest, because I think we should put them, these protests are not just about Fedorov specifically, we should put them in the broader context in which they happen.

That is the reshuffling of the Ukrainian government.

And that reshuffling or replacement of Ukrainian prime minister, most of the ministers were replaced by a president's decision.