No Elections in "Democratic" Ukraine
Ukrainian President Zelensky declares that there may be no parliamentary or presidential elections during the war with Russia
I decided to watch my first episode of Tucker On Twitter recently, and I started with episode 7. In this episode, Tucker Carlson talks about how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently announced that Ukraine may not hold its next scheduled elections due to the war with Russia, and Carlson goes on to point out how establishment figures in both major parties in the United States have made the point that we have to support Ukraine to defend not only their democracy but our own as well. He asks how you can back Ukraine in the name of democracy when Ukraine’s leader is openly discussing suspending democracy.
According to Snopes, the Ukrainian constitution does not permit elections to be held in Ukraine while martial law has been declared.
Zelenskyy first declared martial law at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces on Feb. 22, 2022. Zelenskyy most recently extended that declaration to August 30, 2023. Based on terms outlined in the Ukrainian Constitution, elections for Ukraine's parliamentary body the Verkhovna Rada and for the presidency cannot be held when martial law is imposed.
You can say then that Zelensky’s hands are tied on the matter, and that’s reasonable enough in so far as it goes. Russia invaded Ukraine and Zelensky, as Ukraine’s president, declared martial law as a result of that invasion, and Ukraine’s constitution makes it illegal for the Ukrainian government to hold elections during a period of martial law. That all seems to be true, but Carlson has a point nonetheless.
Regardless of whether you think it’s justified for Ukraine to not hold elections based on their constitution, it’s objectively true that the Ukrainian constitution is anti-democratic. The hallmark of a democracy is having elections, so if a government is capable of suspending elections for any reason they are not a democracy as we would understand the term today. So figures like U.S. President Joe Biden or Representative Nancy Pelosi talking about “defending democracy” in Ukraine are spreading false propaganda to justify wasting American tax dollars on Ukraine’s war with Russia. I’ve written about the U.S. government’s strategy in regards to this war previously:
Tucker Carlson mentioned Abraham Lincoln illegally suspending habeas corpus during the American Civil War, but even Lincoln did not use his perceived wartime powers to suspend the presidential election of 1864 where he soundly defeated Democratic Party nominee George B. McClellan. If Abraham Lincoln, who was willing to abuse the presidency to commit any number of unlawful acts during his time in office, didn’t feel the need to suspend elections during arguably the worst crisis in American history, how can Americans justify supporting a foreign regime that would do so in a war that has nothing to do with the United States at all?
I also find the lack of coverage of this issue in major western news media very interesting. President Zelensky made these comments in an interview with the BBC on June 22, 2023, so I went to The New York Times website to try to find a news article on the subject. Strangely enough, a search from the date periods of June 20, 2023 - July 1, 2023 showed that the Times did not have a single headline discussing Zelensky’s comments on these upcoming elections despite this being extremely newsworthy subject. The Washington Post similarly had no headlines discussing the potential of Ukraine holding no elections during its war with Russia and I did a search at The Telegraph from the United Kingdom with the same result.
Why would three of the biggest newspapers in the world not have a single report on the very real possibility of the Ukrainian government not holding its scheduled elections in 2023 and 2024? This should be a major issue in the so-called Democratic West which has spent hundreds of billions of its combined taxpayers’ dollars propping up the Ukrainian government. It seems to me that if Ukraine is going to take western tax money while it rejects the main practice of democracy, the citizens of these democracies might have a right to know about how their money is being spent.
The only explanation for this is that the corporate news media is helping western governments in their propaganda campaign in support of propping up Ukraine in the war against Russia. They don’t want their readers to know that Zelensky made these comments or that the Ukrainian constitution is anti-democratic because those readers might then question why their governments are sending their hard-earned tax money to an anti-democratic foreign government. They are lying to their readers by omission and allowing their governments to lie to their citizens by falsely claiming that Ukraine is a democracy fighting against Russia for the principles of democracy.