A Welcome U-Turn in Ukraine
Massive protests forced Zelenskyy to backtrack on a dangerous law. Will Trump’s opponents heed the lesson?
The test for Ukrainian democracy last month started with a self-inflicted wound by President Zelenskyy and his allies in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. On July 22, the Rada voted overwhelmingly to strip two of Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions—the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO)—of their independence by placing them under the direct control of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Ruslan Kravchenko. Not surprisingly, Kravchenko is considered loyal to Zelenskyy and his majority party in the parliament.
According to the government’s critics, President Zelenskyy asked parliament to pass this law to prevent investigations into corruption by some of his ministers and members of parliament from his party. Zelenskyy’s government denied these allegations and insisted that the NABU and SAPO had become ineffective institutions that needed reform. It also alleged that Russian spies had infiltrated these organizations.
If true, ineffectiveness and spy penetration are serious problems for powerful entities such as the NABU and SAPO. But Zelenskyy’s remedy—removing their independence and placing them under the control of a political ally—was flawed.
Ukrainian civil society certainly thought so. Massive demonstrations against the government mobilized immediately—the biggest against Zelenskyy since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Strikingly, many of the protesters were young people who were not old enough to participate in the last major demonstrations in Ukraine during the 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity. Many European leaders sided with the protesters. The European Union even suspended aid to Ukraine.
Zelenskyy and his allies in parliament quickly responded to this backlash. A week later, on July 31, the Rada passed and Zelenskyy signed a new law restoring the independence of the NABU and SAPO, albeit with some minor restrictions still in place. Ukrainian civil society leaders rightfully claimed success. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. The hyperbolic claims by some Western critics that Zelenskyy had become a dictator proved unfounded. Autocrats like Putin do not respond to protesters. They arrest them. They kill them.
By contrast, Zelenskyy responded to the criticism and corrected his error. And just days after their independence was restored, the agencies got to work, arresting several officials on suspicion of bribery in relation to an ongoing military procurement case.
Ukraine’s democratic course-correction has made me think hard about our American system of government. When the Rada first passed the law, I wrote on social media that Zelenskyy should not sign it. When he did sign it, I criticized the decision in the media and circulated articles and social media posts by Ukrainian opponents of the law.
But, honestly, I found it somewhat hypocritical to do so given the new levels of corruption here in the United States and our lack of effective response to it. I wondered if I had the right to criticize Zelenskyy when my own president was committing major acts of corruption and civil society, Congress and myself have done next to nothing to slow it down, let alone stop it. I can’t help thinking that American voices promoting democracy and the rule of law abroad are a lot less credible in the second Trump era.
As Ukrainians were demonstrating against Zelenskyy’s bad law, the Trump administration was completing the paperwork to receive a Boeing 747-8 jet from the government of Qatar, estimated to be worth over $400 million. American taxpayers are going to foot the giant bill to retrofit this plane for presidential use, only to have it given to Trump after he retires. But there were no major demonstrations against this corruption.
Nor have there been massive protests in response to Trump making vast amounts of money by issuing his meme coin, $TRUMP. Nor to the fact that, just this week, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), because he did not like the numbers in the latest jobs report—a report, incidentally, that the BLS Commissioner does not even write. Many pundits on television berated this decision as an act of autocratic overreach. But to date there are no viable plans to reverse it.
Zelenskyy, like Trump, enjoys majority support in his country’s legislature. Yet in certain respects Ukrainian democracy seems to have more effective and rapid checks on executive branch abuse than the United States. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of America did not investigate the legality of Trump’s actions because… the United States does not have a national anti-corruption bureau, nor does it have a specialized anti-corruption prosecutor’s office.
I roundly criticized Zelenskyy’s decision to undermine the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies. I now applaud the young activists who produced a correction to that bad first law and a new, better law just days later. This episode gives reason to hope that Ukrainian democracy is alive and well and will thrive after Putin’s barbaric invasion has ended. But this victory in Ukraine has made me wonder about the resilience of democratic institutions in the United States. For decades, we Americans thought we had something to teach Ukrainians about democracy. Instead, it looks like we could learn some things from small-d democrats in Ukraine.
Michael McFaul is the Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, and author of the forthcoming book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder.
A version of this piece was originally published on Michael McFaul’s Substack, McFaul’s World.
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I would say that maybe the USA ( which is broke) shouldn't be sending billions and billions to help Ukrainians kill Russians. Oh wait! I remember now, Big Bad dictator Putin attacked vibrant democracy Ukraine, led by democratically elected spunky former comedian. Except that a few years into the war, Spunky comedian cancelled elections. Of course the prequel part of the story that is never told is that Ukraine was a CIA playground for decades before Russia invaded. We overthrew the previous Ukrainian government because they were allegedly "pro-Russian". We wouldn't rule out Ukraine joining NATO, a military alliance with Russia's declared adversaries.... I always say to my pro Ukraine friends: " Would America EVER accept that Mexico or Canada was in a binding military alliance with China?". No. So why should Russia accept that Ukraine is part of NATO? See Jeffrey Sach's videos for much much more...
Once upon a time, there was an entity within the US Department of Justice named
"The Office of Legal Counsel". How quaint.