Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shall be ousted this year – having alienated allies domestically and abroad (the military, the far-right, and the West), he is seen by many Ukrainians as a “traitor to the nation”, and thus getting rid of him will, after all, be a good thing. So says Ukraine’s exiled opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk, in a January 10 column. Previously, he had stated Zelensky “gambled away Ukraine”, took advantage of “Nazi ideology”, and has overestimated the West’s will to support his country. Such rhetoric is to be expected from someone like Medvedchuk (who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin), right? He is not a lone voice, though, and the political camp he is part of should be taken seriously.

Medvedchuk is not a very familiar name except to Ukrainians and to analysts. Who is this man? An “oligarch” (as Eastern European multimillionaires and billionaires are often described in the West), this lawyer and businessman, running under the “Opposition Platform — For Life” (OPZZh) party banner, was elected as People’s Deputy of Ukraine on 29 August 2019. That same year, the OPZZh party won 43 seats in Parliament – and came second in the elections. Its program? Undoing the controversial “de-communization” and “Ukrainization” policies, and renegotiating the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement, while reviving trade with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a bloc of 9 post-soviet states (Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Moldava). Moreover, it called for the “neutrality of Ukraine in the political-military sphere and [its] non-participation in any military-political alliances.”

The OPZZh party was thus yet another........

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