Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky perfectly portrays this week’s Trends Journal cover: FOLLOW YOUR POLITICAL LEADER. DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD! YOU’RE NOTHING MORE THAN A PIECE OF SHIT.

To make it perfectly clear, what right does one person, a politician, to tell his country that he decided that he will stay in power and no one in the country can challenge him.

Zelensky announced last week that given the state of the war, it is not the right time to hold elections in Ukraine because it is important that “politically divisive things” stop. 

Zelensky, who is wrapping up his first five-year term, found a loophole in the country’s constitution that states elections cannot be held while under martial law. Zelensky declared martial law on 24 February 2022, the day Russia invaded.

The next parliamentary elections would normally be held in October 2023; the presidential election should take place in the spring of 2024.

“We must realize that now is the time of defense, the time of the battle that determines the fate of the state and people, not the time of manipulations, which only Russia expects from Ukraine. I believe that now is not the right time for elections,” he said in a video address last week, according to The Hill.

Zelensky, a law-degree-carrying comedian who played the Ukrainian president on a TV show, ran for office in 2019 and vowed to work to clean up the crony capitalism and corruption in Kyiv. The show was called “Servant of the People.”

The act worked and Zelensky, who was 41 in the spring of 2019, carried 73 percent of the vote. But his government was never serious about peace with Russia, and, instead, instigated a war by appeals to the U.S. and NATO and refusal to address grievances in the Donbas. 

Clara Weiss wrote in WSWS that Ukraine has been far from a shining example of a democracy since the start of the war. “All major opposition parties are banned, and opponents of the war and the government are routinely persecuted, arrested, and ‘disappeared,’” she wrote. 

She wrote that the Zelensky regime is no longer even trying to hide it and is dropping any pretenses of ‘democracy.’” (See “DUH-MOCK-RACY IN ACTION: UKRAINE’S ZELENSKY POSTPONES ELECTIONS UNTIL AFTER WAR” 5 Jul 2023, “ORTHODOX MONKS IN UKRAINE REFUSE ZELENSKY’S EVICTION ORDER” 4 Apr 2023, and “ZELENSKY TO UKRAINIAN MEDIA: I OWN YOU” 10 Jan 2023.)

TRENDPOST: Weiss wrote that the announcement that elections will be put on ice is just another “nail in the coffin of NATO’s war propaganda against Russia over Ukraine, which the media has portrayed as a war in defense of ‘democracy,’ and the rights of the Ukrainian people.” 

Zelensky finds himself in a weakening position as the West turns its attention to Israel and he engages in public spats with military leaders. 

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican hopeful in 2024, touched one of the mainstream media’s third rails during Wednesday’s presidential debate in Miami when he appeared to call Zelensky a “Nazi.”

Ramaswamy, who has been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine, said it is madness to look at Kyiv and see a “paragon of democracy.”

“This is a country that has banned 11 opposition parties. It has consolidated all media into one state TV media arm… that’s not democratic,” he said.

He also noted that Zelensky has threatened not to hold elections this year “unless the U.S. forks over more money.”

“That is not democratic. It has celebrated a Nazi in its ranks, the comedian in cargo pants, a man called Zelensky… That is not democratic,” he said.