Ukraine’s President Volodymyr during a welcoming ceremony in front of the Palace of Serbia, in August.ANDREJ ISAKOVIC/AFP/Getty Images
A word often applied to Volodymyr Zelensky by foreign leaders and commentators is “Churchillian.”
They’re referring, accurately, to the Ukrainian President’s ability to rally his people around acts of heartbreaking sacrifice, to marshal an international coalition to arm and support his country, and to embrace innovative technologies that have transformed the way the world arms itself.
But there’s another meaning of “Churchillian” that’s also applied to Mr. Zelensky, mainly at home.
Winston Churchill was a disastrously bad domestic leader. In cabinet before the war and as Prime Minister after, he was fiscally and monetarily ruinous, resistant to reform, reactionary, secretive and given to cronyism and hubris. Some of those qualities may have been beneficial wartime traits, but even during those years he was fiercely criticized for his cloistered, aristocratic approach.
When I’ve asked well-informed Ukrainians whether this second sense of “Churchillian” applies to Mr. Zelensky, they’ve invariably thrown up their hands and given me that very Ukrainian “but of course” face. That includes, especially in the last year, people within his party.
This became very public this week, when Mykhailo Fedorov, the young defence minister who had been fired by Mr. Zelensky in July, released a nine-minute YouTube video condemning Ukraine’s “systemic crisis of governance” and calling for wartime elections.
Explainer: Can Ukraine hold elections while at war?
This has been the second summer in a row in which Ukrainians have taken to the streets against Mr. Zelensky’s actions to protect loyalists. In this case, Mr. Fedorov was a highly popular figure widely credited with introducing high-tech drone warfare and thus bringing the war to Russia and turning its tide. He had been sacked because Mr. Zelensky felt he needed to end a paralyzing feud between him and military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi, an old-guard conventional tactician. To many Ukrainians, it looked like yet another instance in which their President favoured loyalty over competence.
After days of street protests, Mr. Zelensky responded by also firing Mr. Syrskyi, and putting new people into both offices. It resembled the events of 2025, when Ukraine’s two anti-corruption administrations had exposed a scheme in which businessman Timur Mindich, a friend and former business partner of the President, was accused of laundering about US$100-million in kickbacks paid to Ukraine’s nuclear-power agency; days later, anti-corruption agents raided the home of Andriy Yermak, who as head of the President’s office was Ukraine’s most powerful official, allegedly in connection with the scheme. Mr. Zelensky forced him out in November.
Protesters march during a rally calling for a reform of the defence sector and the reinstatement of defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, on Aug. 16.SERHII OKUNEV/AFP/Getty Images
Mr. Zelensky had signed a law last July that effectively neutered the corruption agencies, subordinating them to cabinet (at the very moment they were wiretapping his friend and his colleague). Only after large-scale mass protests last summer did he restore the independent status of the agencies, allowing the investigations to go ahead.
Mr. Zelensky has never really served as a peacetime leader. When he was elected in 2019, Russia’s invasion and occupation of Crimea and Donbas had been under way for almost five years; nevertheless, he was elected on an anti-corruption and modernization platform. He hadn’t been greatly successful at either, except that, unlike previous Ukrainian presidents, he wasn’t an oligarch, and hasn’t personally been associated with serious corruption. Some of his actions before 2022, and many after, have reversed modernization: Many mayors and premiers are now appointed loyalists rather than elected figures; only a single state-controlled TV news broadcast is allowed; many officials appear to have been replaced with more loyal and unquestioning figures.
It’s important not to mistake this Ukrainian critique of Mr. Zelensky with the ones that come from Moscow and Washington. President Vladimir Putin has long characterized the Ukrainian leader as a “Nazi” (while somehow simultaneously portraying him as an agent of “degenerate” Western homosexuality and gender politics). Donald Trump last year claimed Mr. Zelensky was “using the war” to avoid elections and that Ukraine is “not a democracy.”
Mr. Zelensky is decidedly not from the far right; in fact, his election in 2019 provoked the permanent collapse of extreme-right politics. And there are good reasons why no Ukrainian leader would have held an election since 2022. Wartime elections are forbidden under Ukraine’s constitution. Polling stations would serve as targets for Russian missiles. The six million Ukrainian refugees abroad would need a way to vote. And preventing Moscow from manipulating the vote, as it has in the past, would be very hard.
It’s unlikely an election will, or could, be held now. But until peace arrives, the two-thirds of Ukrainians who want a new postwar leader can take consolation that their protests, and Ukraine’s imperfect system of checks and balances, have been working.
Unlike in Moscow – or, increasingly, the United States – the corruption and cronyism get exposed, and Mr. Zelensky does reverse himself when confronted.
He needs to be confronted more. Before the war enters a fifth year, Ukrainians deserve a free media, democratic decentralization and mechanisms that ensure competence will be favoured over loyalty, curbing their President’s worst instincts.