Ukraine’s president is getting serious
‘‘No promises, so no disappointments,’’ said Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky during the election campaign that made him the president in May. It was a daring, even cynical thing for a politician to say, but then he’s not a politician.
Zelensky is a television comedian who really doesn’t have much in the way of policies yet, but he does represent a fresh start for Ukraine, and that’s what voters wanted.
After two non-violent popular revolutions in 2004 and 2014 that promised change, twice the country ended up back in the hands of the same old corrupt post-Soviet oligarchs. Zelensky didn’t need to make promises. He just needed to be different.
He hasn’t actually done much since he got elected, but that’s because he doesn’t have a majority in the Rada (parliament). In fact, he doesn’t have anybody in the Rada, because his party, Servant of the People, was only formed last year. So his first priority had to be a fresh election for a new parliament. It’s happening next Sunday.
If Zelensky’s party doesn’t win an absolute majority in the Rada, it will at least get 45-48 per cent of the vote. Then he just has to pick a coalition partner from among four smaller parties that will get 10 per cent or less. The likeliest would be Holos, the new party founded by rockstar Svyatoslav Vakarchuk.
Yes, I know. Two showbiz figures, complete novices in politics, trying to run a country of 44 million people, which, by the way, is in a proxy war with Russia. What could possibly go wrong?
But if you are ready for generational turnover, as Ukrainian voters obviously are, then by definition the politicians you back will be younger people – Zelensky is 41, and Vakarchuk is 44 – with little experience in politics.
Most of the members of the new Rada will also be tyros. Vakarchuk’s party is so dedicated to changing the way things are done that it is not letting any member of the current parliament run on its list. Zelensky’s parliamentary list is more varied. About a one-third reformers, one-third people with personal or business ties to Zelensky, and one-third people with ties to Ihor Kolomoisky.
This is when the red lights start flashing, because Kolomoisky is a major oligarch who owns the TV channel that has been broadcasting Zelensky’s show, Servant of the People, for the past three years.
Servant of the People has a heartwarming plot in which Zelensky plays a high school teacher who is suddenly elevated to the presidency by the voters after his rant about the appalling state of Ukrainian politics, secretly taped by a student, goes viral.
Now, Zelensky leads a real political party with that name and he is living out the same miracle. Or is he just following a cunning strategy that he and Kolomoisky settled on around four years ago?
What did Kolomoisky stand to get out of it? Well, he was self-exiled in Israel because of a huge business and legal dispute with Petro Poroshenko, another oligarch who was president at the time and might send him to jail. Kolomoisky could only go home if Poroshenko lost the next election.
But why would Zelensky play along with that? He was already successful, and he could probably have sold that TV series to some other outlet. Did he just want to be president? And if so, did he really plan to do Kolomoisky’s bidding once he got the job?
Thinking too hard about this can drive you crazy. For example, Zelensky has just appointed Andriy Bohdan, once Kolomoisky’s lawyer, to the key job of head of administration in the president’s office. That’s pretty suspicious.
However, Bohdan has also served as lawyer to almost every other oligarch in the country, and he probably knows where all the bodies are buried. That would be very useful if Zelensky really plans to go after them all, which he must do if he intends to change the way the country is run. You can argue it both ways with equal plausibility.
Right or wrong, however, most Ukrainians currently believe that Zelensky is the real thing – and actually, so do I. Of course, I have been wrong a couple of times in the past.
Acouple of sayings that have formed a reasonable part of my life have recurred to me in the wake of Monday morning’s heartstopping climax to the Cricket World Cup final.
I’m not about to quote them to any Black Caps player. But perhaps I’m finally learning their truth, decades after I first heard them.
As I looked at Martin Guptill standing on the Lord’s turf, tears touching the corners of his hollow eyes, leaning on the supportive shoulder of concerned team-mate Ish Sodhi, I felt genuine sympathy for him.
Because I realised the final agonising seconds of that last attempted run in the deciding super over would probably replay themselves in his mind, in slow motion – perhaps in dreams, definitely while awake – for days to come.
They would gradually reduce in frequency, but they’d have one inevitable ending. Wicketkeeper Jos Buttler grabbing that pinpoint throw from the outfield, breaking the wicket with Guptill well short of his ground, and winning the World Cup for England by the slenderest of possible margins. Perhaps interspersed with another image; Guptill’s pinpoint throw from the deep in the last over of England’s innings freakishly hitting the bat of a diving Ben Stokes and squirting away to the boundary.
I finally remembered my Dad, about 48 hours later. He’s been gone 17 years, but if somehow he’d been watching with me, he’d have said it: ‘‘It matters not who won or lost, but how you played the game.’’
I lost count of how often I heard that growing up, often brushing it off in the agony of a shattering defeat, more commonly for a team I supported than one I was in, because I wasn’t a great sporting achiever, but like most of my family, I lived sport.
Dad wasn’t a Kiwi, but I just know if somehow he’d been here on Monday morning, his admiration for the behaviour of the whole Black Caps team, and especially remarkable captain Kane Williamson, would have known no bounds.
Because it was exemplary. You want an example of how to behave in the face of a soul-crushing defeat that was within a hair’s breadth of being a victory, you have your case study for the rest of sporting eternity right there.
I’m not sure exactly where Dad first heard the phrase he so faithfully uttered. The closest a web search can get me is a poem by a legendary American sportswriter of the early 20th century, Henry Grantland Rice, which ends:
‘‘For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,
He writes – not that you won or lost – but how you played the game!’’
I’ve struggled to find the whole poem among the many Rice wrote, though fair play and dignity in defeat seem like prominent themes.
rules and imperfect officiating have been biting teams and their supporters on the bum as long as there’s been sport, I’d wager, because we’re all human.
And that’s where the other saying I’ve been reminded of this week comes in. A man who has had a significant impact on my life says it all the time, quoting from an old South African golf pro and commentator, Denis Hutchinson: ‘‘You play the course the way it is, not the way you’d like it to be.’’
I think it’s finally dawned on me that as good as it makes us feel, the focus on winning to the exclusion of all else in sport, and sometimes in life generally, has gone too far. It’s about doing your utmost, then accepting with grace and dignity the possibility that somebody else’s utmost might be a little better.
Yes, money has dramatically changed sport – not for the better in my view – and it’s still the best reality TV there is, which is probably why the organisers of events like the World Cup are so determined there has to be an outright winner, even when England and New Zealand sharing the cup this week would have been the fairest outcome. They couldn’t be separated, so why insist on separating them?
Another sporting adage comes to mind here: ‘‘No-one remembers who came second.’’ What nonsense. I’m sure nobody who watched Monday’s drama will come close to forgetting the brave boys in black and their contribution.
For me, I’m choosing to remember it as the day a squad of hugely courageous Kiwis made the whole country proud, and filled cricket fans the world over with admiration for their grit, dignity and grace.
Well done, team.