The first days of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s administration have left a mixed impression.
On the one hand, his inauguration address on May 20 was on point. He delivered it at the parliament, which is largely hostile towards him. He touched upon almost all the key topics: ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, ending corruption, and bringing back the many Ukrainians who have left the country. It was a nice touch to ask officials to stop putting up the president’s portrait in all public offices. We’ll see if they do it.
There are things we wish he would have included in his speech. For instance, a promise to be the guarantor of free speech and a pledge to force a full investigation into the murders of journalists, including Georgiy Gongadze in 2000 and Pavel Sheremet in 2016, as well as attacks on activists, such as the horrific murder of Kateryna Gandziuk in 2018.
Still, his address was a promising start. What followed was worse.
It was expected that Zelenskiy would appoint to top positions some of his partners from his two-decade-long show business career. But we also remember that Zelenskiy campaigned on the promise to bring “new faces” to government.
However, his most important appointment so far fell short of this promise. His new Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan is a lawyer who worked in government under ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, and officially represented the notorious oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky right up to the time he joined Zelenskiy’s team.
Even more worrying than his background is the way he was appointed. Bohdan is subject to the law on lustration and is banned from taking the chief of staff position. Zelenskiy nevertheless appointed him, quoting a dubious legal loophole that the authors of the law disproved.
Bohdan may be a great manager, and the law may be imperfect. But it’s a worrying sign that Zelenskiy started his presidency with bending the law to his need. We’ve seen his predecessors do it. We’ve seen enough to know that once presidents start ignoring the law, they rarely stop at small things.
