Vendetta

Unlawful political revenge

Vladimir Socor from the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasian Daily Monitor on March 19 fleshes out motives behind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s decision to harass former President Petro Poroshenko on trumped up charges, instead of investigating pro-Russia member of parliament Viktor Medvedchuk.

Socor’s analysis was not lost on Oleg Sukhov in this week’s edition of the Kyiv Post.

Melinda Harding, the Atlantic Council’s deputy director of Eurasia Center and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, sounded the alarm a day earlier in an interview with Voice of America.

For Ze!Team and Kremlin leaders it’s too dangerous to have someone like Poroshenko running around, so he needs to be damaged.  This practice in Byzantium, where ancient Kyiv got its religion and founding mythologies, was called political mutilation, the practice of mangling one’s rivals by disfeaturing them: slicing off noses, amputating limbs and poking out eyes. 

Looking on the bright side, some Kyiv insiders offer a less gruesome explanation, saying it’s entirely possible Zelensky himself is oblivious to the efforts of his underlings to harass Poroshenko.  

“Maybe he doesn’t care at all. What preoccupies Zelensky most are his popularity ratings,” they say. “What he wants is applause.”

(to be continued…)