Once a decade, Ukraine has a moment in which street protests redefine the country’s political direction. The Orange revolution of 2004; the Maidan revolution of 2014; and now, over the past 10 days, the first major wave of protest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
A series of unexpectedly boisterous and well-attended demonstrations forced Volodymyr Zelenskyy to execute a swift U-turn on his decision to scrap the independence of two anti-corruption bodies. On Thursday, MPs reversed the contentious changes they had adopted a week previously. Outside the parliament building, crowds whooped and cheered as the result of the vote was announced.
The size, scope and demands of this latest protest movement have been much more modest than those of its revolutionary predecessors, but the spectacle has been no less remarkable, given the context of full-scale war in which it has taken place.
The final, celebratory gathering came only hours after the latest massive Russian airstrike had hit Kyiv, killing at least 28 people including three children. Hardly anyone had managed a good night’s sleep before arriving at parliament armed with banners and high spirits.
This wartime context to a large extent inspired the protests: a common sentiment that when people are laying down their lives for the country on the frontline, the government has to live up to a certain set of values. But it also limited their scope. There was none of the revolutionary enthusiasm of Maidan present here; instead, there was a sober acknowledgement that all-out political unrest would only play into Russia’s hands.
“There were some people chanting for impeachment and the vast majority of others said, ‘Shut up, we do not undermine the legitimacy of the president, what happened is that the legitimate president made a mistake,’” said Inna Sovsun, an MP from the opposition Holos party who attended several protests.
Dmytro Koziatynskyi, whose post on social media provided the initial spark for the protest, dismissed any comparisons to Maidan for exactly this reason. “Even if they don’t pass the law, this will never become anything other than a peaceful protest,” he said, in an interview before the parliamentary vote.
Koziatynskyi was a masters student in the Czech Republic before returning to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion in 2022 and signing up to become a combat medic. After three years on various parts of the frontline, he left the army in May and now works for an NGO. When he saw the news last week that parliament had rushed through a law curtailing the independence of two bodies specially designed to go after high-level corruption, he found it “insulting”, he said. “People are not fighting so that our government can do some crazy stuff, that destroys all our achievements since 2014,” he said.
He penned an angry post on social media calling on people to protest against the new law. He expected “maximum 100 people, mostly friends and acquaintances” to join the protest. By the second night there were about 10,000 people outside the Ivan Franko theatre, the nearest point to the presidential office that is accessible to the public.
Most of those who came out were young – this has been a protest wave dominated by gen Z, with friends competing for the wittiest slogan or meme reference on their handwritten placards. On Wednesday evening, a man leading the singing of the Ukrainian national anthem through a loudspeaker was holding a sign that bore a single word: “Cringe”.
Suddenly, the fate of two relatively small institutions – the national anti-corruption bureau, known as Nabu, and the specialised anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, Sapo – had become the issue of the day among Ukrainian teenagers.
Nabu and Sapo were established after the Maidan revolution as part of a drive against the long-running scourge of corruption in Ukraine, financed partly with US money. Some western observers agree that there are problems with Nabu and Sapo: too many cases opened and not enough of them brought to a conclusion, for one. In theory, some streamlining would make sense; in practice, Zelenskyy’s move looked a lot like bringing independent investigators under political control.
With the Trump administration no longer pushing an anti-corruption agenda, and Europe on summer holidays, Zelenskyy’s team appears to have felt they could push the bill through quickly, without anyone paying much attention.
That might have been the case were it not for the protests. But the images of thousands of young people demanding the law’s repeal forced European politicians to take a stand, and several leaders spoke privately to Zelenskyy to tell him he needed to find a way out of the self-inflicted mess.
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“This became a major breach of trust. It’s problematic both from an EU accession point of view and in that it makes it much harder for friends of Ukraine to continue making the case that the country needs support,” said one diplomatic source in Kyiv.
Zelenskyy’s response was swift and decisive, even if somewhat embarrassing for the MPs of his Servant of the People party, who were instructed to vote against the very thing they had been ordered to vote for the previous week.
Now that the status quo has been re-established, there are two very different readings of the whole episode. One sees a leader using wartime powers to try to stifle independent institutions, too out of touch to predict the obvious backlash. Another reflects on how, even in wartime, Ukrainian society is still capable of expressing democratic sentiment, and its leaders still able to react swiftly to it.
Koziatynskyi, whose post started off the protest wave, leans towards the second view. “The protests showed that Ukrainian democracy is as strong as possible in times of a full-scale war, and our society is mature enough to have a dialogue with the government, and the government is able to listen,” he said.
Zelenskyy’s five-year presidential term should have ended last year, but almost all Ukrainians, including his fiercest opponents, agree that elections are both legally and technically impossible during wartime. With Russia’s nightly attacks continuing, and a hope that Donald Trump might finally start getting tougher on Russia, that consensus has not changed. Nobody wants upheaval, but the outburst of protest may yet change the political atmosphere.
“Legally, everything will go back to how it was; politically, it’s more complicated,” said Sovsun. “It’s unpredictable what this might have done to Ukrainian society. We have basically lifted the unspoken rule that we don’t protest during martial law.”