Hacker News Reader

Comment by tut-urut-utut | Hacker News Reader

I agree Putin is some kind of dictator, but are you really calling Ukraine democracy? Then you can also call North Korea democracy.

View on HN

Uhm, yes? They elected a comedian with no political experience or ties for f's sake. But I suppose that was some sort of rigged election or he's just a figurehead or something?

Uh, he's banned all opposition parties. Where's the democracy? He was a direct employee of a Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, plenty of ties, just check the Pandora Papers...

What are you talking about? He didn't ban opposition, only pro-russian (and that is just small part of opposition).

Yeah? One of those parties had nearly 10% of the seats in the Ukrainian parliament. That's not a democratic move.

are you backpedaling from "banned ALL opposition parties"? it's unclear whether or not you still believe this is the case

Election where major opposition parties were banned? A democratic society where 40+% of population is not allowed to use their own language? When opposition leaders get arrested? Where almost a 100 people were publicly burned alive, and still no one is punished? Where right wing extremists / neonazi paramilitaries are incorporated in an official army and given a licence to kill, as documented by OSCE multiple times in eastern part of the country? And all that happened before this war. Just that they now fight Russians doesn't mean they are democracy, they are just a useful enemy of an enemy.

And the list goes on and on, although only one of the mentioned things would be enough to consider such a country as non-democratic at least.

I think corruption and a rule of oligarch is the least problem in a country like that.

>are you really calling Ukraine democracy

Isn't it strange how Russian money kept trying to prevent it from becoming so and yet, it kept becoming one?

There is some speculation that the liberal democratic rumblings from Zelenski are what forced Putin to act. I have no illusions that a country with deeply rooted corruption issues like Ukraine can turn on a dime, but he was at least voicing support for the idea. If he managed to root out some of the corruption then Putin would lose the ability to puppet the state entirely, and that's a slippery slope to becoming part of Europe and being lost to Russia forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com