Schrödinger’s Far Right: Ukraine’s hyper-nationalists and neo-Nazis - not really there and yet strong enough to dominate

Ukraine under the Zelensky regime is a place that is difficult to comprehend. It has a “democracy” but no functioning opposition. It features the usual “vibrant civil society” that every monoglot Western correspondent loves to hang out with in up-to-date coffeeshops, but it has no independent media to speak of.

Last but not least, its far right is either simply not there or marginal and irrelevant, as multiple Western “experts” have assured us, but it also has a veto on an essential, literally vital question of foreign policy, namely if and how to make peace in order to end a devastating war. 

That peculiar power of Ukraine’s far right is at the core of a long article recently published by France 24. The head of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Aleksandr Merezhko, we learn, has caused heated discussions. Also a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, Merezhko has triggered some of his compatriots with statements he made in the Financial Times.