By Ayman Okeil
It is said that a person loses their shadow in two cases: when walking in the dark or when turning into a ghost with no existence. However, the current Ukrainian president, Zelensky, a former comedic actor, lost his shadow when he surrendered his country to the unknown and led it into a war that Ukraine has no stake in, leaving it to other nations to determine the fate of its people. This has forced him into an unequal confrontation with a formidable military and nuclear power, namely the Russian Federation. Development in his country has faltered, and he has begun to shirk the international commitments he boasted about when he was elected president.
Zelensky may have come to power in Ukraine through democratic elections, according to most reports that evaluated this experience, but democracy is not a cure-all, nor is it a magic solution for societal expectations of prosperity. This was highlighted in a study released by the High Commissioner regarding the challenges facing democracy. The man who secured around 73.2% of the total votes with a significant lead over his opponent in 2019 currently refuses to hold elections as if he did not come to power through that process, whether for the parliamentary elections scheduled for October 2023 or the presidential elections, where Zelensky’s five-year term will end in May 2024. The excuse is already known: the declaration of martial law.
I hope these views are not seen as glorifying Russia and its president, Putin, or as siding with one party in the Russian-Ukrainian war, because the truth is quite the opposite. One only needs to look at the cost of this war in Ukraine, which I believe is partly due to impulsive decisions made by the Ukrainian president when he leaned towards the West at the expense of Russia and sought to join NATO, and the extent of the use of the Russian language, which he defended while demonizing Russia for the West. This has led Putin to publicly accuse Ukraine of attempting to erase Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine.
Although all of the above is not a justification for the war or its continuation, it illustrates how they fueled Ukraine’s confrontation with a challenge it was ill-prepared for. The Ukrainian president misapplied the saying, “When you have five bullets, don’t create six problems.” Perhaps because the originator of this saying is Russian. Consequently, Ukraine suffered immense losses. According to conservative estimates, Ukraine lost around 400,000 soldiers between dead and wounded. The number of internally displaced persons has reached 3.8 million, and the war’s cost, according to the head of the Ukrainian parliamentary budget committee, Roksolana Pedliashova, is about $172 million daily.
This is not all; corruption in Ukraine has reached unprecedented rates, affecting even the president himself and his chief of staff, who had a relationship with Zelensky for years and served as a legal advisor at Kvartal-95, the television production company founded by Zelensky. On November 28, 2025, anti-corruption officials conducted searches of the apartment and office of Yermak. Subsequently, Zelensky announced that Yermak had resigned due to investigations into an alleged $100 million bribery scheme from Energoatom, the operator of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants. According to available information, part of these funds was used to build four luxurious and expensive houses outside the capital, Kyiv, including one designated for Yermak himself.
The situation did not stop at the human and economic costs of the war in Ukraine or the rampant corruption; the man has even started to evade his country’s international commitments. Ukraine has unilaterally withdrawn from the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and has begun relying on foreign mercenaries, as well as recruiting and training children to operate drones and collect information as a strategy to compensate for the shortage in troop numbers. After all that has been mentioned, can we not say that the Ukrainian president exemplifies the man who has lost his shadow?
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