It means that the ultranationalists have growing power over Zelensky, who in his previous political incarnation wouldn’t have dared gestures like these.
A couple of news stories that establish an ominous pattern if you’re reading the prospects for Ukraine.
From Politico Europe:
Polish President Karol Nawrocki on Friday said he would move to strip Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Poland’s highest state honor after Kyiv named a military unit after the wartime Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Poland is not one to go light on Russia, or be unnecessarily hostile to Russia’s foes. The president of Poland belongs to a party whose leader believes the Russians assassinated his brother.
And another from Euro News:
The repatriated remains of 20th-century Ukrainian military leader Andrii Melnyk and his wife Sofiia Fedak-Melnyk were reburied at the National Military Memorial Cemetery near Kyiv on Monday.
The ceremony was attended by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials.
The ashes of the key leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and his spouse were exhumed last week in Luxembourg and then transported to Ukraine.
“Today we all see that the Ukrainian idea can overcome what once seemed absolutely insurmountable,” Zelenskyy said at the ceremony on Monday.
Who is Andrii Melnyk, you might ask. He was, like the nationalist hero lauded by the Ukrainian far right, Stephen Bandera, a member of the OUN, the paramilitary that collaborated with the Nazis in World War II. He was more extreme and more collaborationist than Bandera. The reburial has drawn condemnation from Poland and Israel.
Many Western partisans of the Ukrainian cause have tried to make a taboo of talking about Ukrainian ultranationalists and their historic affinity for the Third Reich, and for their racism. But it has been obvious since the Maidan revolution that there is a tacit alliance between Ukrainian liberals who want to reorient their nation to the West and away from Russia, and with groups like Azov and other Banderite factions. Not everyone who wears Nazi symbols in Ukraine is a Nazi. But, also, Poland and Israel aren’t getting upset over nothing, either.
Why I think it is a bad sign: One, it means that the ultranationalists have more and more power over Zelensky, who in his previous political incarnation wouldn’t have dared a gesture like this. Second, it probably is a sign of Ukraine’s desperate manpower problem. Unable to recruit from men who have left the country, and unable to deliver on the promises of entry into Western political institutions, the Ukrainian government is increasingly doubling down on this one ultra-committed faction, promising its members a pure, cleansed Ukraine, even if it continues to cost them goodwill among nations that support them.