Given my track record for supporting Ukraine, this post may come as a surprise. However, this needs to be said.
On May the 20th, President Zelensky's term expired. He did not stand for reelection. Nor did anybody else run in an election to replace him. His term simply...expired, and he is still the President of Ukraine.
In effect, he is currently a dictator who rules with the tacit consent of the people. The rationale of "We can't hold an election during a war" is silly. If it's about people in occupied territories being unable to vote, that didn't stop the country between 2014-2022, when Crimea and the Donbass were under Russian rule. If it's about the practical difficulties of people heading to the ballots while bombs are being dropped on their heads, some kind of a mail-in election could be arranged. Granted, this would be an imperfect election but it's certainly better than nothing. For all intents and purposes Ukraine is declining to hold an election because they don't feel like it.
And this is barely mentioned at all. Zelensky's Wikipedia article makes no mention of his term having expired. It acts as though he's still the fully legitimate President of Ukraine when this claim is questionable at best. The article on the Presidency of Ukraine briefly mentions that elections have been suspended during the war, but that's it. The article still assumes Zelensky is the fully legitimate president.
Here's the issue at hand: the Western press, just because it's sympathetic to Ukraine, is collectively presenting the dictator of Ukraine as its elected head of state no different from, say, the British PM or the President of France.
I have nothing against Zelensky, and hopefully he will resume elections after the war ends. It just strikes me as gross how easily they set aside reporting the most basic facts when it suits their purposes. We're not talking about the state-run media of Russia or China, or North Korea. This is the free American press, yet it reads exactly like the mouthpiece of the Biden Administration.
