Ukraine has not had a legitimate government or president since the 2014 Maidan coup, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has said. He also reiterated earlier statements that Moscow does not consider Vladimir Zelensky, Ukraine’s current leader, a legitimate head of state.
While Zelensky’s five-year term as Ukraine’s president ended on May 20, he opted not to hold a presidential election, citing martial law imposed due to the conflict with Russia.
In an interview with Izvestia on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok on Thursday, Peskov said that “de jure President Zelensky now is not the legitimate president” of Ukraine.
“Let us not forget that it is a country where the legitimacy of power was interrupted in 2014 when a coup was staged there,” the Kremlin spokesperson argued.
He added that Ukrainians would likely have a hard time dealing with what he described as the “snowball of illegitimacy” down the road.
At the same time, Peskov stressed that Russia has always been open to settling the Ukraine conflict via the political-diplomatic route. He said that the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers, however, do not seem willing to engage in such dialogue at present.
During a Q&A session with the media on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in early June, Russian President Vladimir Putin also stated that those who believe that “Russia started the war in Ukraine” are wrong. He argued that “it began with a coup in Ukraine – an unconstitutional coup d’etat.”
Speaking to the issue of Zelensky’s legitimacy as Ukraine’s leader, Putin suggested at the time that his powers should have been transferred to the country’s parliament following the expiration of his term in office.
Zelensky’s failure to relinquish the post seems to be in breach of “Article 109 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code, which says that this should be treated as seizure of power,” the Russian president argued at the time.
Putin went on to state that Ukraine’s Western backers were keeping Zelensky in power for now only to blame him for upcoming “unpopular decisions,” such as the lowering of the “mobilization age to 18 years.”
“I think that the US administration will force the leadership of Ukraine to make these decisions… and then will get rid of Zelensky,” he said.