Excluding proponents of radically left ideas, such as Natalia Vitrenko, there were only two well-known populists in Ukrainian politics before Zelensky: Leonid Chernovetsky and Oleh Lyashko. It’s probably not worth including Yulia Tymoshenko in this list. Indeed, she utilized some elements of left-wing populism, promising, for example, to provide all the population, regardless of income level, with cheap gas. But in other respects, Tymoshenko was quite rational and even moderate. The years she led the Ukrainian government cannot be called a failure. On the contrary: the economic indicators were quite stable.
Unlike Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of the Radical Party, Oleh Lyashko, can confidently be called a true, classic populist. His rhetoric included a whole bouquet of various promises, not supported by any economic rationale. Lyashko promised to “bring a cow back to every home,” raise pensions and simultaneously reduce gas prices, restore Ukraine’s status as a nuclear power, and enter a monastery if he failed to fulfill all the points of his party’s pre-election program.
However, Oleh Lyashko and Volodymyr Zelensky have little in common. Lyashko’s populism was aimed primarily at the rural audience, so his rhetoric sounded a bit rough. But he often used funny impromptus, which attracted public attention. Zelensky operated differently before an audience, according to a carefully prepared script, aimed at a broad mass of voters. Unexpected impromptus in his speech, if they occurred, looked extremely awkward.
The closest to Zelensky can be called the former mayor of Kyiv, Leonid Chernovetsky − an experienced populist and the hero of numerous jokes. Despite millions of Ukrainians laughing at Chernovetsky, it did not prevent him from winning the Kyiv mayor’s election twice. Like Zelensky, Chernovetsky gained nationwide popularity thanks to television. In the months leading up to the 2006 Kyiv mayoral election, he regularly appeared as a guest on various political talk shows. Half Russian, half Jewish, Chernovetsky positioned himself as a devout Christian Evangelist, an experienced banker, philanthropist, and defender of the underprivileged. Leonid Chernovetsky always ended his TV appearances by urging viewers to call their moms, “because you probably haven’t talked to them for a while, and they’ve missed you.”
In addition to spiritual nourishment, potential voters were offered material benefits. At least two years before the election, Chernovetsky’s team began regularly distributing small food packages worth 5-10 dollars to tens of thousands of Kyiv pensioners. At that time, Ukrainian legislation did not prohibit politicians from “feeding” their electorate.
Like all populists, before the election, Chernovetsky offered Kyiv citizens a wide range of promises that would surely come true after his victory. He promised not to raise fares for public transport and utility tariffs, to perform quality repairs of almost all 10,400 capital’s apartment buildings, to complete the construction of a bridge to the distant Troieschyna district by 2010, and to double the city budget’s revenues. Of course, none of this was ever fulfilled.
However, Chernovetsky did not forget to do something else. During his tenure as Kyiv’s mayor, the city lost a significant amount of land, which was initially almost freely transferred to front men and then ended up under the control of Chernovetsky’s son-in-law – Vyacheslav Suprunenko.
Suprunenko also gained control over the most valuable assets of the municipal construction holding “Kyivmiskbud”. This scheme was so large-scale that in 2011, the entourage of the new president, Viktor Yanukovych, demanded Suprunenko and Chernovetsky to immediately return the stolen assets.
With Yanukovych’s rise to power, Chernovetsky’s political career began to fade. He lost the desire to appear on talk shows and no longer advised viewers to “call mom”. Kyiv was always considered a very valuable asset among politicians, so it’s not surprising that Yanukovych almost immediately wanted to put his own person at the head of the capital. And since Chernovetsky was long considered one of the country’s biggest corrupt officials, he was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. In July 2010, the Kyiv mayor left the country for a vacation, from which he somehow did not want to return.
The Party of Regions always had low popularity in Kyiv, so they were unlikely to have a chance to win the mayor’s election. For this reason, after Chernovetsky’s flight, Yanukovych’s team decided to put the elections on pause. By presidential decree, the capital was “temporarily” headed by the inconspicuous Olexandr Popov – a member of the Party of Regions, former mayor of the small town of Komsomolsk (now called Horishni Plavni). Popov served as acting mayor of Kyiv for almost three years until the start of the second Maidan.
As for Chernovetsky’s further fate, after several months of vacationing abroad, he ended up in Tbilisi, where he took Georgian citizenship and gradually began to engage in local politics. Hoping to repeat his success, Chernovetsky even registered a political party “Happy Georgia”. However, he did not gain significant popularity among Georgian voters.
In 2018, fearing that the Georgian authorities would extradite him to Ukraine, Leonid Chernovetsky left Tbilisi. According to the latest data, the former mayor of Kyiv lives in Tel Aviv and actively comments on Ukrainian politics on social networks. His son Stepan owns one of the largest streaming services in Eastern Europe, MEGOGO. Despite several criminal cases, the Chernovetsky family still owns many assets in Ukraine.
It should be added that in March 2022, after the start of the full-scale war, Leonid Chernovetsky effectively sided with Russia. On his Facebook, he wrote that Russia bombs exclusively military targets only so that Ukrainian military would not “take over Luhansk and Donetsk”. However, a few weeks later, after the massacre in Bucha and the death of thousands of civilians in Mariupol, Chernovetsky stopped writing about the war and requalified as a religious expert.