KBF
Model X owner (formerly Cdn Signature Model S)
The term 'democracy' is very broad. Technically Russia and China have elections, too (and claim publicly to be democratic - I've read the Chinese Constitution, very interesting...). I didn't want to get into that for the sake of going too far off the thread. American 'democracy' is very different than the UK or Canada; and Scandinavian countries or New Zealand might question how much power regular citizens have in our North American elections... In the USA because there's a choice between only 2 options (and a very polarized society, not to mention the electoral college structure), and in Canada because as low as 37% of the popular vote can create a majority government, and most votes don't go towards electing any representative (in NZ as high as 97% of cast votes are represented in Parliament in past elections). There's more at play than a mere mechanical vote.
Back to Russia/Ukraine. Simply saying they are democratic now and voting to elect Boris Yeltsin clearly did not create lasting change. The hope I see for Ukraine is that before the war, they were starting the difficult task of slowly rooting out corruption. It's what directly led to this conflict - Putin lost his puppet leader and other bribed officials that were pro-Putin.
Post-war, the so-called Free World's response will contribute to how Russia recovers (or not), but in the end, the people of Russia will have to change, admit their mistakes, make reparations honestly, and become more involved in ensuring a just society, or they'll revert to despotism so they can blame someone else.
When it comes to Ukraine, it looks very likely that they're committed to overcoming corruption and joining the EU. The general population seems to have woken up and decided to become involved in saving their culture and country. The ones that have historically done that in Russia have either been arrested, murdered, or exiled.
