Back in February — before he belatedly realized that Russia, rather than Ukraine, was to blame for the failure of peace talks — President Donald Trump denounced President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “Dictator without Elections.”

That unwarranted charge, which has been pushed by the Kremlin propaganda apparatus, seemed to gain a bit more credence this week when Zelensky signed a law that would limit the independence of two agencies probing corruption within his government. But when protesters took to the streets en masse, Zelensky didn’t respond like a dictator. Instead of cracking down on protesters, he vowed to reverse course. The outcome of the anti-corruption protests shows that Ukraine remains very much a democracy — albeit a nascent one locked in a war for survival that, in any country, serves to enlarge executive authority.

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