The emperor has no clothes
As Zelensky's star has fallen, so has Ukraine's chance of success, if it ever existed
Soon after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine two years ago today, a star was born. In America, Volodymyr Zelensky’s name had been familiar only to Beltway-savvy political junkies who followed the Ukrainegate impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump in 2019-20. He had been the recipient of the “perfect phone call”, as Trump called it, that Trump had made to press him to investigate alleged corruption in his country involving the former Vice President, Joe Biden, and his son Hunter.
The Bidens and their cronies had their fingerprints all over the place. Joe, known in Hunter’s business communications as “the Big Guy” whose cut of any business proceeds needed to be secured, had been Barack Obama’s point man for the 2014 Euromaidan coup that started the whole mess still ongoing in Ukraine (I discussed the origins of the conflict here, here, and here). After that, he was responsible for the conversion of the country from a corrupt cesspool aligned with Russia to a corrupt cesspool aligned with the United States.
But all that was before Zelensky’s reign. Now, his moment had finally, truly arrived. He was prepared. Saber-rattling for Ukraine’s entry into NATO and the EU, he began pushing all of Russia’s red buttons against NATO expansion toward their borders, all of which was music to the ears of Western arms manufacturers. He had been a well-known comedian and actor in Ukraine prior to his 2019 election to the presidency. With this background, he knew the game of political optics. But as well-trained as Zelensky may have been for this moment, he initially hesitated and faltered before his talents really kicked in.
When Russian bombs first started dropping on Kiev in February 2022 (after a failed 2021 Russian bid for a new security arrangement with the West that would have included Ukrainian neutrality), he retreated to his bunker for a few weeks, terrified that Putin might have him taken out, according to former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett. Bennett had traveled to Moscow on a peace mission and obtained Putin’s promise not to kill the Ukrainian president. Only when Zelensky was fully assured there was no target on his back did he emerge from his bunker and begin making videos saying he wasn’t afraid.
This was before the West began pumping money and materiel into the conflict, when Ukraine was still having to rely on its existing stockpiles of weapons to fight off the invaders who were then knocking on Kiev’s door and threatening to surround the capital.
In addition to throwing everything his country had into the fight and beginning to wage an often bizarre propaganda campaign, Zelensky had also wisely permitted members of his government to engage in direct negotiations with Russia, brokered by Turkey, to see if there was a way out. By many accounts, this effort was on the verge of success. Russia began withdrawing forces from around Kiev and retreated behind the Donbas frontlines in a gesture of goodwill. A deal involving Ukrainian neutrality and a promise not to join NATO was supposedly ready to sign when British prime minister Boris Johnson intervened to tell the Ukrainians to keep fighting, that help would be on the way.
Almost as if on cue, in April 2022, on the outskirts of Kiev at a place called Bucha, Ukraine and its new Western sponsors gravely announced the discovery of an an alleged civilian massacre they pinned on the Russian forces that had recently retreated. Russia declared it a false-flag operation designed to provide cover for Kiev’s about-face on the talks. Whatever it was (and oddly it’s rarely mentioned today despite the gravity of the allegation) it certainly had the affect of putting a steak through the heart of the negotiations.
From there, it was off to the races.
Zelensky had begun dressing exclusively in an olive-green sweatshirt and casual pants rather than a suit in order to portray an in-the-trenches persona. He enlisted his photogenic wife Olena for glossy publicity shots, such as their famous Vogue cover photo. He hosted celebrities of all stripes — film, media, musical, and political — all in a slick effort to attract money and weapons for the fight against Vladimir Putin’s contract soldiers.
And the money and weapons came pouring in. The geriatric warriors at the Pentagon decided this was the perfect opportunity to sell weapons for their golfing buddies at the top of General Dynamics and Raytheon while bogging Russia down in an Afghanistan-style quagmire, weakening their military, destroying their economy, and, just maybe, toppling Putin in the process. Oh, and killing a lot of Ukrainian young men.
At first, it looked like they might succeed. Following Russia’s withdrawal from Kiev, Ukrainian forces were on the advance for a while, pushing the Russian frontlines back from Kharkiv in the northeast and across the Dnipro River from Kherson in the south, until a relative stalemate was finally reached with Russia still occupying about 20% of Ukrainian territory.
This was not the infamous Ukrainian counteroffensive. That came later. Before it started, though, the prospect of it was leveraged for months to drum up support for more Western weapons, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and anything else they could get the US and Europe to cough up from their armories. Russia used the time to dig in and fortify its frontlines, reorganize its forces, try to learn the lessons of its military setbacks, and adjust its tactics.
It also, in September 2022, held referendums in four of Ukraine’s provinces that it partially occupied, returning results that, if taken at face value, showed overwhelming support for those provinces joining the Russian Federation. Russia promptly formally annexed them, an act not recognized as legitimate by the vast majority of countries. For his part, Zelensky passed a law banning negotiations with Russia, making it illegal, according to the Russians, even for local officials near the war zone to discuss humanitarian corridors with Russian forces.
When the much-touted offensive finally came, in June 2023, Ukraine certainly had more weapons but they’d also lost a lot of time and the advantage, having telegraphed the operation’s approach for so long. Despite a few superficial gains of scattered villages here and there, the offensive as a whole ran into the brick wall of a much more organized and prepared Russian military machine, with an impenetrable frontline fortified in a layered approach. By the autumn, the whole exercise had essentially petered out.
Now, Zelensky’s brash promises of driving the Russians not only out of Ukraine proper but also out of the Crimean territory they had annexed in 2014 rang hollow. Hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment and weapons, including drones and missiles that could reach across the Russian border, as well as advanced tanks and APCs, had failed to turn the tide. Zelinsky’s continued pleas for more and more weapons began to sound tone-deaf, even delusional, as more and more Americans and Europeans began questioning the wisdom of throwing good money after bad.
Then, a seismic geopolitical shift occurred that ensured Zelensky’s star had begun a fall from which he will surely not recover: the October 7th attacks and Israel’s subsequent and still ongoing Gaza offensive in response. It was already starting to look like the story of the Ukraine war was going to be everything that happened before the failed counteroffensive and everything after. Now, the US and its allies can also blame the “everything after” on this new, more pressing global event that brought a full stop to the counteroffensive’s end.
Zelensky tried to react by offering his support to Israel. But, embarrassingly, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government denied his request to visit at a time when Western leaders were streaming into Tel Aviv to kiss Netanyahu’s ring and endorse his plans to kill tens of thousands of Gazan civilians. Bibi was too diplomatic to say it, but he knew that Kiev was a direct competitor for the dwindling artillery shells in Western stockpiles, shells whose production could not be ramped up in time to supply both Ukraine and Israel in their present need.
Now, as Republicans in Washington begin to turn sour on the Ukraine war, knowing their likely nominee, not to mention their constituents, are against it, the Biden Administration has only their lapdog European governments to try to wring more weapons out of for Zelensky’s last, hopeless attempts to stage some kind of turnaround in fortunes. He replaced a general recently. Just this week he mentioned the possibility of yet another counteroffensive, a statement that would be comical if it didn’t threaten the lives of so many remaining Ukrainian youth. This followed a week in which his forces faced one of their biggest defeats yet: the loss of the strategic city of Avdiivka.
And so here we are, two years in. Western leaders gambled big time that blocking peace negotiations and flooding the zone with weapons, coupled with economic sanctions, would bog Russia down militarily and bankrupt its economy. In their best-case scenario, Putin would have lost power in disgrace, possibly opening the door to some future, Western-friendly leadership that would welcome foreign multinational industries back in to exploit the country’s vast, resource-rich frontiers.
Instead, the Russians waited out the counteroffensive, reoriented their trade toward the east and south, and, even by Western accounts, rode out the economic headwinds successfully. Russia’s economy is now one of the fastest-growing in Europe, and projected to remain so. The same can’t be said for western European economies like Britain’s and especially Germany’s. The much-vaunted German industrial machine has almost ground to a halt, plagued by soaring energy costs and other blowback from sanctions. Polls show support for right-wing parties long considered outside the mainstream, such as Alternative for Germany (AfD), is rising so quickly that the progressive German establishment, almost in panic, is considering banning them. Right-wing leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán seem to have been vindicated in their opposition to the EU propping up the war.
In the US, Biden’s $60 billion Ukraine aid package languishes in Congress, with no near-term prospect of passage (although, don't estimate the warmongers’ ability to find a way). The old tactics that always seemed to work — calling people Putin apologists and isolationists — just doesn’t seem to be doing it this time. In their desperation to fund the arms dealers they keep trying to paint ridiculous scenarios, such as Russia attacking NATO and western Europe, if we don’t prolong this war that’s already lost — that was lost last year when the counteroffensive made no material gains and ground to a halt.
These people know that Russia has neither the means nor the will to wage an offensive war against western Europe. They live in a make-believe world in which Russia is the expansionist power rather than the US, the EU, and NATO. In this world, the only reason Russia could possibly be waging war in Ukraine is because Putin wants to recreate the Soviet Union and reclaim all its vast territory. What Putin and other Russians say about their motives and objectives is irrelevant. We know what they really mean to do, and the security of the free world is at stake.
What utter claptrap. The Soviet Union has been dead since 1991. For fourteen years after Putin came to power, Russia made no move threatening Ukrainian sovereignty. The US started this mess with another in a long line of failed regime-change operations, the 2014 coup, toppling a duly elected, Russia-friendly government that was also trying to reach out to the West. Now, the whole thing’s blown up in our faces and the Joe Bidens of the world that started it have no one else to blame but themselves.
Zelensky would be a tragic figure had he not been so ruthless, jailing his political opponents, canceling elections, suppressing the Orthodox Church that so many of his countrymen hold dear, abandoning a peace effort on its way to success at the last minute to act as NATO’s proxy warrior. His time on the global stage hasn’t yet come to an end, but some in the audience are already beginning to leave the theater. He was a fresh face in 2019, elected on a promise to find an accommodation with Russia after five years of confrontation and stalemate. He’s aged ten years since then. One gets the sense that he knows now: history will not judge him well.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.