Zelensky is on his way out, with or without elections
The Ukrainian president would do well to remember the fate of Viktor Yanukovych
By early February 2014, elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych should have seen the writing on the wall. He’d just been through bruising negotiations with the US and EU for a trade agreement. He was between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He needed to assuage the needs and desires of the ethnic Ukrainians in the central and western regions of the country who saw themselves primarily as Europeans and wanted eventual integration with the EU. But he also needed to preserve trading and political relations with Russia that were vital to Ukraine’s economy. Many of the ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east, where he had been born, identified more with Russia than with the West.
He had tried to have it both ways, working out arrangements with both sides that would be mutually beneficial to Ukraine. But the Americans slammed the door shut on that. It’s us or them, they told him. There would be no having his cake and eating it too. The armchair warriors in the Pentagon were determined to pull the country out of Russia’s orbit and into their own. Half-measures wouldn’t do it.
Vladimir Putin had called out the West at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, the same annual conference at which JD Vance recently embarrassingly lectured Europe on the issue of free speech. In 2007, the embarrassment was suffered by US Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman, both of whom were front row as Putin recited and condemned the West’s double-standards and disregard for international law in its global relations, such as in the illegal Iraq War. Ever since that infamous speech, the American desire to weaken Putin and defeat Russia had become an obsession. They were the Cold War losers. How dare they talk to us like that?
In November 2013, seemingly overnight, large anti-government protests erupted in the streets of Kiev near Maidan Square. Those protests, which would last for three months, quickly turned violent at the hands of both police and protesters. One of the most notorious events during this period happened on February 20, 2014 when unknown snipers fired upon both police and the protesters from buildings surrounding Maidan Square. Protestors and the West blamed Berkut, the government police force, for the shootings. Others alleged outside forces had staged a false-flag operation to bring events to a head. If so, it worked. Yanukovych fled to Russia on the 22nd and was ousted by a majority vote in the Ukrainian parliament that failed to follow the process outlined in the country’s constitution for removing a president.
The degree to which the Maidan Uprising is viewed differently by those for and against the regime change is hard to understate. By many it is portrayed as a grassroots revolution against a tyrant (a tyrant who had been duly elected as recently as 2010, mind you) in favor of Ukraine’s unification with the West and rejection of Russian tyranny. This view is portrayed by the slickly produced Netflix documentary Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, funded in part by the currently embattled CIA front organization and tool for American foreign policy USAID. For a very different view of what Maidan represented, one can watch Oliver Stone’s competing documentary Ukraine on Fire, which presents the case from the perspectives of those who opposed Maidan.
Given some very revealing facts about the uprising and related events that are known by those who study it closely but not widely acknowledged or publicized in the West, it’s very difficult not to conclude with a high degree of certainty that Maidan was part of a US-sponsored coup to overthrow an elected government in Ukraine deemed too friendly toward Russia.
A key figure related to all this is Victoria Nuland. She was one of the Obama State Department’s chief diplomats for implementing American foreign policy in Europe (and was later appointed to a similar position under Biden). An old-school neocon, Nuland relished the idea of prying Ukraine from Russia’s influence and making it an American puppet. She once appeared at the Maidan protests and handed out cookies in a somewhat embarrassing attempt at a show of support.
But the most notorious episode involving her was disclosed in a leaked phone call, likely intercepted by Russian intelligence, that was posted to YouTube in early February 2014 and then publicized around the world. The call, between Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, involved a discussion about who in Ukraine would replace Yanukovych when he would eventually be overthrown. A number of names were tossed about before Nuland concluded that politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk was the choice. “Yats is the guy,” she said to Pyatt, who meekly agreed. And, sure as shooting, Yats became “the guy”, succeeding to the office of prime minister under an acting president after Yanukovych had been run out.
You’d think a revelation like that, of US diplomats organizing a regime change in a democratic country, would have shaken the foundations of American foreign policy. But it didn’t work like that. Instead, the Western press focused on another part of the call, where Nuland brashly exclaimed “fuck the EU” when reminded of the European bloc’s more conservative, go-slow desired approach to events. That phrase was seized upon in the press as an impertinent comment and potential rift between the US and EU, ignoring the fact that the contents of the call had far larger implications for how events in Ukraine should have been viewed. Despite the uproar at the time, today virtually no one in the West remembers this incident. It’s an inconvenient fact.
Nuland also bragged at various times during Maidan of the US having spent $5 billion toward promoting democracy in Ukraine. This is likely a small portion of the overall amount the US spent leading up to the coup, with front organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) likely having spent even more to advance US hegemony in the region at the expense of Russia.
(As an aside, Nuland irritated the Deep State in 2022 by admitting in Congress that there were US-operated biolabs in areas of Ukraine that were threatened by the Russian advance, labs that Russia claimed had been working on bio-weapons research before they seized them. Russia’s claims had been treated as mere propaganda prior to this admission.)
Regardless of the price tag, there’s no doubt as to the result this American regime change achieved. Once Yanukovych was out and America’s hand-picked successors were installed, politicians threatened to remove Russian as an official language and restrict its use in a wide variety of forums and media, a threat that was eventually carried out despite millions of Ukrainians speaking it daily. Many Russian media were banned. Officials seen as too pro-Russian were removed (and later, during the war, some were arrested) and pro-Russian parties were restricted or outright banned.
Pro-Russians in the east and in Crimea rebelled, mirroring what many of the pro-Maidan protestors had done in western regions of the country earlier: taking over local government buildings, demonstrating, and taking up arms. In Odessa in May 2014, where protests had been ongoing against the coup for months, someone set fire to a trade union building that pro-Russian separatists were holed up in. When they tried to escape, gunshots were fired that kept many of them in the burning building. In the end, more than 40 died, either from smoke inhalation or from jumping to escape.
European countries brokered a deal between Ukraine and Russia in 2015, called the Minsk Accords, that stopped the fighting, albeit temporarily, as it turned out. Ukraine was supposed to withdraw its forces from the east and grant a degree of autonomy to the Donbas region in exchange for that territory remaining under Ukrainian sovereignty. Ukraine never fulfilled its obligations. After the 2022 Russian invasion, retired German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted in an interview that the accords were a ruse, the sole purpose of which was to give Ukraine time to rearm after fighting to a stalemate against Russian separatists.
Fighting eventually erupted again, with thousands of residents in Russian separatist areas killed before Russia invaded in February 2022 and, after years of resisting appeals by separatists to annex the Donbas region into Russia, they did just that following referenda conducted in the autumn. It’s these regions that Russia claims today and occupies a large part of. Incidentally, these are the same regions that had voted for Yanukovych by sizable margins in 2010.
Other than Crimea, lost to Russia under Obama, Ukraine under Trump’s first administration had retained control over all its territory, save sizable portions of Donetsk and Lugansk that had been lost to the separatists before his time. The situation was tense and sporadically bloody, but relatively quiet. Then Biden came in and began rattling the saber, talking of expanding NATO to Ukraine, providing more weapons, and ignoring Russian overtures for new security arrangements between the superpowers as late as the autumn of 2021. Russia invaded the following February and the rest is depressing history.
And so, now, after three years of a war that Russia is slowly but inexorably winning despite hundreds of billions in weapons and other support being thrown at Ukraine by the West, Donald Trump has entered the scene again. He’s ready to break some china in Europe to shake things up, end a war he considers to be stupid, and shatter European dependence on the American taxpayer as its sugar daddy.
Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders don’t seem to have gotten this message, and they seem to be under the illusion that they can do something to stop it by sheer force of will. They can’t. The game is over. Russia had won before Trump took office. The West threw all they could throw at the problem, short of invading what’s left of Ukraine and getting into a land and missile war with Russia that even the United States would have been ill-prepared to fight.
As a last-ditch effort, Zelensky and the Europeans are resorting to the same tired scare-mongering they’ve tried for years, arguing a settlement on Russian terms will embolden Putin to invade all of Europe. This is and always has been nonsense. There’s no evidence Putin wants to invade NATO or any other countries. Nor does he have the means to do so. Russia holds only about 20% of Ukraine after three years of fighting, and their annual military budget, at $109 billion, is dwarfed by America’s $900 billion, and is much smaller even than Europe’s combined defense budgets. But, most importantly, this argument pretends that the war started solely due to Putin’s territorial ambitions and not for all the reasons cited above. History didn’t begin in 2022.
A peace agreement with Russia will be concluded mostly on their terms because they have the leverage. Their war machine and their economy seem to have sustained relatively well everything thrown at them, and only the western Europeans seem significantly weakened by these events. One of their key demands is that Ukraine conduct elections so that any deal can be considered legally binding on Ukraine without question. Zelensky’s term ended in May last year, and Russia therefor considers him illegitimate to represent the country.
Zelensky was right to reject Trump’s dishonorable demand to sign over Ukraine’s natural resources to America, but his apparent belief that he can reject a deal reached by the US and Russia, survive as president, and fight on without US support is the height of delusion. If America finally stops funding this war, it ends. No ifs, ands, or buts. Europe is incapable of sustainably funding it, being on the precipice of economic collapse for having largely deprived themselves of access to cheap Russian energy through sanctions.
And so Zelensky would be well advised to remember the fate that befell the last Ukrainian president to defy the US when its geopolitical objectives shifted. Yanukovych still lives in Russia. Zelensky can hope for exile in a more desirable locale, but political overthrows are unpredictable and the end result for him could be far graver if he doesn’t play his cards right. With all that in mind, agreeing to elections would seem to be his least bad option. Lucky for him, he’s the world’s greatest salesman. Or at least he was until Donald Trump climbed back in the saddle with Zelensky’s pink slip in hand.
Richie Graham is based in Little Rock Arkansas USA and writes from a free-market libertarian, anti-interventionist perspective.