February news
Bodies and blockades on the EU border, the drone front, Zelensky moves against Soros' business partner, social media conspiracies
If you like my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber to see more paid content, like my upcoming post analyzing Ukrainian social media.
Hopefully I’ll figure out a way to make these news updates a regular thing. At the moment I’m still experimenting with the best way to collect and present news content. The following news comes from a combination of Ukrainian Truth, the premier Ukrainian liberal, pro-western publication, and strana.ua, which is a publication that criticizes liberal militarism and calls for a negotiated end to the war.
Fleeing the country
In the past week the biggest group of draft evaders ever was caught crossing the border - 40 people. Social media continues constantly reporting on dead men found at the border, frozen in the snow or floating in the rivers on the border with Romania.
Ukrainian Truth also reported on the arrest of a military general for organizing the illegal escape of military-age males. The parliament sacked a mobilization officer who had been working ‘remotely’ from Miami. On social media, the main theme for instagrams semi-ironically praising the criminal hustle grindset is to make memes about the glitzy lives of mobilization officers.
It’s interesting looking at the social media response to this topic. Big pages that cover news in various cities often publicize these events, generally with the aim of making the ‘evaders’ look pathetic. However, top comments always support them. ‘Why should we die for a government that never helped us’, ‘How can you make fun of someone who chooses life over death?’. Despite the imperatives of state censorship, many top social media pages have started catering to this by adding a vote option of whether you agree with the evader or not, where generally 90%+ of respondents answer in the affirmative.
An instagram post on a page dedicated to news in the west Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. It shows two men filmed by a drone as they are intercepted by the border police trying to escape Ukraine. The top comments:
Bukovyna border guards let people pass for bribes and catch those who want to escape for free. These are border guards, these are good guys😂
It would be better to catch Muscovites instead of peaceful people!
A free people of a free country! This ironic comment is often left on similar posts. It makes fun of the government rhetoric about Ukraine as the freest country on earth.
Military industry
Borrell graced Ukraine with a visit, having a look at some drone factories and hiding in a bomb shelter. However, his response could have hardly reassured Ukrainian government officials. He stated that Ukraine was doing fine on its own, and that Europe should take a leaf out of Ukraine’s book in terms of drone production.
Meanwhile, foreign minister Kuleba made his customary scream into the void, calling on the creation of a joint EU-Ukraine military industrial market. As far as successes go, the ministry of defense did announce that they had successfully reverse-engineered the highly effective Russian Lancet kamikaze drone.
Splits among the servants
One new topic for speculation around Zelensky is the upcoming date of April 20th, after which Zelensky’s 5 year term will run out. Given the lack of elections, that means that after this date, he will become the acting president, not the elected president.
Another interesting event that seems to have gone under the radar is the announcement of a court case against Tomas Fiala. This Czech businessman is known to work closely with George Soros and bought Ukrainian Truth in 2021, along with a range of other important media and agricultural assets. He is being accused of conducting business in Russian-controlled Crimea, but it’s hard not to see in this case an attempt by the government to take down the main source of critical media-coverage. In fact, plenty of stories critical of Zelensky that emerge in the western press were originally pushed out by Ukrainian Truth. One example is the slew of recent articles critiquing Ukraine’s ham-fisted wartime propaganda and media censorship, another is the wide range of articles investigating military corruption put out by Ukrainian Truth.
Zaluzhny
I’m not going to go too deep into Zaluzhny’s dismissal, since it’s been covered in a lot of detail by the English-language press. In short, Zaluzhny is more popular among nationalists, the army, and the broader population than Syrsky. The latter was born and trained in Russia, has a reputation as ‘General Butcher’, and is generally perceived as Zelensky’s lackey. According to telegrams (I’ll make a post soon translating some), Syrsky received his post based on an agreement with Zelensky that he would hold onto all territory, unlike Zaluzhny, who often voiced his opposition to such bloody and pointless endeavors whose only aim was to continue the western aid flow by avoiding unseemly retreats.
What hasn’t been covered so much are the political forces in Ukraine that are supporting Zaluzhny. In the week before Zaluzhny’s removal, pro-government telegram channels spread rumours that Poroshenko was planning a coup d’etat alongside Zaluzhny, and that the former would be arrested soon by Zelensky. Nothing came out of it, but some of the same telegrams did announce that Zelensky’s long-standing court case against Poroshenko (state treason due to Poroshenko’s supposed organization of a coal smuggling scheme to the separatist Donbass republics during his presidency) was heating up. The idea that Poroshenko will be imminently arrested has long been a popular PR trick for the Zelensky government, but based on the lack of results, it seems that Poroshenko’s western backers won’t allow it.
Poroshenko has certainly been quite positive about Zaluzhny, making various facebook posts in the leadup to Zaluzhny’s dismissal that condemned any possibility of dismissing him. There are plenty of rumours that Poroshenko has made up his old quarrels with other political heavyweights like Klitchko, and that they are eager for the government to hold elections. The government, of course, isn’t so eager. Whenever you look at the top comments under Zelensky’s instagram posts nowadays, everything is pure hate against him.
For instance, the top comment on Zelensky’s last post:
The killer of the Ukrainian people! Jews exterminate Ukrainians with open genocide. Have you seen the current scale of Ukrainian cemeteries?! He lifted the moratorium on the sale of land and sold it to the "Black Rock" corporation, now it clears the territory from the population. He spat on the constitution, destroyed the country with lawlessness and arbitrariness. Creates unconstitutional laws that go beyond any morality and adequacy. Deprives Ukrainians of their passports and citizenship, squeezes real estate and bank cards... - does everything possible to reduce the population. He overtook North Korea, and he and his entire lair do not suffer from the war, but earn billions. And not a single rocket has yet flown to the government quarter and the houses of deputies. Is it like, a conspiracy? Why haven't the soldiers turned towards the enemy of the Ukrainian people who is exterminating them?! Have you seen the current scale of Ukrainian cemeteries?!
Or on this other one, all the comments are raging about the abandonment of Avdiivka:
You all know, I say as a military man, the surrender of Avdiivka, a bunch of our dead guys from 3 OSHBR (the Azov group in Avdiivka) are on the Green [anti-Zelensky slur] condoms and his shitty team. Also on it is that Attention !!! Not one fortified position was made in Lastochkino, to which we are now withdrawing. I will never vote for the Green disease again
Mobilization
As far as mobilization goes, the most interesting developments recently have taken place in west Ukraine. The small village of Kosmach in Ivano-Frankivsk, Stepan Bandera’s homeland, has taken radical measures to prevent its men from being mobilized. First, they attacked a woman in her car, accusing her of working for the mobilization officers as a spy. They beat the woman and her infant child on camera. The next day, they announced that they had built barricades and would not led mobilization officers into the village.
https://www.facebook.com/yana.vandhurak/posts/1788097171614841?ref=embed_post
Their explanation and reaction has been quite interesting. They often refer to the fact that ‘war has not been officially declared by the government, so why should we fight?’ In an interview with strana journalists, they prefaced that by saying that ‘While we are a Banderite village, we don’t wish to fight without the declaration of war’. This is an interesting populist slogan that has been around for a while in Ukraine. It is occasionally related to theories around how the war is being orchestrated by western/ukrainian/zionist elites to empty Ukraine (and Russia) of its male population in order to create ‘a new Israel’ on the land of former Ukraine. Less dramatically, it is also related to criticism of the fact that Ukraine’s so-called People’s Deputies do not fall under mobilization, that the war is being only fought half-heartedly, using the lives of the masses. There were rumors that the latest extremely harsh mobilization laws would include the mobilization of Ukraine’s political class, but this predictably came to naught.
As far as reactions, Evhen Dyky (his surname, by the war, means ‘wild’ or ‘feral’), an Azov commander, has been vocal in his calls to ‘cleanse Kosmach like enemy territory’. He has been echoed by another influential Azov commander, Maksym Zhorin.
https://t.me/MaksymZhorin/4997
Things certainly seem tense in Ukraine. The new mobilization law, essentially copied from the one in Russia, involves a variety of harsh punishments against ‘draft-dodgers’. Ukrainian men living abroad will have their property in Ukraine seized by the state if they do not make themselves available for mobilization. Those who do not create their online mobilization register will have their bank accounts and credit capacities frozen.
Plenty of telegrams have commented that Zelensky’s removal of Zaluzhny, in this context, has been quite the zugzwang. While forced to do so because of the threat of nationalist coup, the removal of the popular Zaluzhny and his replacement with a man known as Zelensky’s lackey makes all these new unpopular measures and failures fall squarely on Zelensky.
According to a recent poll by the western-funded Razumkov centre, belief in the correct course of the country has fallen:
After the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine, the share of citizens who believe that events in Ukraine are developing in the right direction increased significantly (from 20% in December 2021 to 51% in September-October 2022, reaching the highest levels in February-March 2023 (61%).
After this, there has been a downward trend in this indicator. According to the latest survey, the shares of those who believe that events in Ukraine are developing in the right direction (41%) and those who are of the opinion that they are developing in the wrong direction (38%) are not statistically significantly different (21% are undecided )".
For reference: According to the results of a survey for December, 45% of Ukrainians believed that events were developing in the right direction, 33% - that they were in the wrong direction, 21.5% - were undecided.
Details: According to the results of a survey for January, most often citizens indicate a deterioration in the situation (compared to the beginning of 2023) in the following areas: the level of prices and tariffs (86% indicated a deterioration in the situation), the economic situation of the country (68%), the level of stability (64.5%), citizens' confidence in the future (63.5%), the level of well-being of their family (58%), the attitude of citizens towards the authorities (53%). 61% of respondents point to a worsening situation in the country as a whole.
Business associations have also put out statements pleading with the government to soften the new mobilization law in order to spare their employees.
The polish front
Finally, things are only heating up on the western front. Despite the advent of a new, pro-EU, ‘pro-Ukrainian’ government, the blockade of Ukraine by Polish farmers and their right-populist supporters has only intensified. I listened to some discussions about this topic by Ukrainian and Polish experts. Some, who seemed quite obviously paid off by big agrobusiness lobbies (who have benefitted most from shipping cheap, low-quality grain to Poland)
https://t.me/stranaua/143939
A video from the 17th of February - ‘Polish farmers block trucks on the Ukrainian border, including military ones’. It should be noted that the blockade ostensibly is not meant to harm military transportations, though of course the reality is that the build-up on the border because of the blockade also slows down the flow of military goods.