Peace by Sunday?
Is Trump behind the corruption probe? Oligarchs, liberals, nationalists, and Zelenskites give their views.
The past weeks have been full of events. The contradictions, coincidences, and crises have provided febrile conditions for conspiratorial theories.
Yesterday, a range of western media sources, including the Financial Times reported on a new peace plan hammered out by Russian and American representatives. Yesterday, Axios reported that Ukraine’s defense minister Rustem Umerov met with the Americans to discuss it in Miami earlier in the week. Financial Times correspondent in Ukraine Christopher Miller described it with the following apocalyptic tone:
The aforementioned FT article also presented contradictory reports from Ukrainian officials regarding how they felt on the matter:
Officials in Kyiv briefed on the plan said it closely aligned with the Kremlin’s maximalist demands, adding it would be a non-starter for Ukraine without significant changes.
But one of the people briefed on the proposal was less pessimistic, saying “the Americans are pressing Moscow to clearly articulate what their expectations actually are to . . . start the negotiations”.
Zelensky’s statement yesterday that ‘processes have activated’ that hasten peace negotiations led many to believe that the ongoing corruption crisis in Kiev is no coincidence.
In other words, many theorize that the corruption probe against Zelensky’s old friend and business party Timur Myndich, launched by the western-funded NABU (National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine), is Trump’s whipping rod to push Zelensky to accept an unappealing peace deal.
I’m still skeptical. For several reasons.
According to the NABU, its ‘Operation Midas’ against Zelensky’s entourage has been ongoing since 2024, long before Trump took office. Are we to assume that the Biden administration needed to pressure Zelensky with a corruption scandal to force him to accept a peace deal with Russia?
Meanwhile, the peace deal that Trump is supposedly proposing to Ukraine isn’t anything new. Territorial concessions, rights to the Russian language and church, and so on. Trump has been essentially proposing something similar throughout the year. If he wants peace in Ukraine so much, why didn’t he let loose with the corruption kompromat earlier? Forget about the NABU, I’m quite certain that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies have always had their hands full of relevant material.
Regardless, the western press is saying all kinds of things about how peace is supposedly coming this week. Politico released this yesterday, on the 19th:
A senior White House official tells Dasha they expect a framework for ending the conflict to be agreed by all parties by the end of this month — and possibly “as soon as this week.”… The mood inside the White House is bullish, and it seems the plan will be presented to Zelenskyy as a fait accompli. “What we are going to present [to Ukraine] is reasonable,” the senior White House official tells Dasha. The Trump administration thinks Zelenskyy, under pressure both on the battlefield and on the home front (due to a burgeoning corruption scandal), will have to accept what’s on offer.
But how many times has Trump promised the same thing and failed? For its part, the Washington Post doubts that this latest peace offensive will have any results.
I still find the alternative conspiratorial reading of the NABU case more compelling - that it is intended to push Zelensky into agreeing to the EU’s demands to ramp up mobilization and fight for another few more years. While Trump’s US has cut the USAID funding that was once vital for the NABU, now the EU is its main sponsor. And the EU, unlike Trump, certainly isn’t raring for a ‘capitulation’ peace deal with Russia.
Still, it is entirely possible that Trump, seeing Zelensky on the ropes amidst the corruption scandal, decided that now was a good time to propose his peace deal once again.
And perhaps - perhaps - Zelensky, feeling threatened by domestic opposition and unwilling to go on the unpopular steps demanded by the EU, will see the peace deal offered by Trump (and Putin) as a more desirable off-ramp.
But this also seems somewhat logically questionable. The NABU’s corruption probe has severely worsened Zelensky’s image. Why would an increasingly unpopular president be more likely to make the most controversial decision imaginable — ending the war in such a way that immense Ukrainian losses would have been all for naught?
And I haven’t even gotten to the most obvious reason why I think the ‘NABU are Trump-Putin agents’ theory seems wack to me. That’s the fact that the NABU and the liberal parties supporting it are the most nationalist, militarist spheres in Ukrainian society.
They have also traditionally been at odds with Trump, to put it mildly. Funded and created by the US Democratic Party, Ukraine’s liberal nationalist NGOs and anti-corruption organs actually played a major role in the 2016 Russiagate affair, as I wrote here.
The nationalism of these liberals isn’t because they are all fighting at the front - quite the opposite. These groups, often called ‘Sorosites’ in Ukraine, are actually renowned for their draft-dodging proclivities. It is precisely their distance from real fighting and the fact that they receive their income from the west that makes them quite enthusiastic about continuing the war forever.
As I wrote earlier this week, the main Sorosite personalities have been calling for war for another 12-15 years. Military nationalists at the frontlines are disgusted, pointing out that the army simply cannot endure that long.
But to be clear, I don’t think that it is entirely impossible that the liberal nationalist opposition could be the ones to sign a peace deal. After all, it was the ‘opposition leader’ ex-president Petro Poroshenko who reluctantly agreed to the Minsk agreements back in early 2015. He did so because he was faced with massive frontline defeats and the threat of total military collapse. Realistically, this is what it will take for Zelensky to sign a peace agreement this time around.
Anyway, let’s take a look at what Ukrainian liberals, nationalists, and Zelensky loyalists have been saying today.
The Zelensky loyalists are telling everyone to stop talking about corruption because it’s all a cunning plot by the peacenik Russian spy Trump and vengeful imprisoned oligarchs like Igor Kolomoisky.
The liberals angrily deny that their corruption probe against Zelensky has been on the command of the hated Trump to facilitate a ‘capitulation’ peace.
The frontline nationalists, finally, alternate between angrily raging at the demands in the peace talk, ridiculing the liberal opposition, and grimly accepting that a ‘capitulation’ peace is better than the collapse likely entailed by a drawn-out war.
