Petka the wiretapper

Assessing Azovites. Zaluzhny the peacebringer, Arestovych the clown, and Poroshenko the blackmailer. Black suitcases of cash from Moscow. 'Russian spy' wins again in Kiev courts

Yesterday’s article had a look at recent polls on trust towards various political figures in Ukraine. Ex chief of the army Zaluzhny came first, followed by Zelensky, head spook Budanov, and leader of the Azov movement Biletsky.

Today, some more relevant news emerged - Bohdan Krotevych, another top Azov figure, was interviewed by the Guardian.

The article was a big takedown of current head of the army, Oleksandr Syrsky. Syrsky was placed in charge of the army to replace Zaluzhny back in early 2024. The idea was that Syrsky, a charisma vacuum yes-man, would not present the same problems that the excessively popular and independent Zaluzhny did. But Syrsky, nicknamed ‘the butcher’ for his love of sending troops on suicide missions, got into plenty of his own scandals. I wrote about Krotevych’s big 2024 showdown against Sodol, a top Syrsky general for his butchering ways (not against the Russians), back here.

Syrsky

This was manipulated by Zelensky PR-woman Bezuhla as a valiant struggle against the corrupt army bureaucracy, and Zelensky soon fired Sodol. But now Krotevych is going after Syrsky - Zelensky doesn’t have many options. I’ve written before about rumours he wants to get rid of Syrsky too, but it hardly seems wise to keep recycling army leaders like this. At some point, he’d have to make do on the constantly repeated Azovite slogan on the need for ‘motivated young nationalists in charge’ - ie, the Azovites. At that point, if Zelensky found Zaluzhny unbearably politically attractive, wait until a young nationalist with a sexy beard is in charge of the army…

Another Krotevych photo

Here’s what Krotevych had to say about Syrsky in today’s Guardian article:

“I started receiving from the high army command, from the commander-in-chief HQ, orders that became more and more borderline criminal, which I, in my good conscience, was unable to fulfil and follow,” Krotevych said.

the veteran told the Guardian that he had “70% decided to quit” the Ukrainian military because commanders were still “asking of soldiers things which they wouldn’t ask of themselves”.

He also criticizes Syrsky for placing soldiers in danger of Russian missile and drone strikes. This has been a constant problem in Ukraine, constantly resulting in massacres of both recruits at training centres and other units. For instance, on March 3 Ukraine’s army command admitted that a Russian missile attack had killed 19 soldiers at a rear unit. Following public uproar, a criminal investigation was opened. No doubt it will be just as successful in catching the culprits as usual. Anyway, here’s what Krotevych had to say about the problem:

“The general staff ordered that when a soldier’s shift [on he frontline] is over, they can’t rest in the rear, they have to rest 50 metres from the front,” Krotevych said, which he added was typically at a platoon forward observation base.

Forcing soldiers to recover so close to the front put “all these people in grave danger”, he argued. He accused the army command of being “criminally guilty of not understanding the principles of war right now” and in particular “how FPV drones work, how glide bombs work”.

He said similar thinking affected the positioning of larger headquarters. At one point, Krotevych said, Azov’s brigade headquarters was itself struck, after the unit had been “asking, insisting” that it be moved back because Russian forces were advancing. “They specifically told us no, and we got a direct hit.”

Finally, Krotevych had no praise for the Kursk operation, which he blames on Syrsky:

Krotevych said: “Syrskyi must go,” arguing that the military commander-in-chief, appointed in February 2024, had failed to break the Russian lines except into Kursk in August, where he had found “the weakest spot” and executed a simple “linear strike”.

Though Krotevych said the attack into Russia had made sense at the time, he accused Syrskyi of being overly focused on the attack “when we had huge issues” defending Pokrovsk in southern Donbas and “remaining there too long” as Moscow has gradually rolled up the salient, with Ukrainian forces incurring significant losses.

It’s hard not to see this as an attack on Zelensky as well. As I said, Syrsky is seen as Zelensky’s yes-man. While Zelensky’s media mouthpiece, the MP Mariana Bezuhla has been increasingly criticizing Syrsky, this is just her usual strategy - Zelensky is doing his best, but it’s these awful corrupt Soviet generals that are to blame. Likewise, it is absurd to pretend that the Kursk operation was simply Syrsky’s invention. Kursk all stinks of Zelensky - and London’s, as Kit Klarenberg points out - beloved strategy of PR warfare.

So now we get to the end of article - politics. Krotevych swears off political ambitions - Freud’s teachings on denial are relevant here. Instead, he apparently plans to get into the international man of mystery game:

Krotevych said he had no intention of entering politics himself. “I just want to destabilise Russia so it could not make war again,” he said.

The former soldier now intends to set up a private company, Strategic Operational and Intelligence Agency (Soia), obtaining intelligence on Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other countries unfriendly to Ukraine and acting as an expert liaison with the west.

And guess where he’ll be staying:

As part of that work, Krotevych said he hoped to spend time in London, though he stressed he was not aligned with Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, a predecessor to Syrskyi, who is considered a potential future candidate for Ukraine’s presidency.

I found this particularly funny to read. Krotevych here rejects any talk of linking up with Zaluzhny - but in an interview from only a few months ago to a top USAID-funded publication in Ukraine, Krotevych boasted that he’d been hanging out with Zaluzhny in London, and that he even gifted an antique British army knife to the general. Meanwhile, their wives had their own date together. Seems quite the alignment to me. In the same July 2024 interview, Krotevych promised that the public would be ‘hearing more of Zaluzhny soon’.

So I’ve taken Mr Krotevych’s advice - let’s have a look at Zaluzhny’s political prospects: why he has better chances than Zelensky to end the war, and a titillating new story about how Zelensky apparently tried to arrest him in 2023. This will also allow me to let loose against the insufferable Aleksei Arestovych.

But we won’t stop there - next, ex-president Poroshenko’s alliance with Zaluzhny, and Poroshenko’s own political hopes and threats. Zelensky has crafted up a new and impressively ridiculous scandal about Poroshenko’s black suitcases of cash flown in from Moscow - for their part, the president’s office is apparently confident in their gambit.

This will lead us onto an analysis of Poroshenko’s links with Trump, and the reasons why Trump is probably not too keen on the so-called ‘Petka the wiretapper’. As usual, it will bring us to a discussion of the deep politics of Russiagate.

Finally, some even deeper politics - how some of Ukraine’s most experienced ‘pro-Russian’ political operators continue surviving in the capital, with one of the toughest representatives having just defeated several more pro-western, Poroshenko-affiliated politicians and media publications in court. They have been forced to pay him tens of thousands of hryvnia to atone for spreading calumny about his being a Russian agent.

This will lead onto my conclusion on Zelensky’s future - perhaps not as bleak as some may hope, at least for Zelensky (for the country, another matter). Become a paid subscriber to find out more.

The idea of Zaluzhny