Zelensky out by Christmas?
Regime change mechanisms and candidates. Nazis for democracy heed Hitler's lesson. Disaffected siloviki. The Serbian mob connection explained.
A group of orthodox Jews walk through the Kyiv airport on their way to Israel. Faced with an official, the leader whispers his family name:
Mindich. You should already know I was coming.
This might seem like an artistic representation of Timur Mindich’s escape from Ukraine to Israel on November 10 after he was tipped off that his residence would be raided by the anti-corruption organs.
In fact, this is a scene from the television ‘Servant of the People’, which ran from 2015 to 2019. The main character, Vasyl Holoborodko, played by one Volodymyr Zelensky, makes a meteoric rise from humble schoolteacher to Ukrainian president, promising to eradicate corruption and do everything good and nothing bad.
The scene is from the 16th episode, released on November 26, 2015. In it, the corrupt ex-PM Yuriy Chuyko is allowed to leave prison after a secret agreement with Zelensky. Unlike in real life, his attempt to escape to escape to Israel is foiled. It isn’t explained why he told the airport his name was Mindich.
But Servant of the People was produced by Kvartal 95, itself jointly owned by the real Timur Mindich. A little joke, back then. Or a prediction?
Ze gone by Christmas?
The above clip has gone viral on Ukrainian social media the past day. But the real ‘Mindich-gate’ continues to transform Ukrainian politics, despite the fact that Timur Mindich himself remains comfortable in Tel Aviv.
What about the men standing behind Myndich, chief among whom is Zelensky?
On Monday, influential pro-Zelensky political analyst Vladimir Petrov put out quite an entertaining prediction on December 1. In typical Zelenskite fashion, it is filled with swearing and grandiose glorification of the Godhead Zelensky:
I don’t think the president will tell us this, but I feel like Zelensky has decided to send us all to hell. I’m not joking,…
“My prediction is not based on anything, without any analysis. Here it is: by December 15 we will sign a ceasefire. Until December 15 there will gradually be chaos — a huge amount of news, some moves, political hysterics and everything else. On New Year’s Eve Zelensky will make an address to the nation and say: ‘Last New Year I said that I was running for president [Zelensky’s announcement on the night of January 1, 2019 — EIU], and this New Year I’m telling you that I’m resigning.’ We will have signed a ceasefire. From then on, the speaker of parliament will conduct negotiations instead of me. And he [Zelensky] will leave and will not participate in the elections himself. And he will not create a new political project…
Petrov also believes that Servant of the People, Zelensky’s current party “is not needed in the form it currently exists”. More on the impotence and division wracking the Servants soon.
Anyway, Petrov concluded by bemoaning the fact that only the wise Zelensky is enthusiastic to continue the war:
I look at him and understand that he doesn’t want this anymore. And it’s not about him being tired of the war. The point is that he’s tired of explaining to all of us why the fuck we need all this,
Indeed. Zelensky has very good reasons to need all this. $100 million USD just on corruption in the state nuclear energy concern, for instance. The rest of the country, unfortunately, is too dim-witted to understand that this actually fighting and dying in the war is in their self-interest as well.
Yermak fallout
On the weekend, Mindich’s close friend Andriy Yermak was finally removed from his post as head of the presidential administration. Zelensky’s fate is tied with the fallout of this move. Ukrainska Pravda, a major media publication virulently opposed to Yermak, put out an article on Yermak’s fall on December 1.
The article writes that Yermak had made so many enemies that even the hundreds of supposed loyalists who owed their careers to him didn’t come to his rescue. He was ultimately caught off guard:
According to the interlocutors of Ukrainska Pravda (UP) in the president’s team, when he was asked to write a statement, the head of the Office threw the president into a formal half-hour tantrum with insults, reproaches, and accusations.
“Yermak did not believe until the end that the First (Zelensky - UP) would remove him. And especially not like this — by simply presenting it as a fait accompli. They say that what upset him the most was the fact that the president abandoned him,” a person from Yermak’s close circle explains the drama of the situation.
The loss of Yermak has led to much speculation that Zelensky will be rendered a powerless figurehead. Interestingly, the Ukrainska Pravda article is quite optimistic about Zelensky:
Most of the surveyed members of the president’s team agree that after Yermak’s resignation, Zelenskyy seems to have returned to his previous version.
“Now he is energetic again. A kind of president of the 24.02.2022 model. And all of us are with him. There were very good meetings on Saturday. Really crazy motivation and attitude ,” one of the members of Zelensky’s team says off the record.
But perhaps this positivity is merely a sign of what is to come — Zelensky stays, but powerless, with his loyalists replaced by liberal-nationalist opposition figures. Removing Zelensky in wartime would lead to too much turbulence. The west doesn’t fancy the idea of Russian troops taking advantage of that, and hence demands that anti-Zelensky forces let the king maintain the trappings of power. Ukrainska Pravda is a western-funded publication that translates the wishes of its sponsors, hence the positivity towards Mr Zelensky.
Zelensky’s successors
Strana.ua, unlike Ukrainska Pravda, is NATO-critical and pro-peace. It put out its own article on Zelensky’s prospects a few days ago.
Since elections are not possible in wartime, the mechanism which would probably be used to remove Zelensky would involve making the parliamentary speaker the acting head of state.
This happened in 2014, with MP Oleksandr Turchinov swiftly elected speaker and acting head of the state following the euromaidan coup. The speaker then, as now, can be easily changed by parliament, meaning that the Zelensky replacement need not necessarily be Ruslan Stefanchuk, a Zelenskite figure no one takes seriously.
This hypothetical removal of Zelensky would be intimately connected with two things — corruption investigations and peace talks. The most popular prediction is that forced out of power by corruption scandals, Zelensky would leave, allowing the next head of state to sign Ukraine’s peace deal with Russia.
So who would be the replacement? One popular candidate is David Arakhamia, head of Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ parliamentary fraction. Ex-president Petro Poroshenko and his ‘European Solidarity’ party are the largest opposition party, and they rather like Arakhamia. This probably has something to do with the fact that Arakhamia was connected with European Solidarity until 2019.
Another interesting option that strana.ua takes quite seriously is Yuliya Tymoshenko. Like Poroshenko, she is an ancient heavyweight of Ukrainian politics. After the ‘gas princess’ made her fortune on transporting Russian energy in the 90s, she became a rather unpredictable prime minister from 2005-2010.
Tymoshenko was perhaps best known for signing a new agreement on gas imports with Russia in 2009, pushing prices up to European levels and requiring purchases of a fixed volume of gas each month. This won her little clout in Ukraine, and was one of the reasons cited for her 2011 imprisonment. Released by the 2014 euromaidan, many thought she would finally become president in the 2019 elections, but to no avail.
Anyway, here’s what political analyst Maksim Karizhsky says about her prospects:
The new Rada speaker will be someone who is ready and willing to sign a peace agreement. Only one person in Ukraine has experience signing major agreements involving Russia and, at the same time, a sufficient level of self-confidence, someone who has nothing to lose and who is already thinking about her place in history. That person is Yulia Tymoshenko. Tymoshenko will become speaker. Parliament will be the center of power. The agreement will be signed in one form or another
These major agreements involving Russia refer to the aforementioned 2009 gas deal. Were Tymoshenko to sign a ‘capitulation’ deal with Russia now, she would certainly have quite a dividing political legacy. Arguing in favor of Tymoshenko’s chances to succeed Zelensky, Ukrainian political analyst Kost Bondarenko argues that Tymoshenko was Russia’s preferred candidate in the 2010 elections.
Blogger Alena Yakho also believes the Tymoshenko option is more viable due to the hatred Zelensky’s ‘Servants’ feel for Petro Poroshenko. The Servants currently number over 220 MPs, by far the majority in parliament (the Rada):
Who could become the speaker during wartime? It just so happens that we only have two political heavyweights in the Rada right now – Poroshenko and Tymoshenko. The ‘servants’ hate Petro Oleksiyovych on a physiological level. They certainly won’t agree to him. That leaves Tymoshenko. They hate her too, but moderately. Not as fiercely. As a compromise figure, perhaps. And no matter how you feel about her, she’s the adult in a room full of showmen. A systemic and experienced person
With Yermak gone, Zelensky’s main source of power is his parliamentary majority, his ‘last line of defense’ in the words of strana.ua. Just how loyal his Servants will be to him will play a major role in his fate. The Yermak affair pushed the Servants to near-disintegration, and they seem remain unenthusiastic for Zelensky’s projects.
Currently, the main task before the Servants is to pass the 2026 budget. They don’t seem to be doing very well at this, boding badly for Zelensky’s parliamentary power. Opposition MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak wrote this on the matter on December 2:
The quasi-coalition of opposition to Zelensky is made up of relatively unpopular individuals, due to their long history in politics. That’s why many, especially the Poroshenkites, are so enthusiastic about ex-head of the army Valery Zaluzhny. Lacking a background in politics and with the physiognomy of the man in the street, Zaluzhny could easily gather votes as an unknown alternative to the status quo. In power, he would no doubt be the same or worse, but that’s another question.
Zaluzhny seems to believe he will soon return to Ukraine. Currently ambassador to the UK, he shared a facebook update with his wife on December 1 reading ‘It’s better back home’.
Following Yermak’s removal, the chorus of voices calling for the removal of current head of the army Oleksandr Syrsky has once again swelled up. Zelensky replaced Zaluzhny with Syrsky largely because of the latter’s unpopularity and total lack of political ambitions.
Were Syrsky to be removed, it would probably be in favour of someone like brigadier general Mykhailo Drapaty, a younger figure highly popular among ultra-politicized nationalists.
Someone like Drapaty in charge of the army would also gather political heft around him, forming an alternative power center to Zelensky.
In short, Zelensky is increasingly faced with bad options. If he is to sign a peace deal, he will be torn to shreds - probably literally - as soon as he loses the autocratic grip on power the war has allowed him to wield. Zelensky has imprisoned too many powerful men, not to speak of his supervision of the industrial slaughter of what is probably hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers.
But if he doesn’t sign a peace deal, the frontlines will continue to deteriorate. At some point he’ll either have to switch up Syrsky, with the risks I mentioned above, or risk a large-scale collapse.
Let’s now take a look at two other forces possible threatening Zelensky - his own intelligence community, and the fervent neo-nazis at the frontlines. The spooks are distancing themselves from Zelensky, which is not a good sign for his longevity. Discussion of the spooks’ sensibilities will also lead us to new information one of the most tantalizing and mysterious stories of the year, involving Ukraine’s military intelligence, the Serbian mafia, and Timur Myndich.
The nazis, meanwhile, are calling for peace and democracy. They believe the electoral victory of 1933 is preferable to ongoing military dictatorship run by those with the racial makeup of Zelensky, Yermak, and Mindich. Finally, I will also explain why I think that predictions of a nationalist coup are overblown. If it even happened, it would be a coup to force a peace deal, not to prolong the war.
