Zelensky's mistake - zoomers win

Not all is lost - but much is. Operation figurehead vs Zelensky's '5-6 effective managers'. Parliamentary crisis? Kolomoisky plotting? Decrypting the encoded flash drives.

Let’s return to the drama unfolding between Zelensky and the liberal nationalist opposition. Just a day after trying to subordinate the western-created anti-corruption organs with his July 22 bill 12414, Zelensky cracked - on July 23, he announced a new bill to reverse 12414. The new bill is to be voted on next week.

Against Zelensky, a liberal nationalist alliance has formed. On the one hand, this includes ex-president Petro Poroshenko, threatened with jail by Zelensky for his supposed ‘receival of 10 suitcases of money from Moscow’.

According to the latest rumors from Alexander Dubinsky, an imprisoned parliamentarian from Zelensky’s party, Poroshenko will be officially charged with treason on July 31. This is supposedly to be the day that parliament will vote for the new bill that will reverse bill 12414 and return NABU/SAPO’s independence. Dubinsky writes that Zelensky’s coterie believe that Poroshenko’s involvement in the Russiagate campaign against Trump will mean that Washington will stay silent.

The protests against bill 12414 have featured the presence or support of a number of politicians from Poroshenko’s party, influencers associated with it (such as the murderer Serhiy Sternenko), and members of Poroshenko’s youth organizations.

And besides the ex-president, Poroshenko is allied with NGOs, anti-corruption organs and media publications funded by USAID (formerly), Tomas Fiala (currently), and Alexander Soros (also currently). I have written in detail on Zelensky’s threats of sanctions against Fiala and his pressure on various other members of the community that can either be called ‘anti-corruption warriors’ or ‘Sorosites’, depending on your persuasion.

Ukraine’s ‘robust civil society’ (as the copy-paste phrase in the western press goes) has been very active in opposing Zelensky’s latest antics.

Top anti-corruption warriors like head of the Centre for the Prevention of Corruption Daria Kaleniuk warned that Ukraine’s EU integration is threatened by the move against the anti-corruption organs. She even made the claim that Ukraine’s status as EU candidate was received in 2022 ‘precisely because of our accomplishments int he sphere of anti-corruption infrastructure’. Of course.

Meanwhile, head of the International Renaissance Foundation (the local affiliate of the Open Society Foundation) Oleksandr Sushko worried that bill 12414 was a sign that Kyiv is ‘moving along the Georgian scenario’. He claims that ‘not only EU-integration is at stake’.

I’ve written about this dreadful Georgian scenario at length here. In short, it involves detente with Russia, the weakening of neoliberal ethnonationalists, and peace. A terrifying prospect for foreign-funded anti-corruption warriors.

But in the long-term, Zelensky has made a massive mistake by showing such indecision and weakness through this entire affair. Not only has he angered his liberal nationalist opponents, but his reversal of bill 12414 has betrayed his loyalists.

The Ukrainian publication strana.ua calls it Zelensky’s ‘worst strategic political defeat since he became president’. They recall that it was Yanukovych’s accession to the demands of the street protestors in 2013-14 that emboldened them. What was originally merely a protest in favor of joining the EU became a protest to topple Yanukovych and assume power.

Zelensky has always been terrified of street protests - it was in response to relatively small nationalist protests in 2019-20 ‘against capitulation’ that Zelensky caved to their demands and abandoned the peace platform that 70% of the country had voted for.

I suppose that’s show business - a desperate desire for attention from the audience - the ones that boo, not the everyman.

However, in the short-term, it still seems highly unlikely that Zelensky will actually be removed. Though a range of American senators have criticized Zelensky, the White House, State Department, and US ambassador have still said nothing. This was always clearly Zelensky’s bet - he knows that Trump despises the NABU for their role in sparking the Manafort ‘Russiagate’ saga back in 2016.

It’s only the hawks that are saying anything - Lindsay Graham, for instance. Or the daughter of the anti-Russian Keith Kellog - though Kellog himself has been silent about the NABU/SAPO affair.

Operation figurehead

To understand what is really going on, we need to turn to a famous quote by the president.

In a famous December 2023 press conference, Zelensky told journalists that he depends on a ‘team of 5-6 effective managers’. When asked whether all of them were truly free of corruption, he answered that removing any of them would weaken the country.

Zelensky’s liberal enemies are not trying to get rid of Zelensky. But they have made it their mission to turn Zelensky into a powerless figurehead. Their goal is to remove Zelensky’s beloved ‘5-6 effective managers’ by either charging them with corruption through the NABU, or forcing them to leave because of backlash over bill 12414.