The decline and fall of Volodomyr Zelensky
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an expert analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com
Cross-posted from Russian & Eurasian Politics
A year ago I discussed the coming demise of Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskiy noting that there was always something akilter with a former comedian becoming the president of a country at the geopolitical heart of security dilemma between two great powers. It did not promise a happy ending (https://gordonhahn.com/2023/12/11/sad-clown-with-the-circus-closed-down-zelenskiys-demise/). Since then the position of Zelenskiy and the country he ostensibly still presides over are on the ropes. Zelenskiy has become, arguably, an illegitimate president and is exceedingly unpopular. His army is falling back at an increasing tempo as the Russian army drives to the Dneiper. With the advent of Trump administration 2.0, the Ukrainian leader is shorn of US support, and Washington is closer to the Kremlin’s position. Trump has demonstrated this by conducting talks with Russia without Ukraine, signaling that both Ukraine and Europe should accept an initial agreement concluded bilaterally between Moscow and Washington.
Trump’s treatment of Zelenskiy puts the latter and his beleaguered country between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the Trump rock, trumping his Greenland expansionism, is using the Ruin of Ukraine in order to push through a nation grab in Ukraine. The recent offer Zelenskiy managed to refuse for now was a boorish and cynical power grab. It is reported that when U.S. officials met with Zelenskiy at the Munich Security Conference they demanded he sign an agreement that would effectively handed over Ukraine to the U.S.—not Canada, but Ukraine would have become something on the order of America’s 51st state. The agreement specified that the U.S. would receive in compensation for the some $250 billion in military and other assistance already provided during the Biden presidency something of are greater value: „The US will receive 50 percent both of all recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources and of the financial value of “all new licenses issued to third parties” designated for the future monetisation of resources. The US also will be a lien on such revenues,” meaning first revenues received go to the US, then, when the US take is covered, revenues will begin goping to Ukraine. Moreover, “for all future licenses, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals.” Washington also “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licenses and projects”(www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/11/trump-says-ukraine-may-be-russian-one-day/).
This contract was not a shot out of the blue for Zelenskiy, as some have portrayed it. Zelenskiy himself suggested the idea of giving the US a direct stake in Ukraine’s rare earth elements and critical minerals on his visit with Trump Tower in September last year. A U.S. draft of the contract was received Zelensky’s Office of the President a week ago before it was proposed to Zelenskiy in Munich(www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/11/trump-says-ukraine-may-be-russian-one-day/). The contract if signed and implemented would amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, while the Trump administration has still not addressed the issue of Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, which could be facilitated, for example, by devoting a share of U.S. profits from Ukraine going to said reconstruction. This gambit rivals if not surpasses Russia’s alleged neo-imperialism; it is a full-blown colonial project. The Ukrainians’ only hope is that this contract was intended to intimidate the Ukrainian elite and force Zelenskiy to negotiate with Moscow or flee abroad to save himself, as Washington begins investigating his government’s use of U.S. aid. It cannot be excluded that Trump hoped Zelenskiy would or will sign such a document before any Ukrainian presidential elections and thereby further make his reelection unlikely.
The contract also seems to be a stealth ‘security guarantee’; not based on a public (or secret) defense security agreement. It is an implied defense security agreement in that Washington would presumably be prepared to defend its new resource colony from any Russian military encroachment or invasion. It also is a economic security agreement designed to keep the Russians and Europeans out and the U.S. in when it comes to Ukraine’s future economy. Thus, the contract called for the US and Ukraine to form a joint investment fund to ensure that “hostile parties to the conflict do not benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine” (www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/11/trump-says-ukraine-may-be-russian-one-day/). Trump’s domestic constituency may be exceedingly disappointed it turns out that the investment fund in question becomes the Blackrock-Ukraine investment fund established a year ago. Regardless, Moscow will be regarded as a ‚hostile party‘ and will be obstructed to one degree or another in accessing the Ukrainian market. The contract is intended to ‚win the peace‘ by containing Moscow’s long-term benefits and advantages from victory over Kiev whether by capitulation or an unequal peace treaty. The agreement also facilitates Europe’s and China’s delimitation as well, though Beijing has already made some inroads in asserts on Russian controlled territories, according to some sources.
On Zelenskiy‘s other side, the hard place, is Russian President Vladimir Putin and his increasingly powerful armed forces. They are a coiled but and sure-moving element pounding Ukraine into rubble and its army into retreat, desertion, and collapse. Hence, Zelenskiy’s battle fronts are collapsing, and as they do so he becomes politically besieged domestically with, as Trump himself stressed, low popularity ratings and poor prospects of being re-elected. And on this background, Trump, like Putin, is demanding Zelenskiy stand for presidential elections by the end of the year as he proposes he sign a contract that sells the country sovereignty (www.facebook.com/ivan.katchanovski/videos/545650581858375/). But for America’s image around the world, Trump’s property-resource grab is nearly as shameful as Trump’s Greenlandian and Palestinian proclamations and the previous U.S. role in provoking the NATO-Russian Ukrainian War by way of NATO expansion and other actions of hubris I have discussed so often and in such great detail.
At any rate, Zelenskiy is becoming increasingly resentful and antagonistic towards the West or at least Trump’s America. But the ‚collective West‘ began pushing Ukraine into this position at least a decade or more ago, and given this one can have some sympathy for Zelenskiy, who like his country, is being thrown under the bus to benefit U.S. power. Yet he fears and knows quite well, the catastrophe is a consequence of his decision: Putin began the SMO because NATO, in the person of the US and UK, refused security guarantees to complete the Istanbul agreement. Instead, the West urged him to fight, promising military aide ‚as long as it takes‘. Yet he persists in bringing out the tired trope that Putin will attack Europe after taking Ukraine. This combination demonstrates that he is lying without the slightest shame, desperately flailing about to survive the disaster heading in his direction. Desperate men do desperate things and executing false flag attacks on the Chernobyl sarcophagus, etc, are the tip of the iceberg of what Zelenskiy and his team might do should they conclude they are doomed.
Trump may have outfoxed Zelenskiy, who prior to Trump’s opening to Moscow was adamantly opposed to talks with Putin—something that is illegal under a Ukrainian law proposed by Zelenskiy himself. Not only is Ukraine not yet part of the process and will determine little of its outcome, but it is but one issue in a far broader agenda opening up for Washington and Moscow, as the read-outs on the 12 February Trump-Putin and Rubio-Lavrov phone calls and the press conferences of the two delegations after the Riyadh meeting last week.
By excluding him and the EU from the talks, they or at least Zelenskiy fear for their survival and prestige, respectively, and have begun complaining. Zelenskiy claimed he did not want to participate in the Riyadh talks but headed to nearby OAE the day before and was scheduled to fly on to Riyadh the day after the US-Russia meeting. After the meeting ended with no invitation to come to Riyadh and participate and little mention of him in the participants’ comments, he cancelled his Riyadh trip and reportedly prepared to fly home. Eventually, one or both can be expected to agree to negotiate so as not to be left on the sidelines. If Zelenskiy refuses he is likely to see all US military assistance cut off, as Trump threatened to do during the presidential campaign should Kiev balk at talks. If Europe refuses and attempts to counter the peace process by escalating, then NATO may be finished. I am tempted to pose the question of a serious US-EU standoff, perhaps a military one implemented by Russia but supported secretly by Washington.
Indeed, since the U.S. and Russia have begun talks sans Ukraine and Europe, gearing up to present Kiev possibly with a fait accompli, Zelenskiy is encouraging the ill-advised EU attempts to drastically increase aide to Kiev and form an ‚army of Europe.‘ The trend in developments is a schism in the Trans-Atlantic community and NATO between the US and EU, and Zelenskiy fashions himself the organizer of a new EU; something some of Ukraine‘s nationalists would find appealing but too few to bolster Zelenskiy’s political prospects either in elections or an even more authoritarian Ukrainian order.
Zelenskiy is in no less of a bind domestically; he finds himself in a very hard place. He is increasingly unpopular with two leaders having potential access to armed force enjoying greater popularity: former Commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, and Military Intelligence Administration chief Kyryll Budanov. Neither Ukraine’s democrats, neofascists, nor moderates support Zelenskiy. The latter or more inclined to support Zaluzhniy or former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko. And Zelensky has few prospects of bolstering his chances for electoral success. Participation in the talks could have been a potential path to his political rehabilitation, excluding the Ukrainian neofascists‘ reaction, but the longer he delays in agreeing and the more he mounts some EU-based resistance, the less he can gain if he decides to engage.
In sum, Zelenskiy is surrounded by a web of threats and dilemmas that are extraordinarily difficult to resolve. His main sponsor has tired of him and is flirting with his enemy, who is on the march to Kiev and perhaps beyond. In the past the US has abandoned allies in numerous, sometimes violent ways. For their part, the Russians would like nothing better than to arrest and put Zelenskiy on trial for the Ukrainian army’s various war crimes. There are many Ukrainians who would like to do the same either for his decision to reject the March 2022 Istanbul agreement and fight Russia or any future decision by him to negotiate with Putin’s Russia, if he ever is to make one.
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