“Why don’t you, Ukrainians, just overthrow Zelensky’s regime and end the war?” I get asked this a lot.
Because Zelensky does not exist in a political vacuum. His power rests on several pillars:
🛑Western sponsors. They have every reason to stick with a Ukrainian leadership willing to wage what I regard as NATO’s proxy war against Russia — with Ukrainian lives supplying the manpower.
🛑Heavily armed, NATO-equipped far-right formations. There are Azov-based units, now organized into major military formations, along with other right-wing units such as Reid, Karpatska Sich, DUK, and other neo-Nazis under the HUR umbrella.
Their ideological hard core consists of people committed to confrontation with Russia for as long as it takes — apparently including until the heat death of the universe. Hence the tendency to describe virtually any negotiated peace as “capitulation.”
🛑The oligarchs and the military-industrial complex. War is also a business, and for some people, an exceptionally good one. Companies such as Fire Point have every commercial incentive to keep the orders coming. If the war lasts another decade, there will always be another grandiose strategic objective to sell — the defeat of Moscow, the collapse of Russia, victory just over the next horizon.
🛑“Civil society.” Ukraine has hundreds of NGOs funded by Western governments and foundations. They present their mission in the language of democracy, reform, “decolonization,” and every other wholesome item on the NGO tasting menu.
In practice, this network also functions as an enormous apparatus of Western influence, helping turn Ukraine into a Western military outpost while calling the process liberation from Russian imperialism. The irony is doing some fairly heavy lifting here.
So tell me: how exactly are ordinary people supposed to get rid of this whole merry fraternity of bloodsuckers in vyshyvanka, shouting “Slava Ukraini” while bleeding the country dry?
