Ukraine actually delegated to the West the right to make strategic decisions in all spheres of public life. The opposite happened. Supporting the Russian position, the West deliberately puts the Ukrainian authorities in a desperate situation – a rare case of a consolidated position.
Oligarchs: “Ukraine, turn your back to Poroshenko, and your face to Zelensky”
The Kiev authorities have assured their own and surrounding people for so long (under all presidents) that Ukraine is the center of the universe and all global politics revolves around Kiev, which they believed. At the same time, most of the population does not care deeply about the foreign visits of the President. And then a different propaganda trick was invented for people who were not engaged in politics. They are told that since foreign leaders communicate with their leader for so long and a lot, it means he is very smart and competent, madly authoritative, and soon, thanks to his efforts, Ukraine will blossom. This helps keep the presidential approval rating at a more or less acceptable mark for a while. But with every next presidency, it helps less and less.
Petro Poroshenko, at the end of his rule, faced the West’s indifference towards Ukraine. There was a banal lack of desire to meet him, and if there was a meeting, then it was in such a format that it would not be better if these meetings didn’t take place at all. It was worth only one humiliating breakthrough for a photo shoot with Trump, followed by a press conference outside of the White House fence.
Zelensky’s team sincerely believed that because he was “young and unsullied”, he was guaranteed a “honeymoon” not only with Western politicians, but also with Putin. It was an inadequate assessment of the situation, but it proceeded from the same confidence in the ever-paramount importance of Ukraine for the world. Roughly speaking, Kiev politicians, who assured themselves of Ukraine’s irreplaceable nature, believed that the West was tired of Poroshenko, and if replaced by someone else, the partners would once again turn to Kiev’s face.
This conviction played not the last role in the fact that before the elections an anti-Poroshenko consensus of all oligarchic groups was reached. Of course, Petro Poroshenko was not loved for greed, but some (the same Akhmetov, and Pinchuk too) worked with him quite successfully. Nevertheless, everyone was against him, including business partners, because they believed that Ukraine being ignored was due to Poroshenko’s fatigue, that the West was sending them a signal about the desirability of replacing Petro Poroshenko with someone else. During the electoral campaign, Ukrainian experts swallowed the thesis about the “fatigue” of the West towards Poroshenko.
The West is not pregnant, but burdened by Ukraine financially and politically
But, having just come to power, Zelensky faced the fact that there was no desire to talk to him either. Or Rather, they do not want to talk just so that he could gain PR against the background of world leaders. The West has plenty of problems. There was a split between the US and the EU. Trump is frankly trying to impose trade agreements on the European Union that are unfavourable to the latter and shift the weight of NATO’s contents onto it, in order to find resource reserves that would allow America to focus on solving its own financial and economic problems.
However, the situation has gone too far. The crisis in the West, and especially in the United States, has long become systemic. And one of the ancestral features of the systemic crisis is the split of elites. Today we are seeing this split into conventional globalists and patriots in both the EU and the US. And in America, the standoff between Trumpists and anti-Trumpists has approached the brink of civil war several times.
In such circumstances, neither the US nor the EU can afford the luxury of keeping Ukraine, nor of entering it into a confrontation with Russia.
By and large, the West, which lost the second cold war, has long needed a truce to rebuild. Globalists are slowing down the West’s exit from the confrontation with Russia, but are no longer able to stop it completely. It may happen slowly, but the relationship still improves. This is especially evident in the sphere of economy and trade. Here, the benefits have long beaten “Euro-Atlantic solidarity”. Since the United States, Poland, and the Baltics did not protest, Germany pushed ahead with “Nord Stream 2“. And this is only one of the numerous examples of constructive cooperation between the West and Russia in the trade and economic sphere.
In the current situation, Ukraine is a burden for the West not only financially (for its maintenance it is necessary to constantly seek funds), but also politically.
On the one hand, Ukrainian leaders can no longer be separated by verbal support. They require specifics. On the other hand, it is at this moment that the West is least inclined to publicly associate itself with the Russophobic regime in Kiev.
The inability of the Ukrainian state to exist on its own is hardly in doubt. In fact, the Ukrainian authorities themselves were shouting this to the whole world, when they justified their claims against Gazprom to the Stockholm arbitration not by the terms of the contract, but by the fact that Ukraine needs money, otherwise it will die, and there was nowhere to get it except from Gazprom.
Once an unfair decision in favour of Ukraine was rendered. However, the process of challenging it has not yet been completed. However, since then, Russia has demonstrated that it easily and without regret leaves any international formats if equality of the parties is not observed within their framework. Moreover, Russia is creating new formats instead, displacing the old ones. As a result, the West is losing political, legal, financial mechanisms under its exclusive control, and with them a large share of influence. Let me remind you that the G7 has been replaced by the more authoritative G20, in which the West no longer has a majority. Euro-atlanticists continue to meet within the framework of the G7, but fate-changing decisions for the whole world are made by the G20. Thus, in an attempt to support Ukraine, the West pays strategic advantages for questionable tactical successes.
The West deliberately puts the Ukrainian authorities in a hopeless situation
But the West is selfish and is not going to suffer losses because of some Ukraine. Kiev was interested in the West as long as there was hope, with its help, if not to destroy Russia, then at least to create serious problems for it. In the course of events, it became clear that the West (with the help of Ukraine) has much more serious problems than Russia. Every day it loses more and more on points. This problem can only be solved by getting rid of Ukraine.
At the first stage (Poroshenko managed to experience this) Kiev simply ceased to be noticed. At the second stage, it started to be demanded to fulfil more and more stringent conditions.
And both Paris and Berlin know perfectly well that when they support Russian demands for preconditions that Ukraine must meet for the sake of the necessary Zelensky meeting in the Normandy format, they strike Kiev almost fatally.
When Ukrainian experts talk about the betrayal of the West, they are right. After all, the Ukrainian authorities did not hide from their partners that they were not going to implement the Minsk Agreements. And they didn’t hide it for a reason. If the Agreements are implemented, Kiev will lose control of regions that all desire independence similar to Donbass. Moreover, the Constitution cannot be amended to guarantee special rights to one region – that would infringe on the rights of the rest of the country’s citizens. The only possibility is to extend the rule of broad autonomy to all, but this is the collapse of a unitary Ukrainian state. Having started to implement the Minsk Agreements, it is still necessary to live to the end of the process. Oligarchs – owners of the current Ukrainian state – and their strike force – Nazi gangs and Nazified security forces – may well use force to prevent “capitulation“.
As we can see, supporting the Russian position, the West deliberately puts the Ukrainian authorities in a hopeless situation. And this is a rare case for the current West of the consolidated position of all key players. Ukraine would have survived the “betrayal” of France and Germany with a scratch, but the US “betrayed” too. Trump openly advised Zelensky to negotiate with Putin (without intermediaries and support).
It should be understood that Zelensky himself would agree with both Russia and Donbass. Personally, he doesn’t care. But he does not represent himself, but Ukraine, represented by its ruling factions. And for them, an agreement with Russia is impossible a priori, because, among other things, it means transferring Ukraine from the status of an oligarchic feeder trough to the status of a standard state.
The current owners of Ukraine in a normal state cannot hold leading positions in politics or business. They are not creators, but consumers of what was created before them.
Nothing Personal, just business
For 27 years they managed to plunder Ukraine under the cover of the West. In Washington and Brussels they understood that they could rely only on gangster comprador capital in Ukraine. The interests of any normal national producer lay in the plane of cooperation with Russia. Accordingly, the West stimulated reforms, as a result of which the nascent national capital in Ukraine was destroyed and replaced by compradors.
But compradors have one feature. They are an integral part of colonial capital, and very much dependent on the capital of the metropolis. If the metropolis leaves the colony for some reason, the local comprador capital is doomed. It can’t even hold onto power on its own.
For objective reasons, the West is forced to abandon its colony of Ukraine. Simply, the cost of maintaining it systematically exceeds the profits of its existence. In a systemic crisis that requires a cost-effective use of resources, this is unacceptable. Nothing personal, just business.
If the Ukrainian authorities had not initially built a system of government based on full dependence on the West, they would have been able to survive difficult years (even decades). However, Ukraine has effectively delegated to the West the right to make strategic decisions in all spheres of public life. As a result, when the West stopped caring about it, it turned out to be a headless chicken. The legs are still moving, the wings flapping, but the command centre is absent and there is only one fate for the unfortunate bird – soup.
Rostislav Ishchenko
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