The collapse of Kyiv’s position at home and abroad over the last six months reflects the fact that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s three closest advisors are working for the Kremlin and have given Vladimir Putin a victory he very much needed but doesn’t deserve, Andrey Piontkovsky says.
During his presidential campaign at the urging of people like oligarchs Viktor Medvedchuk and Ihor Kolomoiskyi and his close friend Andriy Yermak, the Russian analyst living in exile abroad says, Zelenskyy offered himself as the candidate of “the peace party” which Ukrainians had to support against “the war party” of his predecessor.
“This Goebbels-style Kremlin lie,” Piontkovsky adds, “continues to be injected into Ukrainian consciousness by almost all leading Ukrainian television channels which are controlled” by Medvedchuk or Kolomoiskyi. They promote the Kremlin’s notion that the war is not the result of Russian aggression but rather “an internal conflict” among Ukrainians.
This Kremlin “special op by the enemies of Ukraine” has as its second target those countries in the West who have been supporting Kyiv against Moscow but who are now told by the Ukrainians that the war is as Moscow describes it and now as Ukrainians before Zelenskyy did.
“Extremely influential groups in the West have been waiting for any pretext and occasion to ‘surrender’ Ukraine to the aggressor for some financial or geopolitical deals with the Kremlin dictator.”
As a result, Ukraine’s international position has collapsed since Zelenskyy came to office: Russia has been allowed back into PACE, Macron has invited Putin to France, Trump has tried to block US military aid to Ukraine and pushed Putin’s return to the G8, and Nord Stream-2 is proceeding.
According to Piontkovsky,” as a result of “this tragic error of the Ukrainians,” an error Putin’s agents have promoted, “an enormous foreign policy success has been handed to Ukraine’s existential enemy precisely at the moment when the master of the Kremlin really needed it – when a domestic political crisis in Russia is mounting.”
Putin, aware of the gift he has received as a result of his own special operation, can thus be as “bold, arrogant and smug” as he has been because he knows that “the three closest advisors and coworkers of Zelenskyy are unceasingly working for the Kremlin and hardly deign to conceal that fact.”
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