By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 5/7/24
Russia’s foreign intelligence service revealed on Monday that the US has reportedly entered into talks with Petro Poroshenko, Vitaly Klitschko, Andrey Yermak, Valery Zaluzhny, and Dmytro Razumkov as possible replacements to Zelensky. The US is allegedly worried about public sentiment turning against his regime in the event that Russia soon breaks through the front lines like the GUR deputy chief recently warned might happen in a reaffirmation of the Ukrainian Intelligence Committee’s winter warning.
Zelensky himself had earlier tried to preemptively discredit potentially forthcoming protests against him in that scenario as well as the related one of him clinging to power on legally dubious pretexts after his term expires on 21 May. Russia’s decision a few days back to put him, Poroshenko, and a few other past and present Ukrainian officials on its Interior Ministry’s wanted list was analyzed here as signaling that it wouldn’t recognize their legitimacy if he remains in power or those figures end up replacing him.
That’s not a symbolic policy either but a substantive one since Russian representatives couldn’t hold talks with those individuals due to their country’s charges against them, thus making it impossible for Ukraine to resume negotiations out of desperation if Russia soon breaks through the front lines. Pairing this insight with its foreign intelligence service’s latest revelation, which builds upon these two here and here from December, Russia hopes to influence Ukraine’s possibly impending US-backed regime change.
The purpose is to create a political environment that would be more conducive to a sustainable peace in the scenario that Russia breaks through the front lines, Ukrainians rise up against Zelensky after he clings to power on legally dubious pretexts, and a new American-installed regime resumes peace talks. Replacing Zelensky with Poroshenko would simply lead more to of the same even if he’s experiencing a renaissance in popularity among some Ukrainians since he was responsible for the failed Minsk Accords.
That’s why the Russian Interior Ministry placed him on its wanted list and their foreign intelligence service just revealed that he’s being considered by the US as his successor since they want the American and Ukrainian elite alike to know that no peace talks could be resumed under his leadership. The supplementary reason behind Monday’s disclosure is to exacerbate divisions within Zelensky’s regime with the expectation that they might tear each other apart and thus facilitate the rise of “fresh blood”.
Zelensky was supposed to play that “black horse” role as proven by his campaign promise to implement the Minsk Accords with a view towards ending the then-civil war and ultimately normalizing ties with Russia. Regrettably, he was co-opted by the US and Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist military-intelligence members shortly after entering office, who combined to transform him into a much more Russophobic leader than his predecessor ever was and thus made the ongoing special operation inevitable.
President Putin candidly acknowledged his prior naivete last December a year and a half after speaking from the heart in summer 2022 when he told his foreign intelligence service not to indulge in wishful thinking when conducting strategic forecasts. He’s therefore not going to be duped again by the West simply swapping Zelensky with Poroshenko or another puppet as a pretext to resume peace talks for the purpose of buying time to rearm and recommence the conflict sometime later from a better position.
These experiences are why Russia hopes to influence Ukraine’s possibly impending US-backed regime change through its Interior Ministry’s updated wanted list and foreign intelligence service’s revelation in order to ideally create a political environment that would be more conducive to a sustainable peace. The odds of this succeeding are admittedly slim, but forthcoming developments on the ground – especially regarding the growing possibility of NATO-Russian clashes – could reshape the dynamics in its favor.