By Ian Proud, Website, 6/23/24

The G7 recently made the headlines by agreeing to lend Ukraine $50bn which will be repaid using the yearly interest accrued on $329bn of confiscated Russian sovereign foreign exchange reserves. When it is finally structured, the loan will consist of a series of loans by G7 member countries, with the US topping up the fund by the required amount so it hits the $50bn mark.

Taking a step back from the legality of, effectively, expropriating another country’s sovereign assets to repay a rival country’s debt, what does this mean for Ukraine? Figures vary, and the Ukrainian government is increasingly coy about releasing economic data sets, but Ukraine’s economy is currently around $180-190bn in size. To put that into context, that is around 11 times smaller than Russia’s economy and 131 times smaller than the US economy.

$50bn, therefore, represents around 27% of Ukraine’s yearly GDP. That is a huge figure for a single loan. But the problem is that Ukraine has been borrowing this amount every year since the war started. According to politico, Ukraine borrowed $58bn in 2022, $46bn in 2023 and is set to borrow $52bn in 2024. So, in just three years, Ukraine will have borrowed 82% of GDP.

Ukraine needs to borrow this much because its government spends almost twice as much each year as it receives in income from taxation and other sources. To put that into context, the European Union sets a limit that Member States cannot run a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. Ukraine, which aspires to join the EU, has been running a yearly budget deficit of 25% since the war began. And in addition to that, with Ukraine running a deficit on its current account each year – the difference between how much it exports and imports – it also needs capital to stop its currency going into meltdown.

And here’s the thing, Ukraine will probably need to borrow even more this year than what is currently forecast. Don’t be fooled by the official defence budget for 2024 of $28.6bn; this is around half of what Ukraine actually spent on defence in 2023. (Ukraine adjusted its original 2023 defence budget up from $39.4bn – still more than the 2024 budget – to $56.3bn). Ukraine’s massive spending spree on the war effort, in 2023 at least, accounted for one third of total economic output. With Zelensky showing no appetite to negotiate, there’s little reason to believe it won’t in 2024. 

So, with Ukraine taking on 25% of its GDP in debt each year, its debt mountain will continue to spiral out of control. The EU forecasts that Ukrainian debt is growing by 10% of GDP each year since the war started, but I view these forecasts with a heavy dose of scepticism. Even if Ukraine’s economy grew by 5.5% in 2023, it remains smaller than it was in 2021, before the war started. More realistically, Ukraine’s debt is growing by 15-20% of GDP each year.

So, Ukraine’s debt will hit 100% of GDP in the current financial year (if it hasn’t already). And the really worrying thing is that there are no plans to repay any of it. Because Ukraine isn’t making debt repayments each year to tamp down its debt growth. In fact, Ukraine stopped making payments ona its existing external debt in 2022 when the war started. For those who remember the onset of the Ukraine crisis in 2014, Ukraine immediately refused to pay a debt of $3bn that Russia had given it as part of the deal with Yanukovich to stay out of the EU Association Agreement.

Fueled by hubris and self-righteousness, Ukraine has become addicted to taking on debt and then refusing to make payments on that debt. Since the start of the war, Zelensky has been pressing for the $329bn in frozen Russian assets to be given to Ukraine. The G7 loan of $50bn therefore marks an alarming shift in that direction. It assumes that Ukraine itself will never need to repay the debt itself, even though it’s Ukraine’s debt. But when the war ends, if this needless war ever ends, who will repay the G7 countries their loans then? The Americans seem to believe that it would be possible to continue to freeze Russia’s frozen reserve assets even after war finished.

If that be so, what motivation, then, for Russia to stop fighting if it feels that massive sanctions and the theft of its assets will continue? As I said at the top, Russia’s economy is 11 times larger than Ukraine’s. Russia is also bringing in healthy amounts of capital each year as its exports continue to exceed its imports. Put simply, Russia gains a surplus of around $50bn each year in its exports, which roughly equates to what Ukraine borrows each year to prop up the war effort. While Putin has offered a peace deal – or at least, terms for peace negotiations to restart – Russia has sufficient resources to keep fighting, even if the fighting results in a barely shifting stalemate.

So, in economic terms at least, winning the war doesn’t matter to Russia right now, even if he and the Russian people would prefer an end to it all. Because the longer the war continues, the more indebted and delinquent Ukraine becomes. Putin knows that practically all of the foreign money that Ukraine borrows comes from western countries that are bankrolling Ukraine’s fight. And we have already seen the sands shift in western support with pure hand-outs transitioning to actual loans. So, over time, the west will increasingly offer Ukraine debt rather than freebees.

And it is pure fantasy to believe that Russia will repay this debt, as Russia wants its frozen money back. A one-sided peace will not be possible in which the west continues to punish Russia, including economically, after the cannon fire stops. Indeed, stealing Russia’s assets will only lead to potential further escalation, prolonging Ukraine’s suffering, and ramping up its unsustainable debt still further. This war will end when Putin feels that there are economic incentives to stand his troops down and to negotiate a lasting peace.  

Until then, the west is holding a ticking time bomb of debt that Zelensky doesn’t believe that he should have to pay. Or, to put it another way, he is paying for this war using credit cards; except that they are our credit cards, not his.

By Leonid Ragozin, Intellinews, 5/27/24

In Odesa, a young woman was badly bruised when a draft officer attacked her with metal crutches as she protested her friend’s detention by a press gang.

Near Dnipro, a man apprehended by draft officers knifed one of them while trying to escape from their vehicle.

In Kharkiv, members of a press gang beat up a man at a bus stop. A video circulated on local Telegram channels shows the dazed man walking staggeringly towards a bench with hands on the back of his head as if suffering a concussion, while women form a human chain protecting the men and shout at the recruiters.

Originating from all around the country, videos of men actively resisting press gangs with the help of women, often random passersby, pop up online on a daily basis. In more than a few of these videos, draft officers are seen using violence against their targets. There were also reports of people dying inside draft centres – either from beatings or from medical conditions, such as epilepsy, ignored by the military.

This has been happening for many months before the new stringent law on mobilisation came into force on May 18. It obliges all draft age men to update their personal data in the reserve registry, making it easier for the military to hand them draft notices or punish them for draft dodging.

The shortage of manpower on the frontline is acute. Both the Ukrainian military and Western allies have been pushing hard to make the government facilitate mobilisation. But its prolonged hesitation is easy to understand when you hear what’s happening in real-life Ukraine, not inside the brilliant minds of military strategists and information warriors.

Sad or outright harrowing stories also come from the national border. In Zakarpattia Region, a man was shot dead by a border guard as he attempted an illegal border crossing. The shooter was charged with misusing the weapon.

In a separate incident, one of the best-known Ukrainian basketball players, Vadym Zaplotnytsky, was detained as he tried to escape into Romania.

More than 30 bodies of draft age men have been found in the Tisza river, which separates Ukraine from Hungary and Romania, since the beginning of the year. Still, Ukrainian men keep risking their lives by swimming across the cold and rapid mountainous stream, ridden with spiky underwater rocks, only to avoid being sent to the frontline. Others walk across the Carpathian mountains, an ordeal that sometimes also proves lethal.

Along a short section of a Ukrainian highway that runs through the territory of Moldova outside Odesa, people abandon their cars and escape into the neighbouring country.

A total of 11 thousand Ukrainian men illegally crossed into northern Romania alone since the start of the full-out Russian invasion over two years ago, according to Liberty Radio, quoting local police. Romania is only one of five countries Ukraine borders in the west.

On social networks, ukhylyant (or draft dodger) is the buzzword – there is an avalanche of memes, Tik-Tok videos, musical clips and posts which more often than not celebrate rather than shame those who try their utmost in order to avoid being sent to the frontline.

Information bubble

The Ukrainian leadership knew well that the mobilisation law would be extremely unpopular, so they kept postponing it despite considerable Western pressure. It was only adopted last month, a few days before the US Congress finally unblocked $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine. That synchronisation at least guaranteed that mobilised soldiers wouldn’t be fighting the Russian army with bare hands.

But the question of what they are really fighting for is dogging Ukrainian society and despite superficial appearances, it is difficult to say what Ukrainians really think on that matter.

Out of all theatres of this war, information space remains the one where the Ukrainian-Western alliance has an absolute advantage over the Russians. Infowar professionals are making a convincing case that Ukrainians are united like one in their desire to fight Putin until the last drop of blood, even though the prospects of victory are extremely dim and the devastation caused by Russian invasion has already set the country back by many decades, demographically and economically.

But when you look at what’s propping up this PR bubble more attentively, it may come across as a colossus with feet of clay. Worse than that, it only manages to linger in an atmosphere that feels eerily similar to the one that is being observed in Russia, Ukraine’s brutal and dictatorial adversary.

Opinion polls show an overwhelming support for the country’s war effort, mirroring similar results in Putin’s Russia. But as many experts, like sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko, point out, war time polls can’t be taken at face value. In Ukraine, millions of people have left the country, also millions have been internally displaced. This migration tsunami primarily affected southeastern regions where pro-peace and pro-Russian sentiments have always been stronger.

But perhaps an even greater factor is preference falsification – a dominant issue in societies where people face serious risks for expressing their private opinions.

Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, puts out regular updates on people arrested for “justifying Russian aggression” in their social media posts or even in private phone conversations. Vast majority of opinion polls happen to be conducted over the phone.

In February, the Guardian reported that SBU had opened more than eight thousand criminal cases related to collaboration with the enemy since the start of the invasion. By comparison, a total of 483 politically motivated criminal cases (317 of them for antiwar views) were registered in the supposedly more repressive Russia in 2023, according to OVD-Info.

In recent months, the arrest spree extended to the hierarchs and ordinary priests of Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the country’s largest church organisation which used to be formally affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate. The affiliation naturally raises suspicion about loyalty to Ukraine and some priests in the east of the country did actively support the occupation. But specific charges in individual cases often sound about as plausible as those brought against members of the opposition, or religious dissidents like Jehovah Witnesses, in Putin’s Russia.

The spectrum of opinions in the Ukrainian media space shrank considerably in the early 2021, when president Zelensky decided to clamp down on TV channels associated with Kremlin’s ally Victor Medvedchuk. The channels commanded considerable audiences, but didn’t explicitly promote Russian propaganda. It’s unlikely that the ban made members of these audiences less sceptical of the government or Western-funded Ukrainian media.

When Putin launched a full-out invasion of Ukraine, regular broadcast on main channels was replaced with the government-controlled news stream known as “TV marathon”. Critical coverage is sparse and mostly confined to pointing out the shortcomings of the government’s war effort, not the overall maximalist policy of fighting Russia until Ukraine territorial integrity is fully restored. The criticism of secret services or far right groups, associated with various military units, is virtually impossible.

As a result, millions have drifted to Telegram with its proliferation of Russian military propaganda as well as fugitive Ukrainian media outlets operating out of the EU.

One of these, run by ex-journalist and politician Anatoly Shary, has 1.2 million followers. By comparison, president Zelensky’s channel on Telegram had 760 thousand followers at the time of writing. Shary covers events in Ukraine using combative and often obscene language typical that attracts the largest audiences on the platform.

An unashamedly biased commentator, Shary charges Ukrainian leadership with pursuing a suicidal confrontation with Russia and thus ruining the country. Official Kyiv routinely dismisses him as a Russian stooge, but Shary doesn’t mince words about Putin’s dictatorship and is universally hated by the Russian milblogger community.

A very different phenomenon is Politika Strany, a professional media outlet that was better known as the website strana.ua until it was squeezed out of Ukraine. Associated with media manager Igor Guzhva (and possibly with one of the fugitive Ukrainian oligarchs), it has adopted a neutral and dispassionate tone in its news coverage. It monitors a multitude of regional channels, scouring them for fresh mobilisation videos and other war-related stories. It also does a great job of monitoring Western media output related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. With over 270 thousand followers, it finds itself well ahead of major professional Ukrainian news outlets, such Ukrayinska Pravda (164K) or NV (50K).

It is no wonder that Ukrainian politicians and security officials periodically call for banning Telegram, but that radical step hasn’t been taken yet.

What are we dying for?

Channels like Shary’s or Politika Strany are popular because they provide an alternative to the predominant view which dwells on two controversial narratives – that the war was inevitable and that it is also existential. That there is no middle ground between Ukraine’s complete subjugation by Russian dictatorship and overwhelming victory that involves complete restoration of the country’s territorial integrity. Or, as people like Estonian prime minister Kaya Kallas and Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov hope, Russia’s disintegration into many small countries.

Russia’s full-out invasion in February 2022 shocked with its brutality, which seemed entirely out of place in the 21st century Europe. Its sheer disregard for international law was also dumbfounding. But when the shock subsided and war became part of the daily routine, people began to get a clearer view of what Putin’s invasion is and what it isn’t.

Notwithstanding the horror Putin has subjected Ukrainians to, when one’s lives are at stake – as in the case of Ukrainian men facing mobilisation – outlandish hyperbole and manipulation of the war’s cheerleaders become a hard sell. It is only natural for people to suspect that an earlier compromise with Putin – any time between 2014 and the failed Istanbul talks in the spring of 2022 – would have likely been a much better outcome for them personally and for their country as a whole. Especially when this idea is backed up by some of Ukraine’s own negotiators.

Over the last two years, infowarriors kept creating an illusion that it only takes this of that new weapon, provided to Ukraine at the risk exceeding the critical mass of Russian red lines crossed, and the Russian regime and its war machine will collapse. But now, after the failure of Ukraine’s counter-offensive in 2023, people are seeing clearly that if anything, the escalatory game is making Russia stronger.

The question which the men facing mobilisation are asking themselves goes along these lines: What if my sacrifice will be in vain or that it only helps to promote the agendas of other people and other countries?

The scope of material which demonstrates resistance to mobilisation in Ukraine is just too overwhelming to be dismissed as abnormal behaviour by people lacking the sense of civic duty or as the result of Russian propaganda.

It shows a growing rift between the public face of Ukrainian society, as presented by cheerleaders calling for war till victorious end, and the private opinion of real life Ukrainian citizens, expressed through draft dodging, cross-border escapes and a seemingly widespread hatred against press gangs hunting for men. This rift may play out in many different ways politically and Putin’s regime will surely try to exploit it to its own advantage.

YouTube link here.

Dr. Grande’s YouTube Channel covers topics related to counselor education and supervision including but not limited to mental health, human behavior, relationship dynamics, psychopathology, personality theory, true crime, pop culture, research, statistics, SPSS, Excel, appraisal, and group counseling. Dr. Grande has a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. He is a Licensed Professional Counselor of Mental Health (LPCMH) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Professional (LCDP).

In this video Dr. Grande recites 12 “word salad” comments made publicly by Kamala Harris in the past few years while trying to keep a straight face. – Natylie

By Lev Golinkin, The Nation, 4/10/24

Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, Amazon’s Debut of the Month, a Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program selection, and winner of the Premio Salerno Libro d’Europa. His writing on the Ukraine crisis, Russia, the far right, and immigrant and refugee identity has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, The Boston Globe, Politico Europe, and Time (online), among others.

America’s largest library association, which annually hands out prestigious literary prizes such as the John Newbery Medal for children’s literature, the Caldecott Medal for picture books for children, the Stonewall Award for LBGTQ+ books for young readers, and the Coretta Scott King award for African American authors and illustrators, has recently honored two authors with a track record of whitewashing Nazi collaborators.

This January, the American Library Association (ALA) published a list of Best Historical Materials for 2023, which includes Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement—Selections from the Secret Police Archives.

This compendium of Soviet documents was edited by Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk. Viatrovych, who is currently a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament, is notorious for drafting laws glorifying Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. He’s been condemned by Jewish organizations as well as the governments of Poland and Israel. Luciuk, a professor in Canada’s elite military college, has defended a Third Reich division accused of war crimes.

The ALA’s influence reaches beyond awards: The world’s largest library association plays a key role in lobbying Congress for federal funding, and runs Booklist magazine, which covers soon-to-be published titles; receiving a Booklist review is an important step on the road to successful publication.

This isn’t the ALA’s first scandal over skewing historical narratives. A 2022 panel musing about the legitimacy of books about Holocaust denial necessitated an apology clarifying that Holocaust denial is, indeed, a means of disinformation and therefore not appropriate. The group has since partnered with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on a traveling exhibit for libraries.

Yet the selection of Enemy Archives places any commitment to avoid both-sides-ing WWII in doubt. One of the book’s editors has described soldiers from an SS division as “war victims,” while the other demanded that the Canadian parliament apologize for calling an SS veteran a Nazi.

In 2015, Kyiv triggered international headlines after passing laws declaring two World War II–era paramilitary groups—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its offshoot the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—to be Ukrainian national heroes and making it illegal to deny that heroism. The OUN collaborated with the Nazis in massacring tens of thousands of Jews, while the UPA liquidated thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles.

The laws institutionalizing the OUN/UPA cult across Ukraine were the brainchild of Volodymyr Viatrovych, who at the time headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), a department in the federal government.

The legislation was only the beginning: Viatrovych’s systematic campaign transforming killers of Jews into freedom fighters became so endemic he was mentioned by name in the annual report on global antisemitism issued by Israel. The 2015 laws and the UINM’s whitewashing were condemned by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Articles such as “How Ukraine’s New Memory Commissar Is Controlling the Nation’s Past” in The Nation and “The Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past” in Foreign Policy exposed a pattern of distortion. In 2017, Viatrovych was barred from entering Poland.

When Israeli President Reuven Rivlin called out Ukraine’s Holocaust revisionism during a 2018 visit, Viatrovych attacked him for “spreading the Soviet myth about the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust,” (the OUN’s involvement is an established historical fact). And when Ukrainian Jewish leader Eduard Dolinsky warned of the institute’s excesses, Viatrovych accused him of claiming antisemitism in order to profit. These smears echoed long-standing racist tropes of Jews carrying water for the Kremlin and concocting false acts of antisemitism to make money.

Viatrovych, who was fired as the head of UINM by President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019, is now a deputy in the Ukrainian parliament.

Viatrovych’s coeditor, Luciuk, is a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada—the country’s equivalent of West Point. Last year, he published an edited excerpt from Enemy Archives in the National Post, a major Canadian paper. The article described the OUN as having been maligned by the USSR, which “routinely portrayed members of this Ukrainian nationalist movement as war criminals, Nazi collaborators, fascists and so on, a trope regurgitated regularly by the Russian Federation.”

The piece made it sound as if the OUN’s collaboration with the Third Reich was Soviet propaganda, instead of established historical fact. The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) denounced the National Post for providing “space to Lubomyr Luciuk who continues to spread Holocaust distortion and disinformation.”

In responding to SWC, the National Post’s editor in chief admitted that the article “included a paragraph disputing the view that the Second World War era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were Nazi collaborators. However, we recognize that this collaboration has been established by prior scholarship.”

Luciuk has also vociferously defended the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), commonly known as SS Galizien. This was a formation in the SS—the paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party and the chief perpetrator of the Holocaust.

SS Galizien was armed, trained, and commanded by German SS officers. Its soldiers, who were overwhelmingly volunteers, swore an oath to Hitler. A video clip from USHMM archives shows the German high command staging elaborate, Nuremberg-style enlistment ceremonies with beaming recruits marching under SS banners. In 1944, the division was visited by SS head Heinrich Himmler—the mastermind of the Holocaust—who praised the fighters’ willingness to slaughter Poles. Indeed, prior to Himmler’s visit, SS Galizien subunits distinguished themselves by burning 500–1,000 Polish villagers alive.

Luciuk has written numerous defenses of SS Galizien, stating that “they weren’t pro-Nazi, they weren’t anti-Semitic and they didn’t engage in war crimes.”

Last fall, on the occasion of a visit by Zelensky, the speaker of the Canadian Parliament recognized SS Galizien veteran Yaroslav Hunka, who was present, prompting a standing ovation by parliamentarians. The ensuing scandal led to the speaker’s resignation, an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and condemnation from Canadian Jewish organizations.

Luciuk disagreed. The professor employed by the Canadian military—which lost over 45,000 men in the war against Nazi Germany—claimed that “members of Parliament joined an execrable chorus of zealots and prats who gibbeted Hunka for someone he never was —‘a former Nazi.’ I’d say the House owes our fellow Canadian, and an innocent man, a public apology.”

(It must again be stated that the SS was literally the military wing of the Nazi Party.)

The annual Best Historical Materials list is published by the Reference and User Service Association, an ALA division. The 2023 list contains 12 titles, each with a brief review by a scholar. The Enemy Archives review is signed by University of Southern Mississippi professor Jennifer Brannock. Tellingly, her review states that the documents in the book “cover topics such as the Soviet claim that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis.”

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 7/23/24

The conventional thinking is that Ukraine isn’t interested in resuming peace talks with Russia unless the latter capitulates to its unacceptable ultimatums, otherwise it’ll continue fighting “until the last Ukrainian”, but that might be about to be turned on its head as a result of recent developments. In the span of less than a week: Trump talked to Zelensky about his peace plan; the Vatican’s top diplomat visited Ukraine; and Ukraine’s Foreign Minister is visiting China, the last two for the first time since 2022.

From the looks of it, Ukraine is fretting about Trump’s likely return to power and wants to get ahead of the curve by exploring paths to peace, which are intended to give it a chance to shape the process instead of being completely controlled by it if the US suddenly decides to end its latest “forever war”. The supplementary developments that led up to the three aforementioned ones are Orban’s peace missions and the unveiling of former British Prime Minister Johnson’s peace plan.

Regarding the first of these two, this saw the Hungarian leader travel to Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, DC, and Mar-a-Lago, after which he recommended in a report to the EU that their bloc explore the modalities of the next peace conference with China and resume dialogue with Russia. As for the second, this infamous hawk proposed territorial compromises with Russia and Ukraine protecting the rights of Russian speakers. These five developments were also just followed by an unexpected proof of concept.

It was announced on Tuesday that 14 Palestinian factions signed the Beijing Declaration that’ll end the years-long divisions between Hamas and Fatah, thus showing that lightning does indeed strike twice after China brokered the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement last year. For background, it was explained here how China is trying to organize a Brazilian-fronted parallel peace process on Ukraine ahead of and/or during November’s G20 in Rio, which is more realistic than ever now.

To explain, Zelensky read the writing on the wall over the past few weeks about Biden’s inevitable departure from the campaign, especially after Trump’s famous fist-pumping picture that followed his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt earlier this month turned him into a hero. This places his unprecedented proposal of Russia participating in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November into context even though he hasn’t yet at this point signaled any willingness to compromise with it.

He suggested this on 15 July, and it was sometime last week that the Vatican’s and Ukraine’s top diplomats finalized their trips, the first to Ukraine and the second to China. 19 July then saw Johnson publish his peace plan, the details of which he likely conveyed to Ukraine and others beforehand, which was the same day as the Trump-Zelensky call. Then the previously mentioned diplomats set off on their respective trips and China coincidentally proved yet again that it can broker game-changing peace deals.

The EU disavowed Orban’s peace mission and associated report, yet the visit of the Vatican’s top diplomat to Ukraine hints that they might be relying on the Holy See as a backchannel for finding out whether the political fallout from Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump changed Zelensky’s views. After all, Orban visited Kiev less than a week afterwards when it wasn’t yet clear what its full implications would be, so it’s sensible to dispatch someone else a few weeks later to follow up on everything.

Zelensky’s unprecedented proposal last week for Russia to participate in the next round of Swiss-like Ukraine talks in November showed the world that he’s becoming more flexible at least in his rhetoric, thus paving the way for the Vatican’s top diplomat to visit Kiev and for his own such one to visit Beijing. Johnson’s peace plan also contained some carrots in it for Russia pertaining to its return to the G7 and the resumption of its partnership with NATO, which Trump may or may not have discussed with Zelensky.

The last part remains unclear since Johnson noted in his op-ed that he talked about the conflict with Trump but clarified that the views expressed therein are his own and claimed that he supposedly doesn’t know how the former American leader might try to resolve this conflict if he’s re-elected. Nevertheless, it’s more likely than not that Johnson sought to informally float at least some of Trump’s proposals in his piece, with the former promoting them before the public and the latter before Zelensky.

Trump considers China to be the US’ systemic rival so he doesn’t want it to play any role in the peace process, yet Zelensky just dispatched his top diplomat to Beijing regardless, which is intended to gain negotiating leverage with the US regardless of whatever November’s outcome may be. That trip is obviously at variance with American interests, which suggests that he’s once again “going rogue” a bit by behaving somewhat independently of his patrons.

Zelensky knows that his maximalist goal of reconquering all of Ukraine’s lost territory is unrealistic no matter what he says for the purpose of keeping morale high. He therefore wants to retake as much as he can before the US either becomes too fatigued with its latest “forever war” or is forced by circumstances into “Pivoting (back) to Asia” before it’s ready. By publicly displaying interest in China’s mediation, he hopes to either keep the US supporting him for longer or to reach a better peace deal with China’s help.

It’s a gamble, but he hopes that the next US President might either become so nervous about him flirting with China that they decide to give him more of what he’s been demanding and remove their restrictions or that China can convince Russia to scale back some of its maximalist demands for peace if they won’t. Nobody can confidently predict how far he’ll go in this regard nor exactly how serious he is, but it’s undeniable that Zelensky is changing tack to an extent, which is remarkable development in this conflict.