Ukrainians have lost faith in Zelensky

Spectator

7 days ago

Donald Trump this week boosted Ukraine's air defences with new Patriot batteries, threatened Vladimir Putin with sanctions if he does not agree to a ceasefire, and even reportedly gave tacit approval to more Ukrainian strikes on Moscow. Trump's newfound support for Ukraine is a welcome lifeline. The question is whether his help will be enough to stop Russia's relentless attacks before Ukraine is engulfed in a critical military, political and social crisis that threatens to destroy it from within.
Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right. Ukraine is running out of fighting men, its frontline soldiers are exhausted and US military support has narrowed to focus on air defence. The Kyiv government is racked by corruption scandals and purges, public faith in their future and in their leaders is tanking and pressure to make peace at almost any price is growing.
In many ways the most remarkable thing about the conflict is that Ukraine still fights on despite the merciless and titanic punishment that Russia has meted out on its soldiers, civilians and infrastructure.
'If the war continues soon there will be no Ukraine left to fight for,' one former senior official in Zelensky's administration tells me. They now believe their former boss is 'prolonging the war to hold on to power'. Even once-staunch pro-Zelensky cheerleaders such as Mariia Berlinska, head of the Aerial Reconnaissance Support Centre, a prominent Ukrainian volunteer movement, express despair. 'We are hanging over the abyss,' Berlinska said recently. 'Ukraine is an expendable pawn in an American game… Trump, Putin, Xi [will] spend us like small change if they need to.'
Ukrainian morale, admirably high for much of the war, is collapsing. Back in October 2022, even after six months of violence and bloodshed, 88 per cent of Ukrainians believed that they would be a 'flourishing country inside the EU' within a decade. Now 47 per cent think that 'Ukraine will be a depopulated country with a ruined economy'. A separate survey found that 70 per cent of Ukrainians also believe their leaders are using the war to enrich themselves.
Nothing is more corrosive to wartime morale than the idea that a nation's leaders are stealing as its people fight and die. 'Corruption kills and loses wars,' says Kyrylo Shevchenko, a former head of Ukraine's Central Bank, who is in exile in Austria after being charged with corruption in 2023. In recent weeks, Ukraine has been engulfed in corruption scandals. Two deputy prime ministers, minister for national unity Oleksiy Chernyshov and minister for reconstruction Oleksandr Kubrakov, have been investigated for embezzlement and treason. Zelensky has also repeatedly tried to sack Major General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine's military intelligence, allegedly because of his growing popularity. Only pressure from the US embassy in Kyiv prevented the sacking of one of Ukraine's most popular generals, a serving senior European diplomat with knowledge of the case tells me.
The recent spate of arrests and searches against Zelensky loyalists suggest serious political infighting at the heart of the Kyiv government – and also a reckless readiness to take down prominent critics both inside and outside the state, regardless of how it looks to the outside world. Perhaps the most shocking of all the recent arrests is that of Vitaliy Shabunin, one of Ukraine's most prominent anti-corruption activists, who has been charged with evading military service and fraud. Shabunin, the chair of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre executive board and a leading watchdog of military corruption, attacked the government soon after this arrest.
'Taking advantage of the war, Volodymyr Zelensky is taking the first but confident steps towards corrupt authoritarianism,' Shabunin wrote on Telegram. He has been a critic of a proposed law on defence procurement that would allow the Defence Ministry to exempt chosen companies implementing government contracts from criminal liability.
At the same time, the administration has blocked the appointment of a new independent head of the Bureau of Economic Security, a powerful law enforcement agency with an uncomfortable track record of prosecuting Zelensky's political opponents.
'Ukraine has two enemies, two Vladimirs: Zelensky and Putin,' says a former Ukrainian cabinet minister, once a strong Zelensky supporter. 'Putin is destroying Ukraine from [the] outside, but Zelensky is destroying it from within by destroying its will to fight and its morale. Human rights are being trampled on, there is pressure against political opponents, rich and influential people who could support opposition are being expropriated and opposition media is silenced. And the irony is that this Putinification of Ukraine is being funded by the West.'
Under the terms of a wartime state of emergency, more than 5,000 Ukrainians have come under sanctions and had their property frozen. The measure, first invented to prevent Russia-connected politicians, media groups and oligarchs from influencing Ukrainian politics, is now widely used to silence opponents of the regime, say critics, as well as to police the media. 'Sanctions have led to the closure of three YouTube channels belonging to Zelensky's critics in the past month,' says Shevchenko. 'Censorship often shields authoritarian leaders, and unchecked power breeds dictatorship.'
Zelensky's term of office formally expired in May last year. While many argue it's unfeasible to hold elections in wartime, there is frustration that Zelensky has exiled key potential opponents and imprisoned and sanctioned others. 'In May 1940 Churchill invited the leader of the opposition Attlee to be his deputy and united all of parliament in one government,' notes opposition MP Oleksiy Goncharenko. 'Zelensky has done the opposite, he is holding on to power by all means possible.' Goncharenko sparked controversy by comparing Zelensky to Kim Jong-un and Ukraine to North Korea.
Meanwhile, resentment, resistance and anger are rising at aggressive measures taken by the authorities to press-gang military-age men into the army – a process known as 'busification'. Unlike the Russian army, which is made up of contract soldiers, Ukraine has instituted full mobilisation of men over 26 not engaged in vital civilian work.
Ukraine's social media is filled with daily videos of men being bundled into vans by recruitment officers, sometimes at gunpoint. Yet many of those forcibly recruited seem to have little desire to fight. In the first six months of this year, Ukraine's Prosecutor's Office reported that it had opened 107,672 new criminal cases for desertion. Since 2022 some 230,804 such criminal cases have been instigated, suggesting that more soldiers have deserted the Ukrainian army than there are fighting men in today's British, French and German armies combined.
Those who remain at the front are exhausted. Mobilised Ukrainian soldiers serve until the end of hostilities, meaning that some have been fighting continuously for three-and-a-half years. A draft law releasing military personnel from service after 36 months was squashed by the government last year for fear that the retiring personnel could not be replaced. No men aged 18 to 60 have been allowed to leave the country since February 2022 without special permission.
Since the Russian invasion, more than 6.8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, with a further eight million internally displaced. That's equivalent to 40 per cent of its working-age population. Runaway inflation is impoverishing ever-larger swathes of the country. Today 8.8 million people in Ukraine are living below the poverty line, up from six million before the war.
Last week governments and businesses gathered in Rome for the third annual Ukraine Recovery Conference. The centrepiece of the conference was meant to be the unveiling of a multibillion-dollar Ukraine recovery fund that US investment giant BlackRock has been working on since 2022. But earlier this year BlackRock announced that it was shuttering the fund 'due to a lack of interest'. Germany's Friedrich Merz, Italy's Giorgia Meloni and Poland's Donald Tusk were there to make the usual pledges of support. Yet in terms of concrete aid, the EU was able to rustle up just €2.3 billion – just a drop in the bucket compared with the World Bank's estimate of $524 billion to restore Ukraine's infrastructure.
'All of the political elite understands that Ukraine needs a new system of government to stabilise [the] situation,' says the former Zelensky cabinet minister. 'People want to stop living in fear. But instead of asking how to help a transition of power in Ukraine, the EU is closing its eyes.' Many of Zelensky allies, including some of the country's top ministers, fear that they could be prosecuted or exiled if they leave power. Zelensky's team have 'made many enemies' in Ukraine's political class, explains a senior European diplomat who attended the Rome conference. 'They fear that their future is exile, or jail' – which, in turn, only increases the 'temptation to line their pockets while they can'.
Trump's newly announced Patriot package is welcome news. So are Europe's continued promises of unwavering support. But none of Ukraine's allies can really help with the country's chronic manpower shortage or with the deepening crisis of legitimacy that Zelensky faces. Most worrying of all, no outsiders can reverse the spiral of arrests of former regime loyalists, crackdown on opposition members and shutdown of media outlets that are doing so much to erode Ukrainians' faith in the war effort and in Zelensky's leadership.