President Donald Trump recently posted on Truth Social that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has continually refused to negotiate an end to the conflict with Russia calling him a “dictator without elections.”

This brought a backlash from the legacy media, including many politicians, even some in Trump’s own party, and spurred numerous posts on social media.

Is Zelenskyy really a dictator?

Or is he the heroic Churchillian figure he is made out to be?

Who is Volodymyr Zelenskyy?

A post-victory propaganda piece celebrating Volodymyr Zelenskyy more resembles the character from his sitcom, Servant of the People, than real life. There are no English subtitles, but you can see here the actor playing a role.

Zelenskyy came to office in 2019 replacing the corrupt and unpopular Petro Poroshenko. The diminutive former comedian promised to end the civil war in Donbas, which started in 2014 after the Euromaidan color revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. He also promised to fight corruption. He won with a very high percentage of the votes against his opponent in the second round, Poroshenko — 75 to 25 percent. Zelenskyy is a Russian speaking Jew, who was supported heavily by ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in the east and south of Ukraine who wanted to end the war. Poroshenko was then indicted for corruption.

At first, many people around the world were stunned by his “surprise” success — a comedian who never held office before. Many wondered if this could herald the reform of Ukraine’s rampant corruption. To provide some context, this resource rich nation was often rated near the bottom of Europe in terms of poverty and corruption. Ukraine’s first two presidents were Leonid Kravchuk (1991-1994) and Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005). Both were former Soviet apparatchiks who knew little about free market economics. Through a combination of incompetence and corruption, they let about 40 percent of Ukraine’s wealth fall into the hands of seven billionaire oligarchs in a short period of time.¹

Ukraine’s four popularly elected presidents since Kuchma have either been:

1. Corrupt politicians who helped enrich corrupt oligarchs after promising reform — Viktor Yushchenko (2005-2014)
2. Sponsored by oligarchs who helped them win the election — Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) and Volodymyr Zelenskyy
3. Billionaire oligarchs themselves— Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019)

During [Yushchenko’s] tenure, local officials and their cronies made new fortunes by doling out communal land in Kyiv, Crimea and Lviv. To the chagrin of his civil society allies, the new president seemed to get along well with Kuchma-era oligarchs. Far from facing jail terms, their business empires expanded, and so did their influence. In 2006, Yushchenko bestowed the state award “For merit” on four of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful: billionaires Rinat Akhmetov and Igor Kolomoyskyi, and multimillionaires Serhiy Taruta and Hryhoriy Surkis. Two years later, Yushchenko visited the Japanese garden of art-lover Viktor Pinchuk, an oligarch whose business empire had mushroomed under the rule of his father-in-law Kuchma. The visit was widely interpreted as a signal that oligarchs had nothing to fear from his presidency (A brief history of corruption in Ukraine: the Yushchenko era).

Corruption has also plagued prime ministers and other Ukrainian officials, including billionaire oligarch, Yulia Tymoshenko, the prime minister under Yushchenko.

US President Joe Biden also came under scrutiny for his dealings with one of Ukraine’s largest gas companies, Burisma Holdings. Allegations against Biden emerged due to the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Yanukovych before he was forced into exile. According to Ukrainian authorities, Zlochevsky was suspected of theft of government funds on an especially large scale.

Enter Zelensky the Showman

Zelenskyy’s oligarch was Igor Kolomoyskyi, a former mafia boss and the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, who helped him found a media empire and a number one sitcom called Servant of the People. The premise is about a high school history teacher whose students post a video of him ranting about the corruption in the country that goes viral. A grassroots led petition wins him a spot on the presidential ballot. Coming from out of nowhere, he becomes president and fights corruption. You can watch it on Netflix in English.

Based on Zelenskyy’s position as a pop icon with a pro-peace, anti-corruption political platform, Kolomoyskyi helped him to found the Servant of the People Party. He was sort of a novelty candidate like Trump at first, but then surprisingly won the election, just like in the TV show.

After Zelenskyy won the election, he soon turned on Kolomoyskyi when he was indicted for corruption.

1. Then he banned any suspected pro-Russian opposition parties (e.g., Opposition Platform — For Life) leaving only Ukrainian nationalist parties in power.
2. He banned all opposition media.
3. He strengthened the ban on Russian language and culture, even removing literary greats such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Pushkin from the education curriculum; and great composers, such as Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, from the national theater.
4. Then he banned the 1,000-year-old Ukrainian Orthodox Church claiming that clergy were spies for Russia due to their ties to the Moscow Patriarchy. He even arrested priests who claimed they were loyal to Ukraine.
5. He even issued a decree making it illegal for him to negotiate the end of the war with Putin.

This decree is reversible at any time, but when challenged, Zelenskyy often resorts to evasion calling negotiation impossible. Not ending martial law and calling for elections is the only way for Zelensky to stay in office. His most recent polls show him losing to General Valeriy Zaluzhny by a wide margin. In four out of five of the most recent polls, Zelenskyy was trailing Zaluzhny significantly with less than 25%. The only recent poll that favored Zelenskyy was taken just after the infamous dust up with Trump. This incident sparked sympathy and the poll might be considered an outlier.

Zaluzhny was relieved from being Commander of the Ukrainian armed forces because he criticized Zelenskyy saying that the war has become a stalemate at best and Ukraine should negotiate with Russia. Zaluzhny was then blamed in a Wall Street Journal report for the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, which Ukraine denied. Zaluzhny was then promoted to be the ambassador to Great Britain.

Currently, more than 52% of Ukrainians want to end the war and negotiate with Russia, and only 32% want to continue. Of course, the sample excludes the Russian population in the five oblasts that have already acceded to Russia. Recruiters who took bribes to allow conscripted men to keep out of the military have been fired and indicted for corruption. Now Zelenskyy has recruiters who literally pull people out of their cars and send them to the front lines with little training.

The Death of American Journalist Gonzalo Lira

Throughout the first two years of the war, American journalist and successful novelist, Gonzalo Lira, exposed much of this information to Americans on social media from the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. He was strangely allowed to do this for well over two years. He was occasionally questioned by Ukraine’s SBU, and was later arrested for “justifying the Russian invasion.” His trial was delayed, and he was then released. SBU agents caught him at the border of Hungary trying to leave the country. Lira was put back in jail without a trial date. He was beaten, contracted pneumonia, and he died in prison. The Biden administration did nothing to try to free him.

A Dictator Without Elections

If Zelenskyy desired, he could ask the Rada to open an election and allow a slate of candidates on a ballot. Then he could ask the Rada to negotiate a ceasefire with Russia while they held elections for a few days or a week. The Russians would likely want that legal opportunity to get Zelenskyy out of the way so they could negotiate with someone with the common sense to end a war that is already lost.

But that’s not likely to happen. The same powers that be, the same oligarchs and nationalists that control Zelenskyy, also control the key leaders in the Rada too.

People who defend Zelenskyy as a hero see a little piece of the picture, but when we look at his whole story from beginning to an end he’s one in a line of many corrupt Ukrainian politicians.

Ukraine is not a free democratic nation. It was originally a Socialist Republic of the former Soviet Union that was created by communist leaders out of pieces of other nations. Parts of Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland were added to the Russian Empire’s ancient heartland largely populated with Ukrainians. This enlargement of a Ukrainian Socialist Republic as part of the USSR occurred between 1921 to 1954. In 1991, Ukraine declared itself an independent nation just before the Soviet Union was dissolved on December 31st, 1991. Ukraine’s sovereignty was recognized internationally. But from the beginning, Ukraine has been controlled by a corrupt oligarchy.

Zelenskyy is not the hero that the Western media and many Western politicians make him out to be. He is an actor. He’s a clown dancing on the end of marionette strings.

Why was Kolomoyskyi arrested?

It is a mystery as to why Kolomoyskyi was so quickly indicted after Zelenskyy’s election. Besides fighting corruption, one of Zelensky’s two main promises was to bring the Donbas civil war begun in 2014 to a swift end. He even mentioned being willing to visit Moscow for direct negotiations. Polls at that time showed Ukrainians wanted to see this accomplished quickly. More than 14,000 people on both sides of the conflict had died, including many civilians. It is a mystery as to why this mandate from the Ukrainian people to end the war was so promptly and egregiously ignored. However, the following are several possible explanations.

First, the initial indictments of Kolomoyskyi came not from Kyiv, but from the United States after it was discovered the Kolomoyskyi acquired property in the United States using funds illegally obtained from PrivatBank in Ukraine as part of a multibillion-dollar fraudulent loan scheme.

Second, Zelenskyy was now no longer beholden to Kolomoyskyi, who could have acted as his protector from Poroshenko’s supporters in the Euromaidan government. The Rada still consisted of many nationalists who were not going to stomach any pro-Russian concessions. Now the pressure on Zelenskyy to keep the conflict going both from Western neocons in Washington and the Ukrainian Rada was too great.

Third, Zelenskyy faced a number of scandals that kept him from cooperating with Trump who wanted to end US involvement in funding the Donbas civil war. Even before the election, Trump was hit with allegations of “Russian collusion” — himself being a “Russian agent” according to the infamous Steele dossier, which has since been thoroughly debunked.

Fourth, Trump also faced an impeachment, which stemmed largely from a telephone conversation between the two leaders in July 2019. Just after Zelenskyy was elected, Trump tried through both Russian and Ukrainian channels to get to the bottom of the corruption in Ukraine involving US officials, especially Joe and Hunter Biden’s involvement in the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, and its corrupt oligarch, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was being investigated by Prosecutor General Shokin for fraud. Biden infamously bragged that he had had the prosecutor fired using a threat to withhold US aid.

See the Fox News report above in which the former prosecutor accuses Biden of taking bribes from the Ukrainian national gas company Burisma while he was vice president.

Fifth, a large amount of money was funneled through organizations like USAID to the government controlled Ukrainian media that continued to put out daily anti-Russian propaganda — clownish at times — and this in turn acted as a “psyop” in the Western media as well. Stories appearing in so-called “independent” newspapers such as Ukrainskaya Pravda were often repeated verbatim in Western media. All Kremlin media giving the Russian side of narrative such as Russia Today was suppressed

Biden: “We will support Ukraine for as long as it takes!”

Sixth, Biden administration had full information from the Pentagon and the CIA as to what the situation on the ground in the Ukraine war was really like. They knew after the first few months that Ukraine would lose militarily and sanctions against Russia were not working. Instead they chose to deceive the American public into thinking Ukraine was winning on the battlefield and that we would support them “for as long as it takes!” However, the objective to win the war was never clearly explained as to what that would look like.

To draw a conclusion from all of this, we can believe that Zelenskyy may have had the best intentions to end the Donbas war and to fight corruption in Ukraine. His big liability was Kolomoyskyi. But with the corrupt oligarch out of the way, the nationalist faction seized an opportunity. What better president to deflect against accusations against corruption and neo-Nazi influence than an actor — a Jewish actor at that?

If you’re curious enough to want to know the truth. If you are open to discovering you’ve been lied to about Zelenskyy’s rise to power, read the following biography on Ihor Kolomoyskyi on Wikipedia and follow the footnoted links. He was the money behind Zelenskyy’s media corporation and presidential campaign. This is who Zelenskyy is behind the mask. But now Kolomoyskyi is in prison. He has been held for many months out of sight without a speedy trial. Almost nobody in the media will cover this. Opposition media in Ukraine does not exist. Those who do speak out, like Gonzalo Lira, sometimes disappear or are killed. If the pattern holds, Zelenskyy might soon find himself out of power facing corruption charges himself.

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¹ In 2007, I was told 40 percent of the nation’s wealth was in the hands of seven oligarchs. On further research, I found that in 2008, the combined wealth of Ukraine’s 50 richest oligarchs was equal to 85% of Ukraine’s GDP (Taras Kuzio, “Oligarchs Wield Power in Ukrainian Politics.” Eurasia Daily Monitor. Vol. 5, no. 125, 2008-07-01). In November 2013, this number was 45% of GDP (Andrew Wilson, “Survival of the Richest: How Oligarchs Block Reform in Ukraine,” Policy Brief, European Council on Foreign Relations. 2016). While the wealth of the oligarchs is lessening, the GDP of Ukraine has also shrunk dramatically as well. By 2015, due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, the total net worth of the five richest and most influential Ukrainians at that time (Rinat Akhmetov, Viktor Pinchuk, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Henadiy Boholyubov and Yuriy Kosiuk) had dropped from $21.6 billion in 2014 to $11.85 billion in June 2015. In November 2022 they had counted nine billionaires. By February 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the negative impact on the economy of Ukraine led to the decline in billionaires. According to a research by The New Voice of Ukraine in November 2023 there were only two billionaires left in Ukraine, these being Rinat Akhmetov ($6.59 billion) and Viktor Pinchuk ($1.72 billion).

² In my opinion, people ought to have the chance to weigh all news sources — even those controlled by foreign governments — to understand the differences in perspective, and then draw some abductive conclusions.

Sources:

1. OSCE election reports, Ukrainian Central Election Commission data, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
2. Reports by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Reuters coverage of Kolomoyskyi arrest.
3. Ukrainian legislation (Law on De-Oligarchization), reports by Reporters Without Borders.
4. Ukrainian language law (2019), statements from the Institute for Religious Freedom (Ukraine).
5. [Ukraine] Presidential Decree No. 679/2022.
6. Ukrainian Constitution, statements by the Central Election Commission.
7. Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Poll Rating Group polls.
8. Ukrainian court records, BBC Ukraine reporting.