Zelensky: Is this the end? (Unheard)
Well…yeah. But the 4 buildings in Robotyn wouldn't have been 'liberated.'Quote:
Despite the failure of Ukraine's Nato-backed counteroffensive, which is now universally accepted, Zelenskyy continues to stick to the maximalist victory-at-all-costs narrative that Ukraine must go on fighting until it retakes every inch of lost territory, including Crimea, and that Putin should not be negotiated with. This is understandable: he has staked everything on achieving that objective anything less would probably mean the end of his political career.
But Zelenskyy's position is looking increasingly isolated. As Simon Shuster wrote in Time magazine, "Zelenskyy's associates themselves are extremely skeptical about the [current] policy", describing the president's belief in Ukraine's ultimate victory over Russia as "immovable, verging on the messianic".
In early November, none other than Ukraine's commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, told The Economist that the war with Russia had reached a stalemate and was evolving into a long war of attrition one in which Russia has the advantage. Many took this to mean that the general believes that the time has come to negotiate a deal with Russia. This led to a public confrontation between Zaluzhny and Zelenskyy, who rebuked the general's assessment and repeated his refusal to negotiate any ceasefire deal with Moscow.
Since then, the rivalry between the two has grown into an all-out power struggle. According to the Ukrainian news site Ukrainska Pravda, Zelenskyy views Zaluzhny's popularity as a political threat and recent events have only heightened the president's fears. Indeed, the army, it reports, is divided between those who are subordinate to Zaluzhny and those who are loyal to Ground Forces Commander Oleksandr Syrskyi, an ally of Zelenskyy.
But Zaluzhny has not been alone in criticising Zelenskyy. Last week, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko publicly supported Zaluzhny's comments about the war, stating that Zelenskyy was "paying for mistakes he made". At the start of this month, a long-standing conflict between Zelenskyy and the former president Petro Poroshenko also came to the fore, when Ukrainian authorities stopped the former head of state from leaving the country for a planned meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbn.
According to his critics, this is evidence of Zelenskyy's increasingly authoritarian grip on the country. "At some point, we will no longer be any different from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man," Klitschko told Der Spiegel. Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Poroshenko's former vice-prime minister, also spoke of "an authoritarian regression".
But Zelenskyy isn't just facing criticism over the way forward for Ukraine; some are now saying that the entire strategy was botched from the start. Oleksii Arestovych, Zelenskyy's former presidential advisor now turned critic, recently wrote that "the war could have ended with the Istanbul agreements, and a couple hundred thousand people would still be alive", referring to a round of peace talks that took place in March and early April 2022, mediated by Turkey.
