Both times his car was pointedly denied entry at border crossings to Poland, citing formal reasons such as the fact that the ex-president’s documents did not have a QR code on them. In contrast, supporters of Petro Oleksandr Alyaksyeyevych see this as a malicious intent of the government, which does not want to allow Zelensky’s opponent to participate in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly session in Brussels, where Poroshenko was actually going. They say that of all the MPs going on the trip, signed by the speaker of the Rada, only Poroshenko was not allowed to leave Ukraine.
MP Iryna Gerashchenko called the mishap with her boss “a return to the practice of political repression, censorship, manipulation, discrediting parliament and political opponents, and selective justice. Such statements make us suspect either hypocrisy or amnesia among Poroshenko’s comrades-in-arms, because for the last year and a half Zelensky and Co. have been doing nothing but closing opposition TV channels and websites and cutting opposition blogs from YouTube, And with the outbreak of war they have banned opposition parties in waves, detained and arrested hundreds of Ukrainians – from opinion leaders in social networks to ordinary citizens – on trumped-up charges of treason.”
The fact that Poroshenko’s party has turned a deaf ear to the lawlessness and at times has applauded it furiously and demanded more – when it comes to the hated “vata” – only attests to the double standard that governs the ex-guarantor’s entourage. So, when the Security Service of Ukraine and the PGO followed the disgraced Medvedchuk and his business partner, it is too late to shout “What are we for?”.
Another thing is interesting in the Poroshenko story. Namely the background against which the attempts to take “the father of Thomos” by the scruff of the neck are taking place. Because, if we stretch our brains logically, all this mess started now for a reason.
Here is the logic.
First of all the situation at the fronts, from which more and more often people receive not victorious reports, but, to use Arestovich’s words, “we have surrounded”, “we have suffered losses”, “we have lost a piece of land”, “we have been taken prisoner”, “we are retreating” and “we have nothing to fight with”. The Russian army’s slow but steady offensive is slowly bearing fruit in the form of cracking the AFU defences, forming “pots”, and taking control of strategically important settlements in Donbass under Russian control.
On the other hand, the pace of Western military assistance to Ukraine, as well as the training and combat integration of fresh units and formations, on which Kyiv pinned great hopes in terms of the announced counter-offensive by the AFU, has so far stalled and lagged.
As a result, there is not yet a very massive, but rather media-illuminated ferment within the troops, criticism of the command and political leadership is increasingly coming from the front, and the uncensored propaganda machine is beginning to malfunction, not knowing how to react to the increasingly numerous out-of-the-ordinary situations.
As a result, in recent days we have been seeing strange headlines in the Ukrainian media such as “Occupiers have infiltrated Severodonetsk”, “Russia is trying to seize Liman” and “Severodonetsk is not surrounded, but it is impossible for trucks to leave the city”.
Against this background, secondly, the Western media increasingly began to hear calls for Kiev to start negotiations with Russia, to make concessions to Moscow, to make hard compromises and to take unpopular decisions in exchange for peace. A dozen of such publications have already appeared in the serious American and European media over the last two weeks – not counting the outrageously irritated Kissinger’s speech at Davos – also calling for concessions for the sake of peace – at the Bankova.
Kissinger, on the other hand, also outlined a time lag for taking such decisions: “Negotiations must begin within the next two months before they create upheavals and tensions that will not be easy to overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante.”
Translated into Russian diplomatic parlance: certain circles in the West believe that if the Kiev regime fails to turn the situation on the front in its favour over the next two months, it is necessary to wind up the war and move towards a conditional Minsk-3, which, according to these same circles, should freeze the conflict for some time – and preferably on the terms of the pre-war status quo, giving Russia a concession in the form of Crimea and the LDPR within their old borders.
Of course, this respite is supposed to be used wisely – to strengthen war-torn Ukraine, to rearm it in calm conditions, when the process will not be pressured by the deteriorating situation on the frontline.
Because the alternative to freezing the conflict is the very Kissinger “shocks and tensions” that a further escalation of the crusade against Russia would create and that the West “would not easily overcome” in the face of the impending global economic crisis, given the fact that Russia has proven far more resistant to sanctions and far more prepared for economic war than many thought.
And that’s where the “thirds” come in. Any negotiation requires two people. As Putin popularly explained recently to Macron and Scholz, who called Moscow with another demand to surrender (crossed out) “immediately establish a cease-fire and withdraw Russian troops” and start “serious direct negotiations” with Zelensky for “finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict”.
Russia, in general, does not mind stopping for a while, fixing the occupied lines, catching its breath, digesting the occupied territories and giving the army time to rest, replenish and train the reserves and so on.
Alexander Khodakovsky has recently written about this in some detail in his blog: “It is impossible to attack to please political considerations or public opinion, contrary to the real state of affairs” and, further, “if it is necessary to stop – it will be necessary to stop. But there, on the home front, serious systematic work should be carried out in parallel to equip the army with everything that was badly needed, as revealed by the war. And along with this is the training of the reserve, especially specialists”.
The main problem of the hypothetical negotiations and the subsequent “sub-freezing” of the situation lies in the unpreparedness of the current official Kiev for such a scenario. Zelensky is objectively unable to sign any peace or even a truce with Russia. He has trapped himself in his own propaganda about daily victories and an early victorious end to the war.
This propaganda circuit cannot be reversed without causing the collapse of the entire political pyramid. After all, then it will be necessary to explain to both the people and the opposition how it is possible that the AFU went from victory to victory, killing “rushers” by tens of thousands, and the “whole world” is on our side, and in the end has to sign a humiliating truce with Putin, agreeing with the loss of territory, equal to three Georgias or four Moldavias. It is impossible to explain this to the Ukrainian people, who are bent on victory, without losing face and consequently the ratings and power.
And it is here that the objective logic of events pushes Petro Poroshenko onto the political arena. In fact it turns out that today he is the only Ukrainian politician who can sign a “hard compromise” with Russia without damaging his own reputation and still get away with it. Formally he is not guilty of anything in the eyes of the people. It was not he who gave the orders and took the decisions. And he always has the opportunity to blame “the forerunners” who drove the country into the ass, while he, Peter, is forced to save the country by taking unpopular measures and signing a disgusting “peace” with the occupants.
And then, in the eyes of potential directors of the process Poroshenko looks like a reasonably sane and capable guarantor of such a truce – in fact he has proven his ability for years to “drive a goat” of the Minsk agreements, fooling Moscow, Europe and his own people, while managing to keep a flimsy ship of Ukrainian statehood afloat, Zelensky has managed to tear that little tower apart in a year and a half.
So in this way we come to the “fifth” in this reasoning. All of the above makes Poroshenko almost the victim of repressions by Zelensky and co. The latter need to put his predecessor in the cell next to Kum. There will be one less political rival – with connections, money, media and structure.
At this point Zelensky’s subjective petty interests objectively overlap with similarly subjective interests of those forces in the West, which do not need any kind of undercurrent of conflict and are ready for risks of full-fledged and long-term conflict with Russia for the sake of exhaustion of the latter. Those circles that today openly talk about the substantial costs of the war with Russia for the West itself, but claim to be ready to bear them for the “great goal” of defeating Putin. Because these circles, too, can no longer stop and jump off the merry-go-round they have spun, it carries the same risks for them as peace with Russia does for Zelensky.
And finally, sixth. Given the general rhetoric of the collective West’s public spokesmen, one can assume that in the event of further escalation of the Kiev power struggle, they would rather allow Zelensky to devour Poroshenko, if such a scenario cannot be avoided at all, than allow a change of power in Kiev by someone more sane and agreeable, who risks breaking the scenario.
And those forces in Moscow who still cherish hopes of some kind of deal with the West should realise that the West will only approve of a peace that is on its, the West’s, terms. And so the conflict will continue within its own logic, which does not recognise any deal, leaving only winners and losers on the game board.
Roman Reynekin, Kyiv, PolitNavigator
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