from Executive Intelligence Review:
Jan. 19—As United States President-elect Donald Trump takes office, prospects for ending the conflict between NATO and Russia in Ukraine remain unclear. Without question, however, it is a moment for great political changes. One of them is that the violation of the fundamental freedoms of Ukraine’s population, by the current government in Kiev and its foreign sponsors, can and should be ended. A new case, opened in late 2024 by a U.S.-sponsored Ukrainian “anti-corruption” body against the world-famous economist and former Member of Parliament Dr. Natalia Vitrenko, illustrates such ongoing violations.
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In the closing weeks of last year, the lame-duck Biden Administration did all it could to keep Ukraine fighting, drawing down weapons stocks to send Kiev new arms packages with previously authorized funding. President Joe Biden abruptly approved the use of U.S.-supplied missiles to strike deeper into Russia, which he had refrained from doing for many months. And on January 10 the White House announced new, drastic sanctions against Russia’s oil industry, sanctions that will also hit its customers in China and India.
This continued arming and instigation of Kiev to continue the war, despite horrific losses, is a linchpin of the dangerous Anglo-American effort to crush Russia through sanctions and the provocation of ever new conflicts, outlined in such strategy documents as the 2015 Chatham House paper The Russian Challenge and the RAND Corporation’s 2019 Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous Ground. With the January 9 final Biden-era meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (Ramstein Group) for arming Ukraine and the inauguration of the new NATO Security Assistance and Training for Ukraine command center in Wiesbaden, Germany, the new NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte of the Netherlands, and other European war party figures are likewise trying to lock in a continuation of the war, regardless of what the new U.S. Administration does.
For his part, President-elect Donald Trump says he intends to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin “very quickly.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rejoined on January 13 that there has been “no substantive preparation yet, but there is a declared understanding and political will….” Trump’s appointee as National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, elaborated in a January 12 TV interview, “[F]rom President Trump’s perspective, you can’t enter a deal [on Ukraine] if you don’t have some type of relationship and dialog with the other side.”
Russia’s terms for beginning any negotiations specifically on Ukraine were set forth by Putin in June 2024: withdrawal of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the four regions incorporated into the Russian Federation since 2022, after military occupation and the conduct of referendums; and that Kiev “officially notify that it abandons its plans to join NATO.” In December, Putin remarked in his annual year-end webcast that negotiations involving Ukraine’s (acting) President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose term of office expired in May 2024, could proceed only after he “were to go through elections and gain legitimacy.” Zelensky himself, already in October 2022, signed a decree that outlaws talks between Kiev and Moscow as long as Putin remains President.
What precisely may emerge to shift the Ukraine conflict away from slaughter on the battlefield and the constant danger of escalation to nuclear war is not yet known, but getting rid of two assumptions that prevail in U.S. and European political circles will help. The first assumption, that Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine was “unprovoked,” has been refuted, most recently, in the webcast “2025: Nuclear Doom or New Paradigm, with Ray McGovern and Helga Zepp-LaRouche” (EIR, Jan. 10, 2024).
The second wrong assumption, which is the subject of this article, is that NATO, in fighting Russia with Ukrainian hands, is defending a model of “democracy” and the “rule of law.” Realizing the falsehood of that belief is both crucial for Ukraine’s future, and timely, as rumors swirl that forcing presidential and parliamentary elections, delayed by decree under martial law, will be an element of Trump’s policy toward Ukraine.
How fiercely will Zelensky’s clique try to hold onto power? His “trust” rating in Ukraine fell by 12 percentage points in 2024, to 52 percent, according to polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, bne IntelliNews reported January 8. Zelensky’s rating is expected to plunge still more, if he bows to pressure to conscript men aged 18-24 into the war.
Other polls indicate that Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, who resigned as Armed Forces of Ukraine Commander-in-Chief in February 2024 and is now ambassador to the UK, would trounce Zelensky in an election held today. The Ukrainian news agency RBC Ukraine reports that Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, quietly visited Zaluzhny in London last month, offering him a leadership post in the Zelensky-Yermak political party, if he would promise not to run for President. Former President Petro Poroshenko and ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko have likewise courted Zaluzhny, RBC Ukraine said.
The Kiev regime’s anxiety about any political opposition, real or putative, was also evident in December when MP Yuri Boyko, former leader of one of the eleven political parties banned by Zelensky in 2022, dared to make a social media post against the wholesale demolition of World War II monuments and bans on people speaking their native language (such as Russian). Boyko was summoned to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) for interrogation and made abject apologies the next day.
The Banned Parties
On November 4, 2024, the Pechersky District Court of Kyiv found Natalia Vitrenko guilty of an administrative offense (misdemeanor)—failure to submit reports on the property, revenues, expenditures, and financial obligations of the banned Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU), which she formerly headed. The suit was brought by the Department of Ensuring the Honesty of Political Finances, of the National Agency on Corruption Prevention (Ukrainian acronym NAZK). According to the Appellate Complaint Vitrenko filed November 19 to the Kyiv Court of Appeals, she was tried in absentia because the court failed to notify her of the proceedings, and was accused in the capacity of chairman of a “liquidation commission” for the PSPU—a position of which she was unaware and had never accepted.
