On this background it is hardly surprising that tensions between Kiev and its Western patrons are running high, with each side blaming the other for the military farce. Both Zalyuzhniy and Zelenskiy are at odds with the West for its failure to provide sufficient military equipment for a counteroffensive the West itself has demanded as a kind of test as to whether Kiev deserves continuing military aid. In turn, Zelenskiy made his disenchantment with NATO and the West known both before and during the summit. In a June 30th Washington Post interview, Zalyuzhniy seemed to be airing both his opposition to the conduct of the counteroffensive without sufficient fire power (recall the pre-offensive pressure from Kiev for the provision of F-16s) as well as Kiev’s grievances regarding insufficient arms, thus setting up the West as scapegoat for the counteroffensive’s failure. He condemned that Western expectations that the Ukrainian military do what no Western or Russian military would ever attempt to do – carry out a major offensive without air and artillery superiority – ‘pissed him off.’ “This is not a show,” Zalyuzhniy said; a comment that might be construed as a subconscious slight against the showman president who seems hell bent on winning an unwinnable war by a very bloody path, while he and his wife bask in the global limelight, outshining such spirits of our disinformation age ‘superstars’ as Greta Thunberg, and Zalyuzhniy’s coerced soldiers and even commanders die in pools of blood and mud for precisely what? “It’s not a show the whole world is watching and betting on or anything. Every day, every meter is given by blood,” Zalyuzhniy complained. “Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all.”[4] Of course, these unfeasible plans were not wholly or even mostly hatched in Kiev.

At any rate, the effect of the counteroffensive in failure is to ensure that NATO would do what it was going to do and has been doing anyway: hanging Ukraine out to die on the altar of NATO expansion ‘as long as it takes’ in the hope of provoking a color revolution in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties, destroyed cities and towns, millions of refugees, and tens of millions of ruined lives have and will not cause NATO to throw out the playbook. They just will edit it a little: a security guarantee with loopholes, a NATO-Ukrainian Committee, dispensing with a ‘membership action plan’ for a Ukraine that may not exist ‘after victory.’

Years of successfully pulling the wool over people’s eyes and Western fawning over him since February 2022 led Zelenskiy to overestimate the power of his personality and his communication skills. There was never any chance that the NATO summit in Vilnius would offer Ukraine membership, a membership action plan (MAP), or a shortcut to membership no matter how charismatic Zelenskiy imagines himself to be. These hopes were as delusional as were the repeated Ukrainian decisions not to forego NATO membership before and after Maidan, before and after Minsk, before and after Putin’s proposals on a new European security architecture and his massing of troops on Ukraine’s borders, before and after his February 2022 invasion, and before and after the March 2022 agreement to end the war by Kiev renouncing the goal of NATO membership and returning to the Minsk format. What kind of policy is it that demands Ukraine’s movement towards NATO membership, backs a coup to achieve it, and then arms the intensely anti-Russian Maidan regime while not offering Kiev NATO membership in the face of decades of protestations from the military and nuclear power next door that it views such actions as a grave threat to its national security? But it is worse than that. The Washington/Brussels consensus tells us that Putin is a hungry, imperial dictator determined at all costs to conquer ‘all of Ukraine’ and reestablish the former USSR, meaning taking all the Baltic and Transcaucasus countries as well. If we are to be guided by the concensus’s analysis, then we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that Washington and Brussels pushed Ukraine into the claws of the aggressive, angry bear they themselves riled and aggravated. No matter. United together, ‘we will not waver’: Ukraine will fight ‘as long as it takes’ to defeat the bear on behalf of the United States and its subservient allies.

Before the summit Zelenskiy pulled out all the stops: his usual simulacra, then trading at the Turkish bazaar, even blackmail. He faked an impending nuclear incident allegedly being planned by Russia, only to have the IAEA refute his claim that Moscow had positioned explosives on the roof of the Zaporozhiya nuclear power plant. He convinced Tukish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to break the agreement that the neofascist Azov commanders captured in Mariupol and transferred by the Russians to his custody would remain in said custody for the duration of the war. The PR of both these moves was to cover for the losses rather than the promised gains produced by the counteroffensive. So entranced by enthusiastic welcomes the West (not the world) over, he thought his threat not to attend the summit should NATO not present him the PR gift he needed and thought his due – NATO membership and the resulting adulation as national hero of most Ukrainians (though not necessarily from the neofascists that helped force him into this war) that would have come with it.

But Zelenskiy attended the Vilnius summit. Reports from the show Vilnius revealed a desparate Zelenskiy resorting to frantic backroom cajoling in order to beg for concessions on NATO membership. This would bring the alliance closer to entering the war and more of its arms at a sufficient level to defeat an increasingly powerful Russian force, or it might provoke the Kremlin into actions that would inspire NATO to finally take Kiev’s neck out of the noose into which NATO itself put it.[5] But the NATO summit declaration repeated what is now a bromide, having been stated 15 years ago—that “Ukraine’s future is in NATO” and would be admitted once more “democratic reforms and security reforms” are implemented. Of course, no country has ever implemented democratic liberalization during war time. History, including America’s own history shows that countries authoritarianize in wartime—take the internment of the Japanese during World War II or the suspension of habeus corpus during the U.S. civil war, for example. Such reforms may be drawn out in any hypothetical reconstruction period after a ‘Ukrainian victory’ or other form of an end to the war.

The lack of compromise was reported to be a consequence of resistance to Ukraine’s accession to NATO now and in the future coming from Germany in addition to Hungary and perhaps Bulgaria, which recently refused Zelenskiy further arms transfers during his recent visit to Sofia. Germany apparently refused to sign on to a draft that included some vague language about Ukraine’s accession that has not been disclosed. Germany appears to be adamant about avoiding any potential direct military conflict between NATO and Russia, and depending on how the war plays out it may mount resistance to Ukraine’s accession even after the war. Germany is already in a recession, and there is no sign that the economic dislocation created by the war, mutual sanctions, pipeline explosions, etc is likely to abate any time soon. The social explosion in neighboring France probably has been instructive as well for some in the German leadership.

Tensions between civilian leaders and the top brass emerged by late spring when in May, then Ukrainian presidential spokesman Aleksei Arestovich openly criticized the military leadership, referring to “criminality” and “treason” that need to be investigated and punished. Voices representing the military shot back, criticizing Arestovich and other civilian critics. One military voice reported to be close to Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Viktor Zalyuzhniy asserted: “Hundreds of killed and wounded men and women every day are securing (your) tasty coffee in sunny Kiev. Every day. And to search today for someone to blame among them is far from the best idea. The guilty are not in the army, though there are some who can answer for something, the guilty are in the high offices that formed the budget policy and determined who would serve in key posts.” One Ukrainian journalist predicted that if the Office of the President continued to criticize the military, the consequences for the critics would be “devastating.”[11]

In early June, Zelenskiy and commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Viktor Zalyuzhniy differed over the timing of withdrawal from Severodonetsk and where to form a new defensive line against the Russian offensive in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. While Zelenskiy demanded that the army hold out as long as possible and create a defensive line close to the city, risking encirclement of thousands of troops, Zalyuzhniy called for puling back forming a defensive line running north-south through Kramatorsk.[12]

On 7 September, General Zaluzhnyi and Lieutenant General Mikhail Zabrodskii, the first Deputy Chairman of the Ukrainian Rada’s Committee for National Security, Defense and Intelligence, wrote a revealing article for UkrInform, the most important aspect which were indications of the Ukrainian military command’s disagreement with President Zelenskiy’s decision to conduct the offensives in the south in the Kherson direction and in the north in the Izyum direction.[13] The officers felt that this was being undertaken without the proper preparation and sufficient manpower and weaponry for what seemed to be largely political reasons at great costs to Ukraine’s personnel and weapons stockpiles without any real prospects of making a permanent breakthrough on either front. This should sound familiar.

The Zalyuzhnyi article read like a cryptic critique of Zelenskiy’s September counteroffensives in the south and north. In arguing for the creation of a Ukrainian military capable of conducting a counteroffensive “in 2023” to take Crimea, Zalyuzhnyi notes: “turning to the situation in which the Armed Forces of Ukraine are likely to be in 2023, everything seems less clear. In fact, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine the situation will be a complex combination of the actual position of the contact line, the availability of resources and a set of combat-ready troops and, obviously, finding strategic initiative to be in the hands of the enemy.

At the same time, following this logic, we express strong reservations about the outline of the line of contact from the point of view of the Ukrainian side. Its contours have an extremely unfavorable configuration again on the Izyum and Bakhmut directions. The enemy’s significant interference shackles any operational maneuver for the Ukrainian troops and requires, in fact, a double set of forces to contain it.” In other words, the Ukrainian military, they argued, lacked the forces necessary for conducting the counteroffensive then underway at that time around the Izyum bridgehead in the north, slightly east of Kharkiv.

The situation “in the south and east is no better,” continued Zaluzhnyi: “The threat of the enemy’s advance in the direction of Zaporozhye has already been noted. In addition, the danger of the enemy developing partial success in the direction of Gulyai-Pole is not disappearing, which, under certain conditions, could pose a threat to the capture of the entire grouping of Ukrainian troops in the East. The existence of the enemy’s operational bridgehead on the right bank of the Dnieper River requires additional efforts to prevent its expansion.” This was accomplished in the famous withdrawal of Russian troops to the west bank in autumn of last year. Zelenskiy appeared to have been proven right then, but this ‘victory’ was misleading, as both in Kharkov and Kherson, the Russians were not defeated militarily but simply withdrew without a fight in order to limit casualities and in the Russian tradition wait for a better time to recoup the territory retreated from when the correlation of forces are more clearly in Russian forces’ favor.

Zaluzhnyi called for a delay until the army was better supplied and later conducting “several consecutive, and ideally simultaneous counter-attacks during the 2023 campaign.” He outlined a series of measures – the creation of 20 new brigades and weapons systems capable of striking Russia at a depth of 2000 kilometers, for example — needed to be taken before any such counteroffensive, any offensive to take Crimea, and any attempt in 2023-24 to bring the war to Russian territory and its population. It was a cryptic signal that Zaluzhnyi chose as his co-author a leader of the opposition ‘European Solidarity’ party led by former president Petro Poroshenko, who is under indictment by Zelenskyi’s prosecutors.

The article came out on the background of ‘chatter’ in the Ukrainian and Russian press, media, in particular on Telegram channels reporting that Zaluzhniy was opposed to Zelenskiy’s plan to conduct dual counteroffensives at the time, that Zaluzhnyi recently convinced Zelenskiy to halt the southern counteroffensive in Kherson and instead divert resources to the northern counteroffensive in Izyum, which helped convince the Russians to retreat from Kharkov. The article overall, therefore, was a cryptic expression of Zaluzhnyi’s disagreement with Zelenskiy’s hasty Kherson and Izyum offensives and was important for at least three reasons. First, it was more evidence of the tensions between the military and political leaderships in the country – understandable in the current near catastrophic situation Ukraine finds itself in – and between the Office of the President and Zelenskiy, on the one hand, and the military command and elements within the political opposition, on the other hand, over the conduct of the war. Second, such tensions risk the politicization of the military and a grave deterioration in civil-military relations – a precondition for a military or palace coup supported by the military. Third, an alliance of the Poroshenko-supportive portion of the Ukrainian opposition with any military opposition –particularly if the neofascist element in society and the military joins a plot — would pose a grave threat to Zelenskiy’s regime.

It is very likely that Zalyuznyi and Zelenskiy will be at odds again if they are not already. One Ukrainian source in the Office of the President claims that the Biden administration has given up on any progress in the counteroffensive and that “a complete collapse” of Zelenskiy’s foreign policy regarding Western support, which is now expected to decline sharply. It was said that Zelenskiy’s promises regarding the results of the counteroperation were overdone and that has led to the political failure (https://t.me/rezident_ua/18713). Zalyuzhniy might be saying: ‘I told you so.’ Zalyuzhniy’s allusion to a ‘show’, asserting that the war is not one and is having a high cost in blood, not only underscores both the contradiction between any professional military’s ethic and ordinarly civilians, whether officials or citizens. Military officers and sericeman have a different view of the world and certainly war, especially once the shooting starts. The blood and sacrifice are deadly serious matters and impart a sense of romantic patriotism, unique sacrifice, a sense of comradely brotherhood, and a corporate self-identity that sets soldiers apart from civilians. The ethical gap between soldier and citizen can be narrowed by military leaders adopting a similar seriousness of purpose regarding the war effort and those who sacrifice. When civilian leaders appear to be overly enamored with themselves, their public fame, and foreigners or to be using the war effort for political purposes or subordinating that effort to political expediency than the ethical gap widens. It might widen further if the civilian leadership is taken with ‘shows’, fakes, simulacra and the like, as is the Zelenskiy government.[14]